The Nation Newspaper

Tag: Reinventing

  • Reinventing Lagos’ transportation architecture

    The training of bus conductors by the government signals the advent of a new regime of organised public sector transportation in Lagos, writes ADEYINKA ADERIBIGBE

    With the coming of modern bus terminals, as well as hundreds of bus shelters, that are nearing completion, the Akinwunmi Ambode-led administration in Lagos State has left no one in doubt of its determination to reinvent transportation.

    That determination was consolidated last week with the training of conductors, a critical factor in the government’s transportation reform.

    Since assuming office, Ambode has enhanced transportation systems, so profoundly that a lecturer at the School of Transportation Studies, Lagos State University (LASU), Prof. Samuel Odewunmi, described his intervention as, “beyond conceivable threshold”.

    Odewunmi canvassed a robust intermodal system that would maximise the state’s massive investments on road, rail and water transportation.

    In a paper: “Accelerating integrated transport system: rail, road and waterways,” delivered at the second Lagos Traffic Radio Lecture, the don said such development became imperative because of the anticipated migration of more Nigerians due to growing insecurity across the country, which could put pressure on the state’s 23 million population.

    In the last two years, the government has invested hugely on changing the state’s transportation architecture. Ambode inherited an unregulated public transportation system, where the about 18 million population relied on unplanned, unsafe, unreliable and rickety means of transportation – popularly called Danfo – or commercial motorcycle or tricycle for their travels.

    Building on the successes of the strategic transportation masterplan by his prede cessors, which sought to replace the privately-owned commercial transportation with an organised public sector-driven transportation system, the government consolidated on the Lagos State Traffic Law 2012, restricting okada operators from some arterial roads and bridges, and  the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) revolution by introducing a reform that seeks to inject 5,000 maxi buses into the transportation sector over the next three years, under a group franchise operator system that would grant 50, 100 and 200 buses to willing operators.

    In tandem with Odewunmi’s position, The Commissioner for Transportation, Mr Ladi Lawanson, at another forum, said the government was determined to revolutionise the rail and waterways transportation, with massive investments to further promote the mass transportation initiative aimed at decongesting city centres and freeing the state of the about two billion man hours lost to gridlock yearly.

    Ahead of the take-off of the pilot phase of the project in November, the government last week confirmed it has updated its databank, disclosing that over 4,000 bus assistants (popularly called conductors) operate in the state.

    The Chief Executive Officer of Lagos State Drivers’ Institute (LASDRI), Mr Phillip Ogunlade, confirmed on Friday that 4000 conductors have been trained on new skill sets that would be needed when the new bus reforms of the government eventually takes off.

    “More than 4,000 members of the Bus Conductor Association of Nigeria (BCAN) have registered with the Lagos State Drivers Institute (LASDRI) for training and accreditation in line with our mandate,” Ogunlade said.

    Ogunlade, who refrained from speaking on the transportation policy, confirmed that his agency has trained bus conductors on such skills as customer relations and the requisite roles of a conductor in the new regime.

    BCAN President Mr Israel Adeshola said the training would equip them to function and conform to the state’s reforms on transportation.

    “Over 4,000 members are fully ready to operate along with the new Lagos State transportation reform.”

    While LASDRI would deal with accreditation of operators, which includes drivers, the Directorate of Commuters Service is to provide appropriate gears, including identification badges, uniforms and route numbers for operators.

    “We want to assure the people and the government that our members are fully for the state transformation of transport system. All these we have done to get prepared for the state development plan in the transport system,” he said.

    According to him, the association has enlightened its members that very soon conductor work will no longer be business as usual.

    “The association had trained so many registered members. BCAN wants to ensure no more jumping and hanging on the buses anyhow.

    “We are in line with the state government’s plan on the new transport reform and we enjoin others in the system to key into the system and get registered,” he said.

    Adeshola however appealed to the state government to carry members of the association along with the ongoing reform.

    Planet Projects Managing Director Mr Biodun Otunola said the government was actually pioneering a paradigm class shift.

    According to him, while hitherto the government has continued to invest heavily in making the rich in the society more comfortable, by investing in motorable roads and building more airports across state capitals, the poor, who form the bulk of mass users of the roads across the state are denied comfortable ride.

    Otunola who said the 20,000 passengers who use airports across the country, do so in comfortable environment, while the 12 million passengers who use the road in the state alone, have to queue up under the blazing sun or the rain, without a shelter over their head and rush for rickety buses only to end up becoming a victim of one-chance robbery gangs, operating in commercial vehicles.

    He said it is unacceptable that an average Lagosian spends over 60 percent of his income on transport cost monthly, adding that with the bus reform, cost would be crashed, and safety more assured as government is determined to ensure all operators have  identity cards and wear uniform that would be clearly marked.

    Also on the card would be the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) which allows passengers plan their journey time right from their homes, while travellers would pleasurably walk into the comfort of a terminal purchase their ticket and sit down to wait for their buses at whatever time of the day, adding that when the buses begins operation, they would run a 24 hour schedule.

    Otunola whose firm was behind the construction of laybys which has brought huge relief on critical roads across the city, and bus terminals which is springing up in 10 different locations and about a thousand bus shelters across the state; said Ambode’s massive investments in providing supportive infrastructure for the roads is a major policy shift, as it would for the first time, “give back to the people the real essence of governance where it is most critically needed.”

    “Government must redefine the content of its welfarist offerings. People could choose the kind of education or the type of healthcare, they wanted, but not the road. The road is a leveler. It brings the poor and the rich together and that is where government’s spending should go because it has the capacity to create more wealth,” Otunola said.

    He said all over the world, government make the terminals more inviting and attractive in order to generate a fluid or “itinerant economy” as people spend more on consumption at the terminals, whether road, rail or air.

    The Managing Director Lagos State Ferry Services Corporation (LSFC) Mr Paul Kalejaiye said the government is determined to replicate the same signature projects with which it has been noted on the road on the waterways. Last year, the government unveiled three executive boats and four jet skis in what was seen as a bold attempt to further strengthen the state’s responders on water emergencies.

    Espousing the government’s strides at a public forum recently, Kalejaiye said the government is dredging, clearing and charting new routes, building more jetties, and ensuring a seamless world-class inter-modal system of transportation aimed at promoting the waterways as a better, and more affordable alternative to road transportation.

    But it is on the road mode of transportation that the government seems determined to make the most profound statement with iconic threesome Oshodi interchange, that came with a shopping mall and a 30-bed hotel facility, which is projected to process a million passenger traffic when fully on stream, the Ikeja Terminal, which is projected to accommodate 400,000 passenger traffic, as well as the Oyingbo, Yaba, Ojodu Berger Terminals among others all of which are in various stages of completion.

    The terminals, when completed, would be serviced by a new set of medium or large capacity buses which the Mercedes Benz in Brazil confirmed the first batch of 200 buses is on their way to Lagos.

    Mr Ladi Lawanson, the State Commissioner for Transport, said the government is would commence commercial operations of the buses before the end of the year.

    “In the last couple of months, we did the commissioning of the Ikeja Terminal, which was meant to be the flagship.

    “The Ikeja Terminal would be signaling the beginning of what was going to be the entire project, consisting of 13 terminals including Oyingbo, Yaba.

    “We are using the Ikeja axis as a laboratory where we are going to roll out from,” Lawanson said.

  • Reinventing the Nigerian State ( For Gabriel Adetunji Ajayi 1947-2018)

    By way of introduction:
    The piece you are about to read was written and published in 2001. Seventeen years after, it remains as relevant as ever. The piece is dedicated to the memory of our friend and former comrade in arms at the iconic battle-joyous Nigerian Tribune, Col Gabriel Adetunji Ajayi, who this week became the latest casualty of the Nigerian post-colonial state leaving behind the remains of his mother in the mortuary. While Gab was heading for the military academy in 1971, I was heading for the University of Ife. In 1995 Gab was sentenced to death while I proceeded on exile. In what turned out to be our last conversation a few weeks back, Gab, a much decorated former combatant colonel in the Nigerian army, was stoically complaining about the prohibitive costs of drugs needed to manage critical post-surgery. Now he is gone. For strategic reasons, we will leave out a proper tribute to this illustrious son of Nigeria till a later date. The atmosphere is just too foul and murky. We are in a delicate situation.

    IN much of sub-Saharan African, the post-colonial state is in a profound crisis of identity and transformation. It disappeared completely from Liberia for most of the nineties only to be replaced by a bandit state organised along the lines of primitive extortion. In Sierra Leone, its ghost presides over a traumatised populace. In Somalia, after a brief intervention of sanity, it is business as usual for the warlords and a return to murderous contention. In the former Zaire, nation and state are effectively defunct.

    There are no citizens or subjects, only refugees, survivors and the dead, to put it in the memorable words of a leading authority.  In Nigeria after decades of military misrule, the state faces a traumatic transformation irrespective of the wishes of its ruling elite. A state with an untrammelled Sharia ethos emblazoned on one side of its flag and the ethics of resource control engravened  on the other faces insurmountable centrifugal forces. It is an epic gridlock because the flag bearers are travelling in opposite direction.

    In a sense, there is a historic justification for this. States are always an unfinished business, a perpetual project-in-progress, and they tend to come under intense pressure as they confront new realities of history and competing claims. Many of them founder in the process and more still undergo a qualitative transformation or mutation..

    The English state moved from a single-nation –state to a state presiding over a forcible union of nations , then to an empire state and back to a multi-nation state. Several centuries later, they are still tinkering with it in the name of devolution. In this sense, a nation’s constitution  is never a finished product, subject as it is to unending amendments, adjustments  and endless reconstitutions.

    Nation-states may be new to Africa but not state-formations. The Songhai, Mali, Kongo,  Bornu , Oyo, Benin, Zulu   Kingdom/empires were state-formations with a high degree of cohesion and sophistication. When the Portuguese arrived at the Kongo Empire at the turn of the fifteenth century, they met a society in many ways politically superior to the one they left at home. They loitered around a bit before they could subjugate the place, not knowing whether its fire-power could match its organisational prowess. This was why imperialism took its time subduing these empire-states, particularly those around the coast.

    To be sure, it was not that Africa was a haven of peace or a paradise of political stability before colonisation. Neither was it the case that the internal boundaries of its constituting ethnic nations a fixed and immutable affair. Indeed, the phenomenon known as the mfecane and the Yoruba civil wars changed the internal composition of contemporary South Africa and current day Yoruba nation irreversibly.

    One still wonders what might have become the fate of the old Oyo Empire. By the time the British ordered the combatants to go home and fight no more, the empire—or its rump— was already at the mercy of the Ibadan military machine and its redoubtable war-lords. These were the original grandmasters of palace coups.

    Twice, their leading generals unilaterally assumed titles they were hardly entitled to. Once, when the great generalissimo and military genius, Ogunmola , assumed the title of Basorun and told the incumbent Alaafin to go to hell. Again, when Latosa invested himself with the title of the supreme military commander, the Aare Ona Kakanfo, even while there was a living, if helpless, incumbent. But by then, the Ibadan army was the backbone and the heroic saviours of the entire race against the marauding horse men from the plains.

    In the light of the foregoing, and in order to face the reality on ground, it is now imperative to explode certain myths about Africa. First, pre-colonial Africa was not a paradise lost. Second, it was not a state-less lump in which natives luxuriated in rural idiocies. The nation-state might have been a colonial imposition, but some variants of statehood were in evidence. The degree of durability, cohesion and sophistication of these pre-colonial state-formations depended on history and its unfathomable equations.

    This gives the lie to the third myth of pre-colonial Africa as a politically, economically and culturally homogeneous entity. Finally, with the inevitability of war and concomitant dispersal , the ethnic boundaries were not a fixed and immutable affair but subject to perpetual flux. The Fulani have not always domiciled in the northern tip of contemporary Nigeria, and neither have the Itsekiri, the Urhobo and the Ijaw resided in its southern basin from “time immemorial” for that matter.

    Whatever their inherent flaws and weaknesses, the old African states, almost without exception, developed internal mechanisms for hedging and hemming in the overweening excesses of the state and its temporary custodians. The colonial imposition of the alien nation-state paradigm not only destroyed these anti-autocracy disincentives but generated a new form of state enslavement.  The unmediated collision of contrary forces often led to civil wars.

    The grim reality, in the light of such pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial accretions, is that each contemporary African nation has become a unique specimen which will have to solve the crisis of the state in its unique way. Some will falter and disappear. Many will undergo a qualitative transmutation.

    A few will be faced with the stark choice between devolution and dissolution. With the war-cry of resource control renting the air, Nigeria, which miraculously limps along while avoiding the greater human tragedy of the post-colonial state in Africa, deserves a special focus.

    Ever since its test-tube conception and clinically induced delivery, the battle for the Nigerian state has been fought under many guises, diverse fronts and different platforms. The latest, and arguably the most inevitable, is  the contention for resource control.  Such has been the partisan fury, the fierce intellectual bombardment, the emotional blackmail, the towering contempt for the Geneva Convention of warfare, that it is virtually impossible to wade through the trenches without ending up as a hostage.

    In a scene reminiscent of the prescient conclusions of the authors of  The God That failed which argued that the death of communism was inevitable but that the greatest battle would be between socialists and ex-socialists, Nigeria’s former Marxist fraternity have been at each other’s throat. Owing to the ideological occlusion under which such a battle must take place, given the moral and political eclipse on the field of contention, partisans often confuse their base, opportunist motives with noble, altruistic campaign on behalf of their oppressed people or embattled state.

    In the smoke of battle, combatants often confuse friends with enemies and enemies with friends; once and future betrayers of their people’s will to the federal might pose as generals of the salvation army. Needless to add that the end result is often vastly dissimilar from what was set out to achieve.

    So it is that in a provocative monograph , Yesufu Bala Usman, celebrated radical historian, , argued that the  petroleum resources of the Niger Delta derived from the geological debris of his people in the north of the nation washed down across age and time. Bizarre as this may sound, it is still within the bounds of respectable geochemistry.

    But why such arboreal refuse should refuse to be washed into the open sea, why they should get stuck in Peter Ekeh’s homestead, and why they could not have come from the Sahara desert which was once a lush and verdant plain , is a source of intellectual mystery to some of us who retain a measure of admiration for the left-wing prince of Katsina.

    Perhaps the geological garbage was waiting for the federal government littoral suit before it could be safe to venture into the open sea. It may be that this was a mere rhetorical trope that went beyond the content, but for Bala Usman to contend that his people have been in the north of Nigeria since geological time is an affront to the intellectual honesty and fastidiousness for which he made his reputation.

    But let it be acknowledged that Usman’s position approximates orthodox Marxism in all its statist and commandist ferocity, even though there are parallels between this and the absolutism of feudalism. The problem with this orthodoxy is that it could not have foreseen the advent of globalisation, the stunning capacity of capitalism to reinvent its operational procedures and the impact of its own noble critique on the qualitative transformation of capitalism.

    The all-powerful, all-centralizing state is an unavoidable precondition for socialist political and social engineering. The husbandry and judicious allocation of national resources must proceed from this central organ and strong state. Although in Marxist mythology, the state was supposed to wither away, it never did or showed any sign of waning in its controlling ardor. It collapsed with a thud, imploding from its own internal contradictions and the scuttling of human initiative.

    The little local difficulty with Usman’s position is that it ignores or wishes away, the predatory and extractive nature of the Nigerian state , its thieving incompetence and the despoliation and ecological disaster this has wrought on the oil-producing areas of the nation in the last twenty years.

    The fact that the worst culprits of this executive malfeasance are military despots of northern extraction demands tact and sensitivity from the defenders of the status quo,  particularly from that segment of the country if the whole thing is not to degenerate into an intellectual justification of eco-ethnocide. It is this seeming lack of sensitivity and tact that has overheated the polity and led to the war-cry of resource control.

    But then, the Nigerian state did not become an absolutist monstrosity overnight. When General Yakubu Gowon famously announced that the problem for Nigeria was not lack of money but how to spend it, he was celebrating not merely the arrival of petro-dollar , but the vanquishing  of the old regional giants both as centres of political initiatives and as units with outstanding productive capacity. Henceforth, the state doubled as a huge economic almshouse doling out stipends to mendicant-states or paying the public service bill of some Caribbean nation.

    In order to focus properly on the task ahead, it is important to remind our crusading compatriots of the role of many of their noted siblings in the absolutist fiasco, either as conniving super permanent-secretaries, palace intellectuals and propagandists of the super state, regional agitators for self-determination and shadowy decoys for armed destabilisation of the old regions.

    What then is resource control? It simply means the  self-management—and mismanagement—of resources by the authorities in whose domain such resources are located. Such authorities then determine and decide what goes in to the national coffers from their resources based on need and the imperative of development.  On the face of it, it is a simple, logical and straightforward business.

    But on another level, it is not as simple because it ignores the overbearing reality of the modern Nigerian state molded in the image of its colonial forebear where the constitutive components surrender their economic and political rights in exchange for certain expectations from the central authority. All states are by nature and instincts  centralizing forces. Even the old African empire-states extracted tributary from vassal-states, satellites and their immediate constituent assembly.

    Being its arterial lifeline, the custodians of the Nigerian state would not be nearly as dumb as not to vest the issue of resource control firmly within the exclusive preserve of the state.  The duty of the judiciary is to interpret the constitution and not to change it, hence all appeals to it are forlorn, null and void.

    In the light of this, three options are open to those clamouring for resource control. First, to strategise for an upward review of the resource allocation formula from its current thirteen per cent, which can be achieved through a legislative amendment.  Second, to join forces fully with advocates of a sovereign national conference which will overhaul the constitutional impediments to Nigeria’s march to greatness.

    Thirdly, to continue to heat up the polity until  protests mutate into an armed critique of the state or a guerrilla insurrection in which the initiative will pass from them on to more radical oppositional forces. Given the ever  present factor of enlightened self-interest and the privileged insertion of the executive arrow-heads of resource control agitation in the current hegemonic politics as members of the dominant conservative party, one would have expected them to use their leverage to achieve the first option. That they have not shows one of three possibilities:   a political gambit that might have gone too far, severe pressure from below , or an apostolic radicalisation of Damascus-like proportions.

    Whichever way the drama unfolds, it should now be clear that the cry for resource control, the agitation for a national conference, the rise of ethnic militia and even the Sharia gambit are nothing but a shorthand for a greater ferment:  the contradictory struggle to reinvent the Nigerian state. How to domesticate the errant state to suit the aggregate Nigerian reality, how to humanize it and make it responsive to the yearnings and aspirations of its captive-subjects, is the battle royale of our time.

    The current assembly —and even republic—may do their bits and pieces but being products of the old Nigerian state in its last gasps, it is obvious that the major brief is beyond their historic will and capacity.  After decades of economic and political violence against its own nationals, the old Nigerian state suffered a fatal cardiac arrest on June 23, 1993, in the process of annulling the collective will and aspirations of Nigerians.

    In the face of such a historic watershed, it is no use hiding behind the constitution. A constitution aggregates the sovereign will of the people of a country. When that will changes as the current ferment demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt , so must the constitution. Let the regents of the current transition note that and commence the process of realigning Nigeria with civilization and the twenty first century accordingly.

    • First published in Africa Today, March, 2001.

     

  • Reinventing the industrialisation wheel

    Reinventing the industrialisation wheel

    The Nigerian Association of Small Scale Industrialists (NASSI) in collaboration with public sector agencies, is positioning private sector operators to drive the economy. Assistant Editor Chikodi Okereocha reports that the move, which is seen as the most comprehensive and practical approach to boost the employment and wealth creation capacity of small scale enterprises, may be the tonic to turn the economy around in the face of dwindling oil revenue.

    The industrial sector is set for a rebound. The Nigerian Association of  Small Scale Inudstrialists (NASSI), the umbrella association for all small scale enterprises and industries, is leading a campaign to position Micro, Small and Medium and Enterprises (MSMEs) operators to drive the industrialisation process.

    The campaign will see the MSMEs take their pride of place as the engine of growth. The leadership of NASSI under its National President, Chief Chuku Wachuku, is forming some strategic partnerships and alliances with major public sector agencies which mandate verges on promoting the development of MSMEs.

    Some of the agencies include Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN), Raw Materials Research and development Council (RMRDC), Federal Institute of Industrial Research (FIIRO), National Agency for Science and Engineering Infrastructure (NASENI) as well as development finance institutions such as Bank of Industry (BoI) and Bank of Agriculture (BoA). In fostering such strategic partnerships, the overall objective of NASSI is to position its members to drive the  economy, particularly now that focus is shifting to the non-oil sector in the wake of declining oil prices in the international market.

    Wachuku said: “Anybody who knows the economy of the emerging nations or even developed nations should know that all economies must necessarily depend on MSMEs and the informal sector because it’s the engine of growth.

    “Seventy-five per cent of all new net jobs in the US are created by small and medium enterprises, and in this country Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) contribute 90 to 95 per cent to Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

    “Their only problem is that whereas they contribute this percentage to GDP, the wealth addition stands at only 46 per cent.

    “So, if we could bridge that gap, which is what we are trying to do, we are going to create more wealth in the economy.”

    It was in the bid to bridge this gap, according to Wachuku, that such strategic partnerships became necessary.

    To begin with, NASSI would sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with SMEDAN soon in training and entrepreneurship.

    He said under the MoU, businesses of members of NASSI would be well-packaged with the collaboration of SMEDAN.

    “We will train you in entrepreneurship and give you the technical knowhow and entrepreneurial skill to become a businessman; how to prepare your own business plan and feasibilities, and also present you to either BoI or BoA, who is also partnering with us,” he explained, adding that the purpose is to ensure that NASSI members transit from being applicants to becoming employers.

    Wachuku noted that because most small scale industries emanate from personal resources and do not have the culture of business, they die within two to three years. The MoU with SMEDAN is therefore, seeking to reverse the trend by adding value to what MSMEs have in form of training and entrepreneurial skills.

    According to him,  this is why a Federal Government agency such as SMEDAN, a ‘one stop shop’ to facilitate the access of micro, small and medium entrepreneurs/investors to all the resources required for their development, becomes very relevant.

    He also expressed optimism that the collaboration with SMEDAN would create more impetus by adding more industries, and with the industries that are there already, encouraging them to sustain themselves and not to die.

    Perhaps, the icing on the cake for small scale industrialists under the renewed drive by NASSI to transform the industrial sector is the plan to establish industrial clusters. Already, the Minister of Science and Technology working through RMRDC and NASSI is powering the emergence of clusters along the agro and industrial value chain. Under the new arrangement, to be perfected next week, RMRDC will be coming out with raw materials-based industrial clusters in every local government area of the country.  On its part, NASENI, which produces prototype equipment and commercialises them through the private sector, will power the clusters using its solar energy plant.

    With hundreds of businesses or entrepreneurs in the 774 local government areas of the country, operators and stakeholders are upbeat over the huge impetus this would create in the industrial sector. For instance, if agric clusters such as rice clusters are established in a state such as Ondo, paddy rice becomes natural raw materials to processing mills and that means you already have off-takers. “That is what I mean by value chain. So, you are going to have raw materials based clusters where it’s only NASSI members who will access them,” he said, adding that ‘we are going to sign MoU with BoA.’

    That is not all. Wachuku also hinted that in a bid to get round the challenge of lack of access to finance, NASSI would, in the next couple of weeks, be shopping for investors so that the association can have its own micro-finance bank in every local government. The association is also considering setting up a credit department to investigate every credit refusal.

    He said: “We will supply you training and all our trainings must be certified by SMEDAN.

    “Once SMEDAN certifies you through the Business Development Service Provider (BDSP) that your business plan is good, if a bank refuses you credit, one of my departments in NASSI will ask why. So we are going to establish in NASSI a monitoring department to ask why a bank refused a NASSI member credit.’’

    NASSI’s move to establish a bank may have been prompted by the failure of its earlier MoU with FirstBank of Nigeria Plc, a development that did not go down well with some members of its state chapters particularly Kano and Rivers. NASSI had in 2012 signed a single-digit credit agreement with FirstBank.

    The loan was to be extended to members of the association who were to contribute a certain amount of money. Non-member small scale enterprise (SME) operators were also encouraged to register with a certain sum to benefit from the scheme. The loan was to be funded from members’ contributions and First Bank’s investment, while a large pool of it was to be realised from participating state governments, who were approached by the banks’ officials and NASSI to buy into the initiative.

    However, the MoU failed to achieve its objective apparently for no fault of First Bank or the leadership of NASSI. Wachuku explained that under the MoU NASSI signed with First Bank, the bank was to provide loans at nine per cent interest rate. The MoU, he said, was to made states assist entrepreneurs who have no access to finance and collateral. The state government will put funds into First Bank, about N500 million minimum. The bank will use the money as collateral and lend to the citizens of that state who are members of NASSI.

    The interest rate was negotiated at nine per cent. But when NASSI got to the states, it found out that they were not willing to back up their own citizens. He said state governments did not put money into the First Bank deal to enable the association commence the programme Hear him: “Kano State Government did not pay that money (N500 million) into First Bank. Rivers State Government did not put one kobo into First Bank. Now some stupid elements using politics thought that if you pay the normal membership fee of N15, 000 or N25, 000 as the case may be, you are now entitled to maybe N5 million.

    How do you pay N15, 000 a year and get N5 million loan? It’s stupid, it’s illiterate, and

    it’s annoyingly unintelligent for anybody to think that because you paid N15, 000 First Bank will give N5 million and you keep bashing the leadership of NASSI.”

    He said that NASSI members in Kano and Rivers State probably did not understand the concept of the First Bank MoU, which was that the bank would give loans to eligible NASSI members at nine per cent interest rate. “How do you expect a deposit money bank with shareholders funds to give you interest of nine per cent instead of their prevailing interest rate of 25 to 30 per cent?” he asked, noting that this was why  the association came up with an idea that each state government will deposit at least half a billion into First Bank. “The point is quite clear: you get your state government to put half a billion, which you didn’t do,” he said.

    However, there is good news for all NASSI members who paid membership fees in the hope of getting the First Bank loan but didn’t. “Members of NASSI who paid for the First Bank loan who didn’t get it, particularly Kano and Rivers, we will waive their membership fee,” Wachuku announced, adding however, that “Becoming a member of NASSI does not guarantee you must get a loan. Your business must be well packaged, you must be eligible to meet the criteria, and the criteria from bank to bank are different, but we are going to create common criteria. That was why I said we are going to ask government to create under SMEDAN a platform to ensure that whatever businesses are packaged, approved and certified by SMEDAN through our own partnership, will not have any problem.”

    To ensure that as many members of NASSI as possible benefit from the ongoing initiative to boost their competitiveness, the National President disclosed plans to float a new membership drive.

    The thinking is that if NASSI is going to present its members to either BoI or BoA or any commercial bank or any of its strategic partners for one form of assistance or the other, it has to have their profiles in its systems so it could track them. “Millions of Nigerians who are natural members will become members of NASSI because there is going to be cross-collateralisation,” he said, noting that the strategy is to have the public sector work in strategic partnership with the private sector.

    As Wachuku puts it: “Government cannot create employment; employment and wealth creation must be private sector-driven.” According to him, NASSI through the partnerships hopes to create five million jobs in the next five years. This may not be an empty claim. Wachuku, a former Director-General of National Directorate of Employment, (NDE), actually initiated the concept of self-employment.’’ NDE has done all these things before.

    No matter what you do, it’s still coming back to the concept of NDE, which is job creation through entrepreneurship, through agriculture, through special public works, and through skills acquisition. So what we need to do now is to forget these old ideas of government and build up capacity in the private sector as represented by NASSI,” he said.

    According to him, NASSI simply means entrepreneurs, business owners, and business owners create employment and wealth. He said NASSI remains the critical platform for Nigeria to use to create employment.

    “We are all over the place and we have mobilised. So NASSI is actually driving a serious system that will translate this to active job creation,” he said.

  • 2013 trends: Reinventing the sales function

    2013 trends: Reinventing the sales function

    Prominent sales authority, professor and author Neil Rackham states: “Irresistible new forces are reshaping the world of selling. Sales functions everywhere are in the early stages of radical and profound changes comparable to those that began in manufacturing 40 years ago. But one change outweighs all the others. The meaning of selling itself is shifting. The very purpose of sales is being rapidly redefined.”

    Consequently, sales organisations face a huge challenge, because there is no longer any sustainable competitive advantage through product superiority.

    Author Jerry Stapleton points out that the second problem is that the sales rep’s customers just do not need him or her any longer. At least, not the way they used to. Traditionally salespeople brought value to their customers by facilitating transactions and communicating information about their products and services. Almost overnight, these two core functions of the salespeople have been lost.

    Belatedly, sales – long the corporate stepchild – is emerging not only as a topic worthy of academic and executive attention but also as the business function where substantive improvement is not only doable but also capable of delivering extremely attractive improvements in shareholder returns.

    Sensible investment, handsome returns

    In short, sensible investment in sales effectiveness produces handsome returns.

    •Sales forces, rated as world-class by their customers, showed organic revenue growth of nearly 50% per annum over the last five years. All of this in recessionary markets.

    •An increasing number of business-to-business (B2B) sales forces, facing the insidious effects of commoditisation and margin erosion, are focusing increasing attention on the very purpose of their sales forces. And many are concluding that sales is less about selling their wares, and more about making customers successful.

    If you accept this assertion, the implications are profound. It changes everything. What you sell. How you sell. What kind of salespeople you recruit. How sales managers manage. How you align sales and marketing. How you are rewarded for the value you deliver. And the kind of relationships you have with your customers.

    •In the US, there are an estimated 19 million B2B field salespeople and, over the next decade, this number is likely to shrink to about 10 million. The middle-ranking “field sales rep” who sells products, features and benefits is becoming irrelevant and unaffordable, and will be replaced by competent and well-qualified internal telephone-based salespeople, who carry out account management and other roles.

    •This will create a requirement for highly educated, financially literate, business-savvy, well-trained consultant-type salespeople who are highly paid. These salespeople are in short supply, and there will be an increasing demand for universities to fill this void. In the US, around 60 universities now offer degree courses in sales, and 94% of their students are recruited before they graduate.

    •In South Africa, finding a sales organisation with a clearly defined and articulated sales strategy is all but impossible. This results in lack of focus, confusion and appalling inefficiency.

    •Some business processes have achieved extraordinary levels of accuracy and precision. Commercial airlines have a defect level of 3,2ppm, and electronic chip manufacture 3,4ppm. Sales, in contrast, not only tolerates but accepts as normal extremely low standards. Lack of process, poor adherence to process, hiring failure rates of 50% and sometimes higher, inaccurate forecasting, forecasting slippage, untrained sales managers, and much more. Massive improvement is both necessary, and achievable.

    •According to ASTD in its 2011 report ‘Developing Sales Teams that Win’, more than US$15.5 billion is spent annually in the US on sales training. Yet, despite this level of investment, ‘conventional’ sales methods seem not to be delivering profit at the rates required by most B2B companies – and, as ASTD so elegantly put it – that’s “[a] large investment to attain more mediocre results”.

    Sales effectiveness

    Unfortunately, most discussions on sales effectiveness default to a discussion on sales training, which should actually be the last step in the sales enablement process.

    •Sales effectiveness begins with an informed management decision to capitalise on the economic benefits to be derived from a highly effective sales organisation. The second step is to decide upon an appropriate go-to-market sales strategy for each business unit or line of business.

    Many companies, trying to shed the shackles of commoditisation, are electing to play in the solution space. This, however is very challenging, and most fail to get any return on their investment, often because they strive to deliver value to their customers, but have no clue how much value they actually deliver, and find themselves unable to get paid for it.

    •Customers are increasingly demanding ROI when purchasing large complex solutions, but few suppliers have an effective and credible mechanism for building a robust and logically unassailable business case. Those that do are achieving remarkable growth, with much smaller sales forces.

    Two other areas handled very poorly are recruitment and onboarding. Research by CSO Insight reveals that in a survey of some 2000 B2B sales force, on average, 20% of salespeople delivered 62% of revenues. In industries such as real estate, 10-15% of salespeople deliver about 80% of revenues. This is totally unnecessary and, with readily available tools and systems, a hiring accuracy of 90+ percent is achievable. The financial impact is dramatic.

    In summary, a carefully considered, and well-planned investment in sales effectiveness will yield substantial financial returns, and a 50% improvement in sales productivity should be well within the reach of most organisations.