 And now to our interview segment. I'm now being joined by the President of the Association of Small Business Owners in Nigeria, Asbon, Femi, and Bershula to look at the state of Assamese, its survival amid the macroeconomic challenges that ease the devil in most businesses in the country. Thanks for joining me, Femi. Femi, can you come over with me? All right, it is indeed our pleasure. Let's just start by this report that we hear that small businesses fold up due primarily to lack of basic financial literacy. You have been at Asbon for quite some time and how true is this? And what has Asbon, or what can be done, particularly about that? I didn't get your question right. Please can you take that question? I was talking about some SMEs actually died in Nigeria as a result of financial or lack of basic financial literacy. Is this true? If it is true, what can be done? Or what has Asbon done about it? Well, it's unfortunate that even in this 21st century, financial literacy is still a challenge to nano, micro, and small business owners. Quite a number of us have not yet come to the reality of the day by embracing financial literacy. And that's why you will discover that many of us have challenges when this new cash policy, cashless policy was introduced. It was difficult for quite a number of SMEs to migrate immediately from the cash-dependent economy to cash-less economy. And then for us as an association, we take it as one of our strategic duties to ensure that we have businesses of scale, especially when it comes to financial literacy. Some of the things we do is that we engage them in training and retraining. We keep letting them know that there's no way they can survive into this business world without embracing financial literacy. And we're happy that quite a lot of organizations are also supporting us in ensuring that we are able to train our TV members into becoming financial districts and also engaging themselves in some sort of banking, trading and businesses. They have migrated now, quite a number of our members have migrated now from the unbanked sector to become customers of different banks. And this has helped their businesses. We also ensure that over time, we help them to navigate their businesses in a way of providing soft landing for those items, those gadgets, those digital issues that may be relevant to their businesses. One of such is that we are ready for them to be able to have accounting software that they can access for free for the first one year without payments. And we believe that after the first one year, they will be able to have funds to not begin to pay for each of their items. With accounting software, it helps them to do their monthly and yearly auditing without the need of an auditor. It helps them to automatically file their tax returns and then much more. It also does the PR and the HR that the company needs from time to time. And this has also eased their business. We also make sure that we get them point of sales machines, POS machines at no cost. And with this, it helps them to make their businesses seamless. And we make sure to do that and their businesses are registered because it takes a registered business to be able to engage with the banks. So we make sure they have their businesses registered. Those who cannot afford to register their businesses at immediate, we support them with some kind of funding while they pay back on an instrumental basis. This is one of the many things we do to migrate them from being financially literate to become financially literate. That's a very good one, FM. But let's look at what I started to show in my intro. I talked about them how most small businesses in Nigeria are not insured. According to the LCCI, just about 0.5% of SMEs are insured in Nigeria compared to what we have globally, which is 54%. As important as insurance is to SMEs, I know we've had issues over the past few years with COVID-19 and other issues that actually affected the global economy. What would have thought that SMEs would have gotten some sort of a buffer if they were insured? So is it like Asbon, or is it that Asbon is actually opposed to insurance or somewhere I read that you said that insurance has failed small businesses. Can you expatiate, please? Well, over time, Nigerians in general and business owners, particularly micro and small business owners in particular, are vast insurance. And this is because over a period of time, we have subscribed to insurance and when it is time for claims, the claims did not either come or are delayed or did not come in a way or in a quantity that we expected it to be. And that has actually discouraged a lot of small business owners from embracing insurance. And one of the reason that we have highlighted with the other time is because the awareness is not even there now. How many Nigerians, how many SMEs are actually aware of the benefits of insurance? In other claims where we have 70, 80% of the populace embracing insurance, we have less than 10% here in Nigeria because the awareness is not done enough. And I think this is a time that insurance companies need to wake up to do more awareness that they have been doing before. We also discovered that one of the issue that we face as business owners is that many of the policies are too expensive. They are not affordable to us. To some, the documentation is just too lengthy. Many of the members are not too good in reading lengthy documents and some of them are awarded in such a way that it's only lawyers that can understand them. So I think it is time for insurance companies to begin to break this down to see how they can ward them in a way that a common man on the street can understand. Do them in a less seamless way such that within one or two pages we're able to get what we want and sign up if you are interested in insurance and target it to the specific needs of the SMEs. We have different needs at different sectors. The particular need of an SME who is into that great sector is different from the person that is in the ICT sector or perhaps in the trading sector. We need insurance that can be targeted to our needs such that it's to be able to meet what we want and that will help us to be able to appreciate insurance the most. All right, let me very quickly, we have to wrap up. But I need to get two questions just before we go. So you just have to be very prompt to respond. Firstly, I want to talk about countries and tax system. Over time, most businesses, even the average Nigerian complains about double taxation or multiple taxation as it were. And very quickly, how would you say the impact of regulation specifically in the tax system in Nigeria has affected them small businesses? The tax system in Nigeria still needs much to be desired because we are faced with so many taxes. Many of them are multiple taxes. Many of them are just coming from the blues and I think it is time to advise governments to one, make sure that taxes are harmonized. We have harmonized taxes and also those taxes should be made public. Everybody should be aware that, I mean, in this particular sector, these are the set of taxes I am eligible to pay. So whether that person comes demanding for different kind of taxes, are we able to say no, this is not right. Today we have taxes from federal government, local government, state government and many of them are multiplicated. In today's business, we have seen some of the business owners contracted with over 100 different taxes. That is killing and so it's not happy business. Government needs to do more about harmonizing taxes. Yeah, as we round off with you now, Femi, let's talk about something that's equally important. You know, recently, the National Bureau of Statistics, MBS reported that Nigeria's inflation rate rose to 22.04, which is 2.04% in March. In clear terms, how has it affected small businesses in Nigeria? You have 30 seconds to answer that, Femi. It has made a lot of small businesses close shop. I can tell you that quite a number of business owners have closed shop. Well over 20% of businesses has folded up because of the high inflation we have experienced, particularly from the COVID-19 year to this particular time. It makes it impossible for us to upgrade. First is that it has depleted the purchasing power of the consumers. So the consumers can no longer buy as they used to be. For those who are buying up to 40, 30 product, a quantity of a particular product, can no longer buy even half of that particular quantity. And for us also who are the business owners, we are challenged with the issue of our raw materials. Inflation has eaten our capital. If you need to get, for example, 50 KG of a particular raw material before, you need that same phone you need two years ago to now get about 15 or 20 KG of that same quantity. And what does this imply? It implies that we need to begin to now halt our overhead. And that means that we have to check some weights. One of such weights is reducing our substance, which is also increasing our employment. And this is not good enough. We are hopeful that in the new government that is coming on board, they will walk around the clock to check, make inflation so that the economy can grow. If the small business owners are able to grow their businesses and upscale, the economy itself will grow. Maybe to do more of exports, we'll be able to also compete more globally and it will be better for us because we end up in reducing the joblessness. Thank you so much, Femi. We do appreciate the time and all of the inputs that you have brought to the show this morning. Femi Egbeshwila is the president of Aspwn. He's the association of small business owners in Nigeria. Thank you so much. We do appreciate your time. All right, we'll move on next. Thank you once again for having me. All right.