 On the show this morning we will be looking at Nassima's challenge to Tinibu on SMEs, private sector driven economy. We'll also be taking a look at the success rate of small businesses in the Nigerian environment. Good morning and welcome to the breakfast. My name is Nyam Gul Aghaji. It's a pleasure to have you join us. We can understand what a lot of people are passing through. I'm sure that the viewership today will even be more because so many people will be sitting at home and it's not because they chose to but some of them because they have not been paid their monthly salary because it's delaying because of a lot of challenges that even the employers of labor are facing they do not even have the money to go to work because whatever they had budgeted for the month as transportation is now nothing to write home about. Maybe money that should have taken you for one full week will now be money that will take you for one day or two days because the transportation or the fares have gone up. So many things happening now because of this fuel subsidy removal. Of course we'll be looking at the headlines also on the program today and I'm sure a lot of things will be also tied to the fuel subsidy removal. While people are commending or were calling for the fuel subsidy removal it seems as if a lot of people didn't see the consequences of the removal at least the immediate consequences of the removal. For a country that has just, will I use the word suffered, cash crunch which put a lot of people in trouble. A lot of people suffered a lot of damages and lost a lot of things because of the cash crunch that came up just before the elections and then now we're suffering this again. And a lot of people are asking the questions why would in an open economy why would prices be set for a commodity by a body that should be like a regulatory body or something you're setting prices that this is what it's supposed to be. A few moments ago, a few days ago, a few weeks ago there was this general complaint that the airlines should not have put a uniform price for whatever the fares should be because it's an open market let the market forces be the ones to drive whatever the price is going to be but they put a uniform price and they said that was not acceptable. The government itself said that was not acceptable. Now NNPC has put their own price and even a filling station that may have thought that okay, till the end of June let me do what I'm supposed to do as a patriotic Nigerian and let my pump price be the same till the end of June that we know the fuel subsidy removal will actually kick off. They will also borrow a leaf from what should have been like a government and do the needful. So right now, as we speak, the lowest filling station in Nigeria is selling fuel for 500 Naira at least the ones that we know. The ones that we do not know that may be selling less than that. Bravo to you, congratulations. You have earned our respect as patriotic Nigerians who think that they should do the best for the citizenry. A lot of people were going back yesterday and they knew they would not be coming to work today because of the kind of things they met. You come with a fare and when you're going back you pay double. This morning also people woke up, went to the roads. I saw some people turning back and once the prices told them that this is what you're going to pay to a particular place that you're going to they just turned back, dejected knowing that they may lose that job because they don't even have the money. And then others that are strong enough are trekking. But how far can you trek? A lot of people live in Moewe and they come to work on the island every day because houses in Lagos are not affordable. A lot of people come from so many other places that are far but at least they knew or they know all the time that they can always have a vehicle to take them here. Right now those vehicles are not available anymore because no fuel. So there are fewer vehicles on the road, there are more people on the road and then employers of labour I just hope that you will understand with a lot of people. Today we do business because it's a Thursday. Thursday we zero in on the things that we can glean from the business world and educate ourselves and try to find out solutions to the kind of problems that we may have in our economy. So we'll be having some people join us later on on the show to talk on these issues that I've talked about. Nasima is challenging Tinubu on SMEs and private sector driven economy and we're also looking at how small businesses in Nigerian environment have succeeded so far and all that. So did I even tell you my name? My name is Nyam Gul Agadji and I'm home alone today because of obvious reasons we're glad that at least we could connect today. So when you go into the social media space you go into the internet and you want to look at the stories you find one particular story about Trump. Trump is a former American president vying for the position again. He was ousted by Joe Biden who is now the president of America who is also still trying to recontest the election to be president. We also found out that Mike Pence, a former vice president is also in the race, has thrown his wits inside the race and he wants to run for president as well and a lot of other big names in the American political space. But the story about Trump now is that he has vowed to stop Nigerians and others from getting U.S. birthright citizenship if elected or if re-elected. Now what that means is that a lot of people like in Nigeria you have the opportunity to travel to America and your wife is pregnant or you yourself are just pregnant and you can go to America. You just time it in such a way that when you get to America you just give birth and when you give birth your child automatically becomes an American citizen enjoy the privileges of two citizenships. And so many other things that people do. So Trump is saying that just because you can do that there is no way that you're going to get citizenship anymore. He vows to stop Nigerians and others from getting U.S. birthright citizenship if re-elected. So if he's re-elected you know that you have to give birth to your child in Nigeria or if you're going there it doesn't change anything or except you choose another country to go and give birth to your child to get that country's citizenship for your child and all that. So that's what he is about to do. It's not just Nigeria. I'm calling Nigeria because that's what concerns us in this country. So a lot of people have this dual citizenship because of where they were born. Now federal government meets NLC over fuel subsidy removal. The federal government has met the Nigerian Labor Congress they had a meeting yesterday, Nigerian Labor Congress, TUC and the federal government. But according to the federal government the meeting was very successful but in successful I do not mean that they had solutions. There were no solutions. The federal government didn't give any further details of how successful the meeting was but they said the discussion was very high. The spirits were high and everything but they didn't give the details of what happened. But the TUC and NLC have come out to say that they didn't reach any agreement. Now this is the quarrel of the TUC and NLC that there are no palliatives. There is no road map. There is no clear cut definition of what this fuel subsidy removal actually is and what it would mean to the Nigerian populace. What has the government done so far to make sure that the suffering of the people will not be as high as is being anticipated. And then why did the NNPC just fix price of fuel at a time when the subsidy has not actually been removed because we still have till the end of June and all that. So there were so many questions that the federal government needed to answer but as it stands now they couldn't answer the questions the way NLC and TUC wanted these questions to be answered and the solutions that they wanted for the people of Nigeria, the federal government so far has not been able to give solutions. So where are we in the scheme of things? Every time everybody will be talking about fuel subsidy being a scam that a lot of people have been enjoying. Yeah, we agree. A lot of people who shouldn't be enjoying our common wealth were enjoying the money that they termed fuel subsidy. But right now that it has been removed, how will the Nigerians feel? How will the lives of the Nigerian people improve? What is the road map to making this improved livelihood come to us? Nobody knows anything about this. Things that are going to be discussed or the NLC is trying to discuss with the federal government are things that should have been discussed. Before even the pronouncement was made, that's the argument from a lot of quarters. But right now we do not know whether it's a good thing or a bad thing that is coming to us or whether the same money that was supposed to go for subsidy will have another name on that different subhead and the same people who were enjoying it were going to be enjoying and then will be the worst for it. Okay, we also have another story which is sort of like trending from Abia State. The governor there, Alex Ote, has announced immediate suspension of transport levies in Abia State. Now this is one governor that if he continues the way he is doing right now, he may just be one of the best. I do hope that the spirit that he has started this administration with will still be sustained until the end of this tenure, this four years that he's going to be at the helm of affairs in Abia State. He started by setting up a high level committee, a transition committee comprising people who a lot of experts say that were round pecs and round holes and nothing would be left untouched as they were talking about transition committee. And then when he was sworn in, he had the secretary to the state government already. He had the spokesman for the government. He had some key positions the same day that he was sworn in. And if you start that way, a lot of people will start to build confidence in you. And for any administration, confidence building is a very key factor. Let the people believe what you're doing because they feel or they trust you because of the kind of things you have done before and the things that you say you are going to do. If they trust you, your government is going to be smooth as it is. But how will you let the people trust you by putting the right people in the right places and also being transparent enough for the people to see what is being done in your state, what is being done because of them or by them or for them. Let it not just be that you sit in government house and you decide things to be done for your people. That is not democracy. And that's what we're saying. The role of true leadership in progress of institutions, what is true leadership in the first place and what are these institutions that we talk about all the time. In Nigeria, we say our institutions are not as strong as the individuals. And I keep asking the questions, the question, how can an institution be stronger than individuals if the individuals that shoot superintendent over the institutions rather are not ready to do what they're supposed to do. Is it because of the law? Let's say the judiciary, for instance, the judiciary is there. The law established the judiciary. The law is there. Everything that we need for the judiciary to work is there. It's in the books. But are the people who are supposed to work within that sphere honest enough? Are the people who are supposed to enforce the laws or the judgements from the courts and all that? Are they patriotic enough? Are they disciplined enough? Are they straightforward enough? Are they transparent enough? Are they ready to obey the law and keep to the law? Sometimes you make the laws and you fail keeping the laws. So while we're looking at the role of true leadership in the progress of institutions, how can the true leadership make our institutions better? Okay, let's just take a look at one of the videos that we need you to just see. Thank you very much. Mr. Craig, I have a couple of remarks to make. And it's related to what Professor Lemumba talked about. The first thing is that I think we have a misreading of our own history in Africa. And here is a correction. It wasn't Ghana that was the first country in Africa to become independent. That's wrong. Historically, it's wrong. It was the Sudan that became the first independent post-colonial African country. January 1st, 1956, almost a year earlier than Ghana itself. So that's a correction that we need to give the credit to the Sudan. The second remark I would like to make is that Professor Lemumba celebrated many of our leaders. But retrospectively, if you look at the presidents who have performed the best for the African people, many of the names he mentioned wouldn't rise to the top. We have two countries who have been led incredibly well, but who never or rarely ever get the credit for that. And they are models that we should be all copying. The first one is Seret Sechama of Botswana. President Chama and the late Vice President and then President Misery built a country from scratch. And Botswana became an African miracle. So if we want to know and understand how to build countries, we should look at Botswana as a model. Second country is Mauritius. These two countries, their annual growth, economically speaking, over the last 40 years almost, has been competing on the growth rate with the East Asians of Taiwan and Korea and others like them. Botswana ran 7%, 8%, 10% growth annually. So did Mauritius. The level of corruption in the public sector in Botswana is among the lowest in the continent, if not the world. So is Mauritius. And therefore, Botswana, for instance, has over $10 billion in foreign reserves. No other African country can say that. They didn't go to President Misery or President Chama or those who came after them, their pockets. So these are two countries. We want to see models of Africa that works and Africa that's marching towards prosperity despite inequality in all of us. Those are the two or three places that we need to look at. The final remarks here is that I'm Abdi Samatar from Somalia. This is my first session in Parliament. Somalia is known as a basket case. But I want to give you a two-second history of the country because just like Chama in Botswana and in Mauritius, Somalia did something before any other African country post-independent state. Somalia was the first place in this continent from Cairo to Cape, from Mogadishu to Dakar, where there was a democratic change of government several times in the 1960s when the rest of the continent was wrecked by coups and single-party states. I wrote a book about that called Africa's First Democrats. So don't think of Somalia as al-Shabaab. Think of President Osman and Prime Minister Hussain who set the tone for what it means to be a democratic, free and an African country. So Somalis are Africa's first Democrats. Thank you very much, sir. When I was watching that clip, I was just imagining a people without a history, people who will forget their history because of one thing or the other. In Nigeria, even history was removed from the curriculum and then a lot of people had to shout and shout and shout before it was returned. And even if it was or even when it was returned or when we were still taking history in our schools, what kind of history were we learning? Were we learning that Mongopak was the person who discovered a lot of things? Somebody will come and discover a river in a place where people were already living there and he enters these history books as the first person to discover the river and all that. What kind of history were we studying? Were we studying the history of our fathers and really the people that existed in this entity called Nigeria before the coming of the whites, as it is, or the colonial masters? Or were we studying the history of people who came and colonized us and made a name for themselves and all that? We've heard stories of people who we idolize as people who were role models in those days, pre-colonial times and during colonial times. And we've seen that some of them were really terrible people. But because the history has given them a good name, it means that they are good people. How can we leave the history of our people and concentrate on the people who came to colonize us and gave us a history that is suitable for them? We jettisoned all the things that were tradition. We jettisoned everything that was culture. We jettisoned all the things that were values in the African continent and then took something that was alien to us, hook, line and sinker. The same way we have taken democracy, that doesn't seem to be working in states of Africa. Well, we're glad that that clip was able to tell us some of the things which needed to remember about history, which we just overlooked or just decided not to know anything about. A lot of people thought that it was Ghana that first of all had independence, but right now we know better. A lot of people do not know that in Africa there are those that should be called the first democrats and we didn't know about that. But the crux of the matter is that if you become a leader, what will you be remembered for if you leave the scene? Because everybody must leave the scene. And I always say that whoever never thinks about legacy is one of the most dangerous people on earth. If you leave your life and you don't think about what you're going to leave behind, what people are going to remember you by, then you are a dangerous person. Because you are the person because of whom this saying was coined, man die go woman born another. Like it doesn't matter whatever you do, your life ends when it ends and you don't care what happens after that because other people will come on, take the shoes, wear them and do what they are supposed to do. You don't care what name you leave behind because after all you're dead. That's not the kind of people that we want in our community. So if you need to be a leader, you need to have a mindset that you need to leave a legacy. I'm not talking about legacy projects, building flyovers in a place where there are two cars. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is leaving your people better, leaving a good name that will be remembered for years to come. Today we remember their world wars of yesteryear. We remember the Zeke there, all the people that fought for our independence. They may have their shortcomings but we remember them for what they did, the general picture that they saw and brought to fruition. So now we have in Nigeria, if you are having a political role or any other role for that matter, how are you fitting into that role? How are you doing your best to make sure that when you leave people will remember you? Today we remember our leaders. We've had Obasan Joe, superintendent over the affairs of Nigeria when we returned to democracy in 1999. We also had Yara Dua. We had Jonathan. We've had Buhari. Buhari has left the scene. Now we have Bola Akme Tinobu and we'll still keep having leaders. But in your mind right now, even as I'm mentioning these people, you know who you will think is the best among them. And then you have your ratings for all these leaders. So if you become a leader now, how will people rate you? Everything lies on the table of the person who is leading. They say on easy is the head or lies the head that wears the crown or something like that. So if you wear the crown, be sure that you're going to face some hardships and all that. But at the end of the day, let the people applaud you when you leave the scene. We've seen presidents that handed over, went their way and they were called by their people to come and take the reins again, even though they didn't want to. These are people who impacted lives. But you, if you're a leader, as a family man, as a little counselor, as a sweeper in the office, as an MD somewhere, as somebody of influence anywhere that you are, what have you been doing? So don't say the system is bad. It takes one person to change the entire system. Do not say because the system is corrupted, you cannot do your best. Even in this administration, we know people who, in spite of the system or the last administration, in spite of the system that we're doing well, what can you do? Why can't you be one of those people that will be applauding afterwards? Everything that happens in Africa is leadership. And we should stop as leaders being selfish and greedy. That's the major thing. So right now, it's been raining in Lagos. I don't know if that is what was predicted for today. It's been raining in Lagos and maybe some other parts of Nigeria. But for the details of our weather, let us take this weather report.