 I believe that His Excellency Dr. Isayuguda, the trustees and the executive of the APC Professionals Forum, deserve our commendation for providing this very unique platform, a forum for APC professionals. And I must say that I'm honored to host you today and join you at this first ever public convening of the forum. I also bring you the warm greetings of Mr. President, President Muhammad Buhari. The theme, the role of professionals in politics and nation building, is an important one because it provokes questions about the role of the Nigerian elite in shaping the destiny of our nation. In doing so, we must also interrogate the narrower but equally important question of the role of the APC as a political party in nation building. I think first we must admit that we are frequently in a classic conundrum. We find many gifted, accomplished and remarkable Nigerian individuals and professionals in particular across all walks of life all over the world. But there is a clear mismatch between our individual quality and our national outcomes. We have not yet become greater, as they say, than the sum of our individual selves. It is this paradox of individual genius and collective underperformance that we must now break. As part of an honest inquest, we must admit that part of the challenge is the fact that holding public office in Nigeria at any level is largely perceived as synonymous with the accumulation of power, privilege and wealth. By the same token, the understanding of public office as an instrument of service and as a responsibility to the people has been relegated to the background. So turning this tide is at the heart of our task as professionals who are interested or involved in politics and nation building. And this is especially so for we who are professionals in the APC. The critical point to be made is that professionals are the elite in a poor society such as ours and professionals are therefore enormously privileged in a society such as ours. We represent a small fraction of 200 million Nigerians many of whom are poor, vulnerable and without a voice. So it's my thesis that the privilege or the elite both individually and collectively have a responsibility. We have an obligation to society to plan it, to organize it, to order it, to reorder it and to make it and to do so with all manner of sacrifices and for the maximum benefit of all. This is the burden of privilege. It is important to understand for the professional that because we are an elite, we bear a burden of the privilege that we enjoy as an elite. It's our obligation individually and collectively to charge the cause for the millions to define and house the ethos, the ethics and the public sense of the people. It's our expected role to find common cause across professions, vocations, ethnicities and faiths defining the minimum terms and conditions for the safety, for the growth, for the prosperity of our communities. It is the elite that define clearly what is lofty, what is noble, what is deserving of honor and how these values can be sustained, preserved and enforced. This is the burden of privilege. And in French they will say no bless, oblige. That nobility obligates or perhaps not correctly for our purpose, privilege places an obligation upon us. For us in the APC perhaps that obligation is even greater. For the first time in Nigeria's history, a left of center party is in power. And I just want to say very quickly that there is no question at all that the party that we're in represents that left of center. The APC came together from a number of opposition parties, many of who could be classified under that general rubric of progressives, primarily because of their left of center orientation. Although then the new PDP joined, it is indisputable that the heart and soul of the APC remains essentially left of center. In other words, a party committed, devoted to the common man. Our presidential candidate, and now President Mohamed Dabuhari, was a product of the firm will of the common man, not the product of an elite consensus. And must continue to remember that. It was a product of the firm will of the common man. And despite elite consensus or elite collaborations or conspiracies, he repeatedly won elections or at least was able to deliver significant votes in every election since 2003. In developing our manifesto, we pay tribute to our soul by promising to introduce the largest social investment policy in Africa. And we did implement and we are still implementing the largest social investment policy in Africa. And the reason why we're able to do so is because of the orientation of our party. We believe that a significant portion of our budget must be dedicated to social investments. In other words, catering for the poor and for the vulnerable. So we're feeding 9.5 million children in public schools and we're doing so for years now. The NPARP job scheme provides for 500,000 young Nigerians and now one million. The president just increased that number to one million. And 20,000 non-graduates in different areas of public services. These volunteers are in 774 local government areas in all of the six states. We give out the Jeep loans comprising market money, farmer money, trader money. For the very first time in the history of our country, we grab micro credit loans to over two million Nigerian petty traders, artisans and businessmen nationwide. Our opponents who are on the right would argue that why are you giving money? Why are you giving small loans to these people? But they do not argue that in this same country, 5.7 trillion Naira is what about 200 Nigerians owed the banks in Nigeria before Amcon was created. 5.7 trillion Naira, about 200 Nigerians owed that. But we spent just 20 billion on giving 2 million Nigerians traders, farmers, et cetera. We spent just 20 billion in providing them with micro credit. And of course there will be arguments all over the place. But we as a left of center party believe very clearly that our focus must be on the common man. And we kept faith with that. Over a million people now approaching 2 million have received conditional cash transfers. And this social investment policy is the precursor of a full-scale social safety net. But we are now challenged with the current economic and human development challenges that face not just our country but face the entire world. In our case, the president has promised to move 100 million people out of poverty within a decade. We must provide good paying jobs for the largest number of Africans under the age of 30 on the face of the earth. We must educate millions of children, provide healthcare for millions, and a public health system robust enough to handle pandemics when they occur. Already the problems that we thought would be in the future are here. And we are called upon to provide answers. How do we provide for a population growing at 5 million new children every year? The challenge of mechanizing farming and dealing with the farm to table value chain. The challenge of building productive enterprises as opposed to a rent-based economy. How do we deal with the end of investments in oil are major foreign exchange earner? By 2030, all major funding for oil and gas projects will almost certainly end. Many car companies will stop producing combustion engine cars. By 2030, how will we ensure that our huge reserves of oil that remain benefit us between now and then? How will we ensure that we're able to transit to a non-oil economy in just a few short years? How will we electrify our population? How will we ensure that our people have power? Because without power, it's impossible to develop even small scale industry at an optimal level to be able to make the kind of living that people should expect to make. These are some of the tasks that we are confronted with. And of course, there is a central issue of security and reading our nation of terrorism and gang criminality. And any one of us will agree that our government has been confronted with perhaps the majority and multiplicity of complex problems that any government has had to deal with, at least in the history of our country, two recessions, a pandemic that has now entered its third year, terrorist activities in three zones of the country. And our approach has been to plan and to stick to the plan. We started with the economic recovery and growth plan which enabled us to exit the first recession. In response to the fallout of the pandemic, we put in place a stimulus driven economic sustainability plan that enabled us to exit the second recession. And a few weeks ago, the Federal Executive Council approved our national development plan 2021 to 2025. That national development plan focuses on value addition across all sectors, including agriculture, manufacturing, solid minerals, digital services, tourism, hospitality, sports and entertainment. In agriculture, for example, we're paying equal attention to primary production as well as other aspects of the value chain such as storage, transportation, processing, marketing and exports. In similar context, the plan places great emphasis on the import and export of goods and services, especially leveraging of the African free trade continental trade agreements. We know for a fact that we cannot have import and export without ensuring that our ports work efficiently. We know that we cannot have the kind of manufacturing that we expect to have without ensuring that NAVDAC, SON and all our regulatory agencies understand that their role is a role of a facilitator, not policemen, that they are facilitators. And all of these are part of the plan, part of the national development plan. And of course, part of our ease of doing business innovations that will continue to do year after year. Technology will play a key role in that development plan. Many may not know that since 2016, Nigeria has developed six unicorns, tech companies that are worth over one billion dollars each. We believe that we can leverage technology and innovation to create the millions of jobs and opportunities which we will require now and in the coming years. And we just heard the MD of NICSA tell us a few things about what is being done there. Let me conclude with the following thoughts for our further consideration. The usefulness of professionals in politics is that you have people who are used to being assessed on the basis of their own achievements and who are unafraid to make competence the first advertorial of their acumen. In other words, professionals emphasize the role of merit in public life. So one of the major advantages to our communities of having professionals in politics is lost. One of those advantages is lost if we do not recognize that our role as merit driven persons must be to fight the temptation of ethnic, religious, and other parochial considerations in making the crucial decisions for the development of our nation. And I'll just emphasize that, that there is no point in having professionals in politics if the professionals are driven by ethnic, religious, and other parochial considerations. That's your point. Because the whole point of professionalism is that you are defined by merit. You are defined by your professional acumen. Nobody would place their lives in the hands of an incompetent doctor because they share the same faith or continue to patronize a dangerously inept mechanic because they belong to the same tribe. If someone told me, for example, that the pilot who is to fly the plane that I'm to go in is not a very good pilot, but he's from Ikenna, my hometown, I certainly won't go in that plane. So in the same way, we must especially refuse to be swayed by those whose sole argument for power is an appeal to sectional sentiments. We must resist it and we must say no to it because otherwise we fail in our professional calling. Thirdly, while it is true that we have several excellent individuals in various spheres of society, we must recognize that success in a country such as ours can no longer be defined in personal or individual terms. We must come to the realization that is no longer sustainable to keep finding individual solutions to collective challenges. Development and prosperity cannot be understood merely as the exceptionalism of a few individuals that manage to prevail against the odds. This is not an adequate response to the challenges that confront us. True progress is about reimagining our collective circumstances and creating an environment that enables prosperity for us all. This is the challenge for us as professionals. To this end, we must see ourselves as stewards of the common good. Who have been entrusted with the privilege of managing our collective destiny? The collective destiny of our people for an allotted time. And we must do so with a conscience and to the best of our abilities. It's only through public spiritedness and dedication to the common good that we can as a people truly become greater than the sum of our parts. As one of our greatest writers, Chino Achebe once said, and I quote, he said, enlightened and thoughtful Nigerians must bestow themselves to the patriotic action of searching for decent and civilized political values. Our inaction or a cynical action is a serious betrayal of our education, our historic mission, and of succeeding generations who will have no future unless we save it for them now. End of quote. The future of our nation depends, I must say, on professionals, but those who are prepared to live up to their professional calling. Only the professionals who are prepared to live up to their professional calling will be able to define in one way or the other the real future of our nation. So let me again commend the APC Professionals Forum. For starting this important conversation, and I hope we will be able to mainstream some of the innovative ideas and some of the very important suggestions that are made here in our party and also in our governments across the nation. Thank you very much.