 పాస్ల్ల్ాటుటెదింటిగెనిస్ల్లుటిధిలులికంటిసూ. వఠహిటోకింటనినాడింరింటసికింటెట్టికి. during the administration of his Excellency should we get power in May? When his Excellency talks about moving Nigeria from consumption to production, is when all the sectors of production is activated, they used to be engaged. The agricultural sector, manufacturing sector, entrepreneurship and all that. His Excellency is coming up with every youth a skill programme whereby no Nigerian youth will be left out of the job sector. Every youth a skill, make sure that every youth is engaged in one form or the other. At the moment there is no useless human being. What will have a people that are not skilled. His Excellency is going to take a very determined step to ensure that every Nigerian child learns one or two skills that will help him in a living in life. Remember he was talking about the 20 million out of school children, most of them in the north. And he said look if these kids can learn Koran, then they can learn anything else. Therefore why don't we engage them in some life skills that will help them in a living. Every human being can in a living for himself and by himself if he is appropriately trained to do that. There is one area that usually strike me. I mean this is one thing I've always been saying, if I am sitting down across the table with whoever wants to be the next president of Nigeria, is the question of the minimum wage for the youth. No, not for the youth. In our country. The question of minimum wage. Okay so we have someone who is just 21 years old now is going into the employment industry and he is basically asking the basic minimum wage is 30,000 naira. And as a young person, perhaps you've been through school for like 4 or 5 years, you know what they did with some very funny program within the last several years. They call it, I don't want to mention the name, but they are not basically empowering us. So what was the future old? What was the next administration old for? For us, what do they have in terms of minimum wage? What can we look up to? Yeah, this actually has talked so much about paying Nigerians living wages. You see the truth of the matter is that we have not come to understand that every human being would make a living out of the current job he has. If someone lives on 100,000 a month and you pay him 30,000, he's going to make the difference, the 70,000 difference from that job. This is one of the major things that is for corruption. I remember when Poff was talking on the security platform, he talked about the police. How do you give a man a gun and you pay him less than 100,000 a month? And you expect him to respect the citizens he is supposed to protect. So part of the things his excellence is bringing to the onboard is the hourly wage and paying Nigerians living wages. Wages that are adjusted to the inflationary rate. You know someone that was earning 30,000 a month in 2015 is actually not earning 30,000 a month this year because of the inflation. And you pay people the same rate you were paying them when exchange rate was $290. Today it's $790 in the black market. And you should pay people the same rate. Of course, most Nigerians their wages can't take them home. And part of the things the government would do is if you really want to fight corruption, you must pay people living wages. That's one thing that I always feel like because no investor come to your country if people can't even afford their products. So purchasing power has to be something that we need to actually look at. And you have to start from this particular wage. So I'm going to look at it from okay. So now we have that particular side of the supply side or the demand side. Then let's look at the job creation side. Now you've mentioned the skill. But then of course if I have a skill and then I have to look at that particular supply side I'll be able to say okay, these skilled people they are going to come. We're going to talk about skills much better. Because I want to actually get that idea of small business or probably youth business entrepreneurship. What are your thoughts on this particular area? I think I do have some of my own thoughts but I still feel I want to actually get your thoughts as it well. What are those things? What are those concrete and very appropriate programs that you feel that okay, these are the basic things to say. Because these are very, very important to the youth. We have a lot of youth who cannot find jobs and it's not always the case that they don't have skills. And like I've said we're going to talk about the skills. Now you have a young person. We have some youth who they want to be gainfully employed but we have some youth who are ready to actually create jobs for the other. So I mean I want to be able to say okay so if you have someone who wants to create jobs and you have someone who wants to get a job then it's only normal, it's only appropriate that we should have a very, very determined government policy for those who are ready to create the job. And when I mean policies, I mean some steps of policies that will not just be basically on funding but also in terms of governance of the funding because within the last seven years we have been having a series of funding. Okay, we're having some series of funding that the government have been coming up with but then of course it seems that these funding are not appropriate because apart from the fact that the funding might not be much but then we also have the situation where they are giving this funding wrongly. Do you understand? Okay, let me get David's thoughts on some of this area you get. Let me get David's thoughts. David, please, I would like to get your thoughts on the area of what do you think about business funding for the young people? What are your thoughts basically on how you feel government should have a strategy of funding for the young people? Yeah, sorry. I'm not sure why it's not letting me show my video. Maybe the host wants to sort that out. But anyway, let's get to it. I saw a few days ago that there was a bill that was actually thrown out of the House of Representatives. A bill that I thought was potentially a very good bill that was essentially trying to make the National Youth Service Corps programme optional and that's in the absence of it being a mandatory programme as it is now that young Nigerians should instead be given the opportunity to use that funding that would otherwise be used by the government to enroll them in NYC programme to start businesses. So it was essentially going to turn what is currently the NYC into probably Africa's largest small business accelerator. I thought that was a brilliant idea, but for whatever reason it's been thrown out of the House. The House basically had a big problem with it and the issue that the House raised with it was obviously that basically there are a number of states in Nigeria that use the existing NYC programme as a technical subsidy for the education and health sector because they don't want to invest in those things. So they'd rather use young Nigerians as cheap labour as a sticking plaster. So instead of solving the long-term problem which is that you don't have enough qualified teachers and doctors in your state and you don't want to make the investment necessary to put that into place. You'd rather just have young Nigerians coming in every a steady stream of young Nigerians coming in every year and you pay them peanuts and they are obligated to do it. They have to do it by law and even the deteriorating security situation and the risk that puts them in you don't care what they are looking for is your own advantage. I think this illustrates just that basic disconnect that exists in the way a Peter will be and the way the political establishment sees the future of Nigeria. Now when it comes to business funding and business acceleration a simple look at the population demographics of Nigeria should tell you something very simple. Something like 65% of Nigeria's population is under the age of 35. Statistically Nigeria is one of the youngest countries of the world. A median age is something like 18.9. Very young, demographically. What that means is that we are on the course of something called a demographic dividend. A demographic dividend is basically when the majority, the vast majority of the country's population is within the young working age. So between 18 and 14 that's a demographic dividend. Typically when countries go through demographic dividends they are supposed to enjoy explosive rates of economic growth. So when China and India in the 80s and 90s experienced their economic booms they were personally their demographic dividend. Nigeria is about to enter its demographic dividend and it should be clear to everyone that being that they aren't we don't really have that much of a large structured formal sector. The vast majority of Nigeria's economy is informal. Something like 60% of Nigerians are employed in the informal sector. So the only way to properly harness this demographic dividend and enjoy the economic results of the demographic dividend is to encourage growth and expansion of small businesses. That's the only way it's going to happen. That's the only way the economy is going to develop that heat and friction that it needs to drive Nigeria into the 21st century. You take advantage of your youth population and put in the investment it takes to get them to grow the economy to grow businesses and by extension grow the economy. And that's how you take advantage of the demographic dividend not by disability. You reference the N-POWER program. Disability in 10,000 era every few months to people. That does nothing. All that does is that it funds a little bit of consumption. It does nothing more than that. It will buy food for a few days and that's it. That is not what young Nigerians need. Sorry, wait, can you turn on your video now? I think you can come up now. Okay, perfect. So as I was saying, what young Nigerians need is the opportunity to grow the economy. And young Nigerians have already demonstrated the capacity to develop and to grow business. What young Nigerians do not need particularly do not need is just these little subsidies to fund consumption. So these electoral bribes which we refer to you chemistically as Anchor Boruwa's program, N-POWER whichever fancy name you used to call which is basically very tiny sums of money which are essentially just little bribes to poor people. That is not what young Nigerians need. Can you hear me? Yes, yes. Okay, no, something just occurred to me. I mean, you are the very, very well respected investigative journalist here. Did you think there is an aorta of truth to the 75 trillion Naira stamp duties? I'm getting somewhere because you see, I have this very crazy idea about how we can fund the youth business and I've discussed with my role model, Professor Patutomi and he has never considered it very crazy but then of course when I talk to other people they think I feel, me personally I feel we should have a yearly 20 trillion Naira youth business development fund and then people will ask me how do we fund this. So understanding this, let us go into the area of the the stamp duty. Is there any aorta of truth in the very facts that we have a situation where we have 75 trillion Naira on remitted stamp duties is there any truth there? Maybe probably I can then go to can you hear me? Yes, I can hear you. Is there anything, do you think it is true? 75 trillion that's a very large figure being that Nigeria's annual budget is just about 7 or 8 trillion so I'm not sure 75 trillion is a realistic number if you had said 75 billion maybe and by the way I don't doubt that there's definitely some level of corruption going on in the stamp duty repritances is the amounts that I'm not sure about but going on to your point about the possibility of funding basically a nationwide business accelerator program I think this is not just a good idea I think it has actually been done before so if you recall under the previous administration there was something called now for whatever reason either that decision didn't make as much of the meal about it as it should have or the media didn't do its job but this was actually rated by I believe the World Bank at the time as one of the most successful government driven business accelerator programs ever on the African continent and why was it successful the simple reason was that the government itself wasn't directly in charge of administering it so the government funded the program and then hired your corporate consultants like KPMG to actually manage the actual day to day process of selecting people you know judging business plans that sort of thing so the decisions were made purely on a business level they weren't political decisions it wasn't influenced by where this person comes from who sent a letter on behalf of this person who this person's child is and as a result that was a fairly successful program so I believe something like that can actually be done and scaled up using a similar model where the government itself isn't directly in charge of making funding decisions and the application of funding process is privately driven and it's transparent so that people have a significant amount of trust in it if that can be done that definitely could be a solution one of the solutions to this long term problem of youth unemployment and under employment private sector and I believe that the best approach to monitor funding disbursts for me I believe in equity structure I really do not believe in grants very much and I don't believe very much in loan but I believe that if you give money I'm going to give my wife the money to start business I think I want to do it in terms of equity so that I will be able to monitor the business because I'm now a part owner of this business so I can actually set up some kind of governance structure into this then if you have an effective governance structure an effective system of that kind of thing then you can actually then talk to angels there are thousands and thousands of angels across the world who actually want to in young businesses by the way before we continue please do well to donate to the accounts over there I mean we very much love to get your donation so David I'm going let me get back to you let me go to Dr. Chidi for instance Dr. Chidi what are the basic governance approach for me like I've said loan is good, grant is good but I actually love equity I love the situation where if I want to invest in your business it's not because I want to pry into your business but I want to invest there so that I can actually monitor it so what are your thoughts on that kind of funding structure for me it is not something we cannot do there are thousands and millions of angels out there who wants to actually invest what they are just interested in is that there is a particular there is a very strong and very efficient governance structure what are your thoughts on this particular area for the Ovidati administration should actually come in in May we are starting with bringing in transformation in the way government agencies operate one as are today most of the government agencies operate as enforcers of the law not enablers of businesses these are two very different things when the agencies of governance begins to work like enablers business enablers nafdak will begin to work as enabling small businesses to develop standards that are acceptable to the international community and not enforcing them to do that some will begin to become an enabler of small business to meet the international standard for their product a lot of things will change now there are so many government agencies that have been established to support businesses but the bureaucracy that is involved and the corruption that is involved is what makes us not work if you look at what David Hyundai said now government the past government of Jonathan what they did was to contract a private sector KPNG to manage that processes because when the government comes in and the process are compromised quality, competence and capability is not taken into consideration everything fails you do not consider the competence, the capacity and the quality of the business plan then the money might have gone right to the wrong person so this government is coming into equip all the institutions development institutions like the bank of industry development bank to get them to begin to do the work they were established to do putting right people in those places who understand their responsibilities most importantly David was trying to say it is the fact that the private sector must still play the key role you are coming back to the private sector now part of the reason why a lot of people investment are not coming to the private sector is because you don't have a rule of law part of the things the president is bringing to play is rule of law establishing a rule of law and ensuring that every case that goes to the Nigerian cuts is concluded within 12 months no case should exceed 12 months so if we have a dispute and we go to cut it shouldn't be there for 10, 20 years and when people know that if I have an agreement or business misunderstand with you I can go to cut and get justice then I will be comfortable with investing money in that and then a lot of things will happen when you create a conducive environment and knowledge is celebrated right now in Niger knowledge is not celebrated that's why people don't creative industry is not growing at the rate it should grow because knowledge is not celebrated sorry let me get David's thoughts David please on the area of small businesses and funding small businesses as someone who has been involving business yourself and you know how difficult it is to actually grow business so if I give 10 million to business now I run a fund and when I give 10 million to a small business or to a startup I know the sort of governance infrastructure that I must put in place what are the kind of governance infrastructure that you feel based on your experience something we can actually learn from if I had not this is a mistake I have made so if there is a sort of like a young panel person like you that have been successful with what you are trying to do what are the kind of processes you feel working together with government and having a sort of private sector governance infrastructure what kind of structure would you like to see in those kind of regard so I am not exactly a business guru I only have some experience in running a small business so I will speak based on the little experience that I have with all humility I would say going from the mistakes that I made when I was running a copyright agency back in 2019 what I would say is the number one thing that you want to do is make sure that as a business owner you have someone that you are accountable to because it is very easy to if you have what you think of as a successful business the cash flow is good you have money coming in it is very easy to forget that you and your business are supposed to be separate entities your personal funds and your business funds are not supposed to come in you are supposed to pay yourself a salary they are supposed to be that separation and discipline right I personally made that mistake quite a number of times so for the purpose of taxes for the purpose of even sustainability of the business there needs to be someone you are accountable to so what I would recommend is that instead of the usual sole proprietorship model even though it costs a bit more and there is a bit more legal paperwork involved people should look more into limited liability sort of structure with a board so that there are people that one is responsible to so even if one is a central executive personnel in the business one for example doesn't have free reigns just dip one's hands into the company accounts as and when one pleases that one has someone always sort of keeping one honest keeping one accountable that this month you have to make payroll so and such and such has to happen and that no matter what you cannot redraw more than so and so amount from the business because from my experience a very large part of the reason why so many most young businesses fail to make it past three years is not necessarily because the business proposition is bad necessarily because there's the cash flow problem or there's the consumer problem it's simply because the business owners are not sufficiently do not have the the requisite discipline or skill to keep a business running because keep running a business and having the skill set the skill set required to offer a service or a commodity for sale are not the same thing and that was my own experience that was what I mean so now we have the governance and then the skill set and that will take me back to the youth skill set that you actually talk about David an idea like incubation centers maybe probably one local government what do you think about this kind of thing for me I feel in a community if you look at a community for instance there will be lots of people within that community that are gifted there will be lots of people that needed that particular skill set maybe entrepreneurship or employability training what would you think about the idea of the incubation centers like where youth can actually if I need to actually learn something if I need to actually get funding if I need to actually become a small business owner there's a place I can actually go to what will that kind of talk how will it go in your mind what would you want there are actually such things that already exist I don't know if you know about an organization called the seed stars so they run a global network of such incubation centers they are trying to expand across Africa and across Nigeria as well so far they only have a space in Lagos and I think Apuja but they are also trying to expand how I think a government would key into this would be obviously there will be a significant amount of government funding involved the government has to invest in this but very crucially being government property the government should rather partner with a private sector entity like seed space so the government will have equity in that joint venture and then let the private sector drive that thing so there can be a bit of government incentivization involved so for example where in places where it may not necessarily be that viable to site an innovation center or an accelerator maybe because the skilled population maybe isn't really there but for the purpose of government presence it would be expedient to put it there such things might be possible so the government is the one putting up the money but it's driven by the private sector the day to day operation is driven by the private sector because if you leave it completely to the private sector what tends to happen and what has happened elsewhere is that everything gets centralized so the private sector obviously will go straight to Lagos and then everything will get centralized in Lagos and then everybody keeps on coming into Lagos that's not really how to grow an economy even though it's good to have a hub like Lagos where you can access everything but there in Nigeria is a country of close to 200 million people so you can't have 200 million people in Lagos so you need to have 5, 6, 7 other mid to large size viable cities which have their own large economies too so you need to have such things in Ibadaw you need to have such things in Binin in Kano, in Potakot in Wari, in that kind of thing in Enugu, in Onitsha so how a government came to this would be to put up the required funding but going through the private sector I can't stress that enough because if the government tries to go it alone it just becomes yet another Nigerian government scheme yet another subsidy and we know what the history of that is David, your thoughts a lot of ideas has been discussed around this and I mean I'm of the opinion that if you really want to develop the people for me personally and I've discussed it extensively with Professor Patu tell me very great concept we want to be able to say look can we have this incubation same characteristics let me come in here now that's what prof called local factor endowment now you want to set up an incubation center for an instance in Kano you're not going to say this type of incubation center in Ibadaw they have different local factor endowment in Kano you could set up incubation center on businesses surrounding mid-processing high sand skin and all that maybe in another place you said about incubation center about rice production and processing and all that in Ibadaw you set up incubation center for gamete making for shoemaking and all that so we take into consideration the local factor endowment in that area and they set up incubation center that serve that local factor endowment that way you even reduce the urban migration people don't need to live where they are living they can do that thing from their own local environment so you can then have an industrial cluster around that particular value change every jipple goes on I mean this is something that I feel basically that it's a no brainer that the governments should actually think about this it's something we shouldn't have to be talking about in 2023 but then of course it's good the most important thing is that there is a government here that is here and is care to listen so in other words now tying this all incubation centers with the funding that we've talked about then bringing it back to that area of skill then it means that if there is a particular incubation hub around say rice processing and as it's way it then means that we're going to have to provide the requisite skills in that area to the young people in that particular environment so David I mean what are your thoughts on this kind of situation I mean this what they just mentioned this is a very very great idea around localizing incubation centers within a particular area based on their based on their factual endowments with us solve the problem of this over clusterization of incubation hub because I can I'm aware of more than 20 if not 50 around the Yabai alone and a whole lot of them are trying to struggle for office spaces meanwhile there are a lot of people in the villages so I mean this is actually a very very great store so it then means that we need to actually have like a database of for me just you know my idea we already know what every local environment in Nigeria what they are struggling is just to look at that thing and set up a business incubation center that takes advantage of that endowment in that environment I completely align with that I completely agree with that what I'll just add to that is that this feeds into something which if a few people who are active in the economic policy space in Nigeria have been trying to stress over the past seven years especially but in economics there is something called comparative advantage and that it seems as if the Nigerian government is determined to ignore the existence of comparative advantage which is why for example when you see the Nigerian borders being closed because somebody believed that it will stop the importation of rice which would then somehow boost local production of rice there is no evidence that Nigeria has a comparative advantage in rice production as it stands so instead all that happened was that rice prices went up for everybody food inflation went up and everybody's standard of living declined as a result because they don't take notes or cognizance of comparative advantage so what you've just described is basically comparative advantage but within the country that when setting up business accelerator hubs or industrial parks whatever those things are that it's very important to take the local context into account and the reason one of the not a reason but an observation that I've made is that seed starts for example which I mentioned earlier we've been trying to expand they seem very focused on just tech alone so the idea is we're going to go around Africa and we're just going to start building tech accelerator hubs so that everybody in Africa is going to learn how to code David please let me load your thoughts for a minute the question of the demand of the youth it's something we cannot exhaust believe me there are so many thoughts in my mind so so many things going on you can see I'm not really like settled if you give me three hours it's not something I can exhaust believe me and so in that very short period of time I'm trying to cramp everything but I'm very very glad we could be able to look at the area of industrial clusters and trying to have characteristics in the manner in which we have incubation up so that it will not look like the business as usual and then in the area of the funding we've been able to touch on that but then of course we cannot exhaust it to let you go for now but I hope it's something we could actually catch up on later but I have with me in the studio my prof so Sa what are your thoughts generally we've talked about the funding we talked about the governors we've talked about the incubation centers but then of course I know so much we've discussed so much very very much and there is a lot David is a remarkable example a very thoughtful person who applies ideas to experience he made a point about the simple idea of comparative advantage in structural economics they look at latent comparative advantage because you can use industrial policy to accelerate a comparative advantage in building value chains but let's not talk that kind of grammar right now I just want to leave everybody with a shocking thought we can make every 21 year old Nigerian a million year within 15 months of a new government that's not possible I expected that to shock you that's not possible the accountant general how much did they say it took 107 billion what about billion in this government with nabbing billions let me take that idea just a little further so that people don't feel scandalized that I say we can make every 21 year old a million year in 15 months in 2003 two professors of economics at Columbia University have been Subramanian and Javier Salai Martin wrote a working paper for the IMF in which they said that the government of Nigeria was so incompetent that Nigerians would be better off without the government as an IMF working paper I'm not that is if you take the welfare that Nigerians get out of their being governed and just don't have a government just say ok this is a Nigerian revenues 100 billion ok all of you your share is so much Nigerians would be better off that was just thesis now front of mind who was a Norwegian born economist at Harvard at the time later moved to Columbia where these people wrote out of and is currently an editor of the financial times in London Martin Sambu took the concept that Martin argues that essentially when Nigeria is badly governed is that the people don't know that the money that they are playing with in Abuja is their money that if you collected all of Nigeria's revenues wrote to the Sorosuki champions all of them and said look your share of this Nigerian money is 20 million Naira for 2023 but they will give it to you now see we are going to tax you at the rate of 99.9% so what is left in your account will be 50,000 Naira you can go and spend it as you like but we've taxed you at this rate and we've taken 20, 19.7 million you will see people get ready to fight I can't take all of them my money like that the money will then be utilized in a way that makes your life much much better in the United States a state called Alaska they said in in the seven month of the year sends out checks to every citizen as their share of oil revenues in Canada, Alberta does it in Nigeria a few big men steal it and leave you poor even when they spend it they spend it in a way that will make you poor so yes, it's a simple idea it's funny I've been thinking about it, talking about it some guy works into my office and says to me look, get 20 banks credit every Nigerian from this revenue basic idea of Matinsambu Leko where's your account First City Matinsambu we're going to pay 20 million Nairaise your entitlement we want to make sure every child goes to school so the son school fees we're deducting 800,000 whatever it is from that 20 million that's your money for your school school fees for this I'm going to deduct after you've deducted everything you still have 1.5 million left in your accounts and you can spend it as you will and you'll be taxed as you spend it we can make every 21 year old Nigerian a billion year a million year within one year of this administration if people are just going to be serious so let them not deceive you Nigeria is poor because Nigeria is run poorly and the youth can change it and take that internal entrepreneurial engagement that will change everything for the Nigerian people let me leave that thought you want to be a millionaire vote right 15 months from now you'll be a millionaire we shall do we shall vote thank you so much thank you so much David and Dr. Chidi