ADEMOLA SERIKI is a four-time Nigerian Minister, Board Chairman of the Corporate Affairs Commission and currently Nigeria’s Ambassador to Spain. In this interview with BusinessDay’s ENDURANCE OKAFOR, he shares insight on how he plans to strengthen trade between Nigeria and Spain while also activating outstanding agreements between both countries. Excerpts:
What is your take on Nigeria-Spain trade and what are some of the top initiatives you will be working on?
Even though there are numerous activities Nigeria can tap from, it has not been able to amplify its activities in Spain. Nigeria is the second largest on the list of countries they patronise. Spain buys items ranging from oil & gas, wood, leather, to rubber from Nigeria.
I would consider us to be the number one because even though India is number one on record, the items that are being exported are mostly controlled by Indians from Nigeria. The item Spain buys from Nigeria is bigger than what they buy from even Europe.
With that in mind, we need to act. At the Nigerian-Spanish council, the issue of trade and commerce will be well engaged as quite a number of our bilateral agreements have been considered but not yet activated. All those things are what the business council would have to consider as priorities to engage and ensure its efficacy are actualized.
Young people say something that I like to borrow from; ‘talk is cheap,’ one can have a conversation for hours but without backing it with actions..
Nigeria and Spanish Government are not close, and so, I hope to engage Nigeria’s Spanish business council and the Nigerian Spanish chamber of commerce to be well active in the process and ensure that all the bilateral agreements that have been outstanding have been activated because it is one of the ways we can move forward.
Bear in mind also that foreign policy is a mission or vision of any given country but the management of that foreign policy is diplomacy. Myself as the manager of our foreign policy and as a diplomat in Spain, I must be desirous to get the result and that is one line of business we have to engage.
There is no longer a direct flight from Nigeria to Spain. There used to be Iberia (Airline) but they left about 20 years ago. We need to bring that back. Iberia didn’t close shop, they are very much in business, they are still flying to major cities in the world but why did it close on the Nigeria route? I have to engage the aviation minister and open a discussion around it and see how far we can go on that because when you have easy access of going to a place, that is part of the friendliness of doing business and that can fasten things; either in decision making or policy implementation
We need to ensure that we look for all sort of business window with the European Union that we can tap into. I believe there are many such windows and we need to explore other windows where opportunities can emerge.
Apart from crude oil what are other commodities Nigeria can export to Spain?
Commodities like rubber, leather and woods, are the major areas. You can’t believe how much they want our potatoes and pepper, we need to rebrand and package those items very well. Those can be on a low scale as small businesses but majorly its leather and rubber.
I’m sure you know how people will go to local restaurants in Nigeria and eat the meat that we call ‘Ponmo’ (Cowhide). If I have the power, we should ban that because that is a by-product of leather and it is not really healthy for our body and so we don’t need it for that kind of consumption.
These are some of the things that we may have to address when we have a consensus across the board with the business community but both the business people back at home and those over there (Spain) must come together and see the way forward.
Oil & gas which is the major commodity Nigeria is exporting to Spain carries over 60 percent but those little items are also very important and so we are engaging the export promotion council and we are talking around packaging because sometimes, your product can be well promoted through your packaging and those are the things we are missing.
Of course, a lot of people will say that the lack of stable power supply is an added cost to the product and packaging will also be another cost but packaging can be simple.
The effort being put by our young boys and girls into internet fraud are innovative ideas that can be channelled into positive ideas and really, we must engage them and guide them to take other avenues that can enable them to be better off than illegitimate means of earning a living.
With relation to Nigeria-Spain, it will be beyond just business- every corner of ambition will be well tapped.
We also have to engage people in the maritime area, as one of the areas that are yet to be tapped. I have not seen Nigeria and the Spanish business community thriving and so we would have to activate it and when business people from here and there sit down together they will come up with brilliant ideas. These are the things I want to do and I want to follow up on them.
Another thing I hope to achieve, even though it might sound very ambitious, but to me, is to use my horizon of networking to make Mr President visit Spain. I can’t think of any Nigerian president that has been to Spain officially; we go to the same places- US, UK, Russia, France and that’s all. We hardly go to Spain or Greece or Italy and they have different interests in the area of commerce and industry.
As you know that I am the chairman of CAC, we are appointing someone to be a desk officer to liaise with foreign missions. This is something that has never happened at CAC, starting from next week, we are having that at CAC and it will be set up to facilitate business in terms of information, entity vetting and a lot more and I’m optimistic it will make doing business faster.
Also, in the area of arts & culture, I am hoping to have Nigerian-Spanish international school. I’m sure you are aware that Spanish is the second most spoken language in the world after Chinese and Spanish unlike Chinese that is mostly spoken by its citizens, it is spoken in Latin America, South America, some parts of Europe and even in some parts of Africa but it is not in Nigeria. It is one of the ways to promote arts & culture and foster better unity.
What can Nigeria do to retain some of its best professionals who are fleeing the country in search of greener pastures?
That is one of the effects of practising capitalism. The effect of capitalism is three choices; democracy- people can decide to move anywhere they choose to. I fall in that category, I was in the diaspora, I came back from the UN finally in 1986 to do my youth service and the set of my youth service would have been 1983 when I left university but I stayed back for about three years.
Think of it this way, I send my kids to big universities like Harvard, Colombia and the likes. When you pay so much for these kinds of schools, you train them very well, even some of those kids can never earn that salary for life while in Nigeria, that is on one part.
On those that studied here and decided to migrate to other countries; take, for example, someone who has laboured himself to become a doctor and is being paid peanut of say N60,000 per month.
The major problem in Nigeria in terms of the minimum wage is the fact that when you earn N30,000 you will spend up to 70 percent of that salary on transport.
We have too many cars on the road and that is invariably affecting our infrastructure because too many cars are plying the road, especially in a city like Lagos.
So the Government is not responsible enough to be spending money on transport. I am a transporter myself, I am the chairman of a transport company called Primero in Lagos and I realize that with all the effort, I pity those who are paying daily from Ikorodu to TBS because the round trip is about N1,000. If somebody is having 20 busy days in a month that is N20,000 a month, what can he do with N10,000? He will eat and pay for other expenses and there is no way such a person can have savings of up to N2000 in a month.
So the government must be able to spend on transport but the government is not spending anything. Not like they are spending something, they are not spending anything on transport.
This is an indictment to all the state governments in the country. In London, you will see the London buses. The central government, because they don’t have a state is spending 33 percent on London buses. The London buses that you see are mostly owned by private people but when you bring those buses you must paint them in the government designed colours and you must mould it. So when you put it in that colour it will appear as if it belongs to the same people, no it doesn’t but they have standard.
In Istanbul, Turkey, they are supporting transport with 45 percent, same with New York and Los Angeles but in Nigeria, no government is supporting any transport that is why you see the commercial buses in Lagos and the state they are in.
When you talk of the exportation of human capacity, of course, Nigerians are brilliant but we mostly use that our intelligence in other areas. So when you pay a medical doctor for example N60,000 to N100,000 per month he can never be married, except he cut corners because there is no way he can feed a wife and kids. So of course he will take advantage of any opportunity to migrate because they want what is better for their life.
The government must be seen to be very serious in the way it engages with people and feel for a lot of Nigerians that would have to go with the minimum wage and still have to take transportation. State Government must be seen to be more responsible and more pro-active.
Some ministries of the government are supposed not to be making money but in Nigeria, every ministry wants to generate IGR; the ministry of education, ministry of transport, ministry of health and environment. These ministries are not supposed to be making money at all they are supposed to be spending.
What is your opinion on the NIN registration as a lot of Nigerians have expressed frustration about the irregularities associated with the processes?
How many Nigerian will have a bank account, how many will have a telephone? Are we saying that all Nigerians have a telephone? I can tell you, it’s my area, I’m the Chairman of Operations communications ltd. NCC must do more because they can do better. They will often give you an unworkable licence; they gave an aggregator licence to people even after they said they were giving it to only nine people who were asked to come from abroad with their experts. By the time they concluded, the over 100 companies with their foreign partners as mandated in the document, they gave to only nine, which is ok. But a year after, and the licence was unworkable because the mobile network operators refused to cooperate, they jumped from nine to 24 companies without the extra 15 that was issued the licence going through the same process as the first nine, with no advertisement, of course, they made that licence to become like handouts.
The same NCC is now making it under compulsion, saying NIN. Hypothetically speaking, let’s say active SIM users in Nigeria are above 150 million, I can tell you about 80 million people own the over 150 million active SIM cards in Nigeria.
So are you doing that NIN for only that number of people? When you initiate something like NIN, it ought not to have a deadline, because, with that, you will just be creating inconveniences. Power beget power, we cannot be exerting power in this kind of environment in this manner and it is part of shoddiness or naivety on the part of policymakers because it makes no sense to say that you are putting a deadline on a social identification because falls about the social class system.
In the US social security number is never closed. In England NSH number is never closed it is continuing because you will see people migrating to the country every day and others coming in from abroad. These are the things that shouldn’t have a terminal date and since the initiative is a novel thing in Nigeria it should not be embraced in a silly manner.
For me, I condemn the deadline policy and I don’t think it makes sense.
As the chairman of DLM capital, what is you take on Nigeria’s capital market space and what role is DLM playing in that space?
Regulatory agencies are killing businesses in Nigeria often because of favouritism and nepotism just like I said about NCC, particularly with aggregator licence.
DLM operates in the capital market space and it gives client across the board, the best advisory services that will be tailor-made to their investment. So as a result we rely on our regulators to guide us from time to time because it is over-regulated and it has invariably affected the growth of the business. When an environment is over-regulated then that ease of doing business is lacking and that is one thing that is affecting the capital market and the people in the business. That is why very few companies are thriving.
I think if the government can reduce over-regulation, of course I know there is a tendency for insider information and other malpractices in that environment but the government can take another look at the area of regulations. I see a future for DLM for example, as a leading adviser and facilitator in debt management and equity capital.
What must Nigeria do to grow its economy as though it exited recession, growth has remained weak?
The CPI, GDP PCI are parameters that are usually being managed by the government but through the private sector that will supply some of the much-needed resources. I will put it to you that less than 20 percent of Nigerians are paying taxes and so the few people that are paying taxes are paying through their nose.
I see Nigeria’s economy sometimes as a voodoo economy because it is not guided by the correct indices and parameters. Sometimes I hear people putting some unproven figures to indicators like the unemployment rate in Nigeria that is at 27 percent and so on, that is ballooning, this makes no sense because what are the parameters. The unemployed persons in Oshogbo or Yobe and many other areas are not even accounted for. They are excluded from the economy, they don’t have any interface they don’t have any identification known to the country that is why I call it voodoo economy.
When I was a minister of Government, there was a matter in council one day that I challenged with the then minister of labour and productivity when he gave a figure in the areas of the unemployment rate. We do not have the statistics or vital data to even determine this.
Ordinarily, you give people appointment without proper vetting, a lot of people serving in Government cannot even leave Nigeria, and those are some of the things we don’t vet. We don’t know the number of unemployed people, so to be talking about figures around GDP, CPI and the rest; it’s on the gun powder which can blow anytime.
Why do we put artificial figures out there? We must go back to the basics to correct our image and have a correct education. Why do we need 1000 universities, basically you can achieve more with even secondary school because that’s the bedrock? We are supposed to have more primary and secondary than universities but today, Nigeria is having the almost same number of universities than secondary schools.
We need more primary and secondary schools and we need to licence our teachers, they shouldn’t be embracing unionism, we should disband them. Teachers and professors should have licences so that when they do wrong they won’t get a job anywhere, and there won’t be an issue like sex for a grade.
We need to build stronger institutions, most of the ones we currently have are very weak. I go to Ghana often it has a better institution than us. People are afraid of the law there and their policemen, for example, are well respected, ours are not respected because they don’t respect themselves enough.
