Entrepreneurship Development – What Should Our Governments Be Doing? (V)

We are still on the internal measures that may be required to help further brace our public officials and position government agencies into understanding and helping entrepreneurship in our country.

Synergy required! As mentioned last week, some countries are business-friendly partly because their public administrators have a good understanding and feel of what businesses go through at various phases of their development and different situations in the economy. For some of these countries, sadly, even wars have been fought and can be fought to protect and project business interests. Major General Smedley D. Burtler (1881 – 1940), one of the most decorated Marines in the history of the United States said, “I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of (America’s) most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers… I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street… I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested…”

Other than morally questionable measures of pushing business interests, for business-savvy countries, most diplomatic engagements are also essentially about pushing business interests. These public administrators understand the widespread benefits of their businesses succeeding locally and in other parts of the world. For our public officials to be of help to our businesses, synergy between public and private sectors must be created, and two ideas come to mind.

1. Balanced Institutionalization and Coordination of Efforts: I agree only partly with many ‘experts and professionals’ who keep arguing about the need for us to ‘strengthen our institutions’. Quite honestly, I feel we just may be ‘over-institutionalised’, with many of these institutions actually ‘too strong’. The challenges are almost always about us as individuals and what we do with the institutional duties and privileges that are thrown at us. For instance, there are, commendably, several Departments and Agencies set up by the Federal Government to help support entrepreneurs. Some of these Agencies include SMEDAN, NDE, NIRSAL, etc. The mandates of these agencies are in addition to the several interventions by other institutions like the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, Central Bank of Nigeria, Bank of Industry, etc. However, we don’t seem to be getting the mileage for the trillions of Naira invested in various entrepreneurship programs.

Whilst many of the interventionist measures are desirable, their conceptualization need root cause understanding of issues as discussed previously. Without coordination, execution of various programs by several independent agencies could lead to duplications, wastes and ineffectiveness. Consequently, there is a need to review the various mandates of those MDAs to establish unity of purpose, achieve effective execution as well a high level of coordination under a single central authority.

2. Private sector business training and experience-building for public sector officials? Our public officials need to get a true understanding and a real feel of entrepreneurship opportunities and challenges. Besides formal training room lessons, we can probably begin to get our officials from certain MDAs to spend time embedded in businesses for a period. A detailed, legitimate, and controlled scheme through which these officers can acquire some first-hand experience by working with selected businesses for a short period can be developed. The scheme might, for instance, allow for Administrative Officers I and II to work for one week every six months with a some formal MSME company like Ankora Farm Estate. Chief Administrative Officers and Assistant Directors might work at a company like BUA for one week every six months. Obviously, which officers and of which levels, which businesses enroll or are enrolled into the scheme, embedment periods and scope can all be worked out.

Regardless of the details, the purpose will be to get as many public officials of varying experiences and levels as is possible to go through the engagement. It may help bring out the difficulties, costs, and frustrations suffered by businesses in our environment as well as help the officials to come up with creative and effective of government interventions.

Building reliable data base and Documentation of legacy assets: Every Nigerian of my generation that lived in Kano remembers the house numbers we had for each house in the nook and crannies of the old City. It was a colonial and Native Authority legacy that worked very well. Mails from anywhere in the world could be delivered to those addresses. The Mai’Unguwas (local area chiefs) knew every household under their areas of responsibility. They knew the head of the household, the number of wives and children in the house as well as who owned what property. Between the house numbers and the off-head population figures, utility bills could be delivered, taxes charged, and transactions facilitated. That was in the 1970s.

This is 2023. We have computers. We need to have our houses and businesses verifiably addressed. We need to improve asset documentation through formal property representations. The economic value and transactional possibilities of legacy assets inherited and passed on through the generations to individuals and groups can be tremendously unleashed.

Government, businesses, and individuals need reliable data and information as well as formalisation of property representations. Without them, planning by everyone will be vague and transactions will be costly at best and impossible at worst.

Next week, we will take up other measures that we think our governments should pursue to further develop and entrench entrepreneurship in our country.