We want to support youths run mini capital market operations – Okoye

Dr. Nicholas Okoye is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Anabel Group. Anabel Leadership Academy is a catalyst for youth empowerment. He spoke on how the Chartered Institute of Stockbrokers, CIS can create employment for teeming youths and how government can create jobs through entrepreneurship amongst other things.

When  Anabel Group signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Chartered Institute of Stock Brokers (CIS), one of the high points of your presentation was that  Anabel Leadership Academy would do everything humanly possible to integrate the  holders of the Institute’s Professional Diploma Certificate into sustainable job creation initiatives in Nigeria. Can you shed light on that?   

What we did with CIS is to identify an area in the capital market where young people could come in and run their own businesses. And so we identified that the CIS whose mandate and core responsibility by law is to license capital market operators in the finance and capital market industry, can create a window for young people, to create their own jobs, become entrepreneurs and become more self-reliant in the long run, which is consistent with our message and our efforts over the years. And we said okay, if we can bring more young people to take that exam, we can equally equip them to start their own businesses.  And in so doing, support them to run a mini capital market operation in their community.  Our approach was that we figured out that they can attach themselves to a large investment bank or an experienced brokerage house in order to enable the mentors advice accordingly.  Specifically, they can identify customers that need the service of stockbrokers in their communities and those who are interested in the capital market, financial market as a whole, and then they could midwife the relationship between the brokerage firm or investment bank and their customers in the community. And what this approach does for Nigeria is that it creates an army of young men and women who can go out and mop up all the money that is hiding under the mattresses for support for financial inclusion across communities in Nigeria. This is a very powerful financial inclusion strategy which again the government needs to support going forward.

You have just launched a new product called “Startup Nigeria’, what is it all about?

Startup Nigeria is very dare to my heart. Its web site is  www.startupnigeriaworkshops.com.  Anybody interested can go to the website. It is basically entrepreneurship in a box. We have looked at entrepreneurship in its entirety that has been our focus for the past ten years and so we have realised that there are certain specific skills an entrepreneur must have in order to succeed and we have put all these skills into a particular box or set of training modules and developed a workshop and an entrepreneurship clinic around it and it’s called www.startupnigeriaworkshops.com which means that if you come to this event and you are a budding entrepreneur, you will get everything you need to get started. First of all, you will deal with the mindset shift which is the core element of entrepreneurship called the entrepreneurial mindset.  We deal with the book keeping for entrepreneur as you don’t need to learn what the mega companies are doing, you need book keeping skills for your own level. You need to know the ones at the small, micro or medium level that you need. We deal with the evaluation of business, project management, and all those areas that you need to become a successful entrepreneur, even right down to team building, time management and so on.

What are those issues an entrepreneur needs to operate optimally?

We identified access to capital, skills and a bankable business plan in order to raise money from investors, venture capital or a bank. We were working on that and the government now called us and said they were pleased with the good work we had done and they will like to support  us and work with us to meet the goals of reducing unemployment by creating and promoting Entrepreneurship.  In response to this, we developed a strategy for the government which was adopted. The programme is called the Youth Entrepreneurship Strategy of Nigeria. You can abbreviate it to YES Nigeria. And that strategy though very impactful has a very simple structure. The government has over 22 different programs that support entrepreneurship and job training in several different agencies. These include but are not limited to the YOU WIN program, SURE- P which was the petroleum subsidy reinvestment scheme, the Agriculture Entrepreneurs program etc. for training we have the Petroleum Technology Development Fund, and many other programs.  We have aggregated all these programs under one umbrella and young people can now access these programme through one single window. In addition YES Nigeria Initiative goes the extra mile by providing young people with additional training in entrepreneurship and technical skills to increase the art  of success we experience across the board. We have not stopped working as we are passionate about the future of Nigeria and the future of our millions of young people. It is our expectation that YES Nigeria will continue to be a leading programme of the Federal Government which can be extended to the State Governments as well.  President Buhari’s administration has already made it clear that youth unemployment is one of their major priorities so we are excited to work closely with the government to support the young people of Nigeria to become entrepreneurs which invariably will eliminate unemployment in the short and long term.

Finally, we have a new administration as you have pointed out in this interview, headed by President Muhammadu Buhari. If Mr. President were reading this interview what would be your advice for him going forward?

Thank you. My advice is consistent with my position on Nigeria issues in the last ten years. I would strongly advise that Mr. President and his team focus almost exclusively on job creation. Having said that, I know it is wishful thinking, however whereas he has said he will be focusing on Security, Corruption, Power and Job creation, I would ask him to spend 60 per cent of his executive time on job creation initiatives. The reason is very simple, when we create more jobs the crime rate will reduce, the corruption will reduce and we will get a vibrant economic atmosphere which means that demand for stable power, world class education and improved health care will increase.  Once there is sustainable demand from happy paying working customers, the entrepreneurs of Nigeria will fill the void, and ensure that those demands are met.

I wonder why politicians have not yet figured this out. In addition, I would scrap the Federal Ministry of Labour and Productivity if I were President Buhari, that ministry is a relic of the past. I would replace it with the Federal Ministry of Job Creation, Employment and Entrepreneurship.  This would be a more proactive ministry with a clear mandate to stimulate the creation of new jobs across the economy wherever and however possible. That role of constantly negotiating with labour unions which the Minister of Labour always does can be given to a Special Adviser or something like that. The Labour Ministry was created to manage Labour affairs and to manage the status quo, well times have changed what we need now is no longer managing labour unions and their demands to stay employed, what we need are millions of new jobs to employ the younger ones coming up every day so that our society can accommodate the next generation seamlessly.

People talk a lot about Anabel’s Leadership Academy, what is the operational philosophy of this Academy?

Thank you very much. We started the Anabel Leadership Academy as a subsidiary of the Anabel Group in 2012.  And if we go back to 2012, it was an atmosphere of confusion for the young people of Nigeria who do not really believe they were part and parcel of the development of the Nigerian Nation.  We speak to young people all the time, we have quite a number of our customers that are young people and when we were getting all this apathy from young people, we decided to ask  what are the crucial questions and issues that young people have with the growth and development of Nigeria.  These young people told us that the leadership of the country has not taken them seriously as they should and they believe very strongly that the reason why we have a lot of crime is that we have a very large rate of unemployment. Therefore, we decided that we as a Nation needed to take on the issue of unemployment. We also felt that the Private Sector has a great role to play in developing initiatives and strategies that would tackle unemployment and we were willing to play that role. We felt however that it all starts with Leadership and Leadership development so we started the Anabel Leadership Academy.