Teachers: Osun exco approves interview dates for applicants - ITREALMS

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Towards the conclusion of the teachers’ recruitment exercise, the Osun State Executive Council has directed the Ministry of Education to conduct interviews for applicants within the cut off range adopted after the recruitment test.

The Council presided over by Governor Ademola Adeleke gave the directive after receiving updated reports from the Commissioner for Education, Hon. Adedipo Eluwole, who briefed the council on the activities leading to this final stage of the exercise.

Adedamola Johnson of Cakeroyale says business blossoms when family, friends pay for services - ITREALMS

Interviews@ITREALMS ... making leadership SENSE with digital news!

The chief chef at Cakeroyale Confectionery, Lagos, Adedamola Johnson in this chat with ITREALMS' GBEMI OMOTOSO, says business blossoms when family and friends supports your business and pay for services.

Excerpts:

What does Cakeroyale confectionery deals on?

We are into cakes, pastries, desserts and training.

Oswil Cakes boss insists bakers must remain humble, disciplined - ITREALMS

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Oseghale Wilson is the chief executive officer (CEO), Oswil Cakes & Events, Lagos. He recently spoke to ITREALMS' GBEMI OMOTOSO, maintaining that a baker must be very humble and disciplined.

Excerpts:

How did you get around your brandname?
While I was thinking of a name to use for my brand, a friend called me "Oswil." I thought and found it appropriate as my brandname that was how I came up with it.

Stella Luke Irabor: Despite making money, health is wealth - ITREALMS

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Pastor (Mrs.) Stella Luke Irabor, is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Lagos-based Fisis Kreations, she told ITREALMS' GBEMI OMOTOSO that despite making money, health is wealth and advised on regular health checks by professionals in confectionary industry, whilst keeping agreements.

How did you get about your brand name?

My brand name was from my son; Favour Israel Luke Stella.

Nigeria'll not attain SDGs by 2030, except … says Dr. Winjobi - ITREALMS

Interviews@ITREALMS ... making leadership SENSE with digital news!

The National Coordinator, Civil Society Coalition on Sustainable Development (CSCSD), Dr. Tola Winjobi, in this chat with a cross section of media, lamented the seemingly inability of Nigeria to attain the SDGs, especially Goal 16+ by 2030.

Excerpts:

Tell us about the coalition established and its mission?

Established in 2010 as Campaign2015+ and in 2016 formally re-registered as Civil Society Coalition on Sustainable Development (CAC/IT/No 87678), CSCSD is a network of close to 2000 non-governmental orgnisations (NGOs), Community-Based Organisation (CBOs), Faith-Based Organisations (FBOs), professional associations based in Nigeria, and a staunch partner of TAP Network and Action for Sustainable Development.

WAD2022: Prof Adeyeye advocates more asthma awareness, says its preventable - ITREALMS

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Prof. Olayinka Olufunke Adeyeye is a Lung Health Improvement Expert and the Head of Department (HOD), Department of Medicine, Lagos State University College of Medicine (LASUCOM), Ikeja, Lagos. She spoke to ITREALMS' PAUL ADUNWOKE to mark World Asthma Day 2022, with the theme: ‘Closing Gaps in Asthma Care’. She outlined some interventions capable of reducing preventable suffering as well as the costs incurred by treating uncontrolled asthma.

What is asthma?

Asthma is a chronic respiratory condition in which the airways are inflamed, the muscles of the airways contract and the linings of the airway are twitchy, swollen and the lumen becomes smaller with limitation to airflow. The sufferer has cough, episodic breathlessness, chest tightness and Noisy breathing (wheeze). This occurs on and off and may get better with or without treatment.

Aisha Buhari’s BBC interview and rest of us

Opinion@ITRealms:

According to a viral audio clip from the BBC (Hausa Service), Mrs. Aisha Buhari is worried that the more than 15 million people who voted for her husband in 2015 would revolt against him because he has disappointed them by appointing “strangers” to positions of power, strangers who didn’t even work for his electoral triumph.

She is right about the potential revolt against her husband but she is wrong about the reason for it. Most disillusioned Buhari supporters don’t care whether president’s appointees are personally known to him—or whether or not they campaigned or voted for him. They are worried, instead, that many, perhaps most, of the president’s appointees are corrupt and incompetent, but are shielded from any consequences for their corruption and incompetence.

Let’s start from the president’s first major appointments: Secretary to the Government of the Federation Lawal David Babachir is so corrupt that he is now nicknamed “Cash and Carr” in government circles.

He even once publicly bragged about receiving monetary gifts from the Delta State government and has been implicated in the N270 million "grass-cutting" contract for internally displaced Boko Haram victims. The Chief of Staff to the President has been accused of accepting a half-billion naira bribe from MTN to reduce the telecom company's NCC fine from N1.04 trillion  to N330 billion, among other sordid allegations of corruption against him. And the man is incompetent and lazy, to boot. It’s the same story all around members of the president's “kitchen cabinet.”

It took Buhari six (6) months to appoint his ministers who have turned out to be the most questionable and underwhelming cast of characters to ever be in the Federal Executive Council (FEC). Among them is a minister of budget who doesn’t know Nigeria’s debt profile; a minister of agriculture (who, tellingly, is a former PDP chairman) who thinks the cost of rice is high because Nigerians consume too much rice; a minister of science and technology whose technological vision for the country is to start local pencil manufacturing in two years; a comically loud- and foul-mouthed minister of information who says dressing and undressing masquerades is a strategy of job creation; a minister of youth and sports who is so clueless he makes you want to cry; a backward, prehistoric minister of communication who wants to tax Nigerians for calls they make and texts they send; a minister of Niger Delta affairs who was indicted for fraud by a government commission in the 1990s but still keeps his job even in the wake of this revelation; a minister of finance who hides her incompetence behind a Cockney accent. The list goes on.

Add that to the revelations of a series of secretive, illegal employment of the children and relatives of high-ranking political elites in this government, including Buhari’s, while millions of brilliant, hardworking but underprivileged people vegetate in misery amid a biting recession, and you know that Nigeria is wildly adrift. 

Neither the president nor his ministers have a clue. And they don’t care. If this trend continues, by the end of 2019, Buhari would be so unpopular that he would be chased out of Aso Rock with rocks by millions of his own erstwhile supporters. Aisha Buhari obviously doesn't want this terrible fate to befall her husband. I don't, too.

-Prof.Farooq Kperogi, an Associate Professor of Journalism and Emerging Media at Kennesaw, wrote in from USA.

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Pix: Aisha Buhari and Prof. Farooq Kperogi

FirstBank to reduce transaction time to 2 minutes - Adegoke

Rasheed Adegoke is the Group Head, Information Technology (IT) at First Bank of Nigeria plc. In this exclusive interview REMMY NWEKE, he says FBN would reduce transaction time to two minutes. Excerpt:

Let’s start by you telling us how your team has been using technology to drive FirstBank’s services?

As you are probably aware, First Bank is the leading institution in terms of deployment of technology and the use of technology to deliver superior banking services to its customers. In the past few years we have actually focused on what you would call a second phase of our transformation efforts which started from the Century Two project that saw us deploying modern technologies way back in the early part of the 21^st century, around 2000 to 2002.

Now, what we have done in the last three years is to focus on a coordinated transformation of the business with technology again being at the core of that transformation effort. So, in the last three years, we have improved our technology infrastructure to generally improve the reliability of our services across channels; both at the branch and our electronic delivery channels.

If you relate that to the growth that we’ve also seen in the numbers that First Bank is churning out, you will see that there is consistency and a direct correlation between the improvements that we are achieving in the technology and service delivery space and the customer patronage and growth in our business both in terms of size or volume and profitability.

Therefore, in the last three years we have doubled our balance sheet and we have also increased our customer numbers from under 5 million to over 7 million accounts today and that also has translated into the share of wallet that we have of each customer. We have also been able to generate a lot more transactions from our existing customers in that process.

Other statistics that points to the impact of the transformation of our technology include things like volumes of transactions across electronic channels and you would see that First Bank leads other providers. We have more than 30 per cent share of the issued cards volume in the market space and we also process more than double the volume of transactions of the number 2 bank on the industry’s payment switching network.

That basically summarizes the impact that technology transformation has made on First Bank operation in the last few years. I think I will end that by saying what underscores our usage of technology in First Bank is the award we got last year which was tagged the Innovation Award from the Bankers Magazine, that award came out of a number of initiatives but the core initiative then was the introduction of the biometric ATM. We are the first bank and still today the only bank that have biometric ATM services, although we have not extensively rolled-out, but we have deployed it in a number of our branches.

For the benefit of the ordinary Nigerians, can you give us some insights to what you mean by biometric ATM?

Rasheed Adegoke

Well, the biometric ATM essentially like any other ATM except that we have enhanced it with the ability to read fingerprints as an additional security feature to protect our customers against fraudsters. Basically, what happens when you go to an ATM today; you need your card and a PIN number. Although there has been a lot of effort on the part of the industry to improve security like the change in card standard which is not limited to First Bank alone. It was an industry wide initiative to move from the Magnetic Stripe card which was what was initially introduced into the Nigerian market, and which is also a relatively insecure platform to the Chip and PIN platform, which essentially is a much more secured card than the Magnetic Stripe card that could easily be cloned by fraudsters.

So, the industry has done that move, however we at First Bank are “upping the game” and saying that there are a number of our customers that are in the rural areas, maybe that’s also because First Bank has the spread that most other banks do not have, and we have the experience of serving both the urban rich as well as the rural poor.

Some of the rural masses are not too good with numbers so when you say they should choose a PIN number, you won’t be surprised if someone chooses 1111 and so, if that person misplaces his or her card, it is very easy for a fraudster to guess the PIN number, so for such customers you also have to get their fingerprint with a biometric ATM. That’s the extra level of protection that we have introduced into the market place.

Most banks in the country presently, including First Bank seems to fall in line for foreign of IT applications, and from your own perspective, what would be your rating of local applications in Nigeria, basically?

Well, I will be very frank and objective, treating it like a balance. I think you would say that we do have skills within the Nigerian market place to manage IT. We have skills to do software development, however what tends to happen within the software space itself is that there are various categories of software, from the system software which are like the operating systems like Windows, UNIX, and the iOS that runs on Apple platform to business applications starting from simple human resource management, payroll applications to very complex systems like the ERPs that manage entire manufacturing operations or core banking software that are used to run banks.

Now, we are not playing at all in the system software space so we do not have, for instance, the operating system developed by Nigerians, even though you might have a few Nigerians contributing to the development of operating systems because each of the big players like Microsoft do have a reasonable population of Nigerians within their employ.

We also do have freelance programmers that contribute to open source software like Linux development and some of them are Nigerians. However, when it comes to actually having or owning a branded operating system product, Nigeria is not playing in that space. Now when we come to business application space we also have a number of Nigerian companies that have played very well in building human resource applications, small scale ERP solutions, and one company comes to mind easily, Systemspecs with their human manager application which have been highly successful by all means.

On enterprise applications, we also have a number of players that have attempted to play in that space and not all have been equally successful, but we have some players that have stayed upwards of 20 years in that space so you would say they have achieved some level of success and again a name that comes to mind is Computer Systems Associates; they have a core banking software which has been sold not just within West Africa but also in East Africa and other emerging markets that actually needs their solution. They have also sold a version to microfinance banks within Nigeria.

Now coming back to the question of whether Nigerian software companies have matured to the point of developing robust core banking software, I would say it’s a yes and no. Yes, to the extent that the basic skills to do it are there, and I’ve given the examples that prove that those skills are there if we focus well enough.

However, in terms of mindset, we’re not yet there. Software business is a long term business, so, you have to make investment for the long term. Nigerian investors on the contrary are mostly short term investors. So you don’t go into software with the mindset of getting back your investment in six months or twelve months. That’s what has actually not made made-in-Nigeria software to mature to that scale where they can easily compete with internationally developed applications because if you are investing for the long term, it means that you need to be able to retain certain skill set for the long-run.

If you have business architects and software architects that are working within software companies and the turnover of your staff is maybe every eighteen months, you have to recruit new staff because the good staff have left, you won’t be able to actually go for the long run and these are some of the issues that the local software developers or investors are still dealing with.

On the other hand, you need some level of capitalization to be able to hold on for that long in terms of being within the software development line so that you are not hitting the market place with an under-developed products that you want to start earning from. By and large, if we change our focus, if we change our investment mindset and focus on software as a long term business we can actually compete with other internationally developed applications in Nigeria.

Earlier on, you made mention of First Bank running on Finacle 10, what was the business decision behind this?

First Bank essentially, has four key drivers of growth or four pillars of the business strategy; one focus on growth, the second is on improving service delivery and attaining service excellence, the third is talent management being able to retain the best talent within the industry and the fourth is performance management, both at the individual level and the group level.

If you look at those pillars, central to it is service excellence because every business exist for one purpose only and that purpose is to recruit and retain profitable customers, that’s why businesses exist, so if a business is not able to meet the needs of its customers both now and into future, that business will not be a sustainable business.

So as a service enterprise, we need to continually improve our service platform, as you know infrastructure is central to most things. If you use the nation as an analogy, we are where we are partly because of failure of infrastructure so one of the key service delivery infrastructure for a bank is a core banking software, because really a bank’s business if we all think of it not as much  managing money but a bank’s business is actually managing information.

Whether you are talking about ensuring that you properly keep the information for 7million accounts and ensure that there is no mix-up in the management of that information or you ensuring that the information required to dispense cash at the ATM is readily available for the ATM to work. That’s what banking is about; it’s about managing information, so we need to continually improve that platform for managing information which is a core banking infrastructure.

Presently, we have set aggressive target for ourselves in the area of service excellence and our existing platform which is the Finacle 7 cannot continue to serve us to meet those aggressive targets, so we want to be able to be quicker in introducing new products into the market place, that’s what Finacle 10 would give us as an edge over Finacle 7. We want to reduce the time it takes to process the withdrawal transaction, currently we spend an average of four (4) minutes; a customer will spend not more than four minutes in front of a teller officer to do a withdrawal transaction, we want to halve that to two minutes.

Yes, we have improved our infrastructure; our back-end infrastructure, so our processing facilities are faster, but we also need to improve on the underlining software that runs the process. We also want to simplify our processes further in the front end such that the teller spends less time trying to post transactions and spend more time interacting with the customer, that will mean some improvement of our core banking infrastructure, so all of these are the business drivers that has lead us to say we need to upgrade to Finacle 10, because it’s going to give us much more flexible service delivery infrastructure that would enable us achieve that level of service excellence that we set for ourselves.

I would like to know your take on the cash-lite Lagos and eventual deployment across the country, and what is First Bank’s readiness in the long run?

First, I would say that the cashless or cash-lite drive is the right move, we at First Bank have been moving in that direction before CBN (Central Bank of Nigeria) came up with the policy in order to drive it across the industry. Which is why, if you go back to my initial summary, some of the highlights that I made were the investments we made in actually enhancing our electronic delivery channels which has translated into us, I mean First Bank achieving a larger share of the market space for electronic transactions.

We had actually been quiet clear with our own strategy as First Bank in driving towards a cash-lite situation, because we have been trying to move or migrate our customers to the electronic channels, so that they deal less with cash. Now, having said that, it’s a good policy, it’s something that’s going to help the economy because the velocity of transactions will be much faster if you are using electronic means, and you can imagine that we have move significantly forward from a situation whereby upcountry clearing was 21 days.

I don’t know if you still remember that there was a time in Nigeria when it took 21 working days to clear a cheque if that cheque is not a local cheque and local cheque itself took about a week for you to be able to get your money to where we are today which is we have a turnaround time on clearing items which is still T+2 and that has been shortened further to a next day.

What do you mean by T+2?

 T+2 means the day you submit the cheque for clearing you add two days and on the third day you are going to get credit in your account but that is being shortened further to a next day clearing which by next month actually we should be having a taste that fully. That is what has happened within the clearing system and we have seen that, that has actually impacted the volumes of transactions that go by the way of cheques rather than cash exchange.

Also, what has happened which we didn’t note is that it was like a first phase of the movement towards less cash because if it takes 21 days for you to get value for money, you would hardly do any transaction through that channel. Now, what debit card have done, because debit card by their nature are actually cheque replacements because cheques are instruments by which you access your account; debit cards are also instruments by which you access your account for payment.

With the introduction and wide-spread adoption of debit cards, we actually have gotten a faster mode of rendering payment which doesn’t even have to go through clearing, so you could say you have instant clearing with debit cards. So, if I actually want to transfer money to you, if I have a portal that allows me to debit my account using the security on my debit card and transfer money to your own account, then I would basically be giving instantaneous credit into your account, so that’s like instant settlement, what CBN has done is to try to focus us on that platform, the cash-lite policy is essentially trying to focus us on the efficiency of the platform that is built around the card and the mobile payment which it has also introduced a license for, and which are all instant settlement platform.

Essentially, what we do with exchange instrument is largely payment, exchange of value so if we are able to do payment faster, transaction velocity increases and therefore we can actually ensure that the economy becomes a lot more productive. One of the reasons which CBN has also used as a justification for the policy which is a valid reason, is the sheer cost or waste that is going into handling cash because we all know how much it takes to print one naira note and if you are frequently using it, you need to replace the note more frequently, that’s a cost that goes into CBN’s account. Besides that the bank that handle cash needs to employ people to do the cash counting and they need to pay insurance to secure the cash that is held in their vault, we know the risk of armed robbery in the country  and some time the loss of lives that is associated with the easy access to cash.

So, as a policy, we agree that’s the way it should go and what we are doing at First Bank is that we are ensuring that as you adopt the alternatives to cash, you basically do not get services that are less than what you will get with the use of cash.

Our platforms are very reliable, we have moved from less than 2,000 active Point of Sale (PoS) terminals to over 8,000 that we have deployed and we do intend that by the end of the year, First Bank alone will have deployed more than 20,000 PoS is we are looking at focusing on Lagos area. Across the country we will be talking of bigger numbers, but we are focusing on Lagos because the focus this year even by the industry is really around Lagos, so we are focusing on Lagos and we are saying that Lagos can really take that depth of PoS deployment. There are a lot of places we go, all we do is go to the nearby ATM, withdraw cash so that we can pay at the point of sale, why do we need to go through that when you can swipe your card at the point of sale and actually get value.

Why is it that some of the PoS are not working?

Those are the problems that we had initially, because the industry had not focused on that. You know, there was also a time that an average bank’s branch, the chances are that the network would be down was high, or if you go to the bank’s ATM the chances that the ATM would not be online was high but when we focused on that as an industry you see that those cases are very remote; it’s not perfect right now but they are remote because most banks have multiple links, most ATMs have multiple links and the same thing is happening to the PoS right now where you have PoS that are deployed before having only a single connectivity, today we are having PoS that have multiple connectivity, multiple GPRS – Global Packet Radio Service, and all of that.

What causes some of the hiccups in transactions from time to time, especially on the issue of ATM, from your professional perspective?

You talked about challenges, we cannot operate within a vacuum, we know the state of infrastructure within the country, a lot of what we are doing right now has to ride on the infrastructure that we have; communication links, unreliable electricity.

If you actually want to run a branch that you would have an ATM and that ATM needs to be available for 24-7, it means that even when the branch has closed there must be power that is powering the ATM, we have gone ahead to install inverters to protect those equipments and ensure that there is power around the clock, so having put that background there, you would understand that there is some point of failure that could actually arise, what tends to happen is that we do have sometimes the communication links for instance in the middle of an ATM transaction so a customer has slotted in the card and the pin, and the transaction was about to take place and there is a failure of communications.

What the ATM has been trained to do is that it would actually reverse the transaction that has just failed because before parting with money, the ATM will debit the account to be sure the money exist and then dispenses money to you. However, let’s assume that the ATM had debited your account and the link fails, the ATM will wait for an acknowledgement that the debit has actually happen and then it doesn’t get, so it would return your card and also automatically it would raise a credit back into your account. We all experience it and I’m sure you have also experienced it.

If you are a First Bank customer and I hope you are, what happens is if you slot in your card and have failed transactions you would get two alerts almost at the same time, you will get the debit alert and you will get the credit alert immediately, which shows that there is no human being manually reversing the transactions because the system itself is automated to know that something has failed and to credit you back with your money.

However, sometimes that automatic process doesn’t kick in and that’s why we set up a dispute resolution mechanism which ensures that within 24 hours after such incidence of failure of the automatic reversal, someone in the back office is able to credit you back, so there is not any instance that we know, for instance, at First Bank and I believe across the industry really that someone’s account has been debited and the money is not been credited back except where people have been defrauded, because we are aware of cases of people losing possession of their cards or compromising their PIN, and in such cases there are also incomplete transactions on those account.

I am sure you know that bulk of electronic transactions rides on networks, which in-turn depends on Internet Protocols (IPs) to deliver, therefore what are banks doing on migration, especially are we looking forward to having FBN as the first Nigerian bank to hook to IP version 6?

Let’s first define the IPv4 and v6, essentially the Internet Protocol version 4, let’s keep it simple is just an addressing scheme, just like you going into a street in Lagos and you will see old number 5, new number 16, IPv4 and IPv6 are numbering schemes. IPv6 was introduced because the address space on IP version 4 was actually now more or less fully used because of the rapid growth of the internet when countries like China started trooping in and rapidly acquiring internet addresses.

Now, it doesn’t mean that all the addresses on IPv4 becomes invalid, there is no organization that is getting shut down because they are on IP version 4, and there is a transition plan that would actually allow people to have both IPv4 and IPv6 work side by side. So for my internal network for instance, I probably do not need to change the addressing scheme to IP version 6, because the number of devices and equipments that I have on my internal network can still be managed with IPv4. And as it is today, even today on the IP version 4 addresses are still able to communicate with any other hosts, right, because there is that transition management process that has been set up for a transition into IP version 6.

So, we do have a plan for a transition to IP version 6 but is really not something that is going to give us any particular edge. It is not something as you would say is quite strategic; it is not something that is going to give us an edge. Everybody will ultimately transit to IPv6 if we stretch into the very long future so but it’s not something we need to rush into, we do have a plan to ensure that there is clearly no disruption to our business due to the adoption of IPv6.

What would be your advice to Nigerians, especially First Bank customers and what’s First Bank doing in providing facilities like loan for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and encouraging those in the IT sector?

When we began, I told you that First Bank basically have the broadest operation in Nigeria serving the very rich and large institutional customers to the rural poor and how do we do that, we have our business structured around segments, so the SMEs would fall under our retail segment and we do have a group which happen to be the largest group accounting for about 50 per cent of our balance sheet which is actually the retail group, for them to be 50 per cent of our balance sheet, means that we are actually lending to them.

If you look at all the key sectors, First Bank is not just playing there but we are also leading even in lending within those sectors. If you look at agriculture, First Bank is one of the few banks that got the CBN intervention fund and that’s because of the quality of lending that we are doing within the agriculture sector and the fact that we have demonstrated to CBN that we have the processes to actually understand and support that sector.

If you look at telecoms, when the telecoms industries took off with advent of Global System for Mobile (GSM) communications, most people didn’t believe in it; we were one of the first players in that space, not just lending to the operators but also lending to their distributors and those in the downstream of the telecoms operations.

Any sector you look at, especially the SMEs that you are talking about, we are basically very strong players there, as First Bank. But when you look at the group it even get more interesting, because we do have First Funds, which also provides what you could call seed capital type of investment. It’s more like I won’t call it a straight venture capital vehicle but is close to it, we do take equity investment in some of the SMEs that have proven that they have a viable business plan that’s through First funds because you need to appraise those funds differently from the way you appraise loans. Then, we have the microfinance, the FBN Microfinance that also caters to the everyday rural business person that needs N50,000 in order to be able to move tomatoes from Mile 12 to Ajangbadi and have a viable business. So, we cater to the lowest of the SMEs and also we cater to the large customers.


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Juwah tells operators ‘It’s no longer business as usual’

The Executive Vice Chairman (EVC) of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Dr. Eugene Ikemefuna Juwah, recently met with newsmen in Lagos and responded to some industry issues. Senior Reporter, REMMY NWEKE, was there for ITREALMS ONLINE and reports that Juwah spoke on a number of issues including on incentives for mobile operators for conducting registration of Subscribers Identification Module (SIM) card among others.

Excerpts.

What would be the direction of NCC under your leadership?

I am aware that most of you have been seeking to speak to me individually on the focus and direction of the Commission under my leadership. I also have been eager to speak to you but as you may be aware, there are issues that needed more urgent attention since my assumption of office.

You know that shortly before I arrived, a totally new structure was introduced in the Commission. On arrival, I needed to be properly briefed, and I needed to galvanize and stabilize the workforce.

So, I took time to interact with the staff at different levels to acquaint myself with the on-going activities and programmes of the Commission, and mobilized the senior management to focus on the new direction of the Commission under our leadership.

Can you lead us into some of the issues that confronted you on assumption of office?

Part of the issues that confronted me on arrival is the delay in the approval of the 2010 Budget of the Commission. While working with the National Assembly on that matter, we worked hard to ensure that we promptly submitted our 2011 budget before September 30, 2010.

The issue of Quality of Service (QoS), also became very urgent and I promptly set up a Task Force to focus on the matter. This was the focus of the first meeting I convened with the CEOs of operating telecom companies on October 8, 2010.

One of the major achievements of that task force was the fast tracking of the regulation on QoS which has been longstanding. With this regulation, every service provider will now be held properly accountable by telecom consumers and the regulator.

SIM card registration:

I also need to mention to you that another important issue which needed my immediate attention was SIM Card registration for which we immediately published the draft regulation for industry consultation. We sort to manage a situation where SIM cards were still being sold in the streets, several months after the Commission set the May 1, 2010 date for operators to commence registration. We want to ensure that all new SIM cards are registered by the operators as mandated and we expect them to render regular account of the numbers registered.

We are now finalizing arrangements to commence registration of all existing SIM Cards from February 2011.

Having said these, I need to share with you, the major focus of the NCC under my leadership and this will guide our short, medium and long term actions, programmes and projects.

What is the new focus for the Commission?

Given the circumstances, exigencies and urgencies required to achieve spread of basic telephony services in the country, the Commission’s focus in the last ten years was directed at growing teledensity with the massive deployment of mobile telephony.

The result of this was the current impressive statistics of over 80 million active lines and more than 110 million connected lines. Teledensity is now above 53 per cent. So, it is safe, therefore, to say we have achieved appreciable voice mobile telephony penetration.

While sustaining this growth, I wish to indicate here that in the next five years, our regulatory focus shall be directed at six key areas: (1) Consolidation and Integration of mobile Wireless Services; (2) Fixed Line and Broadband Deployment for National Development; (3) Enhanced Competitive Market, Enhanced Choice for the Consumer; (4) Vigorous Compliance Monitoring and Enforcement of Regulations and Directions; (5) National Connectivity for Accelerated Growth; (6) Enhanced International Relations;

Can you expatiate on some of these key agenda?

On consolidation and integration of mobile services, the current mobile network in Nigeria is not fully optimized. The nation can derive more value from an enhanced and optimized mobile network, especially with an improved Quality of Service.

The Commission will encourage the upgrade of mobile networks to include 3G data overlays for the implementation of application services including but not limited to mobile payment, estate agency and other entertainment services using the Internet as a plank.

We want to achieve this by implementing the key performance indicators for quality of services that can be possibly monitored independently by the Commission with zero tolerance for non-compliance.

Such wireless network will also deliver enhanced and integrated services to such other national projects such as the Emergency Communications Centres being implemented by the Commission in the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Abuja.

What of the fixed line and broadband deployment for national development?

It has been said that Nigeria missed a great opportunity for her inability to massively deploy fixed lines when other development-focused nations of the world did.

While it is true that mobile phone has attained high penetration and usage, for many homes, businesses and companies, there still exists a yawning need for basic fixed line access with its numerous advantages. Also, the premium nature of mobile services contributes to the issue of its affordability compared with fixed lines.

This has led to some despair in many circles about the ability of this nation to catch up with the robustness of a fixed network complemented by mobile. As a matter of deliberate focus, we shall strive to bring fixed lines back to homes, schools, offices, and businesses.

To achieve this, plans for massive deployment of broadband infrastructure will be explored by the Commission.

We are therefore currently working out the details on how to implement this desirable project which would bequeath the nation with an accomplished and robust telephone network for national development.

This means that the nation will expect more licenses coming out from the Commission, while investors are being informed of new opportunities that the Nigerian market present.

Can you give us the number of licenses so to expect before the end of this year?

No, as it is we cannot say categorically that this is the figure or number of licenses to expect from the Commission until the process takes off and even concludes. But be assured that more new licenses will be issued this year.

Most of the industry groups like the Association of Telecom Companies of Nigeria (ATCON) and Association of Licensed Telecom Companies of Nigeria (ALTON) have severally noted that registration of SIM cards by the operators is a diversion of their competence and resources. So, they were expecting incentives for their members, especially the operators in this regard?

As far as the Commission is concerned there is no incentive for any kind for the SIM card registration. Before then, there was a meeting at the office of the National Security Adviser to the President and all the operators where invited. In fact, it was only chief executive officers (CEO) meeting; if you are not a CEO, you are not allowed into the meeting and the modalities where spelt out and they know it and there is nothing like incentives for them for now.

As a follow-up, the Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) operators are dying is NCC planning any form of bail out for them?

NCC has chosen the path of technology neutrality and CDMA is a technology and business decision. So, for now, there is no bail out for any operator using any form of technology. They have the opportunity or option to deploy any other technology which they think is more favourable to their business decision.

On the enhanced competitive market, enhanced choices for the consumer?

There is need to enhance the competition in the market place today. Competition brings about the best in all the operators. Competition also breeds best atmosphere for the consumer.

Enhanced competition in the market and availability of choice is a statement of intention to fight for the interest of the consumer. Cost has always been the greatest complaint of the average consumer in Nigeria.

We shall make efforts to ensure that costs continue to drop. In a true competitive environment, there is no reason why prices will not drop. When you have true competition, prices will drop. We will continue vigorously pursue programmes that will deepen competition and bring down prices, such as introduction of more operators and programmes such as number portability. We want to address this through strategic actions aimed at improving competition and accountability of the service providers to the consumers of their products and services.

In this regard, we shall improve on some areas of outreach between the service providers and consumers to ensure that consumers are fully aware of their rights. Such issues like deployment of more customer care centres by the operators, as subscriber bases increase, will be pursued with more vigour.

On vigorous compliance monitoring, enforcement of regulations and directions?

We have observed a major lapse in the disposition of the service providers towards compliance to regulations or directions issued by the Commission. This is as a result of a combination of factors, including sanctions for none compliance that are not commensurate to the degree of breach. This is prevalent in spite of the fact that same service providers are fully consulted during the processes of formulation of the regulations.

In some cases, factors attributable to the harsh operating environment have put the regulator at the long end of wielding the big stick. It would therefore appear that the service providers have taken this soft approach towards enforcement and compliance to regulations for granted in the discharge of their responsibilities to the nation, the Commission and the consumers.

We need to state clearly that it will no longer be business as usual. As we move into the next focus of regulation with emphasis on compliance, the Commission under us, will give a lot of emphasis on compliance monitoring and strict enforcement of extant regulations and directions. Since these regulations were products of wide consultation, it is incumbent on the Commission to see to their full compliance.

A lot of consumer issues prevalent in the industry today are as a result of tardy compliance to regulations instituted by the regulator. The situation must change and all the stakeholders in the industry will need to inject a new corporate governance approach towards compliance to existing regulations and directions.

Why NCC set up Compliance department?

To give a push in this aspiration the Monitoring and Compliance Department recently set up by the Commission is being equipped with the human and material resources needed for effective performance of their jobs in line with the new focus of the Commission. Regulations and directives of the Commission will not only be obeyed, but seen to be obeyed.

In cases where regulations are not equipped with adequate sanctions to compel adherence or recompense, we are going to look at those regulations with a view to effecting reviews as quickly as possible.

How do you intend to achieve the national connectivity for accelerated growth?

One of the key milestones in the measurement of the attainment of the vision statement of the Commission is in the reduction of distance to access to telecommunications services for every Nigerian.

Achieving national connectivity through deployment of fibre rings across the nation and cascading broadband and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure will form our road map in promoting availability and access for national economic and social development.

The programmes and projects of the Universal Service Provision Fund (USPF) secretariat, the Wire Nigeria (WIN) project and the State Accelerated Broadband Initiative (SABI), will form the plank for this major focus aimed at accelerated access provisioning in Nigeria. These projects will be restructured to give them more verve to achieve these objectives within realistic timelines. General roll out of broadband access will be encouraged as we focus in this area.

Essence of open access model?

We are currently working with some international consultants to implement a structured approach for a regulatory framework for optic fibre deployment including an exploratory review of the relevance of the “open access model” to Nigeria.

The “open access model” is a framework for infrastructure sharing where fibre optic cable carriers share the infrastructure used in the deployment of their fibre cables. This model can be designed to bridge the gaps in broadband deployment through central deployment to mid and small sized operators at subsidized pricing. The model provides services to operators on a fair and non discriminatory basis.

Without a robust national connectivity, the nation will not derive maximum benefits from the availability of major submarine fibre cables with landing points in Nigeria, and many others expected to land in the nation’s shores. This is why that Commission will intensify efforts to achieve appreciable national connectivity in the next five years.

How to enhance international relations?

Under our administration, we shall give more vents to our international relations and interactions. The benefit of this focus translates in the attraction of investments, projects and good image to the country.

With our population and positioning in Africa, the visibility of our country, especially within the international telecom decision making bodies and organizations need to be enhanced. In this direction, we will reconstruct our approach to international telecom relations with a view to sharpening our visibility and playing in the main stream of international relations for the Commission and country.

It is also in this direction that our delegation met recently in Mexico at the 10^th Plenipotentiary Meeting with the Secretary General of the International Telecommunications Union, ITU, Dr. Hamadoun Toure, for the Digital Bridge Institute (DBI) in Nigeria to be conferred the status of Centre of Excellence.

Our roles in such sub-regional bodies like West Africa Telecommunications Regulatory Assembly (WATRA), will be enhanced as the pioneer of such organization as we now have some Nigerian companies rolling out services across the Nigerian borders.

The role of NCC under your leadership?

What I have tried to do here is to give some few areas of focus. This is by no means the complete portfolio of our focus. You know our role is to also advise government on major issues in telecommunications and ICT development. We shall continue to work with government as a major stakeholder.

You may be aware that the Ministry of Information and Communications is currently reviewing the National Telecommunications Policy. Some of our programmes will be guided by the recommendations of the new policy when it is launched.

There are some ideals with which this Commission is known, such as transparency, openness, fairness, firmness, and forthrightness. We will continue to cherish those ideals because they are an integral part of the credo of the Commission.

Appeal to stakeholders?

I also want to use this opportunity to request your support for all the programmes and activities of the Commission.

We will continue to work with the media as a partner in achieving our goals because you form a critical stakeholder in our regulatory activities. I will also request you to be very objective in your coverage of the industry.

So, I invite you to share in our aspirations to create awareness among all our stakeholders, especially the consumers of telecommunications services in the country.

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Central Bank interested in agric financing – Moghalu

DR. KINGSLEY CHINEDU MOGHALU, was a senior official of the United Nations for 17 years and founder of a risk management consultancy based in Geneva, Switzerland, before his last year’s appointment as the Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), in-charge of Financial System Stability. He spoke to REMMY NWEKE, at the recently concluded African Green Revolution Forum (AGRF) in Accra, Ghana on why CBN participated in the forum and efforts by the apex body to encourage Green Revolution in Nigeria.

Excerpts:


GIVEN your position at the Central Bank of Nigeria, what would you tell us that has brought you here precisely?
Well, I am here in Accra, Ghana for the African Green Revolution Forum (AGRF) of which I am representing the Central Bank of Nigeria. It is a conference organized by the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, which is a non-profit advocacy organisation headed by the former Secretary General of the United Nations, Mr. Kofi Annan.

The reason why I am representing the Central Bank of Nigeria here was because the governor of the Central Bank was invited to speak on a panel that was discussing
“Cost and Availability of Financing: New Innovations in African Countries” and I am representing him. As you may know, the Central Bank of Nigeria has played a very significant role in agricultural financing over the last 30 to 40 years.

So, it is a subject the Central Bank is very, very interested, both historically and also currently. The reason is because a major part of the reform agenda of the Central Bank is to ensure that banks finance the real economy and as I always say, there is no economy that is real than that of agriculture. So, that is the reason I am here.

What would be your take home on this forum?
First of all, in this forum, I have had the opportunity to share the leadership role that Nigeria is taking in terms of financing agriculture, the role of Central Bank and the role of the government and many participants in the forum have spoken to me about how much they appreciate the leadership that Nigeria is showing in this area.
As you may know also, we have recently signed a partnership with AGRA, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, which is the corporate organisation that organized this conference; whereby the Central Bank and AGRA would be implementing what we called Nigeria Incentive-based Risk Sharing System for Agricultural Lending (NIRSAL).

It is key as well as incentive-based and aims to bring together critical factors that are necessary for financing of agriculture and making financing reach the farmers, small-holder farmers and also the agric businessman. So, it is an entire approach that looks at financing the whole value chain of agriculture from small-holder farming to agric business, production and marketing and so on.

It also addresses the risks and bottlenecks that we have seen in the financing of agriculture. First of all, agriculture contributes about 40 per cent of Nigeria’s Gross Domestic Products (GDP), but the total percentage of lending that goes to agriculture by banks in Nigeria is not more than 1 or 2 per cent.

This is actually, the reflective of the situation across the whole African continent, with a very few exception such as Burkina Faso where the total lending is about 15 per cent of the total bank’s lending to agriculture.

So, what is the lending percentage in sub-region?
Most countries in West Africa especially, have total lending to agriculture which is less than 5 per cent and this is not good, because Nigeria, for instance, has population of a 150 million, it is a country that has more than 70m hectares of arable land; 40m of those hectares are agriculture land and can be used for agricultural productions.

And you know that in terms of economics, a country must be able to feed itself, and must be able to turn agriculture into business as well. It is not only feeding ourselves, but, it is about that agriculture is potentially big business that can create wealth for a lot of people in Nigeria. As you may recall, more than 60-70 per cent of the workforce in Nigeria are involved in agriculture; but how much wealth is that agricultural activities creating for us? This is what NIRSAL initiative is all about. The whole point is to invest about USD300 million and use it to leverage about USD 300 billion of financing from private sector commercial banks. That is the goal.

What are some components of NIRSAL?
There are a number of components that I think that are inherent in this model, NIRSAL. The first is risk sharing. There would be risk sharing between commercial banks and the farmers and other players in the industry in the financing activities.
There would be some technical assistance facility, because we have seen that there is a major gap exists in the banks; there is not enough competence about agricultural financing. So, that is why there is exaggerated perception of risks, there is a fear of lending to farmers or lending to agriculture.

Now also, there is need for the technical capacity of the farmers themselves to be improved; they need access to knowledge, they need access to crops, new types of crops that can yield much greater productivity in addition to capital. So, that is the second aspect of NIRSAL.

There is also what we call banking incentive mechanism that gives banks incentive in terms of risk sharing; you know, first loss, second loss and all sorts of sharing arrangement. Then, there is this agricultural bank rating systems that rate banks in accordance to how much they invest in agriculture. And all important insurance component, is one of the reasons that people shy away from agricultural financing; the view that agriculture in Africa depends a lot on weather pertains and so there is no strong insurance component for investors and farmers.

Therefore, this whole question of insurance of our commercial agriculture would be addressed under this initiative. So, this is where we are going and this is the future for Africa.

Now that CBN has partnership with AGRA, are we looking at involving how many banks locally?
All Nigerian banks are welcome at this stage of this initiative, but I should tell you that at this point that NIRSAL is under the Memorandum of Understand (MOU) we signed between CBN and AGRA, and over the next two to three months we would now development a comprehensive food programme on how it would actually work in practice. This would involve consultation with commercial banks, farmers and groups of farmers associations across the nation, because we want to make sure that all the stakeholders are on board.

I hope CBN is considering the importance of insurance being actively involved?
Yes, of course, the insurance industry would be involved in the consultations going forward.

There is this report that about N200 billion meant for agricultural credit and supposedly approved by the federal government to be given to farmers and allied trade as credit facility was stopped due to the way it was being managed. What is CBN doing about this now?

Yes, you are talking about the Commercial Agricultural Credit Scheme where there was a N200 billion fund. It is actually going on and has been drawn down by farmers and some state governments to the tune of N70 billion so far. But that is not good enough for us. And one of the reasons or one of the lessons we have learnt, although there have been many successes, but one of the lessons we have learnt is when you talk about tax, which is targeting large scale farming and is not addressing the small holder farmers as such.

So, with NIRSAL what we are moving to is a much more comprehensive and integrated approach to financing agriculture that really looks at the bottlenecks that we have identified from the past experience from programmes such as Agricultural Credit Guarantee Scheme (ACGS), which has been in place since 1973 and under that, about N36bn has been lent out to farmers with CBN guaranteeing 70 per cent of those loans. That is what Agricultural Credit Guarantee Scheme is all about.

So, some of these programmes have had quite significant impact, but we are not satisfied. It can be much better and we are always questioning ourselves; how can we succeed far more in creating wealth through the financing of agriculture in Nigeria.

And this is what has led to all the lessons that we have learnt, given the fact that private sector plays an increasingly important role in development, we have decided to move away from what you might call very government-driven intervention that provide money at low interest rates, because sometimes even after doing that, the banks feel it is not adequate as they should and one of the reasons is that they are not seeing this industry (agriculture) as a viable industry and that is why now, we have to be educating the banks, building on their technical capacity, assessing the risks of what they are going into and then sharing in those risks, but they will take the profits. That is why, we have to build capacity even for the farmers, so that these two groups can come together and we can get everybody’s eyes to be open to the full potential that is in agriculture.

We know that a lot of people who have persevered or who have gone against the tide to engage in large scale agriculture; we know they are making a lot of money.
Another thing that comes to front burner when the issue of agriculture is discussed is the issue of infrastructure in terms of transportation between the rural or produce areas to the cities where some of these produce are needed?

Yes, this is one of the lessons that have become very clear out of this conference and that is the fact that the government need to do much more and the development bank like the African Development Bank and World Bank, they need to do much more in financing infrastructure that will support agriculture and rural development and so on.

So, we need government to play a larger role in that area than just giving money directly for agricultural finance. The role of government is better if it takes up in providing enabling policy environment and infrastructure that supports agriculture.

Sir, is CBN intending to open this kind of AGRA partnership with other international organisations that may be interested in such?
Yes, because UNIDO, the United Nations Industry Development Organisation, is also part of this partnership that we are talking about. UNIDO comes from the angle of manu-agric business, which is, manufacturing and turning agriculture into a huge industrial-based business. So, UNIDO is also part of this initiative.

In other words, the likes of Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN) and (NACCIMA) should be part of this?
Of course, they should be part of all this. Yes, indeed, they should, why not? Just add the agricultural co-operatives and small holders. It is a whole value chain that we want to finance, so that banks can look at that value chain and say for instance, where is the potential for them to invest profitably, whether it is at the production level or marketing level and even distribution level? There is a whole lot of the value chain that the banks may choose to finance.

What do you see as challenges for forming cooperatives, especially in agriculture for small holders?
I think that some times, the small holder farmers tend not to be people who are very educated and so, organizing themselves can sometimes be a challenge, but I think here you can have the Ministries of Agriculture at the State levels, really helping these farmers to form very good and effective coordinating bodies among themselves.

The government can also provide support for them in various ways like guaranteeing market price and things like that if they are able to come together. So, government can provide an incentive for coming together. You know that kind of thing and there are various innovative policies that can be pursued.

One of the key issues in this conference is the issue of Green Revolution for Africa. Where do you see Africa in the next two years or even now we are talking about the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) target by 2015. Where do you see Africa, especially West Africa?

I think what we have seen in this conference is a call to action. Some progress have already been made by several countries, for example, in Ghana, we have seen the progress they have made. In Tanzania, we have seen a lot of progress and in Malawi, we have also seen a lot of progress. Malawi has now become a breadbasket from importing food, it is now a net export of food. I think it is important to mention the progress that has gone on in these countries as examples to what can be achieved. But we must be realistic, because not every African country is at the same stage when it comes to agricultural policy or even the political commitment to agriculture, which you know that NEPAD - New Partnership for Africa’s Development - has tried to co-ordinate.

But in terms of how many countries have increased the percentage of their budgets that has gone to agriculture, not every country is in this place. I think that in the next 10 to 15 years, which is more realistic, from my perspective, that is, when Africa should be able to achieve the Green Revolution, if we do the right things today. When I say that, I mean actually beginning to do the right things, not just talking about doing the right things.

In fact, if we do the right things, over the next five years we will see the significant change and in 10 years, we will be able to achieve the Green Revolution, if the continent as a whole is disciplined and comes along with coordinated disciplined about the whole issue. We have seen Malawi do it and we know it happened in many other countries and if it happens in Nigeria, it will happen in the rest of Africa.

How do you see the political will playing a role in this?
Political will is always the centre. I mean, development doesn’t just happen if the political will to formulate the strategies and be discipline in implementing it is not there. Now, one thing that we need the political will for is that in Nigeria and in Africa as a whole is policy continuity. We need political will so that when good policies are developed it should continue with any other government in power. That is where the political leadership in our countries can play a very essential role.

What would be your message as the conference rounds up, particularly to the Nigerian farmers?
Well, my message to the Nigerian farmers is that there is hope coming their way. That we in the Central Bank and government of Nigeria are working very hard to realize the aspiration of the Nigerian farmers and Nigerian people that Nigeria should become a food basket of West Africa.

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