‘’BUHARI DID NOT WIN MARCH 28TH
ELECTION’’
(my interview with IAMNIGERIA
magazine, courtesy Victor Okwuadi. Some
people asked for it actually. Dont mind
the deceptive headline, its how publishers
make money).
Tope Fasua is a political analyst and a
renowned economist. He has pioneered a
successful enterprise across three
continents, Africa,Europe and United Arab
Emirates. He’s the founder, Global
Analytics Consulting; a philanthropist and
a youth advocate. He shares on what the
present administration can do to lift
millions of Nigerians out of poverty; the
effects of globalization and Nigeria’s place
in a flat world.
YOU’RE THE CEO OF GLOBAL ANALYTICS
CONSULTING LIMITED WITH OFFICES IN
THE UK, UAE AND NIGERIA. WHAT IS IT
LIKE DOING BUSINESS IN NIGERIA, GIVEN
THAT NIGERIA IS RANKED AS ONE OF THE
WORST BUSINESS DESTINATIONS?
No! It’s a very wrong concept. When I hear
that I want to believe that there’s a
psychology to it; to put Nigerians off from
doing business in their own country. While
other people come here to do business. If
it was so bad, we won’t see many
foreigners falling over themselves to
come here and do business.
It’s totally wrong to say Nigeria is one of
the worst places for doing business and I will tell you why. In the US and UK , all of
those places are economies that have
reached a certain peak and it’s difficult for
an upstart to come and just get
something done in fact, those who are
actually making a lot of difference there
are maybe, if you like some of those tech
start ups. And for everyone Facebook,
Twitter, Instagram that you see ,five
thousand ,ten thousand people fell by the
way side. You cannot just walk to the US
and say you’re starting a business like you
would in Nigeria. Nigeria is where some
of the gaps are; in the whole of Africa,
Nigeria is where you have some of the
largest population with a very good cash
flow. I have done businesses in different
countries; I am telling Nigeria is one of the
best places to do business and it
competes fairly well with places like Dubai
if you ask me.
IN VIEW OF THE RECENT POLITICAL
PERMUTATIONS IN NIGERIA, WHAT
SHOULD NIGERIANS EXPECT FROM
GENERAL BUHARI LED GOVERNMENT?
I think Nigerians should expect what
Nigerians want to make happen, in which
case it’s not about sitting back and saying ‘’
Buhari has promised let him go and do it’’
it’s about what we do. It’s about how we
make it happen. I personally am not going
to be sitting down to just say ‘’now we’ve
voted for him or whatever the case
maybe let him go and sort it out’’, it’s my
call, it’s my time. if he fails, I have failed.
I HOPE YOU’RE NOT SAYING THIS
BECAUSE YOU ARE A MEMBER OF THE
APC?
See, it doesn’t matter. The PDP forced us
to join parties because of sixteen years of
gross mismanagement, therefore we
realized that and we had to do something.
I am not necessarily politically inclined
but all of us are political animals. In which
case, if you dig deep down you’ll find that
politician in you and at the end of the day,
everybody plays politics – it’s all about
how you manage people, how you lead
,how you deliver your promises, how you
take people forward and for me certainly
I do have lot of those attributes.
Some people can decide to hibernate and
go into a cocoon for the next four years
and be on the other side plotting the
failure, naturally that’s going to happen
but that’s their own cup of tea, I just
happen not to be one of those. I believe
that Nigeria needs change and change we
are going to get and I believe that to a
large extent these next four years is going
to be prosperous for us.
I live on the cutting –edge of economic
thoughts. We can’t be thinking in a straight
linear fashion when things have gone
digital, the kind of challenges we are
dealing with now are not the cut and dry
kind of issues . When I wake up in the
morning that’s all I think about, and I have
fine-tuned my ideas in that regards. What
happened is that Buhari did not ‘win’ the
elections. I think that the people of this
country won and therefore the people of
this country will dictate how the economy
rolls.
If given an opportunity to serve under
Buhari I will take it. in fact, I will give them
my ideas for free!
SPEAKING OF THE PEOPLE WHAT SHOULD
THEY EXPECT IN THE FIRST 100 DAYS?
I think the man should constitute his
team’ I think we are going to see a drastic
cut in government expenditure in terms
of what the government spends on itself’ I think we’re going to see a scenario where
when they are coming in they will declare
their assets. Of course it’s not going to be
easy; we are going to see some fight
backs. Hopefully they’ll be able to
reenergize EFCC to do its work; hopefully
we are going to get a lot of recovery of
assets of stolen money, here and there or
maybe misappropriated funds, let me not
use that word stolen money.
OUR ECONOMY NEEDS TECHNOCRATS TO
DRIVE GROWTH, WELL NOT THE KIND OF
GROWTH THAT WILL KEEP THE POOR
POORER AND THE RICH RICHER. WHAT
KIND OF ECONOMIC TEAM ARE YOU
LOOKING FORWARD TO?
The word ‘technocrat’ itself can be a
fraudulent word because a lot of people
come and they say ‘’we are technocrats’’
and they put their noses in the skies and
they don’t actually see what is on ground
and they come with the arrogance of ‘’I
have been abroad or I have one to the
best schools or I have got a PhD’’ AND SO
ON. What we need are patriots.
The question that you asked, you put this
very question together perhaps with
some divine guidance because you talk
about technocrat on one hand and growth
that does not reflect on the lives of the
people. What our technocrats have been
selling to us including Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala
is growth that does not include the people
and it could be very easy to include the
people in the growth of the nation. In fact,
until you include the people you’re not
going anywhere. We don’t want some
technocrats that will come and tell us
some theories they learned in some
place, what we need are patriots who can
fix this economy and let me tell you, it can
be done.
The only thing that will move the economy
forward now, all things considered is for
the government to define unemployment
from the level of secondary school
graduates to say that anybody that leaves
secondary school must have a job- a light
kind of work. And God have mercy there’s
so much work to be done. Coming to the
office today, the kind of dirt on the
streets, the kind of dumping grounds that
we passed and there are people who can
clean that.
One way to move this country forward is
for us to advertise to the world that now
we are ready to run a country that’s going
to be the cleanest and safest and the
money will come. If we do so, we will be
putting money directly in the pockets of
our young people. Get our young boys
and girls on the streets light work. The
idea is to put money in their pockets.
Every streets could do with 10-20people,
3-4hours shift daily, with this plan you can
easily create 1.5million jobs in this
country and if you say one graduate
should supervise five people or ten
people you can easily create either 200 or
300 thousand jobs for our graduates and
pay them at least N50,000 monthly.
In an economy like ours, private sector is
not charged with the duty of creating
employment. Government first! In the
north we have desert encroachment,
what do you need to do? You need to do
tree planting; you need to do irrigation,
that’s mass labor. Private sector will not
do tree planting for you, government has
to chip-in in order to create the
standards. If government employs
800,000 people as a result of this that is a
plus for all of us and there is a lot of work
for everybody. A clean safe environment
means that businesses will be able to do
more, businesses can open longer and in
fact, we should be talking about the 24
hours economy. No young person should
sit at home waiting for jamb, if jamb does
not answer you, get something doing. If
we do this 1. You’ll reduce crime 2. You’ll
be putting money directly in the pockets
of young people, and by so doing you’ll be
creating a new class of people. In the east
of Nigeria we have gully erosion. Well-
planned tree planting and other
geographical and agricultural solutions
can help and its our youth that will do the
job. They can also assist in planting food
crops, trees, and so on. In the South-
South, we have oil spills and land
degradation as a result of illegal
refineries. All over Nigeria we have an
epidemic of cellophane paper and ‘pure
water’ sachets that is really reducing the
arable land at our disposal even as our
population increases. OUR MONEY IS IN
THE ENVIRONMENT. Of that I’m sure.
We are talking about diversification; you
are not going to diversify with mouth. If
there is a local shoe industry in Aba
manufacturing shoes and there are local
guys in Aba sewing it well, why are some
of them not growing? They need someone to buy from them. The people, who’ll buy the N2000 shoe made in Aba, are those boys and girls. When you put money in their pockets, that guy manufacturing shoes in Aba will sell more and when he sells more he will improve his processes. All this preaching to middle class people and the super-rich who ride their private jets to London to eat breakfast and to New Zealand for lunch, won’t cut it, because their taste buds (our taste buds) are already damaged. WE MUST BAIL OUT OUR YOUTH AND PUT MONEY IN THEIR POCKETS!
MR. FASUA, YOU HAVE BUILT A
SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS ACROSS THREE
CONTINENTS, IF GIVEN AN OPPORTUNITY TO SERVE UNDER BUHARI’S GOVERNMENT WILL YOU TAKE IT?
I will and I will do it for free! I can do it
and I’m ripe enough to do it. In fact, I won’t even wait; if I can I will talk to the
necessary people. It’s not a matter of
pride, these ideas I’m propagating are
out-of-the-box. I’ll be glad if I am called to
serve and if they don’t call me, I will give
my ideas for free. If they don’t accept any
of these ideas they’ll fail, I am telling you.
If they get advice from the hawks I see
floating around the scene now’ they’ll
come and say ‘’oh we have infrastructure
deficit of $100 billion, let’s go to the World Bank and borrow 60 billion’’ they are finished! IF IT IS ABOUT AWARDING
CONTRACTS, THEY ARE FINISHED. What
we should do now is to reinvent our
economy by focusing on the youths, how?
Retooling most of our educational
institutions and I say #BringBackOurPub
licSchools.
SOCIAL MEDIA PLAYED A HUGE ROLE IN
THIS ELECTION; IN FACT YOU ARE ONE OF
THE FEW BIG BOYS WHO WENT ALL OUT
ONLINE IRRESPECTIVE OF YOUR
BUSINESS INTEREST CHALLENGING
YOUNG PEOPLE TO GIVE A 72 YEAR OLD
GENERAL A CHANCE, WHY?
Because with the information at my
disposal I knew we had reached our
tether’s end as far as PDP was concerned.
I staked everything I had to say, look this
wasn’t the way to go and I pushed for
change, I knew that we couldn’t continue
to sustain the level of brigandage and
open looting that was going on. I knew the
economics was wrong because it was all
about chronic capitalism; I knew that we
couldn’t continue to run an economy
based on bailout for the rich. These big
guys have taken Nigerians for a ride, you
bail them out and next time you see them
buying all sorts of things. That’s the
reason chiefly I rooted and still rooting for
Buhari, because hopefully we will get the
opportunity to get things right in this
country, the wickedness was getting too
much.
ALL OVER THE WORLD, THERE IS A
GLOBAL CONVERSATION TURNING
TOWARDS INNOVATION. AS WE SPEAK
THE WORLD IS FLATTER THAT IT WAS TEN
YEARS AGO. WHERE IS NIGERIA'S PLACE
IN THIS?
Regarding that one, Nigeria is finished!
There are 400 Americans working at
Instagram, serving almost a billion
people, when facebook bought Whatsapp
for $19billion, it had 55 employees serving
450million customers. How much did they
cash out? The young CEO Jan Koum who
had 45% stake got $6.8billion,his friend
Brian Acton, co-founder got $3billion, the
other 55 people who were the early
employees who had only 1% stake got
$160million each. Ambassador Victor,
where are you there? YOU ARE THERE TO
USE WHATSAPP. Don’t’ talk innovation as
far as Nigeria is concerned. What we need
to do is, first go back to the root; it will
give us time to think of where to come in.
Cc. Lalasticlala et al

Uhmm

If buhari here you
Your name Na sorry.
He DAT have ear let him hear.

So many stories

nedupel:
If buhari here you
Your name Na sorry.
He DAT have ear let him hear.

Ha! Nigerians and this problem of reading. Why don't you take your time to read the post b4 dropping a comment?

Go to court.


Hire 100 SAN's if you like.

boluwatife66:

Ha! Nigerians and this problem of reading. Why don't you take your time to read the post b4 dropping a comment?

You dey mind am

All they need is to read the headlines and they draw their conclusions from it.

Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.

IdisuleOurOwn:
Go to court.


Hire 100 SAN's if you like.

Haan, did you read the article at all?

opeaceo:

Haan, did you read the article at all?

With the 'Headline' I don't need to read all.

IdisuleOurOwn:


With the 'Headline' I don't need to read all.

But your conclusion is wrong.

opeaceo:

But your conclusion is wrong.

Ok. Thank you.

IdisuleOurOwn:
Go to court.


Hire 100 SAN's if you like.

Receive brain and eye glasses(becos one may not be enuf) IJN