Ken Egbas is the founder and co-ordinator of SERAS, one of the nation’s biggest corporate awards that reward corporate social responsibility, sustainability and good corporate citizenship. In this interview with FEMI ADEKOYA, he talks on how government should create an enabling environment for organisations to engage in CSR, especially as a means of achieving the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations. Excerpts.

How will you rate the performance of entities and businesses operating in Nigeria in terms of adoption of the SDGs?
For me I think it is too early to rate the SDGs because they have barely commenced about 10 to 11 months ago. Maybe we will start by first doing a very proper funeral ceremony for the MDGs as to why Nigeria as big as we are as a nation in terms of our population, our resources, our human capital and capacity to implement policies, only made one out of nine goals. For me to answer that question, we will have to go back to how the MDGs were designed technically by the United Nations. Now, what the United Nations has designed is a public-private partnership approach to drive corporate social responsibility and sustainable development. Government still runs the society and controls it by taking a lot of decisions, but let us bring the government representing the public sector and bring in the corporate entities who have mastered the art of managing resources and multiplying resources together to drive sustainable development.

If you look at when the MDGs came into force and the adoption by corporate organizations, it took almost 4 to 5 years and as a matter of fact we had a lot of organizations who developed CSR policies because they were entering for the SERAS awards, we have a lot of organizations who have gone far and wide out of this country to establish health intervention, environmental intervention, educational intervention with the mind of bringing end products for us to look at. I believe that the adoption of SDGs has been faster and this is because of two things. Firstly, we have reached that age where organizations know that marketing communications has changed. The marketing future that organizations are going to be competing with is not going to be on that differentiation factor, but the impact of their investment on the environment and society at large.

Do you see a threat to sustainable efforts as a result of the present state of the economy?
In years to come, we will still see some organisations coming with the stakeholder theory argument as a justification on why they should not do CSR and get involved in sustainability and all the likes, but it is very unfortunate, the market environment in 1945 is not the same market environment we have today. Now recession is simply explained as a depression or a fall or deflation of the currency value. There is disequilibrium in terms of the purchasing power and it comes with a lot of other demons as it were that creates discomfort to the people.
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When there is less income, the tendency is that you will want to accentuate your ability to meet up your obligations, so what you do is cut out redundancy, but I do not think that we are looking at sustainability for what it truly is by cutting out investment on health care, environment. If you have made a N100 million in 2014, and out of 100 million you contributed 5 per cent of that amount to sustainability and CSR, my thinking is that if you now make N50 million, and because we are in a recession, you can still maintain your 5 per cent, for me that is not a reduction in cost but a sustained action that may even help the country out of recession and impact several lives.

How can government make it easy for organizations to engage in sustainable actions?
I think government needs to create an enabling environment to encourage organisations to engage in CSR. In our society, we have a peculiar situation where infrastructure has failed in most places. Most of these organisations power themselves , they do not even join the national grid especially when they are using systems that cannot deal with power outages and these organizations are saying government should provide an enabling environment , because once we have that, policies that encourage those who engage in CSR or sustainability are rewarded and acknowledged for it and with that, you do not need to enforce it by nature, everybody will want to do it and at that point they can see the inherent benefits from investing and engaging in CSR and sustainability.

For me, what we need right now if we are to meet the SDGs is for government to go beyond the rhetoric which is what we get most of the time. People come and mouth up slogans just to show that they understand sustainability, yes, you can understand the term sustainability, but the workability of sustainability is an entire matter where you have to get a clear understanding of working with the right people to ensure that these things happen. Today in this country we lose more people to ailments that can be cured and it is a very shameful thing.

The government needs to work with the private sector and government has its own responsibility to create an enabling environment that enhances and promotes profitability and justice. Then, you will be surprised to the extent that organizations will be able to go in partnership with government to bring about development in the country.

What criteria do you deploy in arriving at your award categories?
The first thing is about understanding why we do it. The SERAS was set up in the first instance and conceptualised in 2006 and commenced in 2007. The idea at the time ‎was that we are a public communications consulting that gave birth to a project, we were looking at the future of marketing communications and how it was going to either impact positively or negatively on the marketing communications space in Nigeria as it were and for a public relations person, your major skill really is your ability to project the future so that you can accurately or nearly accurately counsel your clients on how they should position against the tide that might come in the future.

In 2006, the future for us was sustainability, because if you go through marketing, you will find out that it has had different areas such as areas of advertising, areas of public relations and areas of what some people call on-the-spot activation. If you look at the global space, you will find that there are some things that are becoming pertinent ‎now that will not go away until Jesus comes and those issues are around poverty and environment. If consumption is sustained at the rate at which it is right now, coupled with the fact that the world’s population would quadruple in the next 30 to 50 years, the reality is that, to meet the demand of the population is multiplied by four of what we have now which is not going to happen. This is why you see when people talk about the era of responsible consumption.

We tied the SERAS to the millennium development goals which include poverty, environment, gender equality and all the likes for the awards category. From December 31st of 2015, we saw the millennium development goals being phased out and of course, a country like Nigeria met only one of the targets and most of the countries in Africa did not meet the target and the United Nations had to go back and sit down to review to get more societies, communities, countries to achieve the targets and that was what gave birth to SDGs which started running on the 1st of January 2016.

The categories were hinged on the SDGs to examine what organisations are doing in the areas of poverty reduction, workplace equality, climate action, health and so on. We are trying to make the SDGs more achievable for some of these organisations. We have those categories and of course we have categories that we have also created based on our own peculiarities. There is a category on SMEs, because we believe there is a need for us to look at the middle class who are entrepreneurs, who can create jobs and activities, who are running on an idea that attracts people to join them. We also have the category for sustainability reporting. If you are aware, as at last year, the Nigeria Stock Exchange came with a policy which we have proposed to the Federal Government saying that henceforth, all the companies quoted on the stock exchange should not only publish their annual reports, but attach with it, their sustainability report to aid reporting and practice.

‎How do you measure impact of CSR actions?
In my course of work I have had to work with some of Nigeria’s biggest brands and sometimes you come in as a consultant looking for materials that should have been compiled and can’t find such. Where people are looking for files, the world has moved on from there and communicating about their sustainability actions. The primary objective was putting together a world class event using the Nigerian situation to sell home-grown solutions. The second thing we try to do with the awards is to get good examples of people who were caught doing the right things and celebrate them for people to emulate while the third thing was to get Nigerian companies to get to the levels where some of our case studies can be brought to a global audience so that all over the world we get people talking about such interventions. Over the years, we have called for entries with very stringent conditions to ask very pertinent questions. From policy initiation stage, we have been able to create an accountability structure where we can have access to monitor organisations’ CSR activities and mark them against global best practices and that is why over the years, the standards we have used for the awards are the United Nations approved standards on the millennium development goals, key indicators and now as it were, is the sustainable development goals and besides the sustainable development goals, we have the ISO 26000.

What should people expect at the 10th edition of the SERAS awards?
We have always had a well packaged show and we have always tried to organize the SERAS awards according to level of the very best practices of awards you can find like the Oscars and others. We try to internationalize what we do because the positioning we always want for SERAS is Nigeria’s business premiere business awards and we wanted organizations to also take the message and every year they come to see what their competitors are doing and we tell them the SERAS award should serve as a reminder every time about our job of saving each other, helping our planet and the second thing we are trying to do and which is a milestone, is that for the very first time in our history, we are having companies from Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Angola and what that has done is that two things have happened in this process. It has given us the opportunity for the very first time, to pitch Nigeria’s best against the rest from Africa and to be able to measure that impact.

We also started this as a movement. We had it from the start that in our strategy that we were going to launch into the African continent at some point, but we did not know when. The idea is that after we take it up from here and the benefits that we have created in the Nigerian space for example, we should export some of those solutions to other African countries and create a unified platform that provides and promotes CSR and sustainability across the continent.

How much of efforts do you take in ensuring that your awardees sustain these actions?
If you ask me to summarize the SERAS awards in one sentence in terms of what we set out to achieve and what we are doing, I will say it is Nigeria’s biggest marketing communications behavioural change campaign. The SERAS awards starts every year at the end of February when we picked the theme for the year and communicate it to organizations and ends in November and in that period, a big part of what we do is that we are perhaps the only award giving organization right now that goes to the extent of gathering evidence, because it is evidence-based and we visit all the locations submitted by these companies to gather videos, pictures and interview all the stakeholders and these are all the materials that we bring before the judges based on our criteria for the categories to help them take their decisions . I do not see anybody who does such a thorough work and perhaps that is why it is very difficult for us to get funds; but we have chosen to follow this path, because you cannot promote responsible behaviour without having credibility yourself.