We’re weaning Delta State of over-dependence on oil revenues – Emu

A banker, financial consultant, entrepreneur and public servant, Dr. Kingsley Eze Emu was one time Commissioner for Commerce and Industry, and also Economic Planning in Delta State. He is presently the Chief Economic Adviser to Governor Ifeanyi Okowa. In this interview with journalists, Emu explains the economic outlook in Delta State and how the non-oil sector upstaged oil and gas as the dominant contributor to the state’s GDP. ENIOLA DANIEL reports

We’ve heard of ‘Delta beyond oil’ and people are eager to know how much of that has been achieved, and the impact of that on poverty alleviation?
IT all boils down to the capacity and experience of the man in the driver’s seat, Governor Okowa. He’s been around at various levels and in many sectors to feel and empathise, particularly at the grassroots. When you alleviate poverty, two things happen: You pull people out of poverty by direct and tailor-made interventions. 

Alleviating poverty can reduce the dependency ratio of those who are already earning but because of the burden of those that you need to support, you are pulled back significantly. So, alleviating poverty frees up your list of dependents and you have enough cash flow to create wealth. Those were the two most critical thought processes we had to work on. 

The next thing was how do we achieve this? Yes, as of today, we are the leading oil producer in Nigeria, that’s the truth. The records are there to show. We have 40 per cent of the gas reserves of Nigeria and that is the truth. However, oil accounts for less than 20 per cent of the workforce. That’s where statistics comes in. So, with statistics, you’re able to say and do a proper mapping of the demography of the population and begin to share them into segments and decide to intervene. 

And in intervening, you must look for what is available and what you must do properly to suit the characteristics of the different segments or targets that you support. So, these were all the thinking that went into it and that culminated in the SMART Agenda. 

The SMART Agenda means to provide sustainable wealth, maintainable peace, technical education, urban renewal and all other things that can make the system work. This was how we arrived at the SMART Agenda. It’s not a political acronym, but the content is real. The thinking behind it is genuine and Governor Okowa has matched that with policies, laws, implementation, outcome and impact.
 
Let’s talk about the impact and how it has transformed segments of the population

Over 100,000 direct jobs have been created (including entrepreneurs) and over 1,000,000 indirect jobs arising from numerous interventions in several Ministries, Departments and Agencies.

So the prosperity mantra is not for a man, who owns two houses, three cars, to buy more. No. It is to uplift those dependent, willing and able people and bring them up to speed, to realise their dreams in life as well as regain their self-esteem and be effective in terms of productivity. Everything boils down to productivity because you can be giving money to somebody who is not doing anything for you. That is not productivity, but when you are gainfully employed, that even translates to the growth of the GDP that we are talking about and that is where we are.

How sustainable are these set goals by the Okowa administration?
First, if we say sustainable wealth creation, we are not talking about handouts. We are talking about productive engagements. The entire concept of job creation is to engage people productively. It is not about calling you out from where you are and giving handouts. No. The first is for us to look at the entire population and isolate youths, who are the most volatile. 

The job creation started with 70 per cent of graduates and 30 per cent secondary school leavers. However, in the first year of operation, that ratio was distorted because, in some local government areas, you have more school certificate holders than graduates. So, that altered that ratio to about 60:40. 

We set out to create five products to confront the challenges that you see in the system under job creation.

We created the YAGEP – Youth Entrepreneurship in Agriculture. Second is STEP – which has to do with technical skills development. Thirdly was tractorization. We have tractors and the usual practice was to keep them for the appropriate department in the Ministry of Agriculture. We decided to decentralise them at a discount for access, availability and affordability.  This now works in the 10 Federal Constituencies. This is because land preparation is the biggest challenge farmers face.

Then we have the Production Processing and Support Programme, PPSP, which is designed to support small farm holders, elevate them and give them funds support in terms of input and land preparation. This was targeted at direct increment in employment for those people. While the YAGEP and STEP focus largely on youths.

Then we have DESMA, the micro-credit segment to support them with loans, special grants to numerous artisans that we have in this state. All these programmes have helped to capture the entire population that we have in Delta. Interestingly, men are left out in all of these, but men have always held sway in terms of this. So the vulnerable segments are those we have focused on in these areas.

Today, after the fourth year of operation, we changed the module. It became obvious to us that since we have 10 functional technical-vocational institutions, the government equipped them and subsidised the training in all these institutions so people can be trained in vocational and technical education. 

From 2015 to date, we have had 11,599 graduates from technical and vocational education and you will agree with me that’s a large number. Under the technical job creation scheme, we have been using over 141 well-qualified trade centres certified by the National Directorate of Employment, NDE, to train our trainees.

We also introduced the concept of BROWN STEP and BROWN YAGEP. The BROWN STEP means that you are doing business before, you have graduated from any vocational trade centre, have paid your way through but you have a problem with starter packs. We designed a programme for six weeks where a proficiency test will be given to the people we inculcate into the BROWN STEP programme, that’s why it’s called BROWN because you are not just a beginner. It’s not by the application. We go to the 141 certified trade centres and from their list invite those that have on their own steam gone through the centre and we profile them. We train you for six weeks or more and undergo proficiency tests to find out the gaps in training and make it up. The essence of the proficiency test is to find out where there are gaps in their tutelage because we have to come up with mindset changes. We have come up with business training a whole lot. We also get them attached to reputable technical firms for four weeks for them to catch up areas they are found to be deficient. Thereafter, we give them the starter packs. That is the BROWN STEP.

BROWN YAGEP focuses on the traditional method of farming and agriculture in our rural areas; people who rear birds in cages and rooms. That seems adequate for them. But we come in to expand their scope after profiling them by giving them feeds and chicken as well as teaching them best practices for six months and elevating what they’re are doing. 

The immediate implication of this is that these people we have expanded are now recruiting more people in their environments. This, therefore, stems from rural-urban drift.

How about teaching skills to students and personnel in MDAs who love skills acquisition?
Today, entrepreneurship and vocational education have become compulsory in all our tertiary institutions. If you don’t pass that, you will not graduate. At the last session, I had with the rectors of the three polytechnics we have, over 9,000 people graduate every year at the OND and HND. And we have over 6,000 of them as Deltans. Predominantly, they were ill-equipped to face the labour market, because there is no nexus between what they teach them and what the labour market requires. There is a need for tilers, plumbers, electricians, auto engineers, masons, welders in the labour market. Seventy per cent of what they churn out is in the social sciences, which is what regular universities do too.

So, entrepreneurs and vocational education became compulsory. This means that to be able to graduate, you must have learnt at least one trade from the OND level to HND level and 50 of them who have distinguished themselves in all the tertiary institutions are given starter packs. The commissioner for youth development has the primary responsibility for this. Recently, he graduated 776 people from the Rural Youths Skill Acquisition, RYSA programme. He doesn’t deal with urban centres. He goes to all the 25 local government areas and their 270 wards, select three persons each through a transparent process, which gives total and full coverage of the entire state. That’s 810 people from the wards. And they are predominantly BROWN.

That of the girl child is Project GEST (Girls Entrepreneurs and Skills Training) just graduated over 400 people. A new cycle was recently approved by the governor and he doubled the number because of the impact on the economy. This is why in 2020, Delta State was judged to be the second least poor state in Nigeria by the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics NBS. 

So, in terms of job creation, we are there and emphasizing it because it has a more long term positive effect as well as provides a better alternative to crime for our teeming youth. Truly better and cheaper than massive investments in combating crime.

The Women Empowerment and Skills Acquisition Programme (WESAP), which is the key product from the Ministry of Women Affairs, is focused largely on women. We are not saying we are developing youths and the girl child, we are backing it up with programmes and implementation with huge monitoring, mentoring that independently do their job without fear or favour. So that is the focus of those areas.

Government has reinvigorated the six technical colleges that have been near moribund. What changed? We have started building more functional workshops than basic buildings and providing tools to learn. Today, all the weekends of most of the boys are engaged. The Vice President was here during the MSMSE week and was amazed at what the boys presented from the technical colleges selected. Consequently, the Governor decided to build one technical college in each local government area for proximity. That’s skill acquisition. Less than one percent of the population can be absorbed into the public service and less than 0.1 percent of those in the public service are active engaged. You have huge redundancy. Over 80 per cent of them are redundant. Those who do the job are less than 10 per cent.

We want to build entrepreneurs. When you build them, they create more wealth for the people. They train more people. They have more examples to show. That has a lot of nexus with what the governor has tried to do by creating some universities of technology and allow other universities to run their normal programmes.

You said earlier that NBS rated Delta as the 2nd least poor state in its 2020 report. Not long ago, a private firm, Financial Derivatives, came out with a report that grouped Delta among states that are not viable to the effect that if those states were businesses, they would have been liquidated. How do you reconcile the NBS and Financial Derivatives’ categorisations?
I know Bismarck Rewane is a renowned intellectual and somebody I respect and have interfaced with a lot. I want to believe that that document was quoted out of context. If the basis for saying that is jobs, rate of unemployment, then that’s not terrible because you cannot adjudge any state by a quarter’s result. Besides, 2020 was a year of a global pandemic. Everything globally went down. America witnessed the worst unemployment ever and challenges are still there. India is in a worse state. Covid is still ravaging, the same pandemic impact and if you realise that in our own environment here, up to 95 per cent are small and medium enterprises. And micro accounts for well over 90 per cent of those businesses and if you know what micro biz means and understand what pandemic means and what a lockdown can mean to these people, you begin to understand why that singular result cannot stand any analytical test whatsoever as a stand-alone, because every economy went down. Except there are other parameters, but as you can see, in 2019, our nominal GDP, though there was a slight drop for 2018, at N4.4 trillion, which means if you benchmark that against 2015, we have grown by 51 per cent in terms of GDP. 

Agriculture has consistently grown by 13 per cent year-on-year. Services in 2019 were 34.41 per cent. Oil grew by 47.2 per cent. This is way above the national average. In fact, the fact that Delta has the guts, the willpower, to do their GDP in conjunction with NBS tells you they are confident of what they are doing. Only a few states in the country have done their GDP up to 2019. The latest GDP you can find is 2019. The data for 2020 GDP should just about becoming in now. There are about 42 activities that are considered. In our last exercise, we used 38 activities to benchmark and 12 of the activities were data collected from the Federal Government. I have also read that even though we have N1.3 trillion as a state in the last six years in the fiscal sustainability index, that we cannot sustain ourselves without revenue support from elsewhere.

Government has a responsibility beyond putting money in the banks. We have spent in excess of close to N400 billion in terms of contracts awarded on roads and civil infrastructure. We have 1,577.8kms of roads awarded and 60 to 70 per cent of them completed. We have 908.8kms of drains and over 60 per cent of them completed. We have 21 bridges under construction, 6 have been completed and 15 are work in progress. We have storm drainage systems to decongest the cities. In Uvwie and Asaba where there are critical environmental challenges that threaten private properties. The state has taken the burden. Of what use will that money be in the bank given what we have done with the revenue we have received. Our non-oil GDP has grown to 52 per cent. Since 2014, this is the first time we are having significant growth in non-oil GDP and that was the target – diversify the economy, create more jobs. Trade has grown significantly, consistently. Construction has grown consistently, real estate has grown consistently, education has grown consistently, transportation has embarrassingly grown and expectedly so. With such interconnectivity of roads in the state, in fact, more roads were done connecting the rural to the urban centres than in the urban centres. That means free flow of goods and services; that means free flow of people; that means that rural environments have been developed significantly. That is the prosperity we are talking about.

Our urban development programme has been one of the greatest. When we say we have over 1,000,000 indirect jobs created, they arose from all of these developments. There is also the construction of schools ongoing. SUBEB is running their N2.2 billion construction in terms of school buildings annually, renovating and building new ones. Then the intervention agencies are working. Uvwie and Warri axis has done several km roads and drains in urban renewal drive. Asaba is wearing a fantastic look. These things are not stories. That’s urban renewal.

Our intervention agencies are working. Today, Asaba has businesses springing up, such as hotels not even owned by Deltans. Night economy has crept back into the system.

Some Deltans are concerned about the debt profile of the state; that by the time this administration leaves the burden would be huge.

There’s no way you won’t leave debts, but you leave sustainable debts and sustainable windows for revenue generation. You cannot be debt-free. A President once left so much money in the bank accounts of his state when he was leaving and yet they had huge infrastructural challenges. Power is still a major challenge to date in the country. We must tackle the capital and social projects. If you recall in 2016, at the peak of the recession, Delta State was adjudged Number 1 in human capital development by an independent NGO founded by Bill and Melinda Gates and Dangote Foundations. Independently. Your politics is known through your policies and implementation. It’s not by rhetoric. It’s not the story you tell, but the results on the street.
 
But the intrinsic meaning remains but it changes from one person to the other. The person in the rural area, what is a legacy to him, is the networks of road that you have created for him, that gives him a free movement from one spot to the other. While the intrinsic meaning remains, what it means to different people differs.