CBN Governor Lamido Sanusi's Revolution

I was on my way to Central London this morning when I got a call from my superbly enthusiastic and talented Associate Producer - Rosemary Ajayi, explaining to me in a rushed tone that the Governor of Central Bank of Nigeria is in town and will be making a presentation to the UK Finance sector at a very cosy and classy hotel, just behind Liverpool Street Station.

I had been talking to Mr. Femi Babafemi, the spokesperson of EFCC earlier with regards having a telephone interview with him on the Saturday morning "Africa This Week" which I present on BEN Television Sky 184 and he had agreed to feature on the show, which was quite exciting considering the controversy generated as a result of EFCC's pursuit of Bank CEOs and Directors that were sacked by the CBN Governor.

My first thought on getting the information from Rosemary was to try and get the CBN Governor to accept my invitation to be interviewed live on my TV show for Saturday.  I headed straight for Liverpool Street, arrived about 15 minutes late for the presentation and sat through the rest of the very intelligent and enlightening information that Mr. Lamido Sanusi put forward.  I have never seen the Governor prior to today's event, except for the photograph on websites and never heard him speak before.

I was quite impressed by the measured, soft-spoken, and very eloquent speech/presentation by the Governor, I have not heard this kind of quality presentation from someone in senior public position from Nigeria in recent times, so I found this quite refreshing.

There was a truly diverse audience at the event and this was obvious during question time as the questions came from senior banking executives from Deutche Bank, Morgan & Stanley, JP Morgan, BBC reporter, Africa Confidential, and Financial Times to name a few, and the Governor gave detailed response to all the questions, with the exception of two questions which he deflected to the two Deputy Governors flanking him on the high table.

At the end of the event, I had a quick interview with the CBN Governor.  I asked him how much has been recovered since August 14 announcement of the sacking of the CEOs of the 5 Banks affecting by the poorly serviced/non-performing loans, he was not able to give concise amount but stated that Oceanic Bank has recovered about N13Billion, while Intercontinental Bank has recovered a bit more than that.

When I quizzed him on the issue of loans by banks to the government departments that have not been servicing or paying back, as well as allegation by a couple of the banks that they have put in money into the energy and oil sector, Governor Lamido Sanusi's response was that loans the sacked CEOs claimed were given to government depts and energy sector which are poorly serviced constitute a small percentage of the Billions of Dollars that have been described by his office as non-performing loans.

I kept at him to give me an indication of what is the size of the small percentage that he was talking about, and eventually he said its just under 5%, which means over 90% of the billions have gone to "powerful and highly placed individuals and organisations", using the words of Governor Sanusi.  He clearly believes that once these individuals are subjected to the pressure they are now under they will have to respect the laws of the land by paying up.  He chuckled and explained that even some of those who claim they are going to court to seek redress for being exposed will have gone back to the banks to pay their debt.

I asked a tricky question on the share price fixing allegations against Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Nigeria Stock Exchange (NSE), Mr. Sanusi seemed to have chosen his words carefully and stated emphatically, that he will not indulge in rumours and unsubstantiated allegations about shares price-fixing.  He said that as far as the CBN is aware, there are no price-fixing confirmed.

I will be taking him up on that again tomorrow when he features on my Saturday morning show "Africa This Week" on BEN Television Sky Channel 184 from 10a.m. to 11a.m.

I expect the full interview today to be on BEN Television tonight, with the Governor responding to my questions on state of Nigerian economy, the growth the CBN believes will be driven by the agriculture sector, the expectation of improvement in electricity that will drive SME growth and more.

See why I said the interview was interesting, just watch it tonight as appetiser and then look out for the full 1 Hours interview that's coming live on saturday... phew... that's me done for the day... :-)

State of Health Care in Nigeria

I am often wondering about when Nigeria will arrive at a point where basic necessities of life will work. Pondering and wondering do nothing for the good of humanity, as my church Pastor has said on a few occasions, "Good intentions count for nothing", in essence, until action is taken, all the good intentions in the world would not do anyone any good.

Where am I going with this you wonder, well its to do with the state of health care in Nigeria.  I have a lot of issues with a lot of things being done in Nigeria and I know that if I do not focus on one at a time, I may lose my sanity... its not funny... actually it may be funny in a sad way, but very true.

In the late 1980s, I nearly lost my life to Typhoid Fever, I could have died because of the poor health care at that point.  I went to the public hospital, time was wasted in treating what was thought to be a simple malaria, but no diagnosis or test to confirm.  When it got worse, my girlfriend at that point in time, Oh God bless her, she encouraged me to go private, with virtually no fund.  The truth of the situation was that I was on the verge of completing my exams at the Ogun State Polytechnic and I was so broke, there was no money to buy Panadol talk less of paying a private hospital.

I was saved by a young doctor, who was a friend to my then girlfriend.  He checked me out, managed to get me into the private hospital, secure blood test and diagnosed Typhoid.  The money to buy the rest of the treatment was raised quickly and I am today grateful to a handful of friends that rallied round to save my life from something that should not be so life threatening.

Just in 2006, I learnt about the accident where over 100 lives were lost on the Ife-Ibadan motorway.  The church I attended that sunday, the congregation was asked to pray that God will battle against the blood-sucking demons that make the accidents happen.  The story of how that accident happened will be in another blog, but the point I am keen on making here was the fact that lives were lost, not just because of the unfortunate accident, but because there was no infrastructure in place to respond quickly.

There were no ambulances, no fire service to rescue lives and no equipment in the general hospitals to initially stabilize the victims or progress treatment to a fairly standard level.  If you have seen how accident victims are carried and shoved/cramped into back of cars to rush them to hospital in Nigeria, you will understand why higher percentage die or are disabled for life.  I have a number of other stories of this nature to tell, including the loss of the life of my mother-in-law some years back through an accident that should not have claimed her life.

The most recent is a very good friend, an editor of one of the popular Nigerian newspapers, whose mum had an accident a few days ago up north.  She was practically in tears as she saw her mother in terrible pain, but the poorly trained and poorly equipped hospital staff including doctors could not do much to help.  The mum has been moved to a private hospital and as at this morning, she confirmed some amount of stability but stated clearly the infrastructure and training even in private hospital in Kaduna is still appalling, in fact I reckon it must be disgraceful.

I was at the Bloggers' Conference this last weekend and was privileged to meet Dr. Ike Anya, a UK based medical practitioner who has been campaigning and supporting initiatives to engage colleagues in Diaspora to help with the capacity issue in Nigeria.  Dr. Anya acknowledged efforts of other various Nigerian interest groups trying to improve situation back home, but unfortunately, the only way all of those initiatives and effort would amount to anything substantial is if the Government would coordinate the effort and put a strategy in place to maximize outcome of all private and charitable initiatives from diaspora.

In my usual style of looking for solutions rather than just moaning / wingeing about problems, I am writing this piece to profile the issue, engage friends who may wish to join hands with existing groups either in Diaspora or back home in Nigeria and most importantly, source for coordinated approach to secure Nigeria's Minister of Health buy-in.  This final point will be to get the Ministry to work out best way possible to tap into capacity from Diaspora as some of the best Doctors, Medical Consultants and Registrars in the medical field in UK and US are actually Nigerians.

As you read this blog, I hope you will feel concerned enough to think of one way or the other to contribute something to help improve health care in Nigeria and save a life or two...  If you are unsure of what to do or where to start, feel free to contact me to point you in the direction of organisations you can add value to.

Bloggers' Conference

I was at the Bloggers' Conference yesterday, it was held at the Account 3 Events' building in Bethnal Green, London from about midday till 6pm. I had a great time just being amongst kindred spirits, people of like minds, some who blog consistently, some who only do it as occasional opportunity to express frustration and poor out the venom of anger in words against authority/society/businesses/government and anything that is found wanting in their views and those who wanted to know about "this thing called blogging"... :-)

The event was organised by a talented young lady Tundun Adeyemo, a consistent blogger (http://tundunadeyemo.blogspot.com/) you can check out her usually interesting 5 Minutes Blog.

There were quite a few people there that I found very interesting and I have decided my blogging has got to be more consistently as well as making sure its now targetted at achieving a specific change rather than just expressing opinion. I have always believe in being a change agent in my professional life, but like a fairly large number of people who blog, we take blogging as something to use as platform to voice thoughts, opinion and so on, not necessarily with a view to change anything.

I spoke at the event and I was inspired to say exactly what I have just mentioned above, I ensured bloggers take cognizance of this. In doing so, I had a sizable number of bloggers in attendance to commit to blogging with a view to change things.

Here are my steps to making the change happen:

• identifying what needs to change and why
• identifying your own solution that could bring change, even if your solution may turn out not being the best
• believing you can influence or create change or even impact/inspire people that can create change to act on your words
• get BLOGGING to enable the words out - even the bible said God created the earth by the Word
• finally do all in your power to share the word, find every possibility to enable visibility, send it out via email, send links to your blog to friends, share on facebook, bebo, twitter, myspace and very social networking site you use.

This is what I have also committed to at the event and I will say "So Help Me God... "

More to come in a bit... :-)