Gov Abdulrazaq Has Strong Leadership Qualities…Well-Positioned To Deliver Good Governance—Nurudeen Adeyemi

Humble and good –natured, Engineer Nurudeen Adeyemi Balogun, is a man of many parts.

 In this interview with Team@orientactualmags.com , Engineer Nurudeen Adeyemi ,  a former Kwara South APC Senate aspirant , objected to the idea of referring to  professionals leaving Nigeria for developed countries as  ‘brain drain’ , while also giving his take on other issues.

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Why is  the aviation industry in Nigeria  not on a par with  the ones available in the developed countries? 

It is a  capital-intensive business  and  the rate of returns and the horizon  of  investments  matters .

 Among the advantages over there is the liquidity of the assets  ,the leaderships of those countries also  get financial institutions  to subsidize some of the financing needs. The various manufacturers have their own lending and corporations that tend to generate, leasing the assets and now for the assets to be in service while revenues are generated but the same is  not readily available in Nigeria in that operators almost have to come up with all they have to buy  15-year, 20-year-old aircraft.

 And then the issue of policy somersault too, because we are doing an investment with a very long horizon,   you need a stable environment for your projection to work but in Nigeria we have a lot of policy somersault that does not allow you to  have a great planning; What you base your business assumptions on today, you find out that by tomorrow the operating traditions and environment have changed. So that makes it very challenging for operators. You are operating in Nigeria, and  you are receiving revenue in Naira. Yet some  of the operating costs that you are suppose to pay like aviation fuel, for example, are sometimes, you have to transact business  in US Dollars. So you’re running an economy that is both naira and dollar white while your revenue is largely in Naira. So that makes it very difficult operating environment.

How can we get things changed for the better in  Nigeria? 

Any reasonable government  should make improving the standard of living of the people a priority . How can we improve the standard of living of our people.   Our large revenue driver which is oil is either stagnant or declining.

 We are trying to diversify.  Nigeria  will soon become the 3rd most  populous country in the world. So, we are in democracy and we cannot begin to mandate to people how many children to have.  Yet  it is  challenging  taking care of the people that we have, so there is a conundrum  and dilemma  facing the government. That’s just a reality of our time What we need to do really, I always say that there’s no prosperity without productivity and most of these large economies that we want to mimic are largely running a 24- hour economy, unlike our own 8-hour, 10-hour economy and yet we want to replicate a productivity that those large economies have. It’s nearly impossible. What do I mean by that?  When You build a factory in USA, India or China, that factory largely operates 24-hour, which means I secure men that work for 24 hours. They either work in 2 or 3 shifts which means machine is likely manned by 2 or 3 individuals in one day. The same machine comes to Nigeria, and that machine works for  only 8-10 hours. You only have one person working ,so, imagine if I have a strong capacity and that capacity is able to work 24-hour, that means 2 or 3 Nigerians is able to get a job . That’s the only way we can fight the huge unemployment that we caused our economy after we expand rapidly  faster than our birth rate because we already have a problem. So if we are just keeping all the problems, we will not solve the backlog of the problem we have, which means our economy actually have to expand faster than the problem that we already have in order to deal with the deficit that we currently have. So we almost have run faster than even everybody else and what are the impediments to 24-hours economy? Now if we want to have 2 or 3 people working with the same machine, we need to be able to travel in odd hours. In the middle of the night, 2, 3, 4 o’clock in the morning, people are on the road. How can people be on the road in the morning in the face of insecurity?  How can people be on the road  2am, 3am in the face of power challenges? Because those factories are to run 24-hours profitably cannot run so well on generators . So now you are talking about people’s movement, which talks about road, we are talking about  Power for the factory and we are talking about a Safe environment that allows free movement so that people can move around. So for the 24-hour economy to work, we need to tackle insecurity, power and our infrastructural development that if we have a man in Ilorin, living in Esie should not be the problem because it’s only so many kilometers apart and we should be able, anybody working within 25-kilometres from the factory should be able to commute there within  one hour or less and that is how things work in most of the developed countries either they  have mass transit that allows people to live far away from where they work or the road network system is safe enough for people to move far people such that distance is not a problem.  So those are  some of the impediments that we have to tackle; if we don’t tackle them, we cannot rapidly expand the economy and if we cannot expand the economy, our deficit will only get worse.

 You have lived in the USA for years  now and people have been complaining about  Nigeria losing its best brains to other countries, they call it ‘brain drain’, what is your take on this?

Let me go to the issue of brain drain. The truth of the matter is that no country develops without its people abroad, Almighty Allah told our prophet to go and seek knowledge  and every scripture encourages seeking  knowledge. The people that we are talking about go overseas  to learn more  , calling it  brain drain is a misnomer. Well, these people leave, they go and gain some more knowledge. They are more valuable later than when they initially left. They are exposed to the newest and greatest technologies. The question for us is how are we able to allow them to bring back those knowledge for the benefit of Nigerians and I think that is the case. Nigeria should create a culture, Nigeria should look towards creating a culture where the people at  home are not seeing themselves as competitors with people in  the Diaspora but rather the two as collaborators . It’s almost as if Nigerians are seeing the people in Diaspora as just a cash cow.  They will always talk about billions of dollars that they repatriate home  every year and paying little attention to the benefit that they can gain from the knowledge  that they have to bring and that is where leadership structure and messaging  and all of those things make sense. China, India and many others depend on their  people in Diaspora to help them develop the country. China actively sent its people all across the globe to go and learn and bring those things back. India did the same thing and is still doing the same till today in the areas where they know they do not have the technology.

in Nigeria, It’s as if you are forcing yourself on the people. People are actively rejecting  you. That’s how they make the Diaspora feel. And same thing in the sphere of politics. Our people are always like ‘won Fe fi bread kowa lomi obe je’. someone has seen  how democracy  is suppose to work and he is trying to bring the experience home; they say ‘rora o. Awa na gbon o. E ma lo gbajue fun wa o’. You know those kind of  things.

For those of us that choose to stay, it is a huge sacrifice of our time and possibly sacrifice of financial gain because we may feel that it is not just the money that you  send to people but see to   the betterment of the people and also for engagement and knowledge transfer. The whole point of trying to go around the world and gaining knowledge is not for you  to die and be buried with those knowledge.

 Not everybody can write a book, for those that cannot write a book, it is teaching by sharing what you have learned; sharing what you have come across with other people is the way to success. So the difference speaks for everybody. The people that come and go, they made some sacrifice monetary  wise and then the people that stay, they are making a huge sacrifice; money and time. Time, like they say, is very precious.

You are of the prominent Kwarans supporting the reelection bid of Gov. Abdulrahman Abdulrazaq. Why?

 Well, Governor  Abdulrahman Abdulrazaq, in him is an embodiment of one thing that you  look  for in any politician or anyone seeking to direct the affairs of the people. One, is that he has  the good  intention to do the best for the people. Two, that they have the requisite character that will allow them to do the best for the people. Three, that they have the requisite knowledge. What I mean by knowledge is that they have the wherewithal  to direct because somebody can have the intention but they don’t know how to do it and that may be  a problem. Having the intention and the knowledge is not enough because at some point the system is going to fight you. So it is your character that will allow you to stay the course and allow you to fight the battle silently. For me and for many of us, over the years, one of the things that we  had always  and constantly stood  against is the concentration of development and wealth in the state capital. For anybody that understands development strides of any society very well, it is that only when development is spread around and people in those areas do not see the need to migrate somewhere, is then we can all develop together.

So trying to concentrate development in the state capital  will make it overly congested and the quality of life in the state will drop. But when you spread development evenly across the state, people in the rural areas don’t see the need to migrate to the capital  because when everybody stays where they are and develops their area, they invariably contribute to the overall development of the state. Under this administration, the intention is to spread development across the senatorial districts as strongly  as possible and this is the first time in a long time that there is no agitation that okay bring the governor from here, bring the governor from there because if our own child is the governor then we would have gotten the development that we are looking for. So the governor is trying to be fair and balance and equitable to all which is one of the traits  and characters that we are talking about. He is not doing it because it is easy, he is doing it because it is the right thing to do because he is constantly fighting those battles .  

The main duty of any government is to take care of its people and when we are looking at the promises and approaches of this governor, he has tried to be people-centred in his approach. However, we may criticize the civil service for productivity, performance and al things.  The governor has prioritized  not only keeping up the current payment of salaries and pensions but working very hard to offset the backlogs that he met on the ground. Those are some of the things that we are talking about. Now, not only the civil servants , we also have to take care of the people. So we have the owo isowo to help the people in the non-formal sector. We have the owo arugbo to take care of the aged. That is the social investment programme. We have the kwaraprenuer to aid our emerging businesses that are mostly youth-driven. So the government  is creating a social investment programme worth appreciating. We need to rebuild the foundations of the economy so that those social programme become less and less important because we don’t  want to have an economy, a state that is largely focused on  because  of its social investment programmes .

His administration had to deal with almost two years of pandemic and some of his programmes were essentially delayed. But with enough patience, those visions we pictured will become a reality to all of us soon. The government has provided an enabling  environment  for  businesses for thrive and this will  bring jobs to Kwara.

 We have the garment factory that will provide thousands of items for Kwarans. We have the Visual Art Institute that  will help to revolutionize film-making industry. Nigeria has one of the biggest film-making industries  in the world, unfortunately the quality leaves a lot to be desired because a lot of attention is not being paid to the post-production activities. To shoot a movie in some instances takes like three months but even if you come to Hollywood you will find out that they shoot a movie for three months and spend the next nine months in post-production,  more efforts and concentration are put into post-production. So that is one of the things the government is doing to tap into the post-production activity of the film-making business which will not only improve the quality of the movies but also create high-value chain for the people of Kwara and that is the thing that we are all looking forward to.  Kwara is getting better daily? And that is why we are supporting  Mallam Abdulrahman Abdulrazaq administration. The two critical areas that one has to look at is the area of education and health, and he has looked to those aspects  for the benefit of the people by hiring high quality teachers to help our students, bringing technology to the classroom via Kwara learn, upgrading a lot of our higher institutions to make sure that their accreditations is up-to-date, making sure that what they needed is being given to them at the right time so that there are no lapses and the students are  given thee  best education  In the aspect  of healthcare, making sure that ICU, our dental unit and all the institutions are getting the necessary equipment that they need to perform, oxygen plant for the ICU. So those are all the things that people like us see in him and trying to give him our support to ensure that he continues the good work. Like I said, when you inherit a deficit of infrastructure and other things, you always have to run faster than you need to be in order to be where you need to be.

Can you please tell us about yourself?

 Iam  Engr. Nurudeen Adeyemi Balogun. I am from the ancient city of Esie, by the way of the ancient city of Offa. My great grandfather was the Balogun of Offa and  later the Balogun of Esie.  We have many Baloguns across Kwara south.

 Iam a husband and  a  father  and I  was honored with  the chieftaincy title of Akinkanju Omo of Esie Kingdom by His Royal Highness Oba Yakubu Babalola the Elesie of Esie Kingdom.

 I attended GSS Omu-Aran, Ilorin Grammar School and the Government High School, Ilorin.

I received a Bachelor’s degree in Aerospace Engineering  from the United States Military Academy, West Point, NY , a  Master’s of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from North Carolina A&T State University, Greensboro, NC.

 I got a Master’s degree in Business Administration from Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan.

Iam a Professional Engineer with many years in the automotive industry working for Chrysler Corporation, Daimler-Chrysler AG, and Ford Motor Company.

 Along with others, we earn a US Patent number 6,270,440 for innovative ideas generated.

I was a member of the Cadets Brigade Staff and the President of the International Students association of North Carolina A&T State University, Greensboro, NC- Team@orientactualmags.com
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