Inaugural Conference Of The APC Professionals Forum On 07/02/2022

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KEYNOTE ADDRESS BY HIS EXCELLENCY, PROF. YEMI OSINBAJO, SAN, GCON, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA AT THE INAUGURAL CONFERENCE OF APC PROFESSIONALS’ FORUM AT THE BANQUET HALL, PRESIDENTIAL VILLA, ABUJA ON MONDAY, 7TH OF FEBRUARY, 2022

 

PROTOCOLS

 

His Excellency, Dr. Isa Yuguda, the Trustees and Executive APC Professionals Forum deserve our commendation for providing this very unique platform – a forum for APC Professionals and I am honoured to join you at its first-ever public convening of the forum.  I also bring you the warm greetings of Mr. President, President Muhammadu Buhari.

 

The theme, the Role of Professionals in Politics and Nation-building, is an important one because it provokes questions about the role of the Nigerian elite in shaping the destiny of our nation. In doing so we must also interrogate the narrower, but equally important question of the role of the APC as a political party in nation-building.

 

I think, first, we must admit that we are frequently in a classic conundrum. We find many gifted, accomplished and remarkable Nigerian individuals and professionals across all walks of life all over the world. But there is a clear mismatch between our individual quality and our national outcomes. We have not yet become greater than the sum of our individual selves.  It is this paradox of individual genius and collective underperformance that we must now break.

 

As part of an honest inquest, we must admit that part of the challenge is the fact that holding public office in Nigeria at any level is largely perceived as synonymous with the accumulation of power, privilege and wealth. By the same token, the understanding of public office as an instrument of service and responsibility to the people has been relegated to the background. Turning this tide is at the heart of our task as professionals who are interested in politics and nation-building. And this is especially so for us professionals in the APC.

 

The critical point to be made is that professionals are the elite in a poor society such as ours; and therefore, they are enormously privileged.

 

We represent a small fraction of 200 million Nigerians, many of whom are poor, vulnerable and without voice. It is my thesis that the privileged or the elite, both individually and collectively have a responsibility, an obligation to society to plan it, organise it, order or reorder it and above all to make sacrifices for it, for the maximum benefit of all.

 

This is the burden of privilege; it is our obligation individually and collectively to chart the course for the millions, to define and house the ethos/ethics and the public sense of the people. It is our expected role to find common cause across professions, vocations, ethnicities and faiths defining the minimum terms and conditions for the safety, security, growth and prosperity of the community.

 

It is the elite that defines clearly what is lofty, what is noble, what is deserving of honour and how these values can be sustained, preserved and enforced. This is the burden of privilege. Like the French would say, “Noblese Oblige” – nobility obligates or perhaps more correctly for our purpose, privilege places an obligation upon us.

 

For us in the APC perhaps that obligation is greater. For the first time in Nigeria’s history, a Left-of-centre party is in power. The APC came together from a number of opposition parties, many of which can be classified under the general rubric of progressives, primarily because of their left-of-centre orientation.

 

Although the new-PDP joined, it is indisputable that the heart and soul of the APC was and remains Left-of-centre. In other words, a party devoted and committed to the common man.

 

Our presidential candidate now President Muhammadu Buhari was a product of the firm will of the common man, not an elite consensus, and we must continue to remember that. And despite elite consensus and conspiracies, he was able to deliver significant votes in every election since 2003.

 

In developing our manifesto, we paid tribute to our soul by promising to introduce the largest Social Investment Policy, SIP, in Africa. We implemented it and we are still implementing the largest social investment policy in Africa.

 

The reason we are able to do so is because of the orientation of our party, we believe that a significant portion of our budget must be dedicated to social investments. In other words, catering to the poor and vulnerable. We are feeding 9.5 million children in public schools, the N-Power job scheme provides jobs for 500,000 young Nigerian graduates, and now 1 million, after the President increased that number. We also have 20,000 non-graduates in different areas of public services.

 

These volunteers are in all the 774 local government areas of the 36 states. While the Government Enterprise and Empowerment Programme, GEEP, loans for the very first time in the history of our country, comprising Market Moni, FarmerMoni and TraderMoni, is providing micro-credit loans to over 2 million Nigerian petty traders, artisans and businessmen nationwide. Our opponents who are on the right would argue, “why we are giving small loans/money to these people?” But they do not argue that in this same country, over N5 trillion is what a couple hundreds of Nigerians owed banks in Nigeria before AMCON was created. But we spent just N20 billion on giving 2 million Nigerians – traders and farmers etc, providing them with micro-credits.

 

 

We as a left-of-centre party believe that our focus must be on the common man and we kept faith in that. While over 1 million have received conditional cash transfers. The SIP is a precursor of a full scale, social safety net.

 

But we are now challenged to deal with the current economic and human development challenges that face, not just our country, but the entire world. In our case, the President has promised to move 100 million people out of poverty within a decade. We must provide good-paying jobs for the largest number of Africans under the age of 30 on the face of the earth; we must educate millions of children, provide good healthcare for millions and public health system robust enough to handle pandemics when they occur.

 

Already the problems we thought would be in the future are already here, and we are called upon to provide answers. How do we provide for a population growing at 5 million new children a year? The challenge of mechanizing farming and dealing with the farm-to-table value chain, the challenge of building productive enterprises as opposed to a rent-based economy, how do we deal with the end of investments in oil, our major foreign exchange earner?

 

By 2030, almost all major funding for oil and gas projects will almost certainly end. Many car companies will stop producing combustion engine cars by 2030. How will we ensure that our huge reserves of oil that remain benefit us between now and then? How will we ensure that we are able to transit to a non-oil economy in just a few short years?

 

How will we electrify our population and ensure that our people have power? Without power, it is impossible to develop even small-scale industries at an optimal level to be able to make the kind of living that people should expect to make.

 

These are some of the tasks with which we are confronted; and of course, the central issue of security and ridding our nation of terrorism and gang criminality.

 

Any one of us would agree that our government has been confronted with, perhaps, the majority and multiplicity of complex problems that any government has had to deal with in the history of our country. Two recessions, a pandemic that has now entered its third year, and terrorist activities in three zones of the country.

 

Our approach has been to plan and stick to the plan. We started with our Economic Recovery and Growth Plan, which enabled us to exit the first recession. In response to the fallout of the pandemic, we put in place a stimulus-driven Economic Sustainability Plan that enabled us to exit the second recession.

 

A few weeks ago, the Federal Executive Council, FEC, approved our National Development Plan 2021-2025. The Plan focuses on value addition, across all sectors including agriculture, manufacturing, solid minerals, digital services, tourism, hospitality, sports, and entertainment.

 

In agriculture, for example, equal attention is given to primary production as well as other aspects of the value chain such as storage, transportation, processing, marketing and exports. In a similar context, the Plan places great emphasis on increasing exports of goods and services, especially leveraging on the African Continental Free Trade Agreement.

 

We know for a fact that we cannot have import and export without ensuring that our ports work efficiently. We know that we cannot have the kind of manufacturing that we expect to have without ensuring that NAFDAC, SON, and all our regulatory agencies understand that their role is to act as facilitators, not as policemen. This is part of the National Development Plan, and also the Ease of Doing Business, innovations that we will continue to do year after year.

 

Technology will play a key role in the Development Plan. Many may not know that since 2016 Nigeria has developed 6 unicorns, tech companies worth over one billion dollars each. We believe that we can leverage technology and innovation to create the millions of jobs and opportunities we require now and in the coming years.

 

Let me conclude with the following thoughts for our further consideration. The usefulness of professionals in politics is that you have people who are used to being assessed on the basis of their own achievements and who are unafraid to make competence the first advertorial of their acumen. In other words, professionals emphasize the role of merit in public life. So, one of the important advantages to our communities of having professionals in politics is lost if we do not recognize that our role as merit-driven persons must be to fight the temptation of ethnic, religious and other parochial considerations in making the crucial decisions for the development of our nation.

 

Nobody would place their lives in the hands of an incompetent doctor because they share the same faith or continue to patronize a dangerously inept auto-mechanic because they belong to the same tribe.

 

If someone told me that the pilot who is to fly a plane that I am to go in is not very good but he is from Ikenne, my home town, I certainly won’t go on that plane. In the same way, we must especially refuse to be swayed by those whose sole argument for power is an appeal to sectional sentiments.

 

While it is true that we have several excellent individuals in various spheres of society, we must recognize that success in a country such as ours can no longer be defined in personal or individual terms. We must come to the realization that it is no longer sustainable to keep finding individual solutions to collective challenges. Development and prosperity cannot be understood merely as the exceptionalism of a few individuals that manage to prevail against odds. That is not an adequate response to the challenges confronting us. True progress is about reimagining our collective circumstances and creating an environment that enables prosperity for all.

 

To this end, we must see ourselves as stewards of the common good who have been entrusted with the privilege of managing our collective destiny for an allotted time. And we must do so with a conscience and to the best of our abilities. It is only through public-spiritedness and dedication to the common good that we can, as a people, truly become greater than the sum of our parts.

 

As one of our nation’s greatest writers, Chinua Achebe once wrote, “Enlightened and thoughtful Nigerians must bestir themselves to the patriotic action of searching for decent and civilized political values… Our inaction or cynical action is a serious betrayal of our education, our historic mission and of succeeding generations who will have no future unless we save it now for them.”

 

The future of our nation depends therefore on professionals, who are prepared to live up to their professional calling.

 

Let me again commend the APC Professionals Forum for starting this important conversation and I hope we will be able to mainstream some of the innovative ideas here in our party and governments across the nation.

 

Thank you very much.