To teach in Tekedia Mini-MBA, you must be a business professional even if you are a professor with 30 years of experience. Yes, being a professor does not qualify you unless you are managing, running, or operating a firm, an organization or unit of a government. With that structure, our members enter into our classrooms to receive practical elements of business.

Of course, we still have theory in our written materials, creating a balance that brings symphonic innovation on learning, at scale. Our members like the design – and I share this testimonial from Saudi Arabia which just came to our email.

“Though coming from a medical background with more than 30 previous online courses, the Tekedia Mini-MBA has been most practical and enriching. There is nothing ‘mini’ about this program. It has transformed my mindset in the most entrepreneurial way. My appreciation to the whole team.” – Dr. Okwukwe Davis, Saudi Arabia

We have an early registration deadline today to unlock many benefits for the June 7- Sept1 2021 edition: I invite you to register today. Begin here .

You will surely like our Tekedia Live which happens thrice weekly to co-learn on business, management and leadership. We know you may be busy, everything is recorded and archived.

Thank you Tekedia Institute nation for collecting  the cheque from Zenith Bank Plc and Mhagic Velocity.  Youth Up is already coordinating the scholarships. Our biggest win will  remain to execute our mission which is to “discover and make scholars noble, bright and useful”.

We will meet in class on June 7 when our next edition begins, to master and deepen the mechanics of market systems, helping professionals and students to accelerate management and leadership capabilities, and in that process advance the wealth in firms and nations.

To our Learners, from 36 countries, Tekedia Institute thanks you for choosing us. To our Faculty, you are the best. To our team, continue to execute the playbook.

Our admission office is open: school.tekedia.com

First, this is not to attack Workers or Governor El- Rufai of Kaduna. Yes, Nigeria has become so heated that one can offend everyone at the same time. But allow me to use data, and I am quoting a statement which has not been disputed: “The public service of the [Kaduna] state with less than 100,000 employees and their families cannot be consuming more than 90% of government resources, with little left to positively impact the lives of the more than 9 million that are not political appointees or civil servants.”

The state governor, Nasir El-Rufai, in April, announced the plan to disengage civil servants in the state, citing fiscal reasons.

He stated that a significant amount of the statutory federal allocations is being spent on the wages of public servants. According to him, the decision was one of the necessary moves to salvage the state’s finances.

“Therefore, the state government has no choice but to shed some weight and reduce the size of the public service. It is a painful but necessary step to take, for the sake of the majority of the people of this state,” the Monday statement partly read.

“The public service of the state with less than 100,000 employees and their families cannot be consuming more than 90% of government resources, with little left to positively impact the lives of the more than 9 million that are not political appointees or civil servants.”

“It is gross injustice for such a micro minority to consume the majority of the resources of the State,” he said.

Yes, the government of Kaduna state is making a case that it spends more than 90% of all state resources to support bureaucracy and workers in the state. Those workers and political appointees are about 100k in a state of about 9 million. So, the governor plans to reduce that bureaucracy.

On the side of the Labour Union, they are making a case that the government must not save to build infrastructure  by sacking people. So, the workers are going on strike to make sure the governor does not go ahead and sack thousands. But the governor has maintained that nothing will change his playbook, strike or no strike.

Kaduna residents are stocking food and other essential items ahead of the workers’ strike called by the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) to begin on Monday.

Residents said they fear the strike may result in shops and markets not opening.

Already, the electricity distribution company has cut off supply to the Kaduna metropolis.

PREMIUM TIMES observed that many businesses were running generators for supply of electricity Sunday evening.

“For us it has begun. Supply of electricity was cut off yesterday night. This is a serious problem.” Yusuf, an electric appliances seller in the state capital, said.

This is the reality: the governor has no chance just as no federal leadership has implemented Steve Oronsaye which recommended trimming the federal civil service many years ago. The Vice President in a recent speech said: “There is no question that we are dealing with large and expensive government.” Yet, no one wants to take any action to fix that. 

Why? Everyone is a victim in Nigeria because there is no trust in the system. Why sacrifice your job to enable politicians to have more money to steal? So, workers will ensure that reduction does not happen. And the politicians will maintain that without those savings, building the infrastructure of the future will not happen.

“There is no question that we are dealing with large and expensive government, but as you know, given the current constitutional structure, those who would have to vote to reduce (the size of) government, especially to become part-time legislators, are the very legislators themselves,” Mr Osinbajo was quoted to have said.

“So, you can imagine that we may not get very much traction if they are asked to vote themselves, as it were, out of their current relatively decent circumstances.

“So, I think there is a need for a national debate on this question and there is a need for us to ensure that we are not wasting the kind of resources that we ought to use for development on overheads. At the moment, our overheads are almost 70 per cent of revenues, so there is no question at all that we must reduce the size of government.”

According to him, “the problem was a major driving factor for the government’s decision to revisit the Steve Oronsaye report on public service reforms”.

He said: “Part of what you would see in the Economic Sustainability Plan also and several of the other initiatives is trying to go, to some extent, to what was recommended in the (Steve) Oransaye Report, to collapse a few of the agencies to become a bit more efficient and make government much more efficient with whatever it has.”

This is a tough call: what can Kaduna, Nigeria do to fix this bloated bureaucratic paralysis? From my angle, I think the state and the nation must deepen productivity. If there is growth, it will become evident that the expenses may not even be too big. My suggestion would be to improve productivity so that the workers (from the governor to the least civil servant) can generate directly and indirectly more resources that would be used to pay them. Today, they do not, and that means the growth elements in the state are not working. Even if you fire thousands without fixing productivity, the root cause would not have been addressed.

If I am the governor, I will develop a productivity index which the labour unions will approve with me. We will benchmark all workers to make sure we can grow the local economy. But where that productivity is not working, the system will be designed to naturally phase out that government unit. Yes, the workers will see the handwriting on the wall.

In America, everything is measured. Joe Biden sent cheques to Americans, paying many more than they could be paid if they are to work. Because of that, many chose to stay home. And unemployment went up. Without that data and measurement, Washington DC would not have known that a generous welfare can dip interests to work. But with data, they now want to add a requirement that the person must be looking for a job before some of those benefits can kick in. Nigeria does not have data and we make policy on guesswork. Possibly, what took America 60 days to see a pattern would not have been detected in Nigeria as we do not measure. Mr. Vice President and Mr. Governor could design a productivity index which can help to organically mutate bloated bureaucracy.

It is key to understand that productivity is not just revenue. It could be measured in many ways depending on the government department. We will bring physics into measuring how workers do their jobs. That is what the governor needs since politically he cannot execute this retrenchment.

The Vice President’s Statement on “Large and Expensive Government” in Nigeria

It looks magical and the stage is ready at Lekki Lagos as Africa honors the best school. At Tekedia Institute, we thank our learners, faculty, scholarship donors and all stakeholders for this festival. Thank you.