As backlash continues to trail Nigerian Immigration Service’s inability to issue new passports to Nigerians, owing to the excuse that the agency is in short of leaflets, the Minister of Interior, Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola has outlined a new line of action aimed at putting a permanent end to the challenge.

In a media briefing on Thursday, the Minister said the operation of the NIS will be reviewed to curb the complaints stemming from the difficulty in obtaining a passport.

Nigerians both home and abroad have been complaining that passport offices and embassies are not issuing passports, putting their respective endeavors in jeopardy.

Weeks ago, a viral video on social media showed a Nigerian man lamenting over the bottlenecks he had to face to renew his passport in Switzerland. On Wednesday, Prof. Ndubuisi Ekekwe of Tekedia Institute issued an SOS on behalf of a Nigerian stranded in Spain, due to a Nigerian Embassy’s failure to issue him a passport.

Nigerians have started a petition to compel the government to take remedying action. In response, Aregbesola said the Ministry of Interior is working to remove the bottlenecks and ensure there is timely issuance of passports in and outside Nigeria. He reiterated the Ministry’s promise to open passport offices in each local government in the country, to make it easier to obtain passports.

To curb corrupt practices hindering swift services in passport centers, he said an ombudsman will also be created for members of the public to receive complaints and reports on officers trying to deviate from prescribed guidelines and subversion of the process.

Read the full statement below:

To permanently curb the complaints of difficulty in obtaining Passports from the NIS, today, I held a meeting with the Leadership of the Nigeria Immigration Service and all Passport Control Officers in Nigeria and Immigration Attachés around the world.

It has become imperative that we review our operations and rejig our system, in order to be able to offer excellent services to our clients. We need to review a system from time to time to see if it helps best to serve and realize the objectives.

One, I declared a zero-tolerance stance to all forms of touting. No applicant will be made to pay any illegitimate fees. We are going to embed security operatives – seen and unseen – in all our passport offices. They will wear body cameras.

They will detect and report any form of solicitations, inflation, improper communications, extortion, diversion, hoarding and other corrupt practices. Those caught will be dealt with according to the law.

An ombudsman will also be created for members of the public to receive complaints and reports on officers trying to deviate from prescribed guidelines and subversion of the process.

Two, we have created special centres for expedited services. These special centres will run on public-private partnership basis. This has already taken off in Abuja and 10 more will be opened in coming weeks as more of such centres will be opened all over the country.

Our goal is to have one in each local government area, university campuses, institutions of higher learning and other relevant public places.

Three, a timeline for the collection of passport will be fixed for every application. This will be six weeks. This is to allow for enough time to investigate, verify and validate personal information supplied by the applicants.

What we are driving at is the peace of mind that comes from assurance of certainty. If there are circumstances that will make the date to change, it will be communicated to the applicant one week before the collection date.

Fourth, applicants will have no basis for further communication with officers, other than to complete their application process and leave the venue. The date for the collection of their passports or any challenge to the application, will be communicated to them. The technology for the efficient running of this system has been acquired and will be deployed.

Fifth, we are publishing on our website the list of the backlog of passports that are ready which are yet to be collected by the owners. They will be required to go to the state commands to collect them.

With these changes, it is my firm belief that we will arrive at a new dawn in passport application processing.

We are turning round the entire application process in a way that is seamless, transparent and will accord human dignity to applicants and fulfill citizenship integrity.

Flutterwave is now worth more than some of the biggest banks in Africa as it joins the exclusive league of billion-dollar tech companies after raising its latest series C funding round.

For anyone who might not know, Flutterwave is a payment company that started less than 5 years ago and has now successfully positioned its brand, tech stack, and resources as the single payment API to connect Africa to the rest of the world. Achieving a billion-dollar valuation in Africa is considered a rare feat. Before Flutterwave, only 3 other companies have achieved this valuation (Jumia, Fawry, and Interswitch). 

For founders looking to build high-growth, high-valuation businesses, here are 4 inspiring business lessons and frameworks to learn from Flutterwave.

1. Choose a problem that has a huge impact when solved.

Building a high-growth company is a combination of how big your target market is and how much revenue you can make per user.

Startup scale = Addressable market (market size) +  revenue potential per customer (margin). 

How does this apply to Flutterwave? 

Flutterwave leverages the combination of the big addressable market for payment in Africa with low and high margin revenues by providing key services to both consumers and enterprise customers like banks, telcos, and multinationals that contribute high revenue potentials.

And it is not just Flutterwave.

The opportunity in payment is huge. I know this firsthand as my previous Fintech employer competed with, worked with, and even became a potential acquisition target to some of the most notable players fixing Africa’s payment landscape (Paystack, DPO Group, Flutterwave, and Interswitch). As of today, all of them have announced significant raises and exits in recent years.

Here are some of their numbers:

• DPO Group: the Kenya-based company was acquired for $288 million.
• Interswitch: Sold 10% stake to VISA for $200m, worth $1billion.
• Paystack:  Was bought by Stripe in a deal worth over $200million. 
• OPAY: Already raised more than $170m through its parent company.

The lesson here is that to build a high-growth company, founders need to be very clear about the market opportunity: its size and average revenue per user (ARPA).

If your goal is to build a business generating at least $100million in revenue, then Christian Janz’s classic published here and updated here is worth your read.

2. Make things simple and modern.

Building a great startup is not only about building something new, but also, focusing on making existing things work better together. Flutterwave understood this secret and this sums up why YC invested in the company

“ “When you look at how payments work in the developing world, you start to realize that it’s a lot more complicated than in the US. There’s a huge number of different payment options and different reasons for people to use each. By making it easy for any merchant, no matter where they are located, to process all of the available payment options, Flutterwave is changing how money moves for an entire continent. That’s a huge idea, E has an incredible team to attack it.” – Aaron Harris, Partner at Y Combinator

According to this Quartz article, Flutterwave says it is doing the plumbing job. 

To put this in context, Flutterwave bundles together the checkout flows for multiple 3rd party payment providers and offers it in a single API for anyone to send or receive money in Africa and beyond.

What underlines this business model is the aggregation construct. 

Flutterwave created value by aggregating multiple payment options offered by other providers in Africa into a single API and removing the complexity around payments. By doing this “plumbing job”, it did not have to invest in costly infrastructure in the multiple markets it operates before it can create value. This is similar to how platforms like Google created value by aggregating content and making the web searchable. 

3. Build partnerships to accelerate growth. 

In business, you need to go fast and far to build a business that has scale. Partnership deals unlock big-ticket transactions which translate to more traction for you.

This tweet aptly sums it all up.

Some of my biggest takeaway at tech events are conversations that happen at the sidelines, when you meet people.

In one of such events – powered by @Techpointdotng

I had a chat with Simeon (CEO, @ThankUCash) on why startups should focus on partnerships.

‘#Thread

— Wole Ogunlade (@wogunlade) March 30, 2021

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Here are some of Flutterwave partnerships deals: 

• – With VISA, it built its consumer business (Barter) to 500,000 users.
• – It launched channel partnership with MTN, Booking.com, Uber to access enterprise markets that brought significant deal flows
• – It expanded globally by partnering with payment heavyweights (Alipay, WorldPay by FIS, and recently PayPal) to connect up to 2 billion users.
• – As a back-office for enterprise businesses, it provided the transaction highways for banks, financial institutions for cross-border processing.

The lesson here is to go for the big deals.

You can’t build your business on the back of consumer growth alone. Building partnerships can take time and resources, that is why you need to be strategic with the type of partnership and the scale it brings to your business. 

Focus on deals that position you as a leader in your market and attract other players to you. 

4. Build Moats to create competitive advantages.

For you to grow and sustain your growth long term, you need to have a moat. A moat is a single (or multiple) competitive advantage that is hard to copy by competitor.

To put this in context, Flutterwave’s moat is its ecosystem of products and platforms. No other payment provider in Africa has this scale and moat. It’s not just a payment company: it is a payment platform powering new business models for others. It has a portfolio of products – consumer products, API, SaaS and enterprise solutions, multiple 3rd party integration (e.g Xero, intuit), and partnerships (Alipay, Paypal) that enable its customers to access global markets. 

All these capabilities are hard to copy and replicate at once.

As the business matures, you continue to build more moats to make it defensible (Flutterwave’s launch of Stores which is one of such double play strategies).  Here is a list of other helpful playbooks to build and sustain the moat for your business. 

Join us on Saturday at 7pm-8.30pm in Tekedia Live as we discuss “How To Scale a Business in Africa”. It would be a conversation on the physics of business growth and anchors for accelerating revenue. He speaks well. She presents well. His slides look great. Her style is superb. When the Board says those, it means your NUMBERS are great. But if your numbers are poor, even if you bring an orator, your presentation will remain mediocre.

Yes, nothing makes a business leader a STAR than great numbers because Growth heals all business problems! People, join me as we look at Growth within the mechanics of business systems. Zoom link in the board.

If you have registered for Tekedia Mini-MBA June edition and want to join, ask Admin for access. Registration continues here.

Our market share has grown but we are not making more money! It does happen. Your industry is shrinking but you are still there. Case in point: analog advertising agency. You must have noticed that many of your competitors are exiting the sector. If you are still there, it does not mean that you are doing better by out-competing them.

What is happening is simple: many of your industry peers are dying. Why? Your sector has been disintermediated by digital ICT utilities. Yes, the pile is getting smaller every year and even though players are working harder, there are limited ways to capture value. This is the time to TRANSFORM.

The disintermediation of advertising agencies by digital platforms like Google and Facebook. How vulnerable is your sector to the evolving digital commerce? The Wealth of Nations is now the Data of Nations, find your path to digital. It took Apple decades to hit the $1T market cap but just about 2 years to hit $2T. There is power in bytes; TRANSFORM digitally, not just Run digitally.

The Challenge Before Ad Agencies

To all Nigerian universities/polytechnics/colleges of education and student unions for Tekedia CollegeBoost, we have moved the recruitment engagement for that program to students. Eyitayo Adeleke is going to nationally coordinate that with his team at Federal University of Technology, Minna. So, if you have any questions, reach out to Eyitayo. Tekedia Institute will continue to handle all academic programs including the delivery, support, etc. But the recruitment goes to the students and their networks. The goal is to improve the cost model and ensure that most students can attain our program before graduation.

Tekedia CollegeBoost is an Advanced Diploma in Business Administration designed for students in colleges. It involves an 8-week program which could be broken into two semesters or taken in one semester, depending on the arrangement with the school or group of students. This course is only offered to a group of students.