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Home Blog Page 6788

When The President’s Tweets Become Risk Factors; The Abuja Screening

By
Ndubuisi Ekekwe
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First, do not worry that I am not writing about what they are doing in Abuja. I simply do not know where to begin. Yes, I find it offensive to allow ministerial nominees to bow and leave in Senate when we have real issues in the nation. Yet, I do not blame the Senate: why send them for confirmation without revealing their expected ministries? Practically, there is no way to assess these nominees without knowing their portfolios. But that is Nigeria!

Imagine if someone was nominated for Defense ministry – a simple question on how to protect the border would naturally follow. But with no portfolio, assessment becomes the quality of the eye contacts between ministerial nominees and the Senators.

So, I go to America. If you are a risk manager, is there a likelihood that you would see the Tweet of your national president as a risk factor? This President Trump tweet sequence is fascinatingly unbelievable! Poor Google!

The president of the United States called out two of the nation’s largest tech firms in a pair of tweets this morning. Google  was the first target. The statement follows weeks of suggested investigations of the tech giant over a supposed relationship with China

 

General Electric (GE) Returns To Its Roots With Access Bank Nigeria Partnership

By
Ndubuisi Ekekwe
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When they sold GE Capital, I made it clear that GE was done: ” The new businesses are not bringing free cashflow to compensate what GE Capital was providing.” My thesis was that anyone in GE that thinks that companies buy expensive GE products because they are great has a malaria fever. Simply, most parts of the world came to GE because GE had a really good financing engine. But when GE took out the GE Capital, it then exposed its main customers to the open market financing which is never friendly to the type of things GE makes. You want me to go to a bank to get capital to finance a turbine? I am sure this country will prefer darkness because commercial banks will mess this DISCO (distribution company) up.

The summary here is that GE did not know that GE Capital was its double play for shipping those hardware solutions. Even if it was not making money via GE Capital, GE Capital was critical for most monies GE Power, GE Healthcare and other units were making. You can read the double play strategy here.

Now, it seems GE is coming back to that root: help customers buy things by making solutions more affordable. Yes, Access Bank and GE are partnering to help institutions acquire GE Healthcare solutions in Nigeria: “Access Bank and GE Healthcare  are to provide sustainable healthcare equipment financing to private healthcare providers”. GE must have negotiated better interest rates for these customers which none could have gotten directly with Access Bank.

Access Bank and GE Healthcare  are to provide sustainable healthcare equipment financing to private healthcare providers; The partnership will help the private healthcare providers to deliver access to affordable healthcare services.

GE Healthcare and Access Bank Nigeria have entered into a partnership to provide Nigeria’s Private Healthcare Providers with equipment financing. Under the partnership, borrowers will be able to secure loans of up to $800,000 negotiable, based on the customer requirement.

Access Bank will provide access to loans for eligible healthcare providers, while GE Healthcare will support the program through provision of GE healthcare equipment and technical support. The equipment under the partnership scope include Imaging Solutions including Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Computed Tomography (CT), Ultrasound Machines and Life Care Solutions. Borrowers which qualify for loans include private healthcare providers such as hospitals, clinics, diagnostic centres and other private practices offering a broad array of services.

GE needs to scale that to have a chance of coming back. Financing is its double play which it lost when it sold GE Capital.

The Solution to the Challenges of Unemployment in Nigeria

By
Akinola A. Afolabi
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Unemployment in Nigeria is a big problem. There will never be a complete eradication of unemployment in Nigeria if we do not set up a system that controls our population. Population growth is a major factor that contributed to the challenges of unemployment in this country. According to the World Bank’s development indicators, as described by Daniel Graumann, in one of his articles on LinkedIn, the population of Nigeria has grown by 330% from 1960 (year of independence of Nigeria). 

The first way to address the problem of unemployment in Nigeria is by population control. I read somewhere a while back that China has adopted a policy in which a family in China is bound under the law not to born more than one child. We can also adopt this type of population control in Nigeria. The second challenge of unemployment in Nigeria is that we don’t have an effective data record system. Nigeria, unlike most developed countries, does not have effective data record system. We need to set up our country in such a way that we can have an updated record every second for every citizen of this country. 

We need to set up a system whereby our hospitals can record every childbirth into our nation’s data records system. Our data records system needs to be addressed as a matter of urgency. Another challenge of unemployment in this country is the state of poor infrastructures and lack of updated educational syllabus in our schools. As our schools still use the syllabus of the 1980s to teach our students.

The solution to this challenge is to equip our schools (primary, secondary and tertiary institutions) with updated infrastructures and syllabus. We need to equip our schools with resources that will equip our students to build themselves to the global standard. The lecturers in our tertiary institutions have to be given consistent training internationally in their respective fields and the government should sign a contract with them so that they won’t leave when they have been trained by the government. 

A contract that indicates the number of years you must use as a lecturer in your school after you might have been giving international training by the government. The challenges of unemployment in this country is not only on the government. We need to also put the blame on society. What is society’s role? Our society needs to encourage creativity and innovation. Parents need to recognize the gifts and talents in their children and build them for the future along with that gifts and talents. Parents should not enforce careers on their wards. Parents need to know how the gifts of their children can be monetized and used to solve global problems. We need to adopt global thinking and perspective in this situation. We need to incorporate a problem-solving mindset into our wards from when they are young.

    “You don’t talk of passion before making a living.” Dan Lok       

Government empowerment schemes like N-power has helped to reduce the challenges of unemployment because I can argue that there is a reduced crime rate because of this government empowerment schemes. These empowerment schemes cannot give a long term solution. Professor Ndubuisi Ekekwe wrote in one of his articles in which I agree that we should see schooling and education as a privilege and once we have the privilege we should offer the knowledge back to the society by building younger generations. A great educational system that empowers the youths to think independently and become problem solvers is one of the key solutions to this problem. 

Government intervention in addressing the problem of unemployment in this country cannot be overemphasized because it is a government that can create favorable policies and laws that will attract investors and venture capitalist to create more industries that can employ the greater percentage of our youths. The government should also set up tax-free policies for major companies so that they can absorb a larger number of graduates.

The National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) which has been in existent since the 1970s has outgrown its relevance of national integration. If you are a graduate currently serving under this scheme. You can save up money from your monthly allowance to be able to plan for tomorrow because, at the end of everything, we are responsible for what we become in life. I wasn’t able to save well during my time. Our government is really doing well by being consistent with the payment of allowances to corps members. Do not let us forget that the economic stability of a country is important to attract investors and capitalist.               

“Money runs away from an unstable society”. Goodluck Jonathan

Our government needs to work on a stable society and economy. We cannot leave out corruption as a major problem in this country. Our country needs to build a system that inhibits corruption. I have always given credit to the Ibo’s( a major tribe in eastern Nigeria) apprenticeship system that equips their children and youths to become businessmen and entrepreneurs. We can also incorporate Ibo’s system in our children instead of training our youths on formal education only. I read one article encouraging us to take up something else outside our area of expertise. Unleash your other areas of interest or talents and then commercialize or monetize.

Human Beings are Not Robots

By
Stanley Alieke
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Most times, we are tempted to think that in life there is a particular way or ways things must be done, for you to achieve a particular result. This may be the truth when dealing with robots, machines or mechanical programs but it is not and haven’t yet been proven to be the truth with man. This postulation is not a negation to the fact that there are laws governing the natural strata, regulating the universe and maintaining the status quo but as far as human beings are  concerned, humans are dynamic, unprecedented and spontaneous beings which react and respond to things according to their moods.

Little wonder why we hear things like, ‘I read a book on how to find and get married to my dream man and I applied the principles in the book to the later but it didn’t work for me’. Indeed, that helpless fellow will think that there are some mystical phenomena that are making the principles not to work for her. The person fails to understand that there’s no particular principle that has been proven to hold man to ransom. A popular saying goes that for the fact that it worked for A doesn’t mean it will work for B because according to the Christian book, ‘Time and chance happens to them all’.

There’s no justification other than attracting audience when people state categorically and make outright statements and postulations like, ’20 ways to talk to a lady and win her attention’, “10 ways to approach your job interviewer and get the job”, “Things you must do to save your marriage from crashing”, and the list goes on and on –  20 ways to approach a lady, 50 ways of talking to people, etc.

These authors and those guilty of these must be called to order because they have limited humans and made human beings appear to be robots and machines which the user guide must be applied so as to achieve the desired response from the robot or machine. While this will work for robots or machines because that’s how it has been programmed to respond to a particular command, and provide the anticipated response, it will not work for human beings because human beings are unprecedented, dynamic and spontaneous in nature and respond/react according to his/her particular mood at that point in time.

Using machines as an example, an ATM (Automated Teller Machines) has been programmed that for you to access it you must slot in your debit/credit card (i.e. for ATM that’s not programmed for cardless transactions), after you slot in your card, the ATM will request you input your pin, and you put in your pin, the ATM further request the transaction you want to make and give you the list of transactions you can only do with it and you click on the transaction you want to make, and on and on it goes until you are done with your transactions, and then take your card and walk away. 

The point is you are only permitted to carry on transactions on the machine that the programmer has programmed the machine for, and you must obey the instructions to the latter in order to be able to carry out the transactions successfully. If you do not put your PIN correctly, you will be shut out; if you do not slot in your card, you won’t have access to the ATM; and if you delay in carrying out your transactions, you will also be shut out; and all these work that way because that’s how the Teller Machine has been programmed to work. It obeys the command and give the anticipated response only if you obey the rules, follow the process and task it to do what it has been programmed to do by the maker or programmer. The same narrative goes with other machines like cars, televisions, stereos, airplanes, pianos, phones and computers.

Can we say the same thing about human beings? Can we in every sense of reason that there is a user manual or guide that you must follow while dealing with a human being just like machines in order to arrive at a particular response pre-empted or anticipated. The answer is obviously ‘NO’ because human beings are dynamic, unprecedented, spontaneous and there actions and inactions are determined by moods, emotions and their predisposition at that time.

There has been instances where you will do what you think is the principle and it ends up not working out or giving you the predicted result; note to yourself that you are dealing with man and not robots. A HR in an organization tweeted that the reasons she didn’t give a job seeker the job is that the job seeker complimented her aura and said to her, ‘you scent nice’, while the job seeker will innocently think that since human beings love compliments and complimenting the lady that just interviewed him will grant him access to the lady’s soft side, but it turned out to be the worst thing he ever did, as the lady went hard on him, and made him feel stupid, and told him categorically that he has failed the interview for complimenting her.

It could even be that a friend told the job seeker to use compliments as a strategy to gain access to the soft side of the HR or maybe he read it in the books that for you to gain access to a lady you have to compliment he. Yet, it ended up not working for him as things went south. Many people would jump on the lady and call her a sadist and some did jump on the lady on Twitter calling her a sadist – a wicked HR. The fact remains that the lady reacted to the compliment according to her predisposition at that particular time . Another lady in different occasion who also happened to be a HR also tweeted that the single reason she gave a job seeker the job was that the job seeker complimented her dress, and that gave way chit chat and they both got along as friends.

The point here is that though we admit that there are principles governing lives and nature, man is dynamic, spontaneous and unprecedented hence every man should be followed accordingly . Before you formulate your rules or apply them to a particular man first ask yourself the mood that fellow is in at that moment and act accordingly while dealing with a person.

Transsion (Tecno, Itel & Infinix Maker) Gets Approval for IPO in Shanghai STAR

By
Ndubuisi Ekekwe
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Tecno Mobile

I wrote about STAR, Chinese version of Nasdaq, the U.S.-focused technology exchange few days ago. Interestingly, Africa’s largest seller of smartphones, Transsion which owns Tecno, Infinix and Itel will be joining the STAR. The company plans to raise $437 million through this initial public offering. Together, Transsion brands control about 59% of the still vast feature phone market in Africa in 2018, notes IDC. Transsion which was established in 2006 employs 14,000 people worldwide with manufacturing plants in Ethiopia,  China, India and Bangladesh.

Transsion Holdings, the Chinese budget smartphone maker that leads sales in Africa, has received approval to go public on Shanghai’s new Nasdaq-style stock market, as the company’s low-cost handsets entice millions of new consumers in the developing world.

The Shenzhen-based company, which filed its initial public offering (IPO) application in March, aims to raise up to 3.01 billion yuan (US$437 million) on the Science and Technology Innovation Board, also known as the Star board, according to an announcement on the Shanghai Stock Exchange website on Tuesday.

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