One of Nigeria’s core problems is that we have many “companies”. Of course, the smarter people in the developmental organizations flip everything as signs of vitality and economic progress, and governments push them as evidence of great policies generating the dividends of democracy. Unfortunately, for this village guy from Ovim whose finest leadership moment remains being elected the inaugural President of his village age grade (Uke Udo, the Peace Age Grade), it is an illusion: our weakest link is that we have many companies in Nigeria.
According to SMEDAN (Small and Medium Enterprise Development Agency of Nigeria), about 59 million Nigerians are currently employed by 41 million Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSEMEs).
No matter how you look at it, it is not a healthy ecosystem. Simply, these companies are not growing or expanding. Until we can reduce the paralysis for most to move from micro, small, and medium to large, we will continue to struggle with paucity of good jobs, development paralysis and stasis on the advancement of human welfare.
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Yes, it is like farming where we produce mass hunger with 65% of our working population when the U.S. uses less than 2% to feed itself, and enough to export to the world.
Nigeria needs to find a way to avoid celebrating what should not be celebrated. We need to get annoyed with them. Yes, unless we see them as problems, we will think those things are actually “progress”. No way, Nigeria does not need everyone to be a business owner!
Of course, I recommend that SMEs register with SMEDAN as even the many we have, we need to know about them.
“On that, we were able to register MSMEs with the SMEDAN unique identification number. The registration is seamless that you can just go into the website www.smedanregister.com and you will be able to register, get your unique identification number and print your certificate. That has been a very good effort and up-till-date we were able to register over three million MSMEs that have full details of their location, the kind of products and services that they provide and their contacts,” Director-General, Dr Dikko Radda said, at the 27th regular valedictory meeting of the governing board of the agency, according to the News Agency of Nigeria.
There needs to be a plan to make sure that some of these SMEs transition into big companies.
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