Podcasts about dangote cement

On the podcast this week, we chat with Mr. Adebayo Adebanjo (Senior Analyst/ Portfolio Manager, CardinalStone Securities) about the listed Cement manufacturers on the stock exchange. We examine the bull and bear cases for that industry and how Dangote Cement has been able to generate enviable returns & market share in that sector. He also shares insights on the other players, Bua Cement and Lafarge Africa such as how they are trying to close the gap with the industry leader. We hope this episode sparks the interest of retail investors in this very crucial sector of both the economy and the stock market. Thanks for listening. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/value-nigeria/message

Aliko Dangote retains the title of Africa's richest man. Aliko Dangote remains Africa's richest person, with a net worth of $15.6 billion, according to Bloomberg. Dangote's success stems from his conglomerate, Dangote Industries, which includes Africa's largest cement producer, Dangote Cement, and other ventures. Through the Aliko Dangote Foundation, Dangote has made significant philanthropic contributions, including a recent $1.25 billion endowment. Aliko Dangote, the visionary President of Dangote Group, has once again emerged as Africa's wealthiest individual, boasting a remarkable net worth of $15.6 billion, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index (BBI). --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-kaagee-mante/message

Shareholders of Dangote Cement unanimously authorised the management of the company to undertake a share buy-back of up to 10 per cent of its issued shares. The company had stated interest to buy back 10 per cent of its issued shares to improve return on equity and shareholders' value and facilitate future long-term growth. The shareholders, who unanimously approved the share buyback through voting at the company's Extraordinary General Meeting in Lagos, described the exercise as laudable and a win-win situation for them. The shareholders also authorised the board to amend the Articles of Association of the company to reflect the company's share capital, following the cancellation (if any) of the shares acquired and/or otherwise held by the company.

The Dangote Cement Plant located in Obajana, Kogi State, has been reopened after being closed by the Kogi State Government over issues bordering on the legality of the company's acquisition of the defunct Obajana Cement Company. The Minister of Interior, Rauf Aregbesola, says that an agreement had been reached between the Dangote Group and the Kogi State Government on the need to reopen the factory while urging both parties to respect the agreement. The reopening of the plant came after a 10-day disagreement by both parties over the legality of the acquisition of the cement plant. The Commissioner of Information, Kingsley Fanwo, the Kogi State Government had maintained that the acquisition of the cement plant by Africa's richest man did not follow due process.

In this episode we look at comments from people concerning Facebook beefs and shades and how people get blocked for reacting to shades when they had no idea it was even a shade.

Aliko Dangote GCON (born 10 April 1957) is a Nigerian billionaire business magnate. He is the wealthiest person in Africa, with an estimated net worth of US$11.1 billion as of May 2021. Aliko Dangote, an ethnic Hausa Muslim from Kano, Kano State, was born on 10 April 1957 into a wealthy Muslim family of the Nigerian bourgeoisie, the son of Mohammed Dangote and Mariya Sanusi Dantata, the daughter of Sanusi Dantata. He is the great-grandson of Alhassan Dantata, the richest West African at the time of his death in 1955 Aliko Dangote, Africa's richest person, founded and chairs Dangote Cement, the continent's largest cement producer. He owns 85% of publicly-traded Dangote Cement through a holding company. Dangote Cement produces 45.6 million metric tons annually and has operations in 10 countries across Africa. Dangote also owns stakes in publicly-traded salt and sugar manufacturing companies. Dangote Refinery has been under construction since 2016 and is expected to be one of the world's largest oil refineries once complete. ✔️✔️✔️✔️✔️✔️✔️✔️✔️✔️✔️✔️✔️✔️✔️✔️ Here are his Top 10 Rules for Success.

Welcome to the Danso Pitch. In today's episode, we introduce the Richest Man in Africa the Nigerian business magnate Aliko Dangote by detailing his rise to becoming the continent's most wealthy individual. This episode hosted by Charles and Ramy cover how Mr. Dangote started the Dangote Group which is one of the largest conglomerate businesses in all of Africa, by their manufacturing of Dangote Cement, the continent's largest cement producer and the company's agricultural business. As well, we cover Dangote Refinery which is Aliko Dangote's next largest project for Nigeria and overall Africa. Nigeria is currently estimated to hold 37 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, which is the second biggest-oil rich country in Africa only behind Libya. A breakdown of how this could potentially, help Africa and also hurt other parts of the world is covered in this episode, along with how to invest in the Dangote group, by understanding the different stock exchanges in the world and how that can be a benefit for any investor looking to diversify their stock portfolio are covered in this today's episode.

On today's episode of "The Money Show", we would be covering a lot of things happening in the world of business and technology. We'd start with the 60% rise in prices of building materials and end it with the $2500 grant for ladies offered by Flutterwave. Below are some of the major news items on today's episode: 60% hike in prices of building materials Dangote Cement proposes N272 Billion as 2020 dividends NSE300 - Dividends for 2021 Q1 announced Whales begin movement of bitcoin from exchanges XRP to the moon China Seizes 7,221 penises from Nigeria Paymob raises $18.5M in largest Series for an Egyptian fintech Facebook Hacked and 533 user information exposed and lots more. Feel free to tune into STARBUSTA RADIO for live broadcasts and entertainment. We are online 24/7. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/starbusta-radio/message

a brief stock selection using earnings, market prices cash flow

RICHARD OBIECHIE is a Human Resources Professional with over 10 years' experience. A fan of writing, human capital development, systems re-engineering, business structure development, speaking and movies. Richard is a certified Project Management Professional. He has worked with various companies as Senior Human Resources officer, Training and Development Manager, Business Development Manager, Acting Group Human Resources Manager, Human Resources Advisor, Deputy - Group HR Manager, and currently serving as HR specialist for one of the indigenous Petroleum company. He is an excellent trainer, facilitator, productivity and personal development consultant, motivational speaker and he is passionate about helping people reach their highest potential and becoming their best selves. He has been engaged in several consulting, recruiting and training programs for notable organizations such as AddyFX Limited, Addygreen limited, Addylogistics limited, Niger Dock Nigeria Plc, Nigerian International Securities Limited, FBN Micro-finance Bank, IESL, Mayakorp Nig Limited, Sky Bird Air, Dangote Cement, American Air Sea Cargo, Oak Pension Limited and Descasio Limited.e.t.c Richard is the president of Career Achievers Group (an NPO), where he assists graduates and experienced professionals with skills on how to kickstart, change and navigate their careers; his educational and work experience equips him to deliver quality services. Career Achievers Group boast of over 5000members. Richard shares with us on this episode the personal challenges he encountered in the early days of his career and the mindset he had to pull through. Email us: instillafricainitiative@gmail.com | Telegram: bit.ly/instillafrica --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/obeta-ikechukwu/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/obeta-ikechukwu/support

Dangote Cement has announced a stock buy back, what gives?

Let's talk about Government letting Dangote Cement move trucks across the closed border. Then let's talk about Southeast leaders praising the President's handling of EndSARS. And then, let's talk about the Army saying it only fired blanks the Lekki Tollgate.

Welcome to the Danso Pitch. In today’s episode, we introduce the Richest Man in Africa the Nigerian business magnate Aliko Dangote by detailing his rise to becoming the continent’s most wealthy individual. This episode hosted by Charles and Ramy cover how Mr. Dangote started the Dangote Group which is one of the largest conglomerate businesses in all of Africa, through their manufacturing of Dangote Cement, the continent’s largest cement producer along with the company’s agricultural business. As well, we cover Dangote Refinery which is Aliko Dangote’s next big project for Nigeria and eventually all of Africa. Nigeria is currently estimated to hold 37 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, which is the second biggest-oil rich country in Africa only behind Libya. A breakdown of how this could potentially, help Africa and also hurt other parts of the world is covered in this episode, along with how to invest in the Dangote group, by understanding the different stock exchanges in the world and how that can be a benefit for any investor looking to diversify their stock portfolio are covered in this today’s episode. To become a guest with Danso Pitch email us at dansofinancialgroup@gmail.com Danso Pitch would also like to hear from you! Click the link today to share your thoughts on today’s episode and future ones below: https://anchor.fm/danso-financial-group-llc/message Follow us at: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dansopitch/ YouTube (Subscribe): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjiAxbcZn2PcW2qztB37zrg?view_as=subscriber Anchor Podcast (location for all audio platforms) : https://anchor.fm/danso-financial-group-llc Photo Credit: Bloomberg --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/danso-financial-group-llc/support

«Aujourd’hui l’économie» fait le portrait du milliardaire nigérian Aliko Dangote, fondateur et patron du conglomérat qui porte son nom et première fortune d’Afrique. Il a fait fortune au Nigéria, mais son rêve va au-delà de son pays. Aliko Dangote :« Nous avons beaucoup de choses à faire. Nous devons libérer l’Afrique économiquement par des Africains. Le seul moyen pour nous de prospérer est que les Africains dirigent eux-mêmes leurs économies. Les étrangers verront ce que nous sommes en train de faire, ensuite ils nous rejoindront. Bien sûr nous ne pouvons pas nous développer seuls, mais nous devons diriger. » Au cœur des affaires d’Aliko Dangote, il y a le ciment. Simple distributeur au début des années 1980, il a ajouté ensuite la production et fait de son entreprise un véritable conglomérat. Emmanuel Igah, directeur de Phobos international, un cabinet de conseil spécialiste de la géopolitique et du développement de l’Afrique. « Dangote, c’est quelqu’un qui flaire beaucoup les opportunités. Donc, dans un premier temps, il diversifie son groupe vers l’agro-alimentaire. » Sucre, farine, riz et ces dernières années, la tomate, afin d’atténuer la dépendance de son pays aux importations chinoises. Et depuis 2013, le milliardaire a lancé un projet d’une raffinerie de pétrole hors norme, d’une capacité de 650 000 barils par jour. Elle devrait être opérationnelle en 2021. Jusqu’ici, les 4 raffineries publiques d'une capacité cumulée de 400 000 barils de produits pétroliers transformés, n'ont jamais réussi à fonctionner de façon continue. Aliko Dangote construit aussi une usine de fertilisants. Travailleur, l’homme d’affaires de 63 ans aujourd’hui ne s'est pourtant pas fait tout seul Il travaille beaucoup et dit qu'il n'a pris ni vacances ni week-end pendant 13 ans. Aliko Dangote est le descendant d’une riche famille commerçante de Kano, dans le Nord du pays. Il a lancé ses propres affaires grâce à un prêt d’un oncle. Et il a construit au fil des années un groupe important, grâce à son sens des affaires, mais pas seulement, dit Emmanuel Igah. « Il n’a jamais fait la politique au Nigeria. Il reste entrepreneur, mais sa stratégie, c’est toujours d’être bien avec le pouvoir politique et la classe politique dans les pays où il s’installe. » Le milliardaire nigérian est décrit comme quelqu’un de modeste et qui déléguait peu jusqu’à récemment. Il ne possèderait ni villa, ni hôtel particulier hors de son pays. Son crédo est d’investir en Afrique, afin de participer au développement du continent. Le groupe Dangote est ainsi la première entreprise cotée sur la bourse de Lagos. Mais Aliko Dangote regarde aussi de plus en plus hors de l’Afrique ; il souhaite investir dans la gestion de fortunes aux Etats-Unis, après s'être introduit sur la bourse de Londres. Des opérations faites, pas simplement pour accumuler de l’argent, assure le milliardaire. « Ce qui me rend heureux, c’est de savoir combien de gens nous aidons grâce à la création d’emplois, en faisant tellement de choses. Je veux m’assurer que le Nigeria soit autosuffisant en matière ferroviaire, en électricité et dans beaucoup d’autres secteurs. » Tout ne réussit pas à l’homme qui a fait de son groupe un champion continental Son projet de construire une cimenterie en République démocratique du Congo s’est heurté à l’opposition d’un industriel congolais du secteur. Mais Aliko Dangoté s’est rapproché du marché de Kinshasa en construisant une usine au Congo voisin. Ailleurs sur le continent, il a dû gagner des procès intentés par des concurrents locaux, notamment au Sénégal, ou par une administration, le cas de la Tanzanie. Alors qu'il est protectionniste au Nigéria, il espère que la zone de libre-échange continentale pourra être opérationnelle rapidement. Le groupe Dangote est présent aujourd’hui dans une dizaine de pays africains. Mais il arrive encore au milliardaire d’être meurtri, lorsqu’il annonce un projet de plusieurs centaines de millions de dollars et que ces interlocuteurs « pensent que c’est une arnaque nigériane ». Aliko Dangote, première fortune d’Afrique, philanthrope d’abord dans son pays Le milliardaire a lancé la « fondation Dangote » en 1993. Une fondation qui finance des actions dans les secteurs de la santé, de l’éducation, de l’autonomisation et de l’aide aux sinistrés. Le dernier apport d’envergure à sa fondation en 2014, c’est la cession des actions de Dangote Cement pour une valeur d’un milliard 250 millions de dollars. Ses concurrents relèvent sa volonté d’être toujours premier. Il a ainsi réussi à imposer des prix exorbitants pour le ciment au Nigéria, où il réalise des bénéfices record, alors que l’ensemble des filiales de Dangote Cement dans les autres pays sont déficitaires depuis certaines années.

Transactions have ended on a positive note for the second consecutive day this week. At the close of the bell, the All Share Index closed at 23,809.31 points, 3.12 percent higher than the 23,089.86 points recorded on Monday when the restriction on lockdown was lifted by the federal government. Market capitalisation closed at 12.408 trillion naira as investors exchanged 342 million shares. NESTLE added 54-naira 80 kobo to close at 975 naira per share while DANGOTE CEMENT gained 13 naira to close with 143 naira per share. Conversely, FLOURMILLS lost 1 naira 25 kobo per share to close with 19-naira 75 kobo per share. --- This episode is sponsored by · Afrolit Podcast: Hosted by Ekua PM, Afrolit shares the stories of multi-faceted Africans one episode at a time. https://open.spotify.com/show/2nJxiiYRyfMQlDEXXpzlZS?si=mmgODX3NQ-yfQvR0JRH-WA Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/newscast-africa/support

My Conversation with Adedayo was an enjoyable experience, as you can tell from the lighthearted tone. He is brilliant and still very much underrated. He also has an incredible personal story - the triumph of choice, opportunity, and knowledge. I hope he gets to tell it one day. The recurrent theme in our conversation is knowledge (human capital) and its importance to development. You can also listen on Stitcher here or read the transcript below. Many thanks to Quadbee for the continued Herculean efforts in making these conversations possible.TranscriptTobi: This is Ideas Untrapped and I am here with Adedayo Bakare. Adedayo is an investment banker, an economist, an entrepreneur and an all-round smart guy. So Dayo it's nice to have you here.Dayo: Thanks for having me, Tobi. I've been looking forward to this and...so I'm very excited.Tobi: So have I, actually. So...let me just jump right in on something you said very recently about trade that, for example, if a country collects twenty percent of its taxes in tariffs, it's definitely killing trade. Just explore that angle a bit and get us into your frame of mind in thinking about that.Dayo: I think I was responding to a tweet about the implications in terms of tax revenues if Africa countries get to implement this continental trade agreement that was recently signed that would start being implemented in 2020. And so I think one of the issues, (i mean) at least protests, from some segment of, say, policy analysts is that a lot of African countries actually depend on revenues from trade - that is, tariff revenues - and one of the ways I think that happens is...(I mean) most African economies are informal in nature. In Nigeria, for instance, I think IMF estimates that [the] level of informality we have in the economy is around sixty percent. So what happens is if government is not able to tax a lot of productive activities that is going on in the economy, and one of the easiest ways to continue to raise money, which is also tied to industrial policy, is around [raising] tariffs.In Nigeria, for instance, we are very big on tariffs to encourage what they call local production even if in some cases we do not have the capacity to do it, but [the] government never stops. The auto policy for instance that was implemented under the Jonathan  era raised tariffs on motor vehicles to like seventy percent to encourage FDI into assembly plants for cars and all sorts. Then you start to imagine how does this even make any sense when we really do not have the capacity, we don't have the skill, expertise, we don't have a good business environment that will support industrialization. So why are we embarking on such a policy? And since the implementation of that policy it has failed woefully, because, obviously, I think it's only Innoson that has been able to, at least, benefit from that policy; and even when you think in terms of his manufacturing capacity, how many cars does he produced in a year? In terms of how affordable the car is, is it affordable for the ordinary Nigerian to buy? It's not. So obviously you have... you have that problem.The starting point should not be that a lot of African countries will lose revenues from tariffs. The starting point should be that does it even make sense for an economy to be reliant on trade for its revenues, that is, in terms of tariff revenues as a share of total government revenues. - ABNow in terms of revenues, one of the easiest ways to actually raise revenue is also to raise tariffs. You can have thirty percent tariffs, you can have fifty percent tariffs on some items and that is why overtime when you combine that with a largely informal economy (where taxation is very very [low], tax to GDP ratios are lower than, say, other emerging markets and advanced economies) then you tend to get a sense of why tariff revenues make up in a very large of share government's revenue.Now, my argument is, the starting point should not be that a lot of African countries will lose revenues from tariffs. The starting point should be that does it even make sense for an economy to be reliant on trade for its revenues, that is, in terms of tariff revenues as a share of total government revenues. If we look at most of, say, the advanced economies you'll see that tariff revenues are a very very small component...Tobi: Yeah.Adedayo: Of total government earnings and I feel like that is what Africa should try to explore.Clears throatAnd by exploring that we could open up a new vista of opportunities for the economy which could propel growth and prosperity. But the catch is this, it is very very easy to quantify one, the other is very hard to quantify. Tobi: Yeah.Adedayo: You can easily quantify the fact that, oh, if we export a certain amount of goods in a year, if we tax it at this rate we're going to obtain this size of revenue. But when you tell a government to, oh, relax your tariffs to encourage maybe even your manufacturing sector such that they have access to quality raw materials, it's hard to capture into, you know, the productivity gains for the company or basically the employment potential of it, and even the taxes that accrue to the government from that extra productivity. It's actually hard for economies to quantify them. So that is why it is easy for someone to come out and say, oh, Cote d'Ivoire is going to lose 10% of their, er...Tobi: Revenue.Adedayo: Revenues... because of the implementation of the AfCFTA [African Continental Free Trade Agreement]. So apart the fact that a lot of Africans do not even trade... a lot of African countries do not trade with Africa, so a large chunk of the tariff is actually trade with external partners, that is, Asia primarily now and maybe Europe in the case of Nigeria. I think our major trading partners are Asia and Europe. So even when we start to develop, you know, local value chains to say, oh, we're exporting into the African market. Some of the natural resource that we have, most African countries do not even have the capacity or the industry to use it so we still have to export a lot of those things outside Africa and you can still generate whatever tariff revenues you're obtaining from that. But really the idea is that, for African countries, we have to look past trade as this money-spinning machine for the government. It's something that should spur enterprise and development and the development of processing industries and local value chains. We should see it as something...we should see in the sense that... the way the World Bank captures ease of doing business, say, oh, access to roads or the time it takes to...er say...Tobi: Register a company.Adedayo: To register a company or to register a property. Tobi: Yeah.Adedayo: Trade should also be something like that. I mean, tariffs should also be something like that - how liberal your tariffs are. Especially in the developing countries. Because it is also important, it goes a long way in what you have in the manufacturing sector and I think nobody would argue, even the government, with what we've seen  between 2015 and 2016 when we had the currency crisis and a lot of manufacturing companies could not obtain raw materials to use in production and we saw the impact on the books those companies and even for government which eventually collects revenue from them. So I think that is the way to actually think about it [but] unfortunately trade is very very contentious, and...Tobi: Why is that, really? Is it really a case of failing to learn from history because, I mean, you talk about quantifiability, it may be difficult in the case of any specific country to prospectively quantify how much you'll gain from trade. But historically we know there are gains from trade. Huge gains actually. So is it simply a case...or what is really the constraint?... why is trade so contentious for us?Adedayo: Umm, it's really the way we think about it. In Nigeria for instance, many people see trade - imports - for instance, they see it as "if you're importing from someone, you're at a disadvantage". That's the general idea which the Nigerian media will call waste. So Nigeria wastes 200 million dollars in importing tomato paste.Tobi: YeahAdedayo: Or Nigeria wastes...Tobi: Or we're losing...Adedayo: Oh, we're losing our FX [foreign exchange] in importing iPhones...but they never say that about iPhones...LaughsTobi: Or Champagnes for that matter.LaughsAdedayo: They never say. So you start to wonder why? I think there are several reasons. One of the reasons that I feel like most people overlook is: the average Nigerian believe that when it comes to certain kind of products, (agriculture is one) the Nigerian might have a palm oil tree in their house or they do maize, you know, in their backyard - they plant maize in their backyard which even if it's not commercial farming, for subsistent use - and a lot of them...it's hard for them to understand that people trade based on what we now know as comparative advantage. You specialise in something you can do better than other countries such that by the time you're exporting to other countries they will buy it cheaper and it's good for everybody.But the average Nigerian believes, you know, agriculture. We are very big on agriculture. We have the land so I can plant oranges behind my...in my garden, so why are you now saying Nigeria cannot produce this and we have to import it? They do not understand that it's probably cheaper, maybe fifty percent even cheaper to plant rice in Thailand or Vietnam than in Nigeria. Most do not understand that maybe the soil you have (the soil formation you have) is not conducive to deriving high yields of those products; and it is on that basis that you have trading with other nations because you assume that oh, a country can do it better than you and you go there to import it; and basically the average Nigerian doesn't understand that. They just want to know that - palm oil...we are good at palm oil. Malaysia - they came to get their seeds...Tobi: Yeah, how true is that story by the way?LaughsAdedayo: I actually don't know how true that is but they will tell you that - Malaysia - they came to get their seeds for palm oil in Nigeria. And now look at them, they're the largest producers of palm oil... [stuttering]Tobi: Whatever proxy we use...Adedayo: Exactly...in and the world. And you begin to ask that okay so let's even assume they got the seedlings from Nigeria, what have you done to improve those seedlings? There are different varieties of palm oil, for instance - they have this Tenera, there is Pisifera, there is another one [Dura]. And what you find that a lot of Nigerians are planting, they are varieties that have not been improved. So in terms of yield, it's very very poor. The gestation period is extended, some go into six, seven years. You see palm trees taller than houses- like, you're basically going to hire someone to help you harvest your fruits. Many do not think in the sense that that is unproductive. They don't think in the sense that yields are very very poor; because when you process, what you can derive, the output you can derive is actually very very low compared to other countries. They just think in terms of we can plant it in Nigeria. They don't think in terms of "can we plant it better than other countries"? I mean, rice or palm oil or whatever it is essentially. So in a way, I feel like that is actually a crucial factor because in my discussions with ordinary Nigerians, they will tell you "I plant cassava, I plant this" but the question is not if you can plant it... Tobi: We have Bamboos so why do we have to import toothpicks?Adedayo: Why did we have to import toothpicks, exactly. But do you have the ecosystem to support the production of toothpicks? Oh, we have... there [are] tomatoes wasting in the North why are we importing tomato paste?Tobi: Yeah.Adedayo: It goes beyond primary production, being able to produce tomatoes. Then you start asking, what kind of variety of tomatoes are you even producing? Are they suitable for processing? So those are the questions that Nigerians do not understand. Then there's also the case which is something connected to what is, I think, happening all over the world. We're seeing rising protectionism.Tobi: Yeah...yeah.Adedayo: It's actually all over the world and one of the things is...Tobi: It's sad.Adedayo: It is sad. LaughAdedayo: So for trade, overall, there is a net gain, right?Tobi: Yeah.Adedayo: It's been proven historically that there is a net gain to society from trading. However, there could also be displacements...Tobi: Definitely.Adedayo: In certain sectors or industries, so you have politicians appealing to those sentiments and a lot of that view. People too, we tend to appeal to those sentiments because even when you see the conversations around the free trade agreement in Africa, a lot of people would say, "oh, they will come and dump goods in Nigeria - the manufacturing sector, they're going to kill jobs, they're going to do this"; and I always tell them "have you even taken a look at the manufacturing sector in Nigeria?" As a share of GDP it's not so big, but when you take it in absolute terms I think there are only, maybe, three more countries that have bigger manufacturing sectors - maybe Egypt. Morocco is also doing a lot now and South Africa.Tobi: YeahAdedayo: Now the challenge with Nigeria is our manufacturing is not quite as sophisticated or complex as what you have in South Africa, in Morocco or in Egypt for instance. But in terms of saying "oh, do we have a big manufacturing sector?" Yeah, we have a bigger manufacturing sector than most of [our] African peers. We actually export a lot of manufacturing products through land and, of course, there's a question where... also when you think in terms even the trade balance (manufacturing trade balance with other African countries) I think we only have a negative trade balance with probably South Africa. When you look at West Africa as a whole in terms of manufacturing, we actually have a positive trade balance with West Africa because we have a big manufacturing sector even if it's just textiles or footwear and garments being manufactured in Abia... I mean Aba. We are sending it to [the] Benin Republic, we're sending it to Togo, we're sending it to Cameroon. If it's not even as sophisticated but we are, at least, doing something.Tobi: The problem is we don't want them to send to us.Adedayo: Exactly. Now, the problem is you don't want those things to come into Nigeria. So in that sense, there's a lot of fear around the dislocation of, maybe, workers, and there's a lot of literature on it as well and many people would usually say "oh, they should, maybe, train people who lose jobs and try to integrate them into other sectors of the economy" but I think one of the things we're missing is: even in terms of manufacturing, if we have liberal trade in Africa it could actually open the doors for other industries which we've actually not looked at in Africa that would actually take up some of the [un]employed people. As a share of employment, the manufacturing sector is very low. I don't think the manufacturing sector employs up to ten percent. We all scream "Dangote! Dangote! Dangote!" How many people can Dangote Cement employ? And even that is connected to my ideas around seeing manufacturing as a way to growth and prosperity in Africa.Tobi: Yeah, we will get to that.Adedayo: When you start to explore it. So, really, trade is actually very very tedious in terms of the underlying concepts called comparative advantage. The ordinary man does not understand that and I think that is really the biggest misconception about trade and why we have challenges [in] having to implement liberal trade policies in Africa.Tobi: You talked about agriculture.Adedayo: Yeah.Tobi: I'll like to explore something I was discussing recently with some people. You know, agriculture (and you can correct me if I'm wrong on this) currently employs about fifty percent of the workforce...Adedayo: Very close. Very close. Yes, forty-five... about forty-five percent.Tobi: But, again, when you look at history for example; over, say, the last 300 years; the global population - we've grown the global population by about sevenfold from around a billion to seven billion currently. We've grown agricultural productivity to about tenfold, that is, we actually produce a lot of food. But when you see agriculture share of employment, it has gone from about 75% to about 2.5% currently.Adedayo: Exactly.Tobi: So, now, my question is, isn't our share of agricultural jobs really a problem for productivity rather than people looking at it as a positive, you know, like, "oh, agriculture is the largest employer of labour in Nigeria hence you have to direct resources to it here". But isn't the correct framework to look at it be that to achieve agricultural productivity we might actually have to lose agricultural jobs?Adedayo: Yeah, absolutely. It's very interesting because there was something I explored when I was at PwC [PriceWaterhouseCoopers] and we were looking at job creation in Nigeria and we were looking at basically services, the industrial sector, and agriculture and that forced me to, like, look at advanced economies and to see the structural transformation of the economies (that is, the structure of the GDP over time) and what you discover is as these societies evolve, as they continue to grow, the share of [agriculture] employment has reduced drastically, later on manufacturing starts falling and really what starts expanding is [services]. It's the services that really becomes the biggest share of GDP. So in Nigeria, it's actually quite interesting that you mentioned that because we have too many people in agriculture. I believe we have too many people in agriculture and they are largely unproductive. So...I've been reading a lot about what I call political crops in Nigeria.Tobi: That's interesting.LaughsAdedayo: They are very political. Rice is one of them...Tobi: Okay...Adedayo: Tomato is one of them...Tobi: Okay...Adedayo: Oil palm is one of them.Tobi: All from Kano.LaughterAdedayo: Rice from Kano. So one of the experiences that has shaped my ideas about agriculture is the project I was on with CUSO International. We had to work with farmers in different sub-sectors of agriculture and what you find out is: the challenge is actually...it's a lot of challenges, really.When you go to the field you discover that it's not necessarily cheap money that is the problem of farmers. I had farmers in my project who had money but it was very difficult for them to source inputs. - ABThe farmers, for instance, one of the ways government approaches it is to say "let's pump more resources into agriculture". By more resources, basically more money - cheap money. But when you go to the field you discover that it's not necessarily cheap money that is the problem of farmers. I had farmers in my project who had money but it was very difficult for them to source inputs. They had to travel, you know, to the next town or the next city just to get fertilizer or to get inputs into what they were doing. So in my thinking about agriculture, what I would like to say is mainly Nigerian farmers are unproductive, yields are very very low and they've not improved for decades. Cereal, for instance, we say one of the most consumed things globally is cereal, right? And, so, I remember I was writing a report and I had to just go and look at how yields are trended over the years and I discovered that over the past four decades Nigeria has made no notable progress; in terms of expanding yields for cereal which is actually...which you could say is crucial to food security, right?Tobi: YeahAdedayo: Draw a chart of other countries - Asian countries - and you'll see the rapid kind of improvements they've made. And I feel like that is what we have to start looking at. Government has to start looking at "how can we drive productivity?" One of the things I've been exploring of late too is: we're giving money to all these people [to] go and start farms. What is the total arable land we have in Nigeria? With the level of productivity we have in this country, when the population doubles according to [the] UN by 2050; if we plant rice on all arable lands in Nigeria, will you be able to feed 400 million people with the level of youth you have currently?  So the question is - how do we do more using less land resources and getting more value per hectare? (And) that is one area I think the government needs to focus on that they've not been able to focus on, and to do that, really, you probably have to let go of most of the manpower you have [in agriculture]. Because it ties into what you're saying. When you start thinking [about it], agriculture is difficult but in Nigeria it is usually the last hope for someone who can't hack it in other fields. "I'll go back to the farm", right? Tobi: Yeah.Adedayo: They'll say they will go back to the farm as if agriculture is something that requires no intelligence, no form of knowledge or skill. "I'll go back to the farm or I'll plant this". And that is why a lot of them can't get out of the trap; because when you are involved in agriculture then you start thinking about "you want to start a farm"...a large [organisation like] PZ, for instance, which is doing a lot of backward integration. They want start a farm, they'll go and look for "okay, where are the best places in Nigeria to site this farm?" I want to plant rice, am I planting rice...the land I have, is it upland or lowland? Will I be able to irrigate the lands? The yields on irrigated lands are better [than] on non-irrigated lands for rice. [But] a lot of Nigerian farmers do not know this because they have no skill, they did not go to school, they have no knowledge. Fertilizer: what percentage of fertilizer should I apply? What size? What are the nutrients necessary for this type of crop? The average farmer cannot know this because they did not go to school, they did not have access to even informal education to learn this; then you start asking yourself, should agriculture really be for the people who have not been able to do anything in their life - without skill, without knowledge? It's not. Government is shouting food security. To achieve that, by boosting productivity, we actually need to evolve in the way our agriculture is structured in Nigeria. Smallholder farmers will eventually not take us to the destination we want because they are too unproductive, they're too unorganised and that's even when you're producing a lot, [then] aggregating it becomes very very difficult in terms of access to, maybe, improved seedlings. Government is not doing enough in investing in the research institutes we have. We have agricultural research institutes - I know for one that NIFOR [Nigerian Institute for Oil Palm Research] is in Benin and a lot of the palm oil farmers I monitored then usually travel to Benin to actually get seed for planting in the nursery and sell it to farmers.Tobi: There is a cocoa research institute in Ibadan.Adedayo: Exactly. They are not investing a lot for them to actually generate ideas that could unlock our productivity deficit in agriculture. So for me, I feel it is necessary for Nigeria to move beyond the current structure we have where we have a lot of smallholder farmers. Like I've said; they are not fit for the job. If our task is really to feed Nigerians by producing locally, and with full knowledge that eventually we're going to get to the stage where we won't be able to import all of our food needs and we will need to start investing locally in food value chains because if we're going to have 200 million more mouths to feed in the next 30 years.Tobi: That's scary.Adedayo: It's scary. And you want to ask "what are we doing?" I mean, I don't know what the government is going to do about it but the current structure - if we want economic prosperity, if we want food security - it can't stand. We need to go into ... When people say large-scale (large-scale) farming, it is because a large-scale farmer would probably be a bit more serious, [she] would apply more thought before going into farming than someone who believes - "Farming is my last resort. When I go to Lagos and it fails, I go back to the farm". A large-scale manufacturer will not think in terms of that. We are recently consulting for a giant in Nigerian consumer space now. [A] household name. So they are backward integrating and they want to start...they've actually started - oil palm plantations. And, do you know what their challenge is now? It's actually to estimate the size of the market. Because there is no reliable data on something as simple as oil palm consumption in Nigeria and that's basically what we're working with them on.Tobi: Wow.Adedayo: They want to commit a lot of resources into it and that is why they are thinking about it that - "oh, do these opportunities really exist?'' In terms of selecting the place to site their farms, we know we have more oil palm businesses in the Niger Delta - Benin and Cross-Rivers and all these places. The thought required in terms of the soil requirement, the seedlings requirement, the fertilizer requirement - you can't rely on the smallholder farmers to make those decisions. It is the large-scale farmers, the commercial farmers that would undertake that, even if later on they employee labourers on the fields. But from the strategy perspective and in terms of boosting yields and everything, they are going to apply more thought than the ordinary smallholder farmer. So the question is how does this end? On the part of government I'm really not optimistic that they would do more than just giving cheap loans or giving subsidized fertilizer. Which is another policy area that is challenging. Government will say "oh, we will ban the importation of fertilizer" but different farms, different crops need different fertilizer requirements. It's also a very complex decision for framers to make but you're selling the same type of fertilizer or you're trying to sell the same type of fertilizer for every farmer; for the person planting maize, for the person...laughsFor the farmer planting tomatoes and everything. So you start asking yourself "now, okay, how does this make any sense?" And to break out of this chain, I think what will just happen is a lot of Nigerian companies especially those listed [on the stock exchange] and which we talk to their management regularly, we've discovered that they are trying to backward integrate as much as possible. So maybe that would spur some form of commercial activity and maybe we will continue to have private interests, maybe beyond the requirements for them to process their goods. They are going to start looking to export markets and, you have, maybe, PZ for instance. [They] have an oil palm plantation which they do not use all of the output maybe they would now start exploring outside markets (market outside Nigeria) and that could cause a chain of continuous investment in the value chain. That is the way I see it currently, that those companies (private interests) can continue to expand and slowly we see... because think about it- if Olam continues to invest in rice for instance and we know Olam will prioritize yields and all those things and they will be a bit more productive, at least, than the smallholder farmer; we could get to a stage where Olam (even in the domestic market) become very competitive such that even the normal farmer won't be able to go to the market and say "oh, I want to go and sell my paddy" because there is an Olam who has a large farm with very very high yields and, maybe, probably cheaper prices, better quality rice output that would now make the smallholder very uncompetitive and as a result of that you'll see that the share of smallholder farmers in terms of planting some of these crops that are so vital to food security continues to fall and you continue to have a lot of a private interest in that area. Unfortunately data in Nigeria is actually very hard to gather and that is one of my issues also with development interventions in Nigeria because when you look at multilateral firms or NGOs. Once they embark on projects, there's usually a bit more thought into it; even in terms of monitoring and evaluating such projects.Tobi: Even if they sometimes invest in the wrong projects.Adedayo: Yes. Even if they sometimes invest in the wrong projects but to an extent, you can, at least, get data to analyse and see. Because we say "knowledge! knowledge!" Knowledge is compounding.Tobi: Yep.Adedayo: We just didn't start using laptops or iPhones. It was some people that started and we kept building on it, we kept accumulating that type of knowledge. So the questions for the Nigerian policy makers is: all the government interventions which is one of the reasons why... probably why all these bad ideas persist anyway because nobody actually tracks anything. You don't monitor it. The CBN does not issue a policy paper to explain their reasons for backing cassava [or] for backing oil palm or collect data on loans that were extended to farmers, repayment terms and everything. On productivity, monitoring those firms sort of productivity for their yields. I've never seen any report on that from the CBN or from the Federal Ministry of Agriculture. Yet they pump billions. Then it's now difficult for us to measure - did this program actually work? Did it not work? What are the lessons from the past that we can actually apply to recent policies? We don't. Because nobody is keeping the data. So it's one of the ways I think all these bad ideas persist because we're not collecting data on it. There is nothing to analyse. You're basically flying blind. So as analysts, we basically just say "oh, this is not likely to work" because this this this or because in other countries that have done it this is how they've gone about. But in Nigeria, we've been doing development intervention since when?Tobi: Yeah, a long time.Adedayo: For a very long time and you will discover that the same ideas continue till today.Tobi: Exactly.Adedayo: So you start to ask if it's not working then why do you think it's going to work now? What are we doing differently? Are we learning any lessons? I feel like if we've been learning a lot from those decades we should have had a body of knowledge that we should have discarded some ideas already that this is not working and we should continue to build on it even if it takes a long time. Currently, it seems like everything is the same. Which is the same thing. They closed the border in the 1980s, they are closing the border today. So, really, that is the way out, I think. We are going to have more private capital into agriculture, not deliberately or incentivised by government themselves but by the fact that as more companies see reasons to backward integrate, as they see reasons to even improve competitiveness even in terms of their sourcing because they need to protect their margins and to be competitive globally. We're going to see a bit more interest and that would maybe force us to explore export market and that is the way out, basically. I have no faith in the government to take us out of...Tobi: That's interesting. There are two things I'll just like to quickly pick up on from what you said. You talked about political crops...LaughsTobi: I don't know, I love that term so much and it's one of my challenges with the concept of comparative advantage...Adedayo: Okay.Tobi: I think that the problem with comparative advantage in our own context is that we naturally see our comparative advantages in our natural resources and when we try to do development that's where we...Adedayo: Focus on...Tobi: Funnel resources into, and historically you'll see that that actually causes deindustrialisation because some of your trading partners (they) then specialise and they will only deal or trade with you based on your identified comparative advantage which may just be primary products and then you make a lot of money when prices (international prices) are high but you have no industrial capacity whatsoever. So do we really need to rethink the concept of comparative advantage in our own context?And then secondly, maybe a bit of a push back on large-scale farming. One underexplored area is land rights for farmers. I don't work with farmers so I don't know much in that area but from a little bit of experience, I know that some of them work in farming collectives. Some of them do not even have rights to the land on which they plant and if you recall one of the big policy changes in Asia, for example, was to give farmers the rights to their land. Even smallholder farmers became productive. So is it really about farms sizes or is it about who owns the land, basically?Adedayo: Let me start [with] the first question. Yeah. I think in terms of comparative advantage, us looking at natural resources, I feel like...I really don't think it's a problem with comparative advantage. It's more of a problem with what we've decided to focus on, which is also connected to I think what you mentioned earlier about government organisations going into wrong projects. I think the starting point is trying to ask this question: how do we...in the case of Nigeria, for instance, how do we create millions of jobs, right? So I think what they look at is just - which sector employs...Tobi: Close to that?Adedayo: Close to that. Oh, Agriculture. Okay, let's invest in agriculture. So it's something of that sort because they would say... they'll say you have comparative advantage. Why? because a lot of them are in agriculture already. Like I said earlier, they are really not very knowledgeable people, so they're already in agriculture. I can't say Nigeria is even more productive in terms of maybe planting tomato than a comparable country. They [policy makers] can't also say that. So rather than say, maybe, explore other sectors or maybe even other sub-sectors even under agriculture that could kind of bring a lot of change, they keep focusing on the same thing. For me, I really don't think it's about comparative advantage. You see comparative advantage in what you can explore. If you don't believe human capital can be explored for development, for instance; it's hard for you to want to now say "oh" or for a development organisation you could say - oh, Nigeria has a lot of people - or we have a lot of young graduates and if we don't see them as capital to an extent, we might not much see them as comparative advantage...because basically some do not look at human capital as comparative advantage and it could actually be one of the things that could unlock maybe some of the progress we want to see. But you are fixated on agriculture. You start from the sector and you're now trying to find within the sector what Nigerians can do better. I really don't think development interventions is from the perspective of what people can do better. It's from what are people doing and how can we make them better at what they are doing? That's why if you read FAO, World Bank and all those research, they'll say "oh, we have a lot of people, we have women in farming". The question is should these women be in farming? Are they planting the right things? Should they be trained to go into other sectors where they could be better used as labourers? No. What they try to do is: they're already farming, why don't we make them better at what they're already doing? It's really not from the idea that... maybe we should...Tobi: What's the best to use...Adedayo: What's the best use of these...Tobi: Of their...Adedayo: Of their labour?Tobi: Of their capacity?Adedayo: Or their capacity. So it's basically around - let's just help them do what [they do]. It's just like the average Nigerian man and maybe you are a rich family man where people come and knock on your door and they come and meet you and you're like "okay, what are you doing now?" [The person responds] "Oh, I'm into furniture".Tobi: And you give them money.Adedayo: And you'll be like "so, what do you need to improve your business?" Oh, I need a loan. You give them the loan. You're not asking whether "should you be doing carpentry? Shouldn't you explore something that would be better for you? It's a very lazy approach, I agree with you. So in terms of comparative advantages, I think we've been... we've not been open-minded a lot about it and we're not ready for the kind of changes we're going to have to make to look past maybe the natural resources sector has comparative advantages for Nigeria. In terms of (also) natural resources that are very very easy to get, the oil and gas sector for instance; one could say is natural resources, right? And it's one of those sectors where overtime maybe we should have seen more industrialisation if we've had a lot of local content into the industry. But it was so easy for us because we just had the resources. We had no capital. We didn't even have the labour because we don't have skilled personnel to actually say "oh, we want to mine oil or anything". We just hired...Tobi: IOCs [International Oil Companies]Adedayo: IOCs. "Come and do this for us". It's like you're in your house...so I hire cooks, I hire cleaners. If I live in a rich man's house or my father is rich, I might not know how to do those things and they could be useful skills for you maybe in terms of application even if you don't want to become a cook or you don't want to become a cleaner. But nobody thinks about that and that is one of the things I've seen in that sector as well. Because if you think about oil and gas, it's very capital-intensive. You need a lot of knowledge. We need to be able to build things and apply things and yet we've not seen it (kind of) spur innovation in other sectors of the economy (that is, the knowledge we've learnt from building ships or building rigs or doing all those things), we've not been able to see it in other parts of the economy.Tobi: We can't even maintain refineries.LaughsAdedayo: Not talk of building new things. Even in natural resources, there are unexplored areas that could actually cause a chain of development in other sectors. We've not seen it, really and it's actually quite disappointing. I think also [that] it's on the part of [the] government to do most of these things. In terms of local content, they're celebrating this Egina field. They're saying they did a fabrication and whatever at Ladol here in Nigeria. But ain't we like four decades late or something? because imagine if we've had that from the start...Tobi: Yeah.Adedayo: A lot of those people would have...with the knowledge they've acquired in oil and gas they would have probably gone into other sectors maybe the one servicing the oil and gas industry then you'll see knowledge keeps, um..Tobi: Percolating.Adedayo: Exactly. All over the economy. So I think for us, it's not really just even about natural resources, [our] oil and gas experience, we've not taken advantage of some of the benefits it would have offered us in terms of building an industrialized economy or a knowledge economy. The second question was on, umm...Tobi: Farmers. Land rights.Adedayo: Land rights. Yeah. So let me give you a bit of perspective of what I've learnt. Okay, so I worked in Yala local government. It's very close to Ogoja. Ogoja is one of the popular places in Cross River and Obudu.Tobi: Okay.Adedayo: Yeah, very close to Obudu [in] northern Cross River and [in] one of the villages we worked in, one of the issues discovered was [that] it was very difficult to get land for women because women were not sort of entitled to lands. So even if the father dies and there is heritance, land inheritance...Tobi: YeahAdedayo: It goes to the men. It doesn't go to...Tobi: To the women.Adedayo: To the women. And one of the things we were trying to do then is try to talk to the communities to actually relax some of those rules. So using that as an example, I would say to an extent, yeah, it affects because they pay rent on the land. And [for] some, the cost of acquiring some of the land can be bad. So for women farmers even if they're very productive on their farmlands, when you account for the cost of acquiring the land or even securing the land you will discover that they are not getting quite much in terms of their output. Yeah, I absolutely agree that land rights are critical to farmers but I don't believe it's the major thing holding farmers back.I feel like knowledge; you can have land and not have knowledge and you'll still be unproductive without knowledge. So maybe the farmers we had in Asia (it's maybe something I have to read up on)...farmers have access to land, right? It's a good thing for farmers in Asia but I believe that was not the single most important determinant of their productivity.Tobi: Definitely. Definitely. Adedayo: Exactly. There is still a bit of knowledge gap with an average Asian farmer compared with a Nigerian farmer. But I feel like, from the experience I had on the ground, land is absolutely crucial; because it gave us a lot of headache. You know when we've invested a lot of people - technical training, giving them grants, train them, sponsoring them, feeding them, and at a point where they're supposed to start engaging in that activity they weren't able to secure lands or the lands they were able to get which men were able to get very easily, women had a challenge getting it or they had to pay a high price for it and you discover in most cases most of the lands they eventually get are those lands that are not quite as good and that would take them to walk long hours before you get to... you know when you have to walk 1 hour 30 minutes. You want to go and farm, you have to walk for 1 hour 30 minutes...Tobi: Wow.Adedayo: To get to your land before you... you can imagine the energy you've lost by walking 1 hour 30 minutes...Tobi: Yeah.Adedayo: Just before you get to your farm then you start asking, you know... and that is one of the challenges most of these people have in terms of securing access to land. So I feel it's crucial for us to figure out a way to encourage farmers to have access to lands, especially for women. Women are at a particular advantage but I feel like it's still not going to (kind of) release the kind of impact we want in that sector we still need knowledge, really.Tobi: I agree and a quick side note on that point. I think one of the least appreciated things about development in Asia is the Incredible amount of human capital that went into some of the reforms, you know... like, when you see people, they say "oh, Asia did this and hence we should do it too". We usually don't think about the state capacity for one, that is, the human capital that is within the government bureaucracy itself. These are incredibly knowledgeable guys who read a lot, who researched a lot, who actually were on ground and know what is going on in their countries and they could actually push through those reforms and they could see where things are going wrong and tweak and change course if necessary. You think about Korea -  sometimes we think of that history begins at the inflection point but usually, it doesn't, you know...Adedayo: Exactly.Tobi: Because I've read multiple papers about even the incredible amount of human capital even in terms of industrial capabilities that Korea acquired under Japanese colonization. But we look at an independent Korea and what they did and we say "oh, yeah, they did so and so policy and we should try and replicate that".Adedayo: Neglecting the knowledge transfer.Tobi: Exactly. So I agree with you about human capital, it's extremely important and I'm quite big on that as well. Let's talk about private capital now which you mentioned earlier. Now, shouldn't capital [also] be going to processing? I remember in one of your articles you talked about the processing gap in agriculture in Nigeria. Should private capital really be going into the same things that we've been doing which is production? Because you read things like Ivory Coast, for example, only gets about one point something billion [dollars] from cocoa exports whereas Germany processes the same cocoa into coffee and other products and gets three, four times the value. So shouldn't private capital be exploring processing? Wouldn't that be a bit more... trails off Adedayo: Yeah, yeah, I believe so. And one of the things I explored in that article was to say one of the things holding processing back (agricultural processing back) for most of the companies we have in Nigeria is because, most times, in terms of the inputs they want, in terms of quality of the inputs, in terms of the quantity of the inputs, they can't get it locally because of the way Agric is done currently. We have a lot of smallholder farmers spread across [a] vast geography. Sometimes unorganised, even in their organised state, sometimes they're still very very tiny. And as a company, you want a reliable source...Tobi: For your supply.Adedayo: Of supply because you don't want disruptions to productions, you have commitments to meet as well...Tobi: Yeah.Adedayo: For your business. So one of the ways Nigerian companies are trying to overcome that is actually what they now say backward integration where they have to do everything on their own. So rather than rely on the farmers to give me the quality and the quantity I have, why don't I invest in the primary bit? And most of the challenges Nigerian farmers have, I am able to leapfrog in because, maybe, I build a warehouse, I build storage facilities and all those things. But to come to the point about shouldn't private capital be going into processing? Yes. Absolutely. I believe private capital should go into processing, not just [in] terms of raw materials. If Dufil Prima or...(that's the makers of indomie)... or PZ... If they're able to get a lot of land and they're able to improve processing, of course, a lot has to do (also) with the business environment in Nigeria for you to now say processing is competitive for other the market. Because in a situation where there's a lot of protection of industries, how do you know you're truly competitive?Tobi: Yeah Adedayo: When all you do is sell to Nigerians? So when you now start looking at processing and you discover that we're only just 200 million people and you need to export outside the country, then the protection you've enjoyed from government might actually now put you at a disadvantage in terms of being able to compete with someone from Ghana or someone from Cote d'Ivoire. The initial stage is what we're seeing currently in terms of companies themselves going into primary agriculture. Like I've said, knowledge is going to be accumulated - with the progress we are able to see over time, if they are able to not just improve the way they do their business and if they're able to really maybe fine-tune whatever models they are using because many backward integration models have failed as well.Tobi: Hmm...Adedayo: Dangote Tomato, for instance, I think they've opened it since 2016, they've not produced anything. Tobi: Is it really closed? I hear it's closed.Adedayo: It's closed; because people just think things are easy to do [simply] because you see tomato waste in some place. So I think what he did was he had a contract with the farmers that, oh, don't worry, I'll give you seedlings, I'll give you maybe fertilizers, I'll give you a bit of capital. Plant this thing for me and come and sell to me. The model failed because some of these farms...it's still the same farmers, right?Tobi: Yeah.Adedayo: They're still not knowledgeable enough or anything. Then some would say, oh, they didn't get the inputs on time before the planting season or the capital on time. Some would say the agreement they had with Dangote Tomato (maybe) at the point of planting...markets change rapidly, prices change rapidly. If I signed a contract to give one ton of tomato to Dangote at five thousand naira per ton or something, for an example...Tobi: And you lock that in.Adedayo: And I lock that in and...Tobi: And then...Adedayo: And upon harvest, I discovered that the market price is seven thousand [naira]. The Nigerian farmer doesn't... Tobi: Wahala ti de [there is trouble].Adedayo: There is obviously conflict then...then how do I maximize the output? So in most cases you'll see them, (they'll go and sell to the...) they will go and sell at the open market to get... which of course I can't blame the farmer but it's one of the things you have to start thinking about even when you say, oh, I want to contract farmers to do all kinds of businesses for me. So that has actually also failed. Some companies also, [as a result of] lessons from what they've done before, they are trying to use it to start new programs or new backward integration schemes that would actually, maybe, be more favorable to them and support their type of business. For me I believe if we are able to get to an extent where a lot of these firms...a lot of them are able to do this or keep doing this, it could even force a lot of investment into processing. If I know that Olam, for instance, can supply these raw materials rather than exporting it out of Nigeria, you could have maybe private capital come into Nigeria. Even maybe local capital [would] want to go into processing because, at least, it's easier to...I mean, I can source locally from competitive producers - Olam or even if it is PZ that wants to later do that, even if they don't intend to expand processing to that scale.I feel like the developments we see could spur some interest in processing locally because you've had a lot of private interests that would come into the market and be like "okay, if there is not a reliable stream of supply for this product, do I want to commit? I don't have the capital to commit to doing primary agriculture, even the resources in terms of both money and personnel to now continue to go into that. Of course, I can't quantify the number of businesses that would likely go into that but I feel like that is one of the advantages we could derive from people who are truly interested in one of those segments but do not want to do the rest of those segments. And [if] we have private capital into primary production, it could spur a lot of more industrial processors. And I feel like in every country, someone has to do the primary production anyway...Tobi: Definitely.Adedayo: Exactly. So, even if, before you have processing or whatever in the US and everything, someone still does the primary production but I feel like we can do it to an extent that it could now generate a lot of interest from processors in Nigeria.Tobi: Okay. So let's look at the role of infrastructure in all this because...and I think you've also written about this so I'll be leaning on that a bit.Adedayo: Yeah.Tobi: I heard that line multiple times even from our chief economic officer or is it the Central Bank governor...LaughsWho say things like "oh, I asked textile manufacturers what is the problem? They said power". And then CBN is going to fix that. "Oh, I talked to toothpick manufacturers and they said power or roads or"... So what exactly are the infrastructure bottlenecks around industrialisation in Nigeria? Because what you see is that a lot of policy even around infrastructure still mimic are structural problems. For one, we know that after the colonialists left we stopped investing in railways, for example. That's a colonial infrastructure for some reasons, and even around things like road repairs or road construction, you'll still see things like ethnic fractionalization. Depending on who is financing the road, you'll see a lot more inter-state projects if it's the Federal Government and at local level you don't really see big infrastructure projects, you just see water pumps and um...Adedayo: Toilets. Tobi: And toilets. So what are the infrastructure bottlenecks and what can break the logjam?Adedayo: I like what you said around the CBN governor - [the] minister of everything - going to meet this person "what do you need?" Oh, meet that person "what do you need?" I feel like it's a bad way to go about policy because it shows that we don't even have... like a vision towards the kind of country we want or like a coherent strategy. I feel like if we have maybe our economic priorities figured out, then our infrastructure should kind of be tailored. The kind of infrastructure we build should be tailored to the kind of vision we have for the economy. So the challenge is this: we have a lot of young unemployed people, in fact, we have... one in two Nigerians...they are either unemployed or underemployed. Now this is at the moment...Tobi: One in two, is that right?Adedayo: Yeah. Underemployment and unemployment is almost 50%.Tobi: Wow!Adedayo: If I remember correctly. Okay, maybe a little over 40% anyway. But I know for youth...it's worst for youth.Tobi: Yeah.Adedayo: Yeah. So the challenge is going to become even more achening in the next 20-30 years when we have a lot of people in the country. So the question is, is policy really thinking about all these things? I don't think they are thinking about it. But what should they be doing? I think they should be thinking about it and to come up with a strategy. I've seen a lot of debates around so what is really the vision for economic prosperity in Nigeria? Do we have a vision to say oh, we want to industrialize or we want a knowledge economy or we want to do anything we want to? There is no vision for that. Even when we see the economic programs that [the] government brings out, they basically want to do everything and everything they want to do still mirrors what we have currently on ground. We invest in agriculture, we invest in agriculture, we do this, we do that. We don't know what we're trying to achieve by investing in agriculture. We don't know what we're trying to achieve by investing in human capital. We're just doing everything, and, for me I think, um, prioritising... because there's a shortage of resources. And in economics we say, oh...it's essentially the study of opportunity costs because you can only have so much and you have so many things to do. So I have this farmer coming, I have textile coming, I have Nollywood coming, I have these people coming to... I mean, to come and meet me and I am trying to do different kinds of things for them. I'm not thinking in terms of what should the economy really be focusing on for the future? What will be the biggest driver of jobs or productivity gains in the economy and let me invest or build infrastructure around that for people? I think one of the reasons why Emefiele is doing that is because they've not thought about that in terms of having a coherent strategy or a vision for the Nigeria of the future, or how the economy is going to be or how we're going to create jobs for people. But in terms of infrastructure imperatives, for me, I always tend to think in terms of...I'm very very... I'm really not keen on industrialisation so to say...Tobi: Hmm.Adedayo:: 'cause l feel like... I just feel like that has passed for Nigeria. I don't know why. I keep reading a lot about industrialisation and [how] it was the biggest driver of growth in Asia. It lifted millions of people out of poverty, right?Tobi: Yeah.Adedayo: And even in terms of countries that are leaning more towards services like India, we've seen that they have also been struggling economically. They've not done enough in terms of lifting a lot of people out of poverty or creating economic prosperity or the kind of growth they had in China, sort of. But in Nigeria there are just too many competing factors. For manufacturing, we say, oh, we need road infrastructure. We know road infrastructure is terrible in Nigeria. Ordinary moving goods...Tobi: Hellish.Adedayo: Hellish, right? I was seeing something... I was reading an article and it's cheaper to import from outside the country (from China) than to move goods from one end of Nigeria to another end.Tobi: It's cheaper to lay an intercontinental fibre optic cable than to take it from Lagos Island to mainland.Adedayo: Exactly. So... and I start thinking what is really the way out for businesses? Does it make any sense for businesses to go to that extent? Of course we have our ports infrastructure issue, which is also crucial to industrialisation, because I can't start a manufacturing plant in Borno and decide that Lagos is the port I'm going to be importing materials from.Tobi: Yeah. Adedayo: I don't see how that makes any sense for the country to have.Tobi: Yeah.Adedayo: It makes no sense for your business to say, oh, I have a manufacturing plant in this place and I want to import through this same port in Lagos. In terms of roads too, the roads are not just bad, then you have human actors (state actors) on the road who are on the roads for safety but who are encumbrance to doing business, because they'll be asking you for money; and If you speak to businessmen they will tell you if you're moving goods - interstate in Nigeria - the kind of bribes you'll pay before you get your goods down to where you're taking them to. So, obviously, I feel like roads are also absolutely critical. In Nigeria, my major idea is, I won't say I know all the kind of infrastructure we need to build... my own is we should agree on what we really want to do. If we think industrialisation is the way to go to accommodate a lot of Nigerians into the labour force, then let's say this is what we are pursuing and let's try to build infrastructure that will make it happen. You know you need roads, you need ports, you need rail, you need those things. You need power. If it's service economy you want to build, then you start thinking differently again. You mentioned laying fibre and if you want to have a service economy you might want to start thinking about communications and having to invest in broadband and all those things. So it's basically a decision between what you want to do - you don't need to privatise everything... build rail, build...we don't even have the capacity to do it. The government doesn't have the capacity to do it and we don't have a lot of private capital to pursue that. So I think if government comes out with a coherent strategy then we'll know the kind of infrastructure that is actually critical. If you say you want a service economy, you need human capital. Even in industrialisation too, you need human capital, but the level will obviously be different. Knowledge economies will have... you can't compare service workers in the US to factory workers in Vietnam or in Bangladesh. Even if they're educated and you need human capital in manufacturing. I don't want to call it, maybe, low skilled... obviously within human capital there are different strands, some are low-skilled, some are higher-skilled in what they're doing.   So for Nigeria, I think it's something that we need to come out and decide and build the required infrastructure. Maybe we then really need to build a lot of rail. Maybe we need to just build (expand) our broadband or something and invest in more schools and in more health clinics rather than building a lot of roads going to nowhere. So I feel like in my thinking about infrastructure, and that was really the idea around the article - to say we are resources starved and we really need to prioritise. We really need to say this is what we want to do and invest in the infrastructure to make it happen. In a case where we have that, then all these distractions of the committee of Nollywood people coming to my office...Tobi: LaughsAdedayo: Or committee of cow farmers coming to my office to say, oh, this is infrastructure we need, this is infrastructure we need. Because that acts as a signal to private enterprise, to people in the economy, that this is government's focus and they will also start to explore opportunities along that line and you're not bothered about all these distractions about people doing rice farming or tomato farming or how you can help them build their own infrastructure. We can't do everything. We really need to prioritise.Tobi: Do we need more private initiatives? Because I don't know...I get squeamish a bit when big things that could really really move the lever of the economy relies a bit too much on government. Because we all know some of the problems in that area, and the slow decision-making process and everything. For example, Tolaram is building a port in Lagos, I think with Lagos state government and a few other partners. So should policy really be about making such initiatives easier and then letting private capital just do some of these things?Adedayo: For me, I think, the role of government is absolutely crucial even for whatever you want to do. I was reading about when US wanted to go to space and the kind of investment they made and how that sort of created knowledge for other industries and how they were able to build capacities along that line. And you want to think that was state-led to an extent. It's very easy to not credit some of the inventions you see to government even if it was as a result of a government grant or government-funded projects (on behalf of government). So I believe, absolutely, we really need high-quality people in power, to be honest. I think that's probably one of the challenges we have in Nigeria.Tobi: Yeah. I take that point but it's interesting you mentioned the Apollo project. Because, really, even for a big economy like the US undertaking such a huge project, what you see is that behind the veil of everything there are lots of private contractors, private companies and government just acts basically as the coordinator. So should we just let government coordinate rather than looking for money to invest and saying that "oh, because tax-to-GDP ratio is low, we can't have good roads; and because you can't raise VAT, the second Niger bridge will be slow" and things like that.Adedayo: Exactly. I absolutely agree with... I agree with that. But you know, the thing is coordination too...Tobi: Takes knowledge.Adedayo: Takes knowledge. And you need Trust. For instance, you talk about PP projects and in some cases government will take it over again, right?Tobi: Yeah, and sometimes...Adedayo: But they will not meet their commitment Tobi: Yeah. Yep.Adedayo:  So imagine you...Tobi: There is actually lots of that in oil and gas...er [industry]Adedayo: So imagine when you are now saying...you come out with a very bold policy proposal and they're saying "oh, don't worry we're just going to coordinate everything" and... I mean I'm even assuming you have the quality human capital to actually create strategies and to probably coordinate such systems and you invite private capital to "oh, let's come and do this". I feel like for Nigeria to do that, a lot of private interests will be reluctant because of the kind of history we've had. So it's not just about even knowledge, it's about trust in the ability of the government to do some of the things they want to do. So yeah, I absolutely agree with you that government can lead a lot of things and they do not necessarily have to do it themselves.Tobi: Yeah.Adedayo: They do not need to provide the capital themselves, private interests will do that on their behalf but they need to get coordination right. They need to get the strategy right initially and you need people in government to do that. Private contractors are not the people that decide what the US government should do. It's people, knowledgeable people within...Tobi: The government itself.Adedayo: The government that come up with it and now say "oh, invite private capital to pursue some of these things". It's something we need to think of. I feel like government needs to completely eradicate this mindset that they are going to fix everything because that the idea we're seeing with this loan they want to go and get. That oh, we refurbished this, we refurbished that. You want 30 billion dollars that you can't even pay for, you can't even pay for the existing level of debt.Tobi: That you probably cannot even raise.Adedayo: Exactly. Because I don't know who will give you 30 billion dollars.Tobi: I was talking to my partner on that and my first reaction was there is no way the Nigerian government can raise 30 billion dollars. This particular government.Adedayo: Exactly. I feel like it's something we're ... we really need more quality people in government. Unfortunately, we don't have enough quality human capital...maybe the few people who want to do it (they) get frustrated out of the system because of bureaucracy and all kinds of challenges we have. But I believe the starting point is getting hiring right in the public sector. To have people who would then say "private capital, come and do this or come and do that...this is what we want to do but we want you guys to lead the effort".Tobi: There's an interesting story in the news around that area recently. Adedayo: Of course.Tobi: So yeah. Getting hiring right. It's absolutely crucial even in public service. People usually think that you don't need smart minds to work in government but it's probably even a lot more important. P

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