Interview With HRH Sanusi Lamido Sanusi

Sanusi Lamido Sanusi NG@60

Winning the Central Banker of the year while a CBN Governor, HRH Sanusi Lamido Sanusi was asked on his reason for focusing on the Sustainable Development Goal launching a challenge to resolve poor education and gender inequality especially among the marginalized populace, His Highness responded to these question stating how each time he looked at the goals he thought of focusing on one or two thoroughly rather than chasing the goose; hence he decided to focus on the girl child and as it is widely known that children of educated mothers have a high chance of been educated than those of illiterate mothers. As the saying goes, if you educate a woman you educate a nation. Educating a girl child is the single bullet that shoots poverty to the heart.

It is important that we have high regard for the rights of the gender that contributes 50% of our total population; not doing this is undermining ourselves. He ploughed on the need for a drive to educate the girl child as issues surrounding domestic violence, forced marriage and arbitrary divorces will be dealt with when this gender access quality education. His Project which is done in partnership with Queen’s University Canada is set to empower teachers from these marginalized societies to deliver safe and economical education to these girl children. Currently, 10 teachers are been trained and the winner of the final competition will have this innovation deployed in their community. With a focus on getting funding to enable scaling from next year, it’s important to start with what is available.

When asked on his thoughts on hindrance to nation-building having vast experience in the private, public and traditional sector in Nigeria, he noted the difficulty in answering such question. Each sector has its peculiarities of problems and the private sector can sometimes be at the expense of the society. But, the public sector needs to be institutionalized. In Nigeria, he stated how public sectors have been personalized by political office holders where these institutions exist to serve the Chief Executive leaving politicians unchecked. Nigeria needs to build institutions and not individuals.

Mr Sanusi stated further how the constitution is weakened against ministers and quality of leaders. Every state is expected to produce ministers but the skill level of the ministers is not defined. Where the quality leaders are not properly defined those who are not qualified for the role are given hence leading to the suffering of the nation. He stated the essentiality of periodic assessment of ministers, publicizing them and setting consequences for nonperformance. The public sector must be handled like the private sector where certain key performance indicators are set.

Former Governor Sanusi advised diversification of the economy where true capitalism is practised and money movement is aided through the exchange of goods and services, and FMCGs are empowered.

Lastly, he emphasized on human capital development and the need to prepare our youth for the fourth revolution through financial literacy, investment in education especially IT, Robotic engineering etc.

He concluded the session stating there are good Nigerians and bad Nigerians and this isn’t based on ethnicity or religion.

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