When I was working with the State Government as a Political Appointee, I organized a youth empowerment program in which I planned to train and empower 500 young people in ICT related skills and help them to kick off.
After all the funds spent in that endeavor, only 3 out of the 500 are still in the field making a living out of that program. The rest either didn’t finish the program or finished the program and disappeared or went into the field and quit in less than one month.
When I left office and was considering a way to give back to people, so I can face my private life and do thing that gives me joy, I set up an entrepreneurship support fund.
Drawing a lesson from my previous empowerment experience. I decided that only those who have businesses that are already going on will receive the support funds to boost their businesses while we keep a tab on them and help them grow.
That too proved to be a really fruitless exercise, as the money went down the drain faster than we expected. Some were the recipients fault, some weren’t.
The truth is that growing businesses in Nigeria can be really unstable and if one isn’t extremely careful, he or she would fall off the cliff.
It was after these experiences that I began to rethink human empowerment, both by individuals, governments and NGOs.
I studied global economies and realized that what constitutes real mass empowerment is not handouts of funds, tools, equipments, materials, nor training and capacity building.
What constitutes real empowerment is the availability and certainty of WAGES and SALARIES.
Instead of sharing fertilizers to 10,000 farmers and call it empowerment, you use that money and set up a standard world class farmland that would employ 1000 people.
You don’t need 10,000 people to become struggling farmers to be able to feed the Nation. You just need one stable and successful farmer that can GAINFULLY employ 10,000 people, and you will be able to feed the Nation.
Instead of Sen Utazi Chukwuka to share 500 butterfly tailoring machines and Keke to his constituents, he can form a Public Private Partnership with a tested and trusted fashion designer, and set up a large fashion design company in his constituency that can employ 1000 people.
Instead of Sen. Okechukwu Ezea to share Coconut Seedlings to his constituents, he could have liaised with a successful entrepreneur in the zone to establish a very large Coconut Plantation in say Uzo Uwani, Enugu Ezike, Unadu, Itchi or Ekwegbe where large expanse of land can be easily found, and then set up an allied industry where things like Coconut oil are produced, so that the plantation will feed the factory.
That way, he must have created thousands of jobs directly and indirectly. But sharing it to the masses means that most of those seedlings died yesterday and only less than 5% will be alive by August next year.
If my principal and boss, His Excellency, Rt. Hon. Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi had chosen to build an agro-processing factory in any LGA in Enugu, instead of empowering over 780 farmers with 3.2 million naira each in 2017, that factory would have employed at least 5,000 people directly or indirectly.
Then food production would have been surplus. Funds will be generated for the state government and things would have been a lot better.
But over 90% of those who got the 3.2 million naira wasted the money or invested it wrongly. Only less than 5% are surviving courtesy of that fund.
The examples abound and the list goes on and on.
Empowerments in the form of training, capacity building, workshops, seminars, sharing of materials, machines and equipments, etc do not work. It empowers almost no one and make people even more miserable.
This is why we must rethink empowerment.
Obasanjo’s idea of operation feed the Nation was a wrong move.
We don’t need everyone to become a farmer, what we need is few farmers that can produce food for everybody.
That’s how successful nations work.