Mazi Sam Ohuabunwa, chairman of African Centre for Business Development, Strategy and Innovation. He is an Entrepreneur who practices and preaches Entrepreneurship. He uses the auspices of the Sam Ohuabunwa Foundation for Economic Empowerment (SOFEE) to teach entrepreneurship and mentor young entrepreneurs. In this interview with  Moses Nosike, he stressed the need to build investment hubs in South-East, South-South regions for development and help create employment in those regions.

Excerpts:

How does African Centre for Business Development, Strategy and Innovation  contribute to business development in Africa?

Essentially we are into business development and promotion. Our desire is to see how we can support enterprise development at all levels and ensure that businessmen and women understand the rudiment of what it takes to be in business, understand the principle and the processes. So we support and help to teach especially Nigerian young business people how to plan and develop business and also teach them how to recruit resources with human resource, material resource, financial resource and how to manage that business both in terms of management governance and corporate governance. Our desire is to ensure that businesses start and grow and achieve their mandate. Every year, one of the things we do is entrepreneurship summit which grants the opportunity to update entrepreneurs of all sizes about current developments within the industry and also criticise on critical issues that need to be advocated on and may be canvass with government. We also recognise those who have done well despite the challenges in the economy. That is what African Centre for Business Development, Strategy and Innovation stands for.

What have they achieve so far?

Well, we have held several summits and other business planning summit. We have held some programmes in the area of exposing businesses to market development through market exhibitions, trade fair and trade mission.

We know that through our conferences we have interacted with nothing less than 3000 business men especially those in the SME class, and we also have had very big business people like Oba Otediola of Honeywell, Dangote, Stella Okoli, Tony Elumelu, Zinox Managing Director and others, to come to mentor younger ones through their testimonies and also reveal the secret of success in entrepreneurship and business development.

That is the limited intact we have had. As I speak to you now, we have two programmes coming up; one in Abuja this September where we are looking at how to move businesses towards being able to generate dollar, we call it, agro-dollar or how to move away from petro-dollar to agro-dollar, which comes up back to back with the agric expo coming up in Abuja. We will also have a summit later in the year.

Again, we’re also developing what we call: “South-East, South-South Development Centre”, which we are trying to create in Aba to be a fulcrum for coordinating business development and other related community development issues. We know those places have governments, but a lot of international NGOs can also partner some people they can interact who understand the need to collaborate with them in carrying out development efforts or actualising business opportunities because we believe that South-South, South-East areas need entrepreneurial development to create more jobs and reduce some social issues that are bordering the zones.

Owing to lack of industries that created mass unemployment in South East, do you know if the governors are doing anything to that effect?

We’ve used many opportunities to communicate. There is a group called: “Ala Igbo Development Foundation”. And last December we had what we called: “Think Home Investment” business conference which was supposed to bring to the knowledge of everybody, especially the business people outside  Ala Igbo,the need to begin to invest at home and help to develop their territory. Remaining absentee landlords in the East is not the best. People travel home during Christmas and go, leaving the place decaying, run down and then bring social malign that make it difficult to own a home.

So that was on one side to attract investment. The other side was also to get government understand what business people need to grow or to make investment. But I must confess to you that the reception generally hadn’t been attractive. I believe that some of governors in the South-East have not understood the necessity to collaborate with the private sector to build the economy.

They so focussed on politics. But few of them are beginning to come to terms like Abia state for instance, is building up a private public sector agency that would promote investment because there are still all kinds of business activities in the South East but is so bristle, unstructured and is like peasant farming.

We need big investment. For instance, there are a lot business people doing shoes in Aba but they are still doing it in a peasant manner, purely manual and so much labour and much is not coming out, even capital to do it is minimised. If we have people who make big investment, they will do shoe factories.

We already have the skills, and that is an industry we can scale up in the East, scale up garment industry and spare parts manufacturing. There are areas the east already has a comparative advantage. We are not even speaking about hydro carbon area, things related to oil and gas.

The corridor is also being built through the concept of the South-South, South-East professionals in Nigeria who are going to build an energy corridor across the region. We are promoting through the South-South, South-East professionals because I belong to different groups, anything that would bring development to our people I find myself participating.


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