His Excellency, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu,
President-elect, Federal Republic of Nigeria,
Defence House,
Abuja.

Your Excellency, Sir,

I want to use this medium to officially congratulate you on your victory at the just-concluded general elections. The people of Nigeria have given you their mandate, and we are all proud to be associated with your vision of a 'RENEWED HOPE.' I pray that your tenure will usher in an era of renewed hope that will birth the Nigeria we have all dreamed of.

As the Director General of one of your campaign groups, the Federation of Artisans Association and Traders for Asiwaju and Shetima (FAATAS), and a patriotic Nigerian, may I, Your Excellency, sir, use this medium to pen down some ideas that I strongly believe would be of great value to the realisation of your mantra of renewed hope for Nigerians. Some of them are as follows:

ESTABLISHMENT OF MEDICAL TRUST FUND: The establishment of a Medical Trust Fund that will be dedicated to strengthening our existing primary healthcare centres across the 774 local government areas, the Federal Medical Centres, as well as our tertiary healthcare centres This fund can derive its funding from revenue realised from stamp duty and the electronic money transfer levy. Of course, legislative frameworks will be needed to model it in line with the existing Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TertFund).

Your Excellency can count on the support of the National Assembly. I would hope it would be passed on a bipartisan level because of the need to revamp our health sector and save the lives of Nigerians by reducing our high maternal mortality rate, avoiding many unavoidable deaths in our hospitals, and saving Nigerians billions of dollars in medical tourism.

FINANCIAL AUTONOMY TO ALL PUBLIC TERTIARY EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS: Currently, Nigeria pays billions of dollars to educate her students in various countries around the world; this is unacceptable in a country that once boasted of having some of the best higher education systems in the world. Nigeria has played host to some of the best minds in her institutions.

I believe this unpalatable and sorry state can be reversed by gradually granting financial autonomy to our higher institutions of learning. This will bring an end to the incessant strikes embarked upon by our dedicated lecturers and ensure that students receive the best education within the stipulated time.

This will be revolutionary, and in the shortest period, Nigerian educational institutions will compete favourably with others around the world. This move will also reduce pressure on our foreign exchange in two ways: firstly, Nigerian students will not have to source foreign exchange to pay for their education in other countries. Secondly, our institutions would also attract foreign students, which would bring much-needed foreign exchange earnings into the treasury.

To cushion the effect of this revolutionary move, deserving students from the lower classes can be granted subsidised fees through strengthened and transparent federal and state scholarship boards. Presently, many of our graduates have been tagged 'unemployable' by employers due to the mismatch between our curriculum and industry demands. More so, granting financial autonomy to our tertiary institutions will ensure value for money as the various institutions compete among themselves for funds, students, and instructors.

The long-term effect of this, though painful at inception, will be to put Nigeria on the map as one of the leaders in the fourth industrial revolution, which has already started by ensuring that our young, innovative, and dynamic youth have access to the best of education.

TOLLGATE SYSTEM INSTALLATION ON SELECTED MAJOR HIGHWAYS: As you may be aware, Your Excellency, sir, many of our major highways have become death traps due to neglect occasioned by a lack of funds for maintaining them. To reverse this trend, Your Excellency, may I suggest that the resources of the government in maintaining these roads should be complemented by tolling them. This can be achieved through public-private partnerships where the government embarks on concession agreements with both local and international companies that can use various models, including Build Operate Own (BOO) and other available models.

These companies will construct, maintain, and collect tolls for a period of time enough to cover their ROI. The government must consider local inputs in the composition of the companies to be considered for such a concession.

LOCAL GOVERNMENT AUTHORITY AUTONOMY: As the closest government to the people for service delivery, poverty eradication, and swift response, it is an international, and rationale to grant our local government autonomy. The present arrangement of a joint-account system with the States of the Federation is not helping development at the grassroots. Huge resources are committed to the states, thereby making them more powerful, and the governors become thin gods while local governments wallow in abject poverty.

PROACTIVE INNOVATION ON THE RAILWAY SYSTEM: The entire railway system must be overhauled by auditing all the foreign loans obtained since 1999 and projects executed up-to-date. There must be concerted efforts to ensure that our railway system is active and can transport goods and citizens across the country. This action will help a great deal in helping the traders reduce the cost of commodities, reduce pressure on our roads, and minimise road accidents.

ESTABLISHMENT OF A PEOPLE-ORIENTED BANK: Firstly, the Bank of Agriculture needs to be strengthened to fulfil its mandate by making loans available to our farmers. The Bank can be strengthened to serve other purposes by collaborating with other agencies that are agriculturally related and ensuring that loans are granted to only financially viable proposals for both small and large-scale farmers to achieve food security in our country. The system where the Central Bank of Nigeria leaves its core mandate to grant loans to farmers should come to an end upon your inauguration, your Excellency.

Also, in the same vein, a department in the Bank of Industry (BOI) can be dedicated to granting timely loans of between N1,000,000.00 (one million naira only) and N5,000,000.00 (five million naira only) to artisans, petty traders, and associations at a single-digit interest rate.

The collateral for such loans shall be a body of unions or cooperative societies. Such a bank will jump-start the economy and boost the living standard of the common man.

HARMONISATION OF MINISTRIES AND PARASTATALS: Some ministries and agencies only exist to add to the burden of wages without contributing anything to national development. These moribund government agencies should be merged with either ministries or universities to enable the government to reduce some of the burdens of bloated wages.

I believe that the Orosanye report should be revisited upon your inauguration, Your Excellency, to make our civil service effective, efficient, and optimally operated.

INVESTMENT IN MINDSET RESET: Nigerians must be made to change their orientations, value systems, ways of thinking, and general behaviours. We must revive our traditional culture of placing values above money. We must promote and reward uprightness and condemn moral decadence and all acts of economic sabotage. Nigerians must uphold a new perspective on life and look at issues differently.

Your Excellency, I am counting on you to drive this movement and a transformative shift in our national consciousness by re-engineering the Nigerian dream. In line with your mantra, on which we all campaigned, it is high time Nigerians believe in the capacity, capability, and great potential of their nation and make the necessary sacrifice to contribute their quota to that dream, irrespective of their location, profession, age, religion, or ethnicity.

For a start, the composition of your cabinet and the balancing of appointments across the 774 LGAs will bring everybody to rally around this dream by giving every Nigerian a sense of belonging in the affairs of their nation.

This will have a far-reaching effect both internally and externally. Your Excellency, I look forward to seeing improvement in the ranking of our Green Passport, which will command respect globally, a new nation where Nigerians are fiercely proud of their government and motherland.

ESTABLISHMENT OF SPECIAL COURTS FOR CORRUPTION: There must be special courts for corruption and economic crimes. The usual practice of endless litigation in corruption cases in our courts must be stopped. Justice delayed is justice denied. The era where people brazenly display illicit wealth with no fear of retribution must be, through speedy justice delivery, discouraged in our country. Many respected legal practitioners and academics have suggested that more judges are needed to efficiently deliver judgments across our various courts of justice. I hope that Your Excellency will heed this call and, upon inauguration, seek honest and upright Nigerians to fill these vacant and critical posts.

There are many innocent Nigerians lavished in various detention centres for petty offences that normally would not attract a prison sentence of six months to one year, awaiting trials for years due to our slow administration of justice.

INVESTMENT IN SOCIAL SECURITY: There must be heavy investment in our social security, pension reforms, and the provision of adequate care for people after retirement. If a worker knows that the system will not ignore him after retirement, the tendency to steal money in the office will be minimised.

EXCHANGE RATE MANAGEMENT: The government must abolish the dual exchange rate and introduce sanity into the foreign exchange system. The myriad numbers of Bureau de Change in Abuja, Kano, and Lagos must be reduced to a controllable size, and all their operations must be regulated by the appropriate regulatory framework.

This will boost the confidence of foreign investors in the independence of our central bank and allow them to bring the most needed foreign direct and foreign portfolio investments into our country.

I have every confidence in Your Excellency to make sure our apex bank is sanitized to ensure stable foreign exchange and price stability for economic growth and development.

TECHNICAL EDUCATION REVOLUTION: There must be a revolution in our technical education by reviving all technical colleges across the country to make them productive and innovative so that they can contribute their quota to the technological revolution for the present and future national needs. These colleges can save us billions of dollars that we use to import agricultural equipment, spare parts, and other critical tools needed for production.

It is through adequate investment in these colleges that they can begin to produce locally conceived and innovative solutions for our needs. Universities of Technology and Polytechnics must be forced to be practical-oriented to produce students that are employable and productive to the economy.

Your Excellency, sir, let me conclude by saying that there is no denying the fact that Nigeria is a blessed country in terms of human and natural resources. All hands must be on deck to ensure that we pay attention to discoveries and creativity that will help reduce capital flight and make our country self-sustaining and independent.

All the governors of the 36 states of the Federation, including the Federal Capital Territory, must be able to identify the comparative advantages of their respective states. They must be able to pilot the affairs of their state with internally generated revenue rather than relying on monthly intervention from the federal government.

Concerted efforts by the Federal Government are not sustainable; they are aggregates of developments from all the component states that make up the Federation of Nigeria.

It is my fervent hope that Nigeria can be great again if humble suggestions are encapsulated along with numerous brilliant ones from our incoming president and other patriotic people that are coming on board. Your Excellency, on your mandate, Nigerians stand and hope for a truly awakened giant that is finally ready to take her rightful place in the community of nations.

God bless the president-elect, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
God bless the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
 
Signed:
Alhaji Azeez Salako Olaniyi Muideen
Director-General, Federation of Artisans Associations and Traders for Asiwaju and Shetima (FAATAS).
EMAIL: roualmind911@icloud.com
11th May 2023

Student loans must be explored as a component of the financial autonomy of the tertiary institution.

The schools must have budgets for research and teaching comparable to institutions of similar cadre, and must be able to generate income from fees and services.

Students must have access to loans covering fees and living expenses..


For the rail system ,the government needs to be proactive,and go into partnership with the private sector.

While the government should own and continue to maintain the rail infrastructures, the coaches should be pluralised and privatised. This will maximise the use of the rails,and make the sector more robust.

This is in addition to everything you said