Transcript
Speaker: This is Ballots and Beyond, a deeper dive into Nigeria's elections with Timi Sholeya and Toby Lawson.
Speaker: Good day everyone.
Speaker: This is Ballots and Beyond, a podcast that is looking on each episode in an in-depth way about one topic that we think are relevant to the Nigerian federal and state elections in late February 2023 and in early March.
Speaker: We are attempting to bring on a guest who has a great deal of expertise in some question of public policy or something that we think that voters should be thinking about or at least willing to think about and so that whoever wins, they're willing to hold their government accountable.
Speaker: It is powered by Ideas on Trap and co-hosted by myself, Timmy Scholler, my Build Infrastructure and Toby Lawson.
Speaker: Today our guest is Mrs. Tolak-May Martins.
Speaker: And the tentative topic that we are at least advancing with is public service delivery.
Speaker: I'll let her talk a little bit more about her own resume
Speaker: but she has led initiatives at the municipal state government in health, health delivery.
Speaker: She's run the Lagos State Rescue Unit, Abinicio.
Speaker: She has been one of the founding directors of Lagos State's waste management transformation system.
Speaker: To this day, if you pick up the phone and you have an emergency in Lagos State, the fact that there is a response, there's someone on the other end of the phone that is her,
Speaker: And so she's kind of been a great behind the scenes player over the last seven years in public service delivery for state and municipal governments.
Speaker: So we thought it would be good to bring her on because, you know, one of the things that we think about in Nigeria is, you know, you have to do your own power, you have to do your own water, you have to do your own waste.
Speaker: The idea that we build up these infrastructure systems for ourselves.
Speaker: And then what if there's a fire?
Speaker: And these are the things that we hope the government would do for us.
Speaker: When we look at civilized, quote unquote, civilized countries, we think of as a core area of government service delivery.
Speaker: Mrs. Martins has been trying to revolutionize that in Nigeria for most of a decade now.
Speaker: And so we thought we would get her perspective.
Speaker: Full disclosure, Mrs. Martins is also my elder sister.
Speaker: How did you get started and what were some of the early challenges you confronted on the job?
Speaker: So give us an intro into all the other issues.
Speaker: It started with a container.
Speaker: And I mean, I say this today in 2023 because we still have containers dropping every day.
Speaker: But the first project I worked on started with containers.
Speaker: a container falling off Udrelegba Bridge landing on a vehicle full of people and the people were actually alive miraculously but Lagos State didn't have its own cranes
Speaker: So there was nothing to lift the container off this vehicle.
Speaker: There had been a practice by which they would often rent, borrow, beg cranes and other heavy equipment from the major construction companies.
Speaker: And in fairness to them, there was a database of who to call and when.
Speaker: Unfortunately, on this particular day, the closest crane was in Nijiabu Day.
Speaker: So by the time it made its way, remember these are not fast-moving vehicles at all to Lagos, those people perished.
Speaker: I mean, to cut a long story short.
Speaker: And this was in the opening days of the previous administration.
Speaker: So this is the Akumia Modine administration.
Speaker: So he's going, you know, why on earth don't we have our own crane?
Speaker: This is ridiculous.
Speaker: How much is a crane?
Speaker: Why can't we just order a crane?
Speaker: And he actually goes ahead and places an order for a crane.
Speaker: But remember, cranes are not just sitting on the forecourt.
Speaker: OK, so there's going to be a lead time.
Speaker: Plus, there's procurement issues and so on.
Speaker: But they place an order for a crane.
Speaker: As I said, this is the opening days.
Speaker: So you're walking around and you're visiting locations, you're visiting all the sites.
Speaker: You get to the LASMA yard and it's a graveyard of vehicles that have been purchased for LASMA over the years.
Speaker: A good third of them have been decommissioned for one reason or another.
Speaker: So it's quite clear to anyone who's trying to join the dots up that, hang on, if I bring in a crane to this, in three months, in six months, in nine months, it's going to be in a graveyard somewhere.
Speaker: There's got to be a different way to do this.
Speaker: So I came on with a team I was brought in by someone else actually, because my background is in organizational psychology.
Speaker: And it was a case of how do you build a process that embeds with what is existing to respond to emergencies?
Speaker: There was already Command and Control Centre which took the call.
Speaker: So Lagos famously has had an emergency phone number for well over a decade.
Speaker: It actually came in under the Baratunifashola administration.
Speaker: So for that long, there has been a number and that number at the time was 767 because Lagos was so ahead of
Speaker: that the 112, which is the global or the international number, was already under NCC control.
Speaker: So Lagos had to come up with its own short code, and at the time came up with 767.
Speaker: So later on, when the rest of the country caught up, you know, Lagos also plugged in 112 to their systems, which is why you see on Lagos vehicle 767-112, right?
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: There have been many attempts to change 767 to a non-emergency number, but it's not really working.
Speaker: So here we are.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So in that process, you start to look at how can we make this work such that when people call, there's actually a response and there's a response that you can time and you can track and you can monitor.
Speaker: Who knows who is going where?
Speaker: So we've got a fire service.
Speaker: We've got the RRS, you know, the Rapid Response Squad from the police.
Speaker: You've got LASMA.
Speaker: You've got everybody.
Speaker: And in fairness, by this point, everyone has a representative in this building.
Speaker: Okay, but who's actually making sure that this works?
Speaker: So there's an agency, because in Lagos, there's always an agency.
Speaker: And it's Lagos State Emergency Management Agency.
Speaker: And by law, they're empowered to coordinate and oversee emergency response preparedness.
Speaker: But what had happened typically was everything was about after the fact.
Speaker: So after there's been a flood, people will come and help you.
Speaker: After the building has collapsed, people will come and, you know, do their best.
Speaker: It was always playing catch up.
Speaker: So the thinking was, how can we be a little more proactive about these things and make sure that there's a response in place?
Speaker: What does this look like?
Speaker: It looks like a command center quite all right, which is receiving the calls, the ability to dispatch the response, the ability to track the response, and having a diffused network so that there were responders closer to specific incident scenes.
Speaker: So at the time the proposal was, let's start with a yard where this new fleet belonging to what was then called the LASEMA response unit.
Speaker: So separate from FIRE, separate from LASAMBOS, which is domiciled with Ministry of Health, separate from everybody else, let this agency, which is empowered by law, actually have its own little response team so that it can get started.
Speaker: Because these people,
Speaker: Working privately would be more accountable, more accountable on time, more accountable on response, more accountable for the condition of the fleet.
Speaker: So that's how I got into this.
Speaker: I got in from trying to design what did an ideal process look like to us then designing it and realizing it didn't exist really.
Speaker: So building out the team.
Speaker: There was no other template you could take from within Nigeria.
Speaker: No.
Speaker: Not at the time, no.
Speaker: Because like I said, Nemar will come in after.
Speaker: Everybody was always coming in after.
Speaker: How do you actually get on the ground so that you're minimizing issues?
Speaker: So the Ujuru Olegba people, did they live or did they die?
Speaker: Those people perished, that's the point.
Speaker: And that's the tragedy there, right?
Speaker: The crystallizing moment was that had there been such a service, they would have lived.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And why it's very sad, because in 2023, containers are still falling.
Speaker: And it's actually, if I tell you that forensically is such a minor issue and so indicative of the challenges we have in Lagos, it's really a case of the barriers at the bridge.
Speaker: There need to be height barriers at the bridge.
Speaker: The height barriers keep getting installed and are removed at night.
Speaker: So that's the first reason why trucks carrying containers still go on a juror like a bridge.
Speaker: The second reason, because I keep getting asked this, if you know this, why do containers keep falling in legals?
Speaker: I'll tell you why.
Speaker: The truck owners have done an assessment, a risk assessment, and have decided that it is worth spending
Speaker: losing the container, they've weighed it up and decided that if, as is inevitable, they get into a pothole or whatever, and the truck loses its balance, it's better for the container to fall and the truck to survive.
Speaker: If the container is properly attached to the truck, then everything's going to go over.
Speaker: not just the container.
Speaker: Jesus Christ.
Speaker: It is really that simple.
Speaker: That's crazy.
Speaker: Like, and the trucks insured.
Speaker: Like, I mean, that's the whole reason for insurance.
Speaker: How many are insured and for how much vis-a-vis the condition of our roads?
Speaker: Have you seen the Badagri roads?
Speaker: Have you seen the roads?
Speaker: Like, you know, like real talk.
Speaker: This is why containers keep falling.
Speaker: The roads are so bad that the truck owners, not the drivers, have made a decision not to properly secure the trucks on the containers.
Speaker: The containers to the trucks, rather.
Speaker: So that's how I got into this.
Speaker: We would call this a PPP model, right?
Speaker: So this PPP model is working.
Speaker: You have a private company or private operation company.
Speaker: wearing a public face and providing a service that was appreciated.
Speaker: And you know, people's lives were saved.
Speaker: It's actually something that I'm extremely proud of because, you know, one of the things I talk about often is how you see the beginning of a horror movie, right?
Speaker: And you put on the light and it doesn't come on.
Speaker: You turn on the taps and no water comes out.
Speaker: You pick up the phone and the phone is dead.
Speaker: And you know, for some of us, that's Nigeria, like that's Nigeria in summary, right?
Speaker: So the fact that for once you could actually pick up the phone and you could call someone, that was step one.
Speaker: We met a situation where you could call someone, but then that help could come and we knew how quickly help could come.
Speaker: That last mile, that golden hour was very important.
Speaker: The challenge today is one has become a victim of one's own success because now people expect you to respond.
Speaker: The fleet hasn't grown significantly.
Speaker: The response is still challenged.
Speaker: We don't have more centers.
Speaker: So now you are back to very long wait times because now people expect this service and the service is constrained because it hasn't grown substantially since 2016 when it was launched.
Speaker: And you can imagine how much Lagos has grown in that time.
Speaker: So it's one of those, really.
Speaker: Is that one of the challenges to pivot to the topic?
Speaker: Like, if you're a private business and more and more people were calling for your services, you would be growing.
Speaker: You would be investing.
Speaker: You'd be organically growing.
Speaker: But because it's public sector, we're trying to focus a little bit on public sector in Nigeria and how that works.
Speaker: And so part of the interesting thing was having someone who had started this business
Speaker: If you were a water supplier who was drilling really well, or a diesel supplier or a trash collector, your fleet would be... Yeah, it would have grown threefold.
Speaker: Yeah, it would have grown threefold in this period of time, but it just hasn't.
Speaker: And again, trying to tie it into our narrative, which is that it doesn't require the citizens to demand of their representatives and elected representatives
Speaker: functionally demand more resources for the things that they need and that they wish the government to provide for them.
Speaker: Because that's what you see in much more mature democracies, right?
Speaker: Which is like the Rishi Sunak in the UK has just put a huge amount of money behind expert police.
Speaker: All of these things where there's no commercial incentive for it, but it's required by the citizens.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: So that's the big challenge about public goods and public services generally, because the customers can't pay.
Speaker: The beneficiaries are not in a position to pay for the services and the services are required.
Speaker: So it is a conundrum in public service delivery.
Speaker: And it's the approach to resolving that is more complex than we have time or space for to be a candid.
Speaker: But yeah, that's the challenge that you have.
Speaker: which is no one's paying for this.
Speaker: What is the political benefit, especially when a lot of the emergencies, challenges,
Speaker: could be prevented or are caused by other system failures, right?
Speaker: And I'll give an example of that.
Speaker: When we have a pipeline explosion and then the entire neighborhood has to be evacuated because they've been rendered homeless and then they are put in one of the disaster relief camps for three months.
Speaker: Okay, so who's going to give you a cookie for that?
Speaker: Because the pipeline should never have exploded in the first place and rendered them homeless, you know?
Speaker: So this is often...
Speaker: the challenge because the bar is quite low.
Speaker: And of course you can't really market your offerings because that's what the state compulsory collects taxes for.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So it's a big issue with all public service goods.
Speaker: Some it's more straightforward than others.
Speaker: In situations where people have gotten used to paying for a service, so water.
Speaker: If you've gotten used to buying water from Mirua or Baitanka or Jerry Can,
Speaker: Then yes, if Lagos State's municipal water starts coming in, paying for that, you know, there's already muscle memory in that regard.
Speaker: You're used to paying, so you'll pay.
Speaker: But otherwise, you know, how do we cost these things?
Speaker: How do we ensure that they get paid for?
Speaker: The roadmaps are there.
Speaker: The buying plans are there.
Speaker: Everybody knows precisely what we need.
Speaker: The fire service stations, for example, all got an upgrade last year.
Speaker: Lagos, they got much more fire appraisals.
Speaker: Okay, so that's in place now.
Speaker: That's taxpayers' money at work.
Speaker: And yet, these are things you hope never to need.
Speaker: Yeah, I remember looking at the insurance here between East African countries and Kenya and it's stark.
Speaker: Kenyans just have life insurance.
Speaker: If you're a driver there, you have life insurance, you'll cover your burial, your wife, your kids, etc.
Speaker: Talk to millionaires, billionaires here who have no wills, no life insurance.
Speaker: It can be a little shocking.
Speaker: And that's your electorate at the end of the day.
Speaker: That's who's voting.
Speaker: That's who's paying taxes.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I want to go back a little bit.
Speaker: I'm speaking for myself.
Speaker: Personally, I found it shocking that Lagos, they didn't have a grain for that long.
Speaker: They must have had one to be.
Speaker: I think it probably went the way of all the other vehicles.
Speaker: So they bought another one.
Speaker: That's what I'm trying to say.
Speaker: They probably had one at some point.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: My question then is what causes, at least in your own experience, what causes these redundancies?
Speaker: Because it sort of feeds into what we complain about public sector service generally, not just legal states.
Speaker: And I mean, when we were brainstorming this episode with TBS, I made the point that one of the ways that citizens judge the capacity of their government is the effectiveness of public services.
Speaker: You know, and you can't really wrap your head around the fact that there are people
Speaker: There are government departments staffed to think about these problems and to find solutions to them.
Speaker: And yet nothing is happening.
Speaker: So in your experience, what really causes the redundancies?
Speaker: Why is there no consistency?
Speaker: I brainstormed a little bit with my team also for this conversation.
Speaker: And we talked about the ambiguity of ownership.
Speaker: I remember...
Speaker: Gordon Brown, actually, making a big play for a joined up government.
Speaker: You know, the idea that everybody needed to be in a room talking because then you would maximize resources better.
Speaker: You would streamline conversations.
Speaker: You would ensure that, you know, where there was overlap, Party A and Party B would work together.
Speaker: But you quickly realize that that's a private sector approach because you are looking for resource maximization and efficiency.
Speaker: Everybody else is looking for what is their own.
Speaker: And you know, honestly, I'll put aside graft.
Speaker: It may sound weird, but I will actually put aside graft and you have to understand that people who have come into this space, as you've said, they're being paid below market rates.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So what is their leverage?
Speaker: It's control.
Speaker: It's power.
Speaker: its relevance.
Speaker: So the file must touch my desk.
Speaker: This matter must come to me.
Speaker: My agency must weigh in.
Speaker: I must see the memo.
Speaker: There is all that.
Speaker: And what that does is... Sclerosis.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Sclerosis, number one.
Speaker: Number two, it ends up with something that doesn't look anything like what was originally conceived because it's bloated.
Speaker: Consensus and efficiency...
Speaker: You know, are they bedfellows at all?
Speaker: Not usually.
Speaker: So everything at best ends up being a middle ground.
Speaker: You've tried to take on everybody.
Speaker: Try to take on all stakeholders.
Speaker: That's the word we use at No-Sale.
Speaker: You know, so who are the stakeholders and how they've been carried along?
Speaker: So that's why it doesn't, because we're not going for the most efficient.
Speaker: We're going for the most liked or the most palatable to as many people as possible.
Speaker: So efficiency is not the driver.
Speaker: A big challenge for us is, okay, so there's an incident.
Speaker: Let's assign one ambulance from one agency, but everybody wants to go there because everybody wants to
Speaker: reports that they've been there.
Speaker: In the context particularly, you know, when you think about it, like, luckily, we are not in a tectonically unstable area.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: In this Turkish-serious situation.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You know, you really... We're very, very fortunate here because we're very, very fortunate.
Speaker: No colds, no... We're very fortunate.
Speaker: And also, not that much inclement weather because you made the recommendations, we're going to need these, we need these sensors, we need more of this
Speaker: We need to have certain... I don't want to get technical, but there's certain equipment that the rescue workers need to have now.
Speaker: And...
Speaker: Nobody has said no.
Speaker: It's in the plans.
Speaker: Everybody knows we need it, but there are constraints.
Speaker: Isn't part of the point about the discussion that one of the constraints seems to be a lack of political capital in the sense that the constituents aren't clamoring for this stuff until something bad happens and they wonder why it was not there in the first place?
Speaker: Yes, I think that's accurate.
Speaker: But I will say that political will is probably how we are still here.
Speaker: You know, so we've had the political support.
Speaker: There is an understanding that these emergency services are required and that they are required for a city of Lagos' stature, of Lagos' standing, of Lagos' ambition, and that they need to grow.
Speaker: It's just that the funding needs to catch up with the ambition and the understanding.
Speaker: That's all.
Speaker: And I think that's probably the case in every sector.
Speaker: There are limited resources.
Speaker: So sometimes you just have to make do.
Speaker: I could see straight away from your answers that it's one of the reasons why we have this pockets of effectiveness phenomenon in public service and we don't have coordination.
Speaker: So do you have ideas on how to change this particular culture of control, basically?
Speaker: Putting control above efficiency in public service?
Speaker: Okay, so I'm going to move to health service delivery because that's my favorite anecdote about this control thing and efficiency.
Speaker: This was just generally in pitching governments on digitization of healthcare, right?
Speaker: So that's something I've worked on, you know, digitizing healthcare records, electronic medical records, electronic management, testing, building out what that looks like for resource-poor healthcare facilities, right?
Speaker: But here's the thing about when you digitize healthcare, there are three sort of clear benefits.
Speaker: The first is that it improves the patient's experience.
Speaker: They've been reminded about their appointments.
Speaker: They've been given a window, the ages spent looking for their card, all that stops because the records can be pulled up.
Speaker: So the patient experience is improved.
Speaker: Another benefit is for the administrators, you can quickly identify where the cost issues are, where there are inconsistencies.
Speaker: And to a certain extent, for private sector healthcare facilities, certainly you see where your cost centers are, where your profit centers are, where you should be investing and where you should direct efforts.
Speaker: Now, a lot of public facilities, healthcare facilities, are run pseudo-privately in the sense that some aspects, especially the pharmacy and diagnostics, have been partially commercialized.
Speaker: And so those benefits are available to public sector as well as private sector healthcare facilities.
Speaker: Now, so for ages, we were trying to sell healthcare using those first two advantages.
Speaker: And it wasn't getting traction with public sector.
Speaker: It wasn't that exciting.
Speaker: It was like, yeah, so what?
Speaker: Patients have a better experience.
Speaker: You know, there's this old joke.
Speaker: Jamiya and I are
Speaker: the children of doctors for more than one generation.
Speaker: So there's a joke that patients are so-called because they're supposed to be patient.
Speaker: They're supposed to wait, you know.
Speaker: Waiting never hurts anyone, right?
Speaker: So when you try to tell an old school doctor that, oh, you know, we can get faster patients processing, lower patient wait times, it's not really a trigger for them.
Speaker: They're like, oh, okay, cool.
Speaker: But it's a nice to have, right?
Speaker: It's not a must have.
Speaker: But when we were able to show them and see their costings as administrators, administrators tend to be non-healthcare,
Speaker: practitioners, even if they're doctors, most of them have stopped practicing, right?
Speaker: So you would be able to tell revenue at the touch of a button, a dashboard showing you this.
Speaker: Suddenly we're speaking their language because it's control, right?
Speaker: It's oversight.
Speaker: It's the ability to see who is doing what and where.
Speaker: And that was the self.
Speaker: To go back to your question, I don't know how to bring the desire or the need for control because that is the lever.
Speaker: That's what determines what projects get greenlit.
Speaker: That's what they view to be the best investment of political will and political drive and political power.
Speaker: Projects over which there is control or that the ownership is not ambiguous.
Speaker: So we're talking about a couple of things that work and in particular, like healthcare's little hybrid in terms of public and private.
Speaker: Let's talk about waste management a little bit, right?
Speaker: Because this is an area in which you have like vast experience in the attempt to do waste management transformation.
Speaker: And I'm speaking specifically about your experience, kind of directing those initiatives for VisionScape.
Speaker: What are the takeaways, particularly because we're talking about this in the context of the new administrations, and one of the things that I've always thought, which is the failure of the VisionScape initiative, has made politicians politically cowardly in taking on new PPP or public initiatives.
Speaker: Because it's like, well,
Speaker: Actually, the people are not expecting this.
Speaker: My attempt to intervene has cost me politically.
Speaker: Maybe I should just leave them to be doing whatever they were doing, how they're doing.
Speaker: And I think political cowardice is actually something that I see a great deal happen.
Speaker: Like with power, for instance, which is my industry, right?
Speaker: Or with gas.
Speaker: One of the things I see people say in government is like, it's not really working right now, but no one is blaming me.
Speaker: Let me not put my hand inside there.
Speaker: And so I wonder about the Amber Day Visual Escape Bear Trap and what you think about that particular experience.
Speaker: So back to ownership.
Speaker: I think public-private partnerships work when the private sector stays in the rear or when the public face is much more visible.
Speaker: So that's the first thing.
Speaker: I don't know that if everything hadn't been branded as LOMA, that the exercise would not have been
Speaker: more successful than it was.
Speaker: So that's the first thing.
Speaker: I wonder if the enabling law would allow for some agencies or some entities to be part privatized.
Speaker: And it's quite clear that there is funding.
Speaker: And you can look at, I guess, the LCC model for that.
Speaker: So that's the first thing.
Speaker: I think in the example you're giving specifically, it was already in private hands, or should we say semi-private hands?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And so this was a case of which sets of hands were more powerful than the others.
Speaker: It wasn't a straight-up government to private.
Speaker: It had already been semi-privatized, and...
Speaker: You know, we've been talking a lot about structures lately, but I think something critical about the existing structure that we try to disrupt was that bills were being issued to individuals, private homes, corporate entities.
Speaker: With legal state letterhead, but when you look down, you're paying into a private entity's account number.
Speaker: So this was state backing to collect private money privately.
Speaker: And the bear trap was someone just looking at the numbers.
Speaker: You see, I think it's so important to understand that the numbers just tell one part of a story.
Speaker: You will often...
Speaker: have to take into account what do these numbers actually represent?
Speaker: This Naira, this Kabul, what does it represent?
Speaker: Because we were coming from a situation where monthly LOMA had recurring expenditure of 1.2 billion.
Speaker: 900 or so of that was going on pensions and overheads and 300 million was going on OPEX.
Speaker: I'm going to come back to be sure about these figures because I am drawing very much from memory.
Speaker: So there may be a side note later on, but I think I'm correct.
Speaker: And so for a governor who had been an accountant in general, he couldn't see a way out.
Speaker: He was like, the infrastructure has decayed on us.
Speaker: We need new infrastructure.
Speaker: How can we fund this?
Speaker: We're already spending as much as we can.
Speaker: And so when it's like, hang on, what if we committed some of these funds to actually investing in the fleets, investing in
Speaker: upgrading the existing infrastructure.
Speaker: So that's the transfer loading stations, the depots.
Speaker: This landfill that's in my backyard is an eyesore, shouldn't be there.
Speaker: It's the first thing you see when you get into Lagos by road.
Speaker: What can we do?
Speaker: We need to move this.
Speaker: We need to contain it.
Speaker: I'm talking about Lucio Sun.
Speaker: Yes, I'm talking about Lucio Sun landfill, which is a former quarry and is 12 or 14 stories deep with waste.
Speaker: They have that waiting to happen.
Speaker: It was a very ambitious plan.
Speaker: I think maybe too many moving pieces for one person to try to take on in four years.
Speaker: You have now said that it was very ambitious.
Speaker: I'm going to try and anatomize it a little bit, right?
Speaker: Which is, was the ambitious part trying to take on something that had been in private sector hands?
Speaker: So that was one, that's one for sure.
Speaker: You've also identified the fact that it wasn't branded as a state initiative, right?
Speaker: So there's a certain level of buy-in that you get there.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: What you've not said is why it didn't work.
Speaker: I did kind of say that there were too many moving pieces.
Speaker: And so what then happened is you spend your time fighting, playing whack-a-mole, because the entity that's spending 1.2 billion is not really finding you funny because they know how that 1.2 billion is going.
Speaker: The value chain of recyclers, you know, people trading in plastic,
Speaker: People, you know, trading in the existing waste value chain.
Speaker: The PSP is also.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The PSP is private sector partners in waste collection.
Speaker: Who, like I said, had the ability to issue bills with Lagos State Letterhead and had been doing so.
Speaker: since the Tinimbo administration.
Speaker: So they didn't understand what this was about, right?
Speaker: They didn't understand why someone else was being empowered in this way.
Speaker: And to be honest, the project was actually so multifaceted.
Speaker: You know, there was a lot of roar at one time about why it was a new entity, why it wasn't a company that had years of waste management experience.
Speaker: And
Speaker: I think something that people don't take into account is how hard it is to get people who aren't from this place to invest in this place.
Speaker: Even reputationally.
Speaker: This is not just waste.
Speaker: People love, Twitter detective love to go online and check companies' house and see that it's a new entity or it's an SPV.
Speaker: People don't want to be exposed to the risk of this.
Speaker: So one, you're both shading and previous guest you've had.
Speaker: But then two, you're echoing something that our first guest, Dr. Andrew Levin, the chief economist for South Africa, PwC, says that when partners of his from other regions call him and put their clients in touch,
Speaker: he suddenly discourages those people from investing in this place.
Speaker: It is really hard if you have no almost like blood stake in Nigeria to understand why you would engage upon one of these endeavors.
Speaker: And you're tying together a number of things.
Speaker: You know, Pola Fakude, head of advisory at the Africa Finance Corporation, who was a subsequent guest, he said that
Speaker: All of these arrangements that he understands as he signs them and that they're signed, that they are going to be reneged upon and have to be renegotiated.
Speaker: Now, because he does this, he kind of takes that in as a built-in cost, understanding that what we're signing today is not what's actually going to happen.
Speaker: But for most people, even for many people like me who work in this industry, that's kind of nuts that we'll spend a great deal of time because isn't that the point with the visionscape thing?
Speaker: that maybe it founded under a lack of flexibility about the fact that what was initially signed into law and arranged could never really obtain in real life.
Speaker: When you are part and parcel of something like that,
Speaker: you will inevitably have to self-reflect at some point, you know, like, what was my role in this?
Speaker: How could it have gone differently?
Speaker: And, you know, it's been a while, which is why I guess I'm able to sort of enumerate the issues.
Speaker: You're always going to see those entities,
Speaker: The challenge, therefore, is in acknowledging that.
Speaker: You see, I will concede that many times a lot of these companies will still try to do a shock and awe thing.
Speaker: That was probably one mistake as well.
Speaker: I've got a comment slash question on the visionscape thing.
Speaker: For some of these challenges, do you think that there's also a bit of a communication, public relations failure, particularly with this prevailing episode of Visionscape?
Speaker: I can say, at least from a customer's perspective, that not everybody was happy with the PSPs and the quality of service they were getting.
Speaker: And perhaps if the vision of VS had been communicated more directly to the customer, maybe there would have been some buying and it would be easier.
Speaker: Yes, I will agree.
Speaker: But then, Toby, I want you to recount a little bit of the experience you were telling me that some of the people in your media environments had
Speaker: Yeah, so I mean, without leaning too much, because I would say that it's limited to waste management.
Speaker: You see it with power and so many other public service, you know, which I think is a bit of a design problem.
Speaker: Like some of the solutions are not designed for all customers at once and how they use these services, because there are multiple leaders.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So, for example, in my old neighborhood, we were actually pretty pissed with the PSP.
Speaker: For one reason, there was an erosion, of course, due to rain that destroyed the entire road.
Speaker: So for like a year, the PSP truck did not come to the neighborhood and they sent bills every month.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So when Visionscape sort of stopped them, and this is an observational point, not an empirical one, I should say, there was a bit of a relief that, OK, so these people would think they can't be lost without actually rendering the service.
Speaker: There's somebody here to compete or at least stop that, you know?
Speaker: But the implementation was questionable because then you then migrated to this system where people then have to walk two, three kilometres to dispose their trash because that's where the visions keep waste being relocated.
Speaker: You know, and what you see is that people resorted to all kinds of bad habits of putting their waste on the road and in drainages.
Speaker: I mean, that's to say, eh?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That bringing out their waste on the road was a direct attempt to sabotage the efforts.
Speaker: Honestly, we have it on record.
Speaker: That at the time was a kojade, right?
Speaker: Now, what I'll say is the plan was never to actually stop anyone.
Speaker: You know, and this is what you're saying back to this idea of communication.
Speaker: Towards the end, there was actually a partnership where a lot of them were on
Speaker: Visualscape's payroll to carry out the work, actually.
Speaker: Now, in your estate's case, I don't have the specific estate, but I would imagine that one of the fun things we did was
Speaker: we did an audit of the existing PSP trucks.
Speaker: We actually had inspection points and they were all to bring their trucks because we were trying to improve the standards, right?
Speaker: So make sure that the trucks actually worked.
Speaker: Identify which trucks had a proper compactors or working compactors, which could lift bins and so on.
Speaker: Bins were on order.
Speaker: All residents were supposed to eventually have one and you were supposed to stop paying
Speaker: your monthly bill in that way.
Speaker: And it was to be a different levy payable direct to the government.
Speaker: So this plan was a five year plan.
Speaker: And that's why I say that I tend to be now in any kind of initiative, I really am the cautionary voice in Rome when I'm like, okay, we have 10 things we're trying to achieve.
Speaker: Let's start with two because I learned that lesson in a very sort of hard way.
Speaker: that you kind of have to pick the battles.
Speaker: But then you are confronted with political will and political relevance.
Speaker: Very few people, even when its incumbent parties seem to be interested in something that's going to take time.
Speaker: Everybody wants it done now, now, now.
Speaker: I don't know how to address that.
Speaker: That's probably where I would move to on another issue, which is one of the big obstacles is a lot of the political...
Speaker: players don't want to be told the truth about realistic timelines, realistic communication plans, realistic plans for taking ownership, a phased approach.
Speaker: This was a five-year plan.
Speaker: It was never marketed as anything other than that.
Speaker: So really and truly, if I'm to go back,
Speaker: The PSPs and the private operator of VisionScape should have been allowed to operate in parallel.
Speaker: But the problem was nobody wanted to fund two schemes.
Speaker: Lagos is dirty again today.
Speaker: Lagos is filthy and no shade to anybody.
Speaker: It's because the approach to cleaning Lagos has to be in multiple streams.
Speaker: There need to be trucks that are just picking up waste.
Speaker: Random waste.
Speaker: Then there need to be trucks that are actually going door to door or neighborhood to neighborhood or local government to local government.
Speaker: And then there needs to be people who are cleaning.
Speaker: Washing the bins, washing the streets, emptying the gutters.
Speaker: The whole drainage thing is another separate... And this is the funny thing, VisualScape didn't even touch the drainage.
Speaker: The drainage is another issue.
Speaker: So to move from Lagos, what the lessons could be, would be...
Speaker: incentivizing you know timmy mentioned sanctions under his breath just now but you want to actually incentivize good behavior you want to teach good behavior and you want to start early we went into the schools and had started environment clubs and were funding clubs because we recognized that you need to start this change behavior till tomorrow people throw trash out of the window in their cars you see it and
Speaker: Each time I'm still stunned that people think it's okay.
Speaker: And you know, Toby, to sort of almost go back to where you started with communication, because one of the things I do now is I train on communication, right?
Speaker: And messaging, because the best person to ask about an accident is someone who has been in the car.
Speaker: I recognize just how often everybody's saying something and people are taking away different pieces of information.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So one critical area that government can actually work on is this idea of distilling their messaging.
Speaker: They think it's enough to say it during campaign season.
Speaker: People go on and on about Singapore, for example, and how clean and amazing it is.
Speaker: And still on the subway, there's messaging.
Speaker: Till tomorrow, don't spit, don't do this, don't do that.
Speaker: Why do you have to keep reiterating the message?
Speaker: On the tube, you've still got mind the gap.
Speaker: How old is the tube?
Speaker: It's because you have people coming fresh from all parts of the world every day who don't know they need to mind the gap.
Speaker: You have children who are getting onto the tube for the first time who don't know that they need to mind the gap.
Speaker: So you've got to keep saying daily, mind the gap.
Speaker: So we have a real problem here with messaging.
Speaker: It's funny because if I've taken anything away from this last seven year adventure,
Speaker: my interests or the point at which I have the biggest passion now is about how do you distill these big ideas into small, understandable bite-sized, what we call in sort of social media terms, snackable snippets of information that can actually change behavior.
Speaker: Because we've still got people littering.
Speaker: We've still got people defecating.
Speaker: We've still got people urinating.
Speaker: And you see, you'll say it's the lack of, but which comes first, right?
Speaker: And that's where I have found that
Speaker: You know, we want to keep talking.
Speaker: So to go back, on the Tua Elegwa Bridge, for example, my prayer has been that the local government, the area, the neighborhood should recognize and begin to stop the trucks who want to climb up.
Speaker: You know, they need to start to see.
Speaker: When people go up to take down the barrier.
Speaker: Yeah, when people go up to take the barrier, you know, they need to self-police for that.
Speaker: It's the Nigerian problem.
Speaker: God doesn't come down to do these things now.
Speaker: Some of them we have to do ourselves.
Speaker: And for emergencies, we need to self-police.
Speaker: When you see someone building higher than their plan, you need to self-police.
Speaker: You just need to self-police better.
Speaker: Yeah, I think what will make your job easier in the future, I mean, on this communication issue is...
Speaker: To get more buying, I think political leaders have to take a less adversarial approach to citizens.
Speaker: If you get citizens to really buy into your vision and your idea, self-policing would be easy.
Speaker: But I mean, political leaders, they are flippant about the idea of what Nigerians are.
Speaker: Flippant about studying.
Speaker: Both.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So in terms of service delivery, and again, looking a little bit more like, let's say that you were transplanted into the new president's kitchen cabinet and you were given kind of this brief, like let's make
Speaker: public services work, right?
Speaker: You know, we know how to do oil, we know how to do construction, we know how to steal money, but like public services, like let's just from the center, do you think that there are things that the federal government could or should be doing?
Speaker: And then two, who would those be in the event that you did?
Speaker: Or if they had no role, what could they do to assist other people?
Speaker: You know, we talk often about a maintenance culture and the lack thereof.
Speaker: And I think you can't separate the lack of maintenance filter from the lack of ownership.
Speaker: Toby, I don't want to guess your age.
Speaker: And Timmy won't know this, but we grew up with so many jingles, right?
Speaker: And it sounds so cheesy, but we really did grow up with a lot of jingles.
Speaker: Like, you know, we had all sorts.
Speaker: Talking about Nigeria.
Speaker: Oh, really?
Speaker: Yes, there was one.
Speaker: Join us.
Speaker: Come with us.
Speaker: We are on our way.
Speaker: Education for all by the year 2000 And of course, in 2023 it's a complete joke with 20 million children out of school Not proportionally, total population of out of school children in the world So it is a joke, but I think Is it a joke?
Speaker: Is it a joke or is it like actually the reason that you can't drive from here to Djebu a day without your life?
Speaker: It's a very cautionary tale
Speaker: But I think kitchen cabinet, you need to map out who's doing what, why, what the outcomes are, and where the overlaps are.
Speaker: It sounds so obvious, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But honestly, I'd start with that.
Speaker: I would start with mapping out who's doing what against what the priorities are.
Speaker: There's so many quick wins in this regard.
Speaker: You take the Ministry of Youth,
Speaker: sports and culture, I think.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: And then you take something like their biggest line item, which is the National Youth Service Corps.
Speaker: See, then you're getting into the Constitution.
Speaker: No, you're not.
Speaker: I'm just saying, but Obasan tied it in some really strange way, right?
Speaker: You know what's funny about NYZ?
Speaker: NYZ is so privatizable in the sense that it's something that you could actually tie to...
Speaker: CSR or building some academies They used to do that, right?
Speaker: But the truth is It was the way to get people jobs in banks and in corporations You could Because they would hire corporates and then they would hire them on, right?
Speaker: But you could so easily devolve that to states Devolve that to PPPs And take that budget and intervene with the 20 million who aren't even in school at all
Speaker: Because we are at the point where we have these graduates and I'm telling you as an employer of labour and as a communication specialist, they can't communicate.
Speaker: So let's go back.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And so you would not talk about the federal fire service?
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So if you were to ask me now specifically about my emergency work.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So emergency work.
Speaker: Here are the things.
Speaker: We know what incidents tend to occur by region, which regions are prone to flash flooding, which states have enough tower buildings to justify the fire trucks that have the mass, you know, that have the ladders.
Speaker: You can actually access.
Speaker: So I start with regional emergency centers, right?
Speaker: So for example, Lagos is often responding to stuff on the Lagos Fumo Expressways.
Speaker: It's a problem of mine because getting the assets there is a complete pain.
Speaker: But there are times when it affects them.
Speaker: There is, for example, a specific bend on one of the expressways.
Speaker: Would you believe that Ogilvy State has lost three chiefs of staff to that particular junction?
Speaker: Chiefs of staff of the governor?
Speaker: Yes, they have died, three of them.
Speaker: in separate administrations to this particular juncture.
Speaker: So you say to someone like Google state, at least monitor your expressway on one end, have a crash center on the other.
Speaker: Just start with paramedics and recovery vehicles and security and policing.
Speaker: Start with that, right?
Speaker: But where I would be going with this was three or four states can actually share.
Speaker: First of all, NCC has
Speaker: call centers all over the country.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Right?
Speaker: What do they do?
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: And that's why we get some of the calls.
Speaker: Lagos gets the calls that happen on the expatriate because it depends on where the cell tower is and where the call is going to terminate.
Speaker: So that's how we often get to know something is happening on the border.
Speaker: Now, the relationship is the same party, so on and so forth.
Speaker: So very often, Lagos will do its best to respond.
Speaker: But they can't always.
Speaker: And that's not a sustainable situation.
Speaker: Because Lagos taxpayers shouldn't be subsidizing Auguste's taxpayers, frankly speaking.
Speaker: Now, Auguste has enough of industry to come up with something.
Speaker: So here's what I would do.
Speaker: Map them.
Speaker: It's been mapped.
Speaker: Find the map.
Speaker: They've mapped it, honestly, because NEMA does all these stakeholder things.
Speaker: Every state has a SEMA, the different degrees of funding.
Speaker: So map them, group them, and assign fleets to them or resources to them based on what the capabilities are.
Speaker: Train, train so that you have viable local emergency response systems.
Speaker: Funnily enough, that's one of the things we've done in Lagos now.
Speaker: We've built almost like a phone tree in the 35 LCDs so we know what is happening and we get information, right?
Speaker: Train, group them together accordingly, and then work on your prevention.
Speaker: Work on your prevention and your preparedness.
Speaker: So it's not always after the fact.
Speaker: So I'd change Nema's approach from coming in all guns blazing after everything has gone to the dogs.
Speaker: And I would make sure that you're actually working to build the resilience so people are better able to cope.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: I won't even try to enforce any standards yet.
Speaker: Yeah, we're not there.
Speaker: We're not there yet.
Speaker: That's the way I would start.
Speaker: So clusters of response, trained responders who can then go out as need be.
Speaker: And local teams with at least everybody there is
Speaker: basic life supports, a few advanced life supports.
Speaker: And I think also tracking so that you know who's where and what resources you can pull in.
Speaker: It's something we're working on in Lagos actually to develop a proper database of who's where, whether publicly owned or privately owned.
Speaker: So at least you know, I can ring this person and they can get something there.
Speaker: And that's documented and it's available for people to pull up immediately.
Speaker: So that would be my disaster management first steps.
Speaker: Because I want us to look at disaster prevention.
Speaker: Tita Oviad, the ex-co-founder of Heeram Health, she thinks like, you know, many of these centres really just need to be mothballed.
Speaker: Not putting words in her mouth, but she was almost like, start again.
Speaker: The primary health care centre and the federal centres seem to have deteriorated so much and many were not designed or are no longer fit for purpose.
Speaker: So... It speaks to the mapping issue, right?
Speaker: And looking at which states are in a position to look after themselves.
Speaker: Because you see, there's a big federal state that cuts me.
Speaker: Everybody has their budget and nobody wants to support.
Speaker: They're not even incentivized, I presume.
Speaker: Because if you allow for rationalization, then where there was three before, I have three, you have two.
Speaker: There's now only four for both of us to share, right?
Speaker: So I often look at that and I think to myself, and you see it in the federal system, particularly the American system, the American system upon which we model ourselves is incredibly wasteful.
Speaker: It's just because they're such a prosperous country, there's plenty of money so they can afford to run in parallel and waste.
Speaker: They can afford to waste.
Speaker: And I think to a certain extent, you find a lot of wastage at the federal level because they do these things because...
Speaker: they have to or they're empowered to and they don't take into account whether or not the state actually needs it and if necessary that's the best way to support the state so again it's the thing nobody wants to talk about and i said it looking at where there are overlaps and doing your best to streamline them but it takes me back to the issue of i have my budget why should i share my budget i have my power why should i give up my power to somebody else so that's going to be the challenge
Speaker: You have been listening to Ballots and Beyond with Timishulay and Toby Lawson.
Speaker: Thank you for listening.
Speaker: And on the next episode, we'll be talking to Taiwub Oyeidele, fiscal policy partner at PwC, to discuss tax policy in Nigeria and to continue our conversation on the fiscal health of the federal government.
Speaker: You don't want to miss it.
