Never an Afterthought – Private Sector Pragmatism to Government Idealism & the N-Power Success Story empowerment of Nigerians by Afolabi Sokpehi Imoukhuede; Prima, Lagos; 2020; 370pp
By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu
People who serve in government in Nigeria need to publish books for the critical world to appraise their stewardship.
Afolabi Sokpehi Imoukhuede was appointed the Senior Special Assistant (SSA) to President Muhammadu Buhari on Job Creation and served as the head of the N-Power Job Creation component of the government’s National Social Investment Programme (NSIP) between 2015 and 2019.
A certified Project Management and Human Capital consultant with an emphasis on Technical, Vocational Education and Training (TVET), Afolabi Imoukhuede is remarkably trained for the job he eventually got in the Presidency, as he writes: “Ten years before this administration was sworn in for its first tenure, I had attended the Human Capital Institute in Washington D.C. USA and came out of that programme as a certified Human Capital Strategist (HCS). It is this artistic/scientific skill in human management that I am bringing to bear in the service of my fatherland through the N-Power programme.”
With his global fettle on the economies of the diverse continents, Imoukhuede avers that while Africa is the world’s last frontier in the fight against extreme poverty, the continent is also more crucially the next frontier in the world of global economic opportunities.
According to Imoukhuede, “when I met him in 2015, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo took the risk to appoint me as Senior Special Assistant to the President on Job Creation, with the knowledge that, if I failed, the government might be adversely affected.”
Afolabi’s charge was to deal with one leg of the multi-pronged National Social Investment Programme (NSIP), which was the N-Power component. The other components of the NSIP are the National Home-Grown School Feeding, the Government Economic Empowerment Programme (GEEP), which comprises the TraderMoni, MarketMoni & FarmerMoni and the direct Conditional Cash Transfers (CCT) to the “poorest families”.
N-Power was birthed with 350,000 applicants, of which 200,000 were selected after online tests. Afolabi gives the minutiae of the testing, physical verification, deployment, and enrolment in the N-Teach, N-Agro, and N-Health.
It’s crucial to note that Rivers State, a state-controlled by the opposition PDP, came out on top in the first enrolment with about 13,000 volunteers.
Afolabi’s formula is P-I-E-R, which translates thusly: Passion, Integrity, Empathy, Reliability and Resilience. Against the criticism of doubters, he submits that N-Power is indeed relevant to the vision of President Buhari to take 100 million Nigerians out of poverty within the next 10 years.
Never an Afterthought by Afolabi Sokpehi Imoukhuede HCS, with a foreword by Babatunde Raji Fashola, SAN, uses elegant language, photographs, tables, charts and graphs to inform that a new Nigeria is possible with the requisite commitment.
The jury for me is still out on the matter.
Uzor Maxim Uzoatu is a renowned poet, journalist and author.
Ayodelé is a Lagos-based journalist and the Content and Editorial Coordinator at Meiza. All around the megacity, I am steering diverse lifestyle magazine audiences with ingenious hacks and insights that spur fast, informed decisions in their busy lives.
