Lynda Onefeli is the chairman of the Association of Professional Bodies of Nigeria (APBN), Lagos State Chapter. In this Interview with KELECHI EWUZIE, she shares her agenda which focuses on driving mentorship, capacity trainings for young professionals and what government needs to do to turn around the economy. Excerpt:
As the chairman of the Association of professional bodies in Nigeria, Lagos State chapter, what should members, government, and Nigerian professionals expect from your tenure?
In my investiture address as the chairman of the Lagos branch of APBN, I enunciated our agenda for this administration. I wish to reiterate that this administration have mapped out topnotch capacity building programmes for young professionals.
We know that the role of professionals in any economy is very crucial. So, it is important that we play our part because as we play our part, we are bettering our society and our nation.
In the course of my tenure, the executive committee plans to focus on series of training for young professionals because we know the economic terrain in Nigeria is tough particularly for start-ups.
We have mapped out designs and are in the process of organising training, mentorship sessions for young professionals. One unique thing about the Association of Professional Bodies of Nigeria (APBN), Lagos State Chapter is that it is made up of people from different professions.
Since we have different practice areas, it’s a bit unique because a training that is suited for a doctor may not be suited for a lawyer.
However, the association will work with various professional bodies to tailor the training and mentorship to each special profession, but this will be under the auspices of APBN Lagos State chapter. That is one of the major thing that we want to do.
Welfare of members is another agenda that we take seriously in APBN as a body. We don’t work with individual professional; we prefer to work with the various associations under the APBN. When we talk about welfare, we are looking at ways of improving the various professional bodies.
In our assessment of the various associations, we discovered that many professionals are obsolete and it is drawing them back. So, we have designed trainings on cyber security and data protection for each member.
The main mandate we have is to articulate the voices of professionals and relate same to the government. We articulate the voices of nationals in Lagos State. So, we will liaise with government in policy making and encourage the government to appoint the right professionals in places where they can function effectively.
When you look at the economic indices like high unemployment rate, rise in food prices among others. What advice do you have for the present government towards addressing these issues?
As a body of professionals, one of our roles is to articulate the voices of professionals when we have seminars. This October, we are holding a seminar with the theme: ‘Ease of doing business in Lagos’. The choice of the topic is because Lagos is our base. At the seminar, a lot of conversation will centre on how best to drive business growth in Lagos. We will at the end of the seminar prepare a communiqué which will be published and also sent to the government.
In that communiqué, there would be a lot of suggestions that would help government address issues around unemployment in Lagos in particular and Nigeria in general.
One of the ways to tackle unemployment is to build more factories, more businesses. If there is a favourable business environment for organisation to thrive, then they would create more jobs, knowing that the more businesses we have as a country, the more job opportunities we create.
It is not easy to do business in Lagos and other parts of the country. There are issues of multiple taxation, power, transportation, road infrastructure. So, there are loads of challenges that need to be addressed.
One of the things that are going to be a fall out from the public lecture would be to proffer solutions to these problems and extend these suggestions to the government. This, I believe, will go a long way to solve these problems if only government act on them.
How would you assess the corruption fights of the federal government so far?
Government should not pay lip service to the issue of corruption in Nigeria. Government has policies against corruption, what we need to find out is if such policies are been properly implemented.
The federal government has good intentions in its fight against corruption, what however is the problem is enforcement.
