Festus Ibiam is the initiator of Real Estate Synergy Support Associates (RESSA) project. He is an educationist and investor in the sector. In this interview with Ngozi Okpalakunne, he spoke on the need for both the government and private school managements to provide enabling environment for teachers so as to encourage them to positively impact the next generation. Ibiam also spoke on the reasons some multinational companies are relocating to other sister countries for investment and what should be done to woo them back to the country. Excerpts:
Why is your project centered on teachers?
Our focus on teachers was born out of passion for proper education. Purpose gave birth to vision and vision attracts goal setting, and we must achieve our goal on nation building. Teachers are drivers of nation building. So, we in RESSA bringing solutions to housing deficit among teachers will in a long way bring peace of mind and a sense of purpose to live better life. When you give a man purpose, he will be committed, when committed he becomes creative, when he’s creative, he becomes productive, when he’s productive, he becomes successful and on the point of being successful, he becomes impactful. We want teachers to positively impact our generation.
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Considering the current economic crunch which has brought untold hardship to the masses, do you think now is the ideal time for teachers to invest on landed property?
In Real Estate Synergy Support Associates (RESSA) project, we have a well-planned strategy that over the years teachers have subscribed to and result was massive to the surprise of many of them on such achievement. You don’t need to be rich to buy land, but you can become rich by buying land. Since we started operation in 2018, many school teachers have embarked on their individual housing projects in our estates, we have also started extending our operations in other African countries like Cameroon, Kenya, Rwanda among others and we believe that the achievement we recorded in the lives of teachers in Nigeria will also be recorded in such countries.
Getting a landed property in Lagos in particular does not come so easy; what has your experience been like?
Getting landed property generally is not an easy task considering negotiations in a volatile market as it is. Many are ready to swindle investors, even land owners (Omoniles), some family will collect money without complete sharing to the parties involved. But in RESSA project, we ensure all title documents are verified, though we like to get involved in processing the title documents of a virgin land using our professional surveyors and lawyers before purchasing the land from owners and with that we know all the families involved and pay to the right owners thereby ensuring a peaceful environment for our clients.
What is your assessment of Nigeria at 63?
Nigeria at 63 is supposed to be a celebration of freedom and sustainable development cut across but no vision to attract drive. In this 21st century era Nigeria still has larger population out-of-school children due to poor governance, low policy implementation, low proper education funding. The insecurity in the country can be linked to the large population of uneducated and educated illiterates. With focus on standardised educational funding and implementation, Nigeria can develop and achieve better.
Despite Nigeria being the largest economy in Africa with over 200 million citizens, with potential to make fortunes, multinational companies are relocating to sister countries because of the high cost of doing business and lack of basic infrastructure, electricity on focus, also the unpredictable foreign exchange rates, it’s availability for business even when is unified.
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The ways Nigeria as a country can bring back the multinationals include; investing in infrastructure development to create an enabling environment for businesses to thrive ; fostering a competitive business environment like tax incentives and other financial incentives could be an open for multinationals to come back; political stability of our country, Nigeria and security architecture if improved can attract business prosperity, having and maintaining a good transport and infrastructure network to help in smooth delivery of products and raw materials to market place.
There is a generally held belief that pupils and students are being assisted during external examinations. What do you think is the implication?
Assisting school children during examination is wrong and should be punishable by law; this process will murder the strength and future of the nation because the essence of test or examination is to learn how to face challenges and break its codes for human sustainability. Take for example, in a mathematical test or examination it will read “solve this problem.”
The school management, teachers and government should primarily make the children understand that passing through schools is to know how to face challenges and solve problems, with that in mind taken examinations become normal without fears.
A white man went to The Gambia and was discussing with a professor asking why their universities produced engineers that cannot produce simple water filtering machine as he saw their citizens drinking dirty water, even their elderly ones using hammer to crush rocks instead of stone crushers, among others. Again, the Google the world is using as search engine today was a school thesis by Larry Page and Shegey.
So, encouraging cheating during examination is dangerous because that is the only way to lower the standard of education. In the gate of a university in South Africa, you will find the following message: “Destroying any nation doesn’t require the use of atomic bombs or the use of long-range missiles, it only requires lowering the quality of education and allowing cheating in the examination by the students.”
Patients die at the hands of such doctors. Buildings collapse at the hands of such engineers.
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Money is lost at the hands of such economists and accountants. Humanity dies at the hands of such religious scholars. Justice is lost at the hands of such judges. The collapse of education, is the collapse of the nation.
