Full Disclosure with Funso Doherty: Can Lagos Be Better?

that she fee, good morning everyone for joining. FD, good morning sir. How are you doing this Saturday morning? Good morning, good morning uncle, I am doing great and good morning to everybody who's here today. Thank you for taking the time to join. Firstly, I want to thank you for, I mean we had one conversation before in the past and it was a great interaction. I'm going to learn a lot about your personal life, your personal views, your touch around multiple conversations. Today is going to be quite centered conversation around just one line, which is kind of, it goes better. But before we dive right into that conversation, I'd like to know what's like on a Saturday morning in your life when you're not being a politician. The good question. So it depends on the day, but typically, I generally rise relatively early and I have typically one cup of tea in the morning. Then I might go cycling in the morning and then depending on how busy they have, I then roll into the day. Today for example, I have a very full day. So this is the first of all things that I'll be doing today. So unfortunately, I don't get cycle today and then typically what I do is I also run what I like to run in the evenings. So depending on what my evening is like, I may get the opportunity to do that. But that's me. Okay, that's quite active. And thank you for training in that you have quite a full day. So we will try to keep the conversation as tight as possible and an hour. So we don't need in the search, rest of your schedule. So we're just going to have conversations around a couple of questions, a couple of topics. And after about two and a five minutes, we can have an open mic. If you're currently in the audience and you have a question to ask him, if there will be a time for you to accept a mic invitation and asking directly. So in fact, you did spend a career, a considerable number of years in finance. Why do you think it's the right to training for governing the leaders? Well, so much of my career as you noted was spent in the finance industry. But if you look through my profile, you see that from perhaps from my mid 30s, I mean, I became managing director of a company, my first company, I led a CEO. I believe I was maybe 37 other time. And therefore, I've been in sort of leadership roles for much of my career. And leadership roles, as you know, whatever industry you are, then lead you into sort of a general management mindset. And particularly if you're then running an organization that is maybe nationalizing scope as I did, and that has offices across the country and staff across the country, various ethnic makeup and so on. So you're sort of operating less in a finance space and more in a people management and organizational management frame. So that leadership experience, I think is applies across contexts and different contexts may require you to apply them somewhat different nuance, but the same sort of call leadership skills. Emotional intelligence, vision, there's a government. I don't know if I'm doing one, but I can no longer hear you. Oh, if you're still speaking, can anyone hear him? Okay, if you can hear me, please do a tone down. If you can not hear him, do a tone down. On the other hand, if you're listening within the audience. Can you all hear me? Oh, yes. I can hear you now. But you did call for a bit. I call for a bit. So can others hear you? There's lots of thumbs down. Yeah, because they could hear you for a bit. But now I think you're right. So if you can hear me, please, I'm hit us with the tone up. But if you cannot hear him, he lost with the tone down. Okay, so I see the thumbs ups. Okay. Yeah, so I was just concluding by saying that I also have been fortunate in while in my private sector career, so I've run not just individual companies, but also have been elected as a chair of the industry group, which managing essentially the operator side of the industry and having to manage people with different, from different organizations who have different objectives and that may be in conflict. So that brings a different set of skills and skills that you may not have opportunity to access, even if you are the CEO of an organization. So I think those won't have everything that one will ever need in any role, I say no. But the things that are central, that enable you to engage and succeed. I think I think that one has had the opportunity by the grace of God to pick up one's career. You're the answer for a thing to be very much easier. And I think just a little segue from the response you gave, you becoming, you had your first time see your position at 37, and that kind of set of the trajectory for you to gain all the leadership skills that you've had, that made it central for you to be able to find the knowledge to want to go and go and leave us. And I redirect that to us, when I mean also the younger generation, those of us currently in our 30s and how that's not that's even a pipe dream for a lot of people. Because the last conversation we had with you, I came into the commission with a preconceived notion that you were probably a nipple baby and you corrected that in the NETLINOR. You had your own fair share within, walking through things and in your own clicks. And that was when Mary took Christmas, you could say it was going to be rewarded. So do you think, I don't know, what a small segue, do you think a time comes when it becomes the reality of young people to be able to have access to that level of leadership role at the younger age? Most of the people who lead banks today, we have bank managers in their 30s or lead banks or started banks in the 30s from relatively nothing. So I just wanted to know what your perspective is futuristicly on that. So I think that so there are two ways in which we can sort of think about that. One is that you may say the world is maybe a more competitive place today. And part of that is the result of the governance environment that we've lived through. And therefore the extent to which there are widespread inclusive opportunities available for people to access. Because one of the things that would governance produces is that it produces shared prosperity, which creates the opportunity for people broadly to access opportunity to do well attend reasonable standards of living and so on. And by extension it will create also greater opportunities for people moving into leadership roles. And where that fails, the opportunities will be limited. And as population expands things will get perhaps more difficult. So that's the first frame of reference. But the second is also to say that there are a few things that remain true. One is that people are looking for people who can add value and those who are most able to add value within an organization that define themselves. Till today I think we'll still excel. Maybe a smaller proportion of the cool today than it was. But that rare opportunity still exists for the exceptional individuals. But it shouldn't be the case that only the exceptional individuals can attain reasonable standards of living. And I think that's where perhaps governance comes in. I think what I will just add in conclusion to this is to say that there are some opportunities today that we didn't have then. So for example, the phenomenon of the technology, the rise of the technology ecosystem, the FinTech media ecosystem, the entertainment on the scale at which we have it now, I think creates a lot of opportunities for a lot more opportunities relative to what we had back then. And so you tend to see a number of young people in these spaces that we talk about. It's not rare to see young people in these spaces that we're talking about, excel in leading their own organizations and so on from a very early young age. So I guess there are different sides of the coin to look at it, but I will say on balance, on average, the environment has not kept up in terms of creating opportunities for the people. And that's something that we need to do something about. Okay, that's very clear. To have any full of questions. And I will redirect back to the crux of the conversation we're having. So one of the first times where I bumped into your profile or bumped into your open letters as being when you wrote about budgets, you wrote about a spending problem in Lagos, you wrote about a population problem, you had a little bit of open letters. And if I read, if I say they are 10 in numbers, nine out of those are to do with the budget. So it just brings us to the question, was there a specific moment or specific phenomenon you saw, or one specific event you cited that made you to start digging deep through the Lagos budgets in the first place? Well, I think, oh, say that, first of all, I would say that I don't think it's quite accurate to say that nine out of 10 have been about the budget. Actually, most of them have not been about the budget. I typically would at the beginning of each year do something when the budget is released, which is a general thing. And then I might, you know, relit some of my other writings to perhaps things that are in the budget, but most of them actually, if you go back and look on a range of governance issues. Of course, governance always intersects with finance. So, you know, it may seem that way. But I think that in more direct answer to your question, you know, you see, first of all, I would say that even before I came into politics, as far back as, I mean, into active politics, as far back as maybe 15 years ago, I was already writing on governance issues, my first published article, which I think was in maybe Guardian on this day. About 15 years ago, on governance issues. And so I have, you know, it's not something that started today in that sense. But importantly, you know, coming out of the last election, I determined two things. One was that, and this took me about three months to reach this.