Mac Atasie I was Born to Solve Problems, Crack New ways of doing Things

You may mistakenly pass him thinking his is an ordinary folk, but Mac Atasie comes fully packaged, highly cerebral, witty, restive in problem solving and thinks ahead of everyone as his brain is permanently on overdrive when it comes to finding solutions. He jumped into sciences through brain capacity but was brought back by nature and providence into management consultancy, building startup companies and linking companies to funds and markets where he has hit gold in life sitting on several boards of companies like Chams and Satrack. He consults for Anambra and Abia states, which have witnessed a turnaround in their IGRs. He is the unseen hand in the Aba leather manufacturing cluster push. Atasie, who is CEO of NEXTZON, shares the story of his ventures with Ahamefula Ogbu… Excerpts

The Man, His Mission

I am Macauley Chidinma Atasie from Abia State. Most of my life I have spent it solving one problem or the other; as a little boy in primary school, solving family problems in bigger families; stepping in to say this family doesn’t talk to that family, we need to resolve it and all the way into the corporate world where I moved from being a scientist to entering the management phase solely because I felt naturally drawn to solving problems; so management consulting which is my core profession has one of its major value propositions in life as solving problems. You are either solving problems as a new business or a new idea you want to give expression and you don’t know what to do so you have to work with a management consultant that is interested in startups and he consults for you and assist you to follow the right process to start your business… that is problem solving , it could be that this is a massive organisation that is not doing well anymore as far as the shareholders, markets and other things are concerned and it wants to redirect itself and begin to do well, that’s strategy development, that’s is transformation, that is problem solving. They have a problem and I believe that given my nature, the organisation that I have built will help to solve that problem.

Transition from Microbiology to Management Consultancy

I think that the best thing that can happen to anybody is to live his mission. If you realise what you are built to do, you will enjoy your life. You need to see me in a strategy session, I come to life, I’m excited. I was meant to be a medical Doctor by my mother’s advice. She was a nurse and I believed everything she said so when she said medicine, I said great. I usually tell my story of how I got my first and only bicycle, very beautiful and is still in my house in the village, The first time I took an exam in primary one, I failed. I failed because I did not enter the exam hall, I was a playful child and at home, every effort to teach me I refused because she was my mother. So when I failed she got a cane to flog me but somehow she got news that I cried, I was very unhappy , I was five years; she said because you cried, I believe you know what you’ve done. She was a community nurse and we went from one location to another , next time I took third and next term I took third again and she went to my teacher and asked is that my son’s result? The teacher said yes; and those were primaries one, two, three and she said she was tired of this third position so she now said if you take first I buy you a sports bicycle. So, I went to that new school in primary four and asked them who is number one in this class, they pointed at him and I called him and said you are taking first for the last time in your life and of course he never smelt first position again till I left the school.

I was willing and able to take that medicine; all my mates scored over 300 in Jamb but I got nearly 270 and Nsukka said no. Somehow, I entered for Microbiology and believed that I will still enter for medicine. I read like a medical student and scored all the As and my HOD refused to release me, he said he won’t release his best student but my uncle was Dean of Faculty of Medicine in UNIPORT, he said bring your result, if you score XYZ I will take you and we sent the result and it got there but between the VC’s office and his office it disappeared; so I concluded am not meant to be a medical doctor. I wouldn’t have enjoyed it. I’m not interested in that type of exactitude, I want to imagine things. You don’t solve a problem by doing what people have been doing; you must do things differently. My journey from Microbiology to business came as being who I should really be; I need to be a problem solver, I need to be creative to make things happen in a different way. I am not just a microbiologist but I also have Masters in Pharmacy and I worked in Nigeria Breweries for a short time and this will interest you. At NBL the Director of HR after interviewing me said what do you want to do? I said management. He said yea, we know you are coming as management trainee which means you are positioning as a manager in future but today what do you want to be, a brewer, marketing or management person and I said management, that’s admin. Last on the list was brewer so he gave me brewer because I’m a microbiologist.

Pursuing my satisfaction

The day I resigned he said I knew you will resign. Where are you going? I said Accenture. Accenture was then called Anderson Consulting which was paying me lower than Nigerian Breweries but I wanted to go to Anderson because it is where I thought i could learn on diverse problems solving opportunities. In Accenture, we worked for 7up Bottling Company Plc, that’s like a brewery right but I was able to work for 7up at the highest level, then the CEO at night will come and call me kekere, rub my head and say I want that solution tomorrow morning because he knew I will crack it; so my point is that’s where I am and that is problem solving.

When you say schools, I think the most important schools I attended was the Accenture School of Business because everyday in Accenture you are learning new things because I was working with CEOs of massive organisations. You are talking of UBA, First Bank; I would teach the Board of First Bank marketing. Which other training is bigger than that because you are engaging big men? I will be involved in teams transforming NAHCO, participate in a team that is checking what the aviation industry is like, so by the time you have done five years in Accenture or NEXTZON, that maybe like 10 years of MBA , so that’s how I built my business acumen. The first 12 months in Accenture, I handled a project for NNPC, working with top flight Accenture managers and I handled financial projections that touched on dollar-based infrastructure – Eleme petrochemicals and Kaduna refinery etc – doing works at the highest level.

On Job Creation

There is me Mac and job creation in my businesses and there is me Mac and the country. I think as we speak between myself and the companies I own, we have at least 200 people that work for us directly on my payroll. Over time, we just started the alumni association of NEXTZON, I’m sure we have over 200 people that have passed through NEXTZON, excluding the various other companies NEXTZON owns or is affiliated with. The key business i have commercialised is called business incubation. We have incubated in NEXTZON over 20 companies. In Accenture, we incubated Interswitch and several others. In NEXTON we incubated Chams Consortium limited which led to the national identity programm. The federal government has concessioned the roll out of national ID programme to two different groups. Chams consortium which my company owns 35 per cent, Chams Plc owns 65 per cent or thereabout; that was an investment that led to the National ID programme that we have today because as at 2011, using my influence, I used to walk in to Central Bank; NIMC, I was like their staff, at a point I was the most valued client of Sheraton in Nigeria because every week I will spend three or four days with the DG of NIMC trying to build the NIN and by 2011 we had gotten CBN to assist banks to adopt NIN for KYC in banks.

Everywhere in the world every human being is a digit, you are a number and numbers can’t be faked. If you are 101, you are 101 and even if you have a twin, the twin must be a different digit from you, if not, you can confuse anybody. What that programme wanted to do for us was to modernise Nigeria architecture, I put in my innovation, my time to bring it to be so by 2011, CBN had written to all the banks after four years of investment, after Obasanjo had given us the mandate if allowed to continue, there was no longer any need for any other identification method in Nigeria.

. Do you know how many jobs that would have created? It has in any case created job because you know the number of people involoved in NIN, doing biometrics, that’s massive. The BVN came because two weeks after that announcement, that is how the efforts of 2007 to 2012 was lost as it was stalled because the BVN came in to focus only on banks and CBN withdrew the directive given two weeks earlier to banks to use the NIN for KYC from February 2012 The jobs my efforts have led to are in hundreds in NEXTZON, Chams and interswitch which is everywhere in the world. The Interswich guy gotthe idea, gave it to his boss and they came to us for business case and i did my best, convinced our South African and Nigerian partners and we collectively convinced the big banks in Nigeria

You talk about the agency sector, we went to Columbia 2011, came back after study and did a white paper that Central Bank adopted that led to roll out of Agency for financial institutions in Nigeria and I am sure you know there are loads and loads of financial agents who act as bank branches but they are one man shop, that’s is creation of value as we speak so I think it is the use of concepts, conversion into business ideas that people can subscribe to that is my claim to fame in terms of creating jobs with this now it will be nice I go and check how many of my efforts in companies we incubated have created how many jobs directly and indirectly.

Consulting for Anambra, Abia

There is something the governor of Abia did some months back. I also oversee the IGR of Abia and I also did that for Anambra which moved and more than trippled. Abia was also like that and we have increased it upwards of four times now, so there is progress. The challenge of Abia I think Anambra overcame it long ago which is the political aspect ,they have managed to find a way to allow reasonable independence to their leadership.

So, in Abia, my take is that the depth of our lack of infrastructure was overwhelming. It was like throwing a cup of water into an ocean, the deficit has made even the people to distrust government. You need to visit Aba and you will know that things have really changed in terms of development though there is still much to be done. The Abia State Governor mentioned in an interview recently that a key achievement was the entry of some fast foods and people started laughing, do you think they will go there if environment was useless? So it is the action of government that enables people to come out. You are going to start having good hotels coming, businesses and lots of other businesses that will make life better coming into Abia State.

So if you ask me I think what he has achieved is to rebase Aba society, the Abia society. If you can take the opportunity to visit the state you will see that we have moved from minus 20 to about plus 20 so it is still quite low but nothing succeeds like success. We are beginning to attract interest, a year ago, Abia was the third state in attracting foreign direct investment. Why will anyone invest in a dead place? If you ask me, I will say something is happening, but more importantly he has put in effort to push the leather sector. I was in a preparatory meeting as we are going to Kano to meet the German fund GIZ and Kano leather cluster on how Aba can collaborate on the leather industry.

The whole world consumes $365 billion worth of leather, just shoes from leather, I’ve not mentioned belts, handbags, boxes just in 2019. That amount is literarily Nigeria’s GDP, shoe alone in the world. We are among the most respected shoe clusters in the world but then we sell only to ourselves and to the poor people Shoes should be $25 – $40 but our own shoes are N5000 as a very expensive pair of shoes. What he has done is that he has set up a factory that is fully automated and that can compete with any other factory in the world. It means that the over 100,000 shoe makers can now begin to explore how to play in the international market.

They will stop selling shoes of five dollars and start selling shoes of $40. Gradually, we will start bringing money into the country. So if we can do what Vietnam, China and other countries did in the shoe sector I think we can go places and I am using shoe as an example. I believe the best thing is to put your money in productive sectors because those are the sectors that will make people pay their taxes. Everybody may not get it right at the same time but remember that one was one year ahead of this but we are making progress.

What creates satisfaction for me

Solving problems. Once I see a smile on someone’s face. I like to succeed and I like to win, I don’t like being a failure, seeing people smile and winning, doing something that has never been done and succeeding. I want to do great things, win and make people happy.

Silver bullet for Nigerian Economy

Number one for me is export. So I would say, you have Kano and Aba, you link them together. If shoes generated $365 billion last year we target say 10 per cent and that $36 billion and that’s Nigeria’s external reserve from shoes alone and we do garments. It is not complicated, we just buy machinery that is readily available and we have cheap labour, $100 a month is cheap, I don’t know any other country that will let its people earn $100 a day with the kind of skills our boys in Aba have.

By the way America is the largest consumer of shoes in the world and I will go there and I think they do like six pairs per person, we do one pair per annum, they buy at higher rate of $40-$50 and we do N5000 so why should I do the same thing and focus on cheap market? I will rather focus on international market. Now America has a special act that favours Nigeria’s shoe industry. We have a discount when you are exporting into America, we also have a discount when you exporting anything leather and a few other things. Why not have an arrangement where the tanneries in Kano move their leather to Aba and create export organisations that will go into America and find markets supported by government. If we truly produce the quality they want supported by government, I would expect our leaders to set targets. China’s challenge over that sector is dropping why not let ours grow? It is all in our hands to make it happen

The second is decongesting the civll service and upgrading it. At the various level in our country, we don’t pay our civil servants very well because they are way too many for the kinds of jobs they do; we must remove those that are not creating value, not by sacking them as that will create a different kind of problems. If you look at CBN and other types of intervention, there is a lot of money for intervention running into hundreds of billion of naira. If you ask me, those monies should be used to provide capacity for civil servants that are willing to exit. I will professionalise and prune the civil service for competence. In countries that are doing well like Singapore, the civil servants earns as well as those in the private sector. A perm sec in the civil service earns same thing as Director in a bank, that’s the type of thing I want to see. That means we have to do it with a human face, decongest the civil service.

The third layer will be the psyche of the people. We believe government must dash us money. Government on its own believes that people must steal to succeed. There are so many psychological things we have to work on; a national orientation that will help us focus more on the business aspect of governance is what I will like to do. If you have a business plan that is bankable, there are funds for you. You must change and put them into groups that will make then strong enough to succeed.