“Think through solutions”- Osinbajo to Young Nigerians

The Vice President Prof. Osinbajo disclosed this on Thursday at the virtual Townhall meeting of the Law Students Association of Nigeria (LAWSAN) themed “How to build the right mindset for a better Nigeria, post COVID-19”.

The Vice President while detailing the Federal Government’s economic response to pandemic at Law Students Townhall Meeting stated that today’s lawyer must be multidisciplinary, multi-tasking, digitally strong men or women of affairs.

According to the Vice President, “We are faced with a two-fold global crisis. First is a health crisis and then there is an economic crisis and the combined effects have resulted in possibly the greatest socio-economic crisis in recent history.

Continuing Prof. Osinbajo noted “…at the moment, we are also at a turning point with new opportunities to turn under-consumption into thriving business models if only we effectively innovate. We are seeing some of this emerge already.”

“The thing that we will always keep in mind is that this is a huge country. So, sometimes when things are done, you hear people say ‘I don’t even know that things are being done.” So, you will always have a situation where it will never seem like it’s covering the entire country.

I give you another example. When we decided that we were going to provide micro-credit for two million traders across the country, in fact, we did, eventually, over two million. So, in a country of this size, many will even say, we didn’t get anything.

So, every time you think, in terms of solving the problems of Nigeria, we have to think in terms of scale, scale is it. You can do 200,000 of anything and it won’t make a difference in Nigeria. So, scale is very important as you think through solutions.”

I think it is a brilliant challenging new world that we have out there and I am sure you young people know that the days ahead are exciting, we are in the best moment in history, you have all the resources. I always say that never listen to the people who tell you of ”the good old days”, they have memory loss. There is no such thing as good old days, today is the very best day possible.

Every generation has its own challenges; the next 20 years, there will be different sets of challenges. You can’t say that my father told me that when he got out of school, he didn’t need to look for work. You’d need to ask him how many people were in Law School at the time? In my set, we were only 300 in the entire country. If I come out of school and say I found a job, so what? Today, there are thousands of people but there are also thousands of opportunities and the world is open.

In my day, I couldn’t seat in my office and talk to you, I didn’t have a mobile phone and even our regular phones were not working.

So, the days ahead are exciting and I hope this interaction will be one that will give you greater insights into the opportunities they are and I noticed that there are going to be many speakers even from the private sector”. He concluded.