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Mrs Christiana Adejoke Oyewole, the president of Ejigbo Grinding Machine Association, in this conversation with JOY ANIGBOGU, speaks about the association, how the association has been transformed under her leadership, why the government should provide interventions, among other issues. Excerpts:
As the president of Ejigbo Grinding Machine Association, how has your leadership impacted on the lives of the businesses of your members?
I am not the founder of the association, the founder is late.
We had a lot of chairmen who were leaders before I took over the leadership a few years ago.
It is unfortunate that women were not given the opportunity to take charge for a very long time. I thank God for the Women’s Rights And Health Project (WRAHP) which helped me to get exposed to a lot of training where my capacity was built.
In the past the men would take almost all the positions, they would allocate the chairmanship and vice chairmanship positions to themselves and even the position of treasurer. They will reluctantly allocate the secretary position to women.
The men have been leading us and you know that women have unique leadership qualities that God has endowed them with, all they need is an opportunity to impact on the society. We thank God because since 2020 when I took over leadership, things have looked up for our members.
Previously there used to be empowerment but not at the scale that we are doing it now. When you look at our members you can see the impact of my leadership.
Today we are doing medical outreach for them to help sensitise them on the need to be cautious of their health status. We have them check their blood pressure, blood sugar and test them for malaria parasites.
They all closed their shops to be here and be part of the programme because they believe in my leadership and they are aware that we take the issue of their health very seriously.
I was made to understand that your mission is to assist members of the community, women and men, to be financially independent by empowering them with new skills, trade equipment and micro credit support, how do you achieve that?
It is true that our members have been in business for many years before I took over leadership but unfortunately most of them didn’t understand what they were doing.
Some of them have been in this business for over 30 years but there was no accountability until we came in to guide them.
We enlightened them and helped them with the necessary skills that they need to run their business and how to go about having proper records.
Some of them, their machines, have packed up a long time ago but they didn’t speak out because they didn’t know where to go and who to turn to for help.
We secured new engines for their machines, gave them cash to start again. After we empowered them, some of them were able to expand their businesses, some went into rice selling, others into selling provisions.
There are those who went into the frozen food business and we also trained some of them on turban making. We were able to eradicate poverty with the various programmes that we initiated with the help of our sponsors, WRAHP and ActionAid.
My leadership has brought transformation to grinding machine association.
I remember that I covered your programme when you trained and empowered some of your members and community people on turban making, what has happened after that, how do you monitor them to ensure that they are still doing what they should be doing?
Yes, I can confidently tell you that they are doing very well because we have visited them about four times after that empowerment and we are impressed with their level of performance.
We introduced them to piggy banking and some of them are beginning to be conversant with the act of savings and banking.
Like I told you earlier, most of them didn’t know anything about accountability, nor did they know anything about banking and so we came with so many innovations which have impacted positively on their business.
They can go to the bank and carry out transactions on their own. Some of them can operate the Automated Teller Machine (ATM).
These are things that they were not doing before as business owners.
Apart from WRAHP, has your association received any form of assistance from the government whether at the local level?
No, we have not. You know that in Nigeria before you can get anything sometimes from the government. What I mean is that there might be some kind of stringent conditions that they may attach to it.
Some may demand that you get enrolled in their political party and I don’t want us to get involved in partisan politics.
I don’t want our members to be dragged into partisan politics that is the truth. We are independent and we are not attached to any political party.
All the same there is nothing wrong if the government gives us some form of interventions, we would really appreciate it.
The point that I am making is that we don’t want to go into partisan politics and in an ideal situation we don’t really need to get involved in partisan politics before we can access government interventions.
The nature of our business is such that we need electricity to power our machines so if the government makes electricity available it would help to grow our business or if they provide us grants it would also help to expand our business.
What are your thoughts on the proposed Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) cash limit policy of N20,000 per day and N100,000 per week?
It is not a popular policy at all. I think that the CBN should review that policy.
I don’t know how it is going to work. For example, the programme that we are running today cost over N400,000, how could we have handled that with a cash limit of N100,000 per week?
……..I asked that question because you said that some of your members are just being introduced to banking, invariably a good number of people in the city even in remote areas do not have bank accounts, what is your view?
You are talking about remote areas, what about Lagos? I know how many people we assisted to open accounts for. We brought Eco Bank to come and open accounts for them.
We organised an empowerment programme for our members in 2021 and we used that opportunity to bring Eco Bank to come here and open accounts for them.
We discovered that some of them were afraid of the banking system, they few of them that had accounts said that the ATM machines used to cease their ATM cards.
We did a lot of work on them and helped them to overcome the fear of banking and that was the starting point.
It looks like you have only female members now, what about the men?
We have more women but we also have men. The men are very few in number now.
We have over 200 members scattered across the Ejigbo Local Council Development Area (LCDA). We have members in Jakande Ilamose, and we all meet at our various locations every week.
The members that are in Ilamose meet there, those at Jakande meet in that area every month and the ones in Ejigbo meet here.
We had to organise that way for the sake of convenience and for logistics purposes too. You know that the cost of transport is very high now so we factored in all of that. I oversee the activities of the organisation.
The truth is that our members are happier now. Today we organised a medical outreach to educate them on how to take care of their health, because as the saying goes, health is wealth.
Joy Anigbogu is a correspondent with Independent Newspapers.
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