WHO GETS TO PARTICIPATE? Nurudeen Zauro and The Architecture of Economic Citizenship

 

By Mohammed Mohammed Haruna, PhD, mnipr

Every economy has its insiders and its outsiders. The distinction is not always determined by citizenship, geography or even willingness to work. Sometimes, it is drawn quietly by access: access to credit, identity, insurance, knowledge, technology and the institutional pathways through which human effort is converted into economic possibility. Millions may live within an economy, trade within it, labour for it and contribute daily to its survival, yet remain strangely absent from its most productive opportunities. They are present in the marketplace but invisible to formal credit, active in enterprise but largely unknown to the financial system, economically alive but institutionally unseen.

The question, therefore, is no longer merely how large an economy can become, but who gets to participate in its enlargement. Nigeria's aspiration to build a trillion-dollar economy makes that question particularly urgent. A larger Gross Domestic Product may announce the expansion of national output, but it does not, by itself, tell us how widely economic agency has travelled. Growth can expand while exclusion survives. Wealth can accumulate while opportunity remains fenced. A country can become statistically richer without sufficiently enlarging the economic citizenship of its people.

There is, after all, a difference between economic enlargement and development. An economy may double in size while reproducing substantially the same geography of privilege and exclusion. Development begins when more citizens acquire the tools, knowledge, protection, institutional connections and opportunities through which their latent capacities can become productive economic agency. It is within this tension between economic ambition and economic participation that the public assignment of Dr Nurudeen Abubakar Zauro, Technical Adviser to the President on Economic and Financial Inclusion in the Office of the Vice President and a leading figure in the Secretariat of the Presidential Committee on Economic and Financial Inclusion, PreCEFI, deserves serious examination.

The temptation in writing about a public officer is often to begin with the individual: his certificates, appointments, conferences, awards and proximity to power. But perhaps the more useful starting point in understanding Zauro is not the man but the idea. That idea is inclusion, and more particularly, the conviction that belonging to an economy should mean more than merely surviving within its territorial boundaries.

The woman selling produce in a rural market, the artisan working from an informal workshop, the smallholder farmer vulnerable to a single failed season, and the young graduate with a viable idea but no pathway to capital are not necessarily unproductive people. Frequently, they are disconnected, people. Their exclusion is not always a deficit of effort. It can be a deficit of institutional connection.

The question that appears to have followed Zauro through his academic preparation, training in accounting and finance, years in central banking and digital financial inclusion, and now his assignment within the Presidency is therefore a fundamental development question: how does the formal economy make room for those whose energy sustains commerce but whose circumstances keep them at the margins of capital, technology, insurance and institutional opportunity?

There is a meaningful difference between discovering an idea after receiving an appointment and arriving at an appointment with a question that has already occupied one's intellectual and professional imagination. In the first case, the Office educates the officer. In the second, preparation and opportunity meet. Zauro's trajectory increasingly appears closer to the latter.

His experience at the Central Bank of Nigeria is particularly important for understanding this continuity. Central banking in a developing economy offers an unusual window into the contradictions of development. At one level is the economy of policy rates, payment systems, credit aggregates, financial institutions and regulatory architecture. At the other end is the lived economy of the roadside trader, the smallholder farmer, the young entrepreneur, and the woman whose enterprise may be viable but whose economic existence remains inadequately captured by the structures through which formal capital is allocated.

The important policy question is how to connect these two economies, because that is the last-mile problem of development. A financial system can become increasingly sophisticated without becoming sufficiently inclusive. Digital platforms can multiply while digital illiteracy persists. Credit can expand while small enterprises without conventional collateral remain stranded. Citizens may own bank accounts yet remain without meaningful access to affordable credit, pensions, insurance, investment knowledge or protection against shocks capable of erasing years of household progress. To be banked, therefore, is not necessarily to be economically included, and even to be financially included is not automatically to be financially secure.

This distinction is central to any serious assessment of the policy architecture associated with Zauro's present assignment. The Aso Accord on Economic and Financial Inclusion represents one expression of this wider thinking. Its significance lies in the attempt to broaden the vocabulary of inclusion beyond ownership of a bank account to encompass finance, digital infrastructure, financial literacy, underserved communities, women, young people, rural populations, and small businesses.

The deeper philosophy is important. Financial inclusion, properly understood, is not merely the act of moving more citizens into banking halls or onto digital payment platforms. It is the dismantling of barriers between human capacity and productive opportunity. The female trader already understands inventory. The farmer understands production. The artisan possesses skill. The young graduate may possess an idea. What is often missing is the connective institutional tissue: identity, finance, information, professional networks, insurance, digital competence and the confidence to navigate increasingly complex formal systems.

Financial inclusion, viewed this way, is not charity. It is a productivity policy. Every viable enterprise permanently stranded outside formal finance represents unrealised potential output. Every productive woman unable to access appropriate financial services represents foregone economic agency. Every smallholder farmer left without suitable insurance remains one shock away from losing productive assets. Every digitally excluded citizen risks becoming progressively more peripheral to an economy increasingly organised around data, connectivity and electronic transactions.

This is also why PreCEFI should ultimately be judged not by the number of meetings it convenes but by whether it can help solve one of Nigeria's most persistent governance problems: institutional fragmentation. Nigeria rarely suffers from an absolute absence of institutions. More often, it suffers from insufficient coordination among them. One institution holds identity data. Another regulates payments. Another supervises financial institutions. Different agencies administer social programmes. State governments possess distinct demographic and economic realities. Development partners operate interventions. Private firms possess technology. Professional bodies hold expertise. Yet the excluded citizen experiences the cumulative consequences when these systems fail to connect. The deficit can therefore be a coordination deficit.

PreCEFI's potential importance lies in its attempt to create an architecture around this fragmentation. Its engagements with subnational governments, federal institutions, financial-sector actors, professional bodies, private organisations and development partners point towards what might be described as institutional orchestration. The effective public officer in a modern developmental state cannot always command results into existence. Important policy outcomes frequently sit across the statutory boundaries of several institutions. Progress, therefore, requires persuasion, coalition-building, shared ownership, interoperable systems, and the patient translation of different institutional languages into common action. It is an administrative craft that often attracts little theatre but can produce consequential outcomes when sustained with discipline.

No serious account of Zauro's emerging public-service footprint, however, should construct the mythology of the solitary technocrat. Capacity may reside in an individual, but public service remains an institutional enterprise. Ideas require room. Initiative requires confidence. Responsibility requires trust. Innovation within government frequently requires leaders sufficiently confident in their own authority to identify capable people, expose them to responsibility and allow their preparation to be tested against the difficult realities of governance.

It is here that the role of Zauro's principals becomes indispensable to an honest understanding of his journey. His Excellency, Senator Kashim Shettima, GCON, Vice President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, has provided strategic political leadership for the economic and financial inclusion agenda within the responsibilities entrusted to his Office. Alongside him, Senator Ibrahim Hassan Hadejia, Deputy Chief of Staff to the President in the Office of the Vice President, holds an important position within the institutional machinery that coordinates and sustains complex assignments.

From the guidance, trust, mentorship, counsel and institutional support of these principals, Zauro has evidently benefited immensely. That fact diminishes neither his preparation nor his exertions. It properly contextualises them. One of the least discussed responsibilities of leadership is the identification and deployment of competence. Nations do not progress merely because talented people exist. Every country has intelligent citizens. Progress occurs when systems of leadership can recognise capacity, assign responsibility, provide guidance and create sufficient institutional space for competent people to contribute towards clearly defined public purposes.

Preparation without opportunity can remain dormant, while opportunity without trust can remain constrained. When preparation encounters the confidence of perceptive leadership, however, public service can become a platform for consequential action. The larger framework remains the mandate of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and the administration's aspiration for a stronger and much larger Nigerian economy. Yet the expansion of national output creates an unavoidable policy obligation: growth must find citizens, and the statistics must eventually acquire faces.

Reform cannot remain indefinitely at the level of macroeconomic abstraction. Its social and political legitimacy must ultimately be encountered in opportunity, enterprise, jobs, resilience and the expanded ability of citizens to participate productively in economic life. This is where the work of inclusion meets the broader presidential mandate. The President provides the national direction for reform and development. The Vice President provides strategic leadership across responsibilities entrusted to his Office. The Deputy Chief of Staff supports the coordination required to move complex assignments through government. Technical officers such as Zauro are given specialised responsibilities through which aspects of the larger ambition may acquire operational form. The technical officer does not work outside the national blueprint. He works within it.

Several initiatives associated with the present inclusion agenda illuminate the thinking behind this work. The ambition to train millions of Nigerians in financial inclusion and literacy, including through collaboration with professional bodies, rests on an important development premise: capacity is infrastructure. Infrastructure, in the conventional imagination, is concrete, steel, electricity, rail and fibre. These are indispensable, but there is another infrastructure without which physical and technological investments may yield far less than their potential. That infrastructure is human competence.

A sophisticated financial system has limited developmental reach when millions lack the knowledge and confidence required to navigate it. A digital platform is only as inclusive as its intended users' ability to understand and use it safely. Credit availability means little to a potential entrepreneur who cannot formalise, structure or communicate the economics of an enterprise. A road connects places, while knowledge connects people to possibilities. Both are infrastructures of development.

The same logic applies to women's economic participation. Initiatives such as She's Included should not be understood as exercises in benevolence. Women's economic inclusion is economic arithmetic. A society cannot constrain the productive capacity of a substantial proportion of its population and still expect to optimise national output. The exclusion of women from finance, skills, networks and capital represents foregone enterprise, weakened household resilience and diminished national productivity.

Effective inclusion, however, also requires recognising that uniformity is not equity. A female micro-entrepreneur operating informally, carrying disproportionate care responsibilities and possessing little conventional collateral, does not encounter the financial system from the same starting position as a salaried professional. Giving both the same product and declaring the system inclusive confuses sameness with fairness. The test of a gender-responsive inclusion agenda is therefore not how many women attend an event or open an account, but whether more women acquire durable economic agency.

That distinction brings us to the most important part of the discussion: the next frontier. The work associated with Zauro and PreCEFI may have established a compelling architecture of intention. Still, public policy eventually encounters its hardest question after the communiqués, accords, committees, partnerships and launches have been completed. The question is what actually changed.

For the present inclusion agenda to mature into a durable national institution, and for Zauro himself to become even more effective in the assignment entrusted to him, the next phase should move decisively from policy mobilisation towards an independently measurable architecture of outcomes. The first requirement is a public inclusion scorecard. Nigeria should be able to see, at regular intervals and preferably at state and local levels, not merely how many citizens possess accounts, but also how many actively save, obtain responsible credit, hold insurance, use digital financial services safely, build viable enterprises, and demonstrate improved financial resilience. What gets announced attracts attention, but what gets measured attracts accountability.

The second requirement is to move from counting beneficiaries to tracking developmental journeys. Training millions of people may be impressive as an output, but the more consequential questions arise afterwards. How many acquired demonstrable competence? How many formalised enterprises? How many accessed appropriate finance? How many increased revenue, created employment or improved household resilience? Public policy should not confuse reach with impact.

The third requirement is an independent evaluation mechanism. PreCEFI and its partners should periodically invite credible universities, research institutions and independent evaluators to assess major interventions against published baselines and targets. The purpose would not be to embarrass the government but to protect policy from the dangers of self-congratulation. Serious institutions learn in public, and strong policy leadership should be confident enough to allow evidence to confirm success, identify weaknesses and guide correction.

The fourth requirement is a stronger subnational delivery architecture. Exclusion is experienced locally even when policy is designed nationally. The constraints confronting a woman entrepreneur in Lagos may differ substantially from those facing a farmer in Kebbi, a trader in Aba or a pastoral community in Adamawa. A national strategy therefore needs state-level delivery compacts, locally disaggregated data and measurable responsibilities for implementation partners. Abuja can coordinate inclusion, but it cannot manufacture every last mile.

The fifth requirement is deeper integration of Nigeria's emerging digital public infrastructure. Identity, payments and appropriately governed data-sharing systems should increasingly work together so that citizens do not repeatedly prove their existence to disconnected institutions. Interoperability, however, must be accompanied by strong privacy, cybersecurity, consumer protection and accessible grievance-redress mechanisms. The excluded citizen should not be invited into the digital economy only to become the easiest victim within it.

The sixth requirement is the creation of a permanent citizen feedback architecture. The people for whom inclusion policies are designed should have structured mechanisms for reporting what works, what excludes them and where products or programmes fail. Policy elites often understand systems from the perspective of those who design them, while citizens experience them at the point where they break down. That knowledge is itself valuable data and should be systematically incorporated into programme design and evaluation.

The seventh requirement is institutional permanence. The ultimate test of PreCEFI will be whether its work becomes embedded deeply enough in national and subnational systems to survive individual officeholders and political transitions. Personality may mobilise an agenda, but institutions must preserve it. The strongest legacy Zauro and his colleagues can build would therefore not merely be a collection of successful programmes, but an inclusion architecture capable of sustaining itself beyond the tenure of any particular administration or public officer.

These are not arguments against Zauro's work. They are arguments for its maturation. Indeed, avoiding hagiography requires acknowledging that the significance of a public officer lies not in being beyond criticism but in being able to turn scrutiny into better public outcomes. For Zauro, this may be the deeper meaning of the trust his principals reposed in him. Trust in public service is not a decoration. It is a debt payable in results.

Gratitude to President Tinubu for the national mandate within which the assignment finds its purpose, to Vice President Shettima for the guidance, mentorship, confidence and strategic leadership that have given Zauro's preparation room for expression, and to Senator Hadejia for the counsel, institutional support, and coordination surrounding the assignment should not merely be matters of protocol. They are part of the moral story of opportunity.

The greatest tribute to confidence, however, is not repeated acknowledgement. It is the work that makes the trust count. It is ensuring that the privilege of serving close to the centre of power is converted into value for people who may never enter the gates of the Presidential Villa, never sit at a policy roundtable and never know the names of those designing the frameworks that shape their economic lives.

Those citizens include the woman seeking capital to enlarge her enterprise, the young Nigerian attempting to convert competence into livelihood, the smallholder farmer vulnerable to one bad season, the small business that understands its market but cannot navigate formal credit, the citizen unable to distinguish a legitimate digital financial service from a predatory one, and the rural community standing at the outer edge of digital transformation. These are the people before whom the ultimate account of economic and financial inclusion must be rendered.

Perhaps, then, the significance of Nurudeen Abubakar Zauro's journey lies not merely in the positions he has occupied or the professional qualifications after his name. It lies in the continuity of an idea and in the unusual opportunity to test that idea within the machinery of the state. From scholarship to financial policy, from central banking exposure to the Presidency, and from studying exclusion to participating in the construction of mechanisms to confront it, his trajectory reflects a consistent engagement with how more citizens can be connected to the opportunities of the formal economy.

The journey is still unfolding, and it is therefore too early for monuments. Public service is better assessed by legacies than by moments. Yet acknowledging that the final verdict rests on measurable outcomes should not preclude a fair assessment of the effort already evident. Zauro has brought to the assignment more than technical familiarity with the language of financial inclusion. He has demonstrated an evident passion for the subject, an intellectual commitment to its underlying developmental questions, and an instinct for coalition-building without which a cross-cutting national agenda of this nature cannot travel very far.

The breadth of engagements being assembled around the inclusion agenda, the effort to bring public institutions, professional bodies, private-sector actors, development partners and subnational authorities into a common conversation, and the persistent attempt to move inclusion beyond bank-account ownership towards economic agency all deserve acknowledgement. They deserve encouragement too, because public service is not strengthened only by criticism. It is also strengthened when serious effort is recognised, when competence is encouraged and when those entrusted with difficult national assignments know that society is capable of distinguishing between publicity and genuine exertion.

The recommendations advanced here are therefore not a repudiation of Zauro's work. They arise precisely because the work is important enough to demand an even higher level of institutional ambition. A public inclusion scorecard, independent evaluation, deeper subnational delivery, stronger digital interoperability, citizen feedback mechanisms and greater institutional permanence would not replace the architecture being built. They would deepen it, strengthen its accountability, and increase the likelihood that the present momentum can be converted into durable national outcomes. At this point, an assessment of the man becomes unavoidable. On the evidence of his trajectory, Zauro appears to possess a rare alignment of preparation, professional experience, intellectual conviction and personal passion for this particular national assignment. Economic and financial inclusion is not a subject he appears to have encountered merely because the government assigned it to him. It is a question that has travelled with him through different stages of his professional formation, and that continuity matters.

Public policy is often most effectively driven by people for whom an assignment is not simply a portfolio but a conviction. This does not make anyone infallible, nor should it exempt any public officer from measurement, accountability or criticism. Indeed, the right person for an important assignment is not the one who requires protection from scrutiny, but the one who can use scrutiny to improve the assignment. By that standard, Zauro deserves both acknowledgement for the ground already covered and encouragement to push the frontier further.

His passion is evident, his preparation is relevant, his institutional experience is applicable, and his understanding of the financial system gives him an important vantage point from which to engage the complexities of exclusion. His current location within the architecture of government provides an unusual opportunity to translate ideas into coordinated national action. At the same time, the trust of his principals gives him the institutional platform from which to attempt it.

The task before him now is to convert these advantages into an inclusion architecture whose results can be seen, independently measured and sustained beyond personalities and political cycles. The appropriate response at this stage is therefore neither cynicism nor canonisation. It is constructive confidence: to recognise what has been attempted, salute the energy and passion being invested in it, acknowledge the strategic leadership and institutional support that have made the effort possible, and insist that the next phase must translate ambition into measurable and enduring outcomes.

In that sense, the confidence reposed in Zauro by his principals increasingly appears neither casual nor misplaced. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu's broader economic vision requires institutions and people capable of ensuring that reform reaches beyond aggregate numbers to the lives and productive possibilities of citizens. Vice President Kashim Shettima's leadership of the inclusion agenda requires technical hands capable of understanding both the policy aspiration and the difficult institutional negotiations necessary for implementation. Senator Ibrahim Hassan Hadejia's coordinating role requires officers who can translate institutional opportunity into disciplined execution.

Zauro stands at that intersection and, judged by the coherence between his preparation, his experience, his evident passion for inclusion, and the responsibilities now entrusted to him, he appears to be the right man at an important moment to help drive this vision. That is not a declaration that the work is complete. It is an affirmation that the work deserves to continue, deepen and succeed.

The ultimate endorsement of any public officer must, of course, be written by results. But results themselves require people with the preparation to understand the problem, the passion to remain committed to it and the institutional intelligence to bring different actors together around a common purpose. Zauro has shown enough of these qualities to justify confidence in the journey ahead.

The enduring question remains the one with which we began: who gets to participate? If Nigeria's trillion-dollar aspiration is to acquire meaning beyond national accounting, if President Tinubu's reform agenda is to travel the difficult distance from macroeconomic restructuring to shared opportunity, and if Vice President Shettima's strategic leadership and the institutional coordination within his Office are to be felt beyond Abuja, then the answer must increasingly and measurably be more Nigerians, more women, more young people, more small businesses, more rural communities and more citizens presently visible to the economy mainly as consumers but insufficiently empowered as producers, entrepreneurs, savers, investors and creators of value.

For Zauro, the privilege is to have been entrusted with a place in that national assignment. The responsibility is to justify the trust, while the opportunity is to convert passion into systems, ambition into measurable outcomes and institutional confidence into enduring public value. If the energy, preparation and commitment already brought to the assignment are any indication, Nigeria may indeed have found in Nurudeen Abubakar Zauro a fitting champion for the difficult but indispensable task of ensuring that, in the economy the nation is attempting to build, fewer Nigerians are merely present, and many more are genuinely empowered to participate.

Dr Haruna, a political economist and corporate communications strategist, writes from Minna, Niger State, and can be reached at msquare1306@gmail.com.