Interview With Khalil Nur Khalil: Executive Secretary of Kaduna Investment Promotion Agency (KADIPA)

   On Sunday, the 16th of January 2021, I had the opportunity to sit down with Khalil Nur Khalil, the rising and hardworking new Executive Secretary of Kaduna Investment Promotion Agency. He’s the brain behind all the newly constructed infrastructure, transforming Kaduna into a millennial city in its own rights, and on its way to becoming the future hub of Africa. We had some interesting discussions that revolved around economics, life philosophies, unemployment in Nigeria, cryptocurrency, and dealing with burn outs. Read on! 

Aisha: At this point, I think the world knows who Khalil Nur Khalil is but can you briefly introduce yourself please?

Khalil: Hello Aisha, my name is Khalil Nur Khalil. I am the Executive Secretary of KADIPA (Kaduna Investment Promotion Agency).  

Aisha: What drives/what motivates you? What makes you get up every morning even when you’re on the threshold of burn out, and keeps you going? What is the biggest contributing factor? 

Khalil: What motivates me? So let me take it both ways. There’s intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. So yeah maybe when I graduated, the intrinsic drive was more or less trying to find a sense of purpose. How do you redefine yourself professionally? Where do I get a job and so on. So when you’re motivating human beings right? You’re either appealing to their fear or their aspirations. For me, the fear would be failure. That drives me. The extrinsic part is: for you to have a deep sense of purpose in life, it has to be outside yourself. The aspiration there is to make people around me happy. So the extrinsic thing/motivating factor would be my mother. Just ensuring that she sees her kid/kids doing great things. It makes me happy when she’s happy. Another motivating factor (laughs) is the fact that I’ve sworn an oath of office, obviously I’m duty-bound to deliver. 

Aisha: Who has been the biggest influence in your career, in line with your personal life?

Khalil: Personally and professionally. Personally, my mother again. Just the basic moral and ethical lessons that she impacted on myself and my siblings. You don’t know how far that goes until you’re actually in public office. All these things you thought you know; don’t lie, don’t steal, don’t cheat…it’s very cliche but you don’t do it because of how you were brought up. It’s very important. Professionally, the Administrator and Commissioner, Hafiz Bayero. Craziest influence because he was my first boss coming into Government, just watching him navigate public service at such a young age was crazy. He has been the most crucial influence for me. He’s gotten me to where I am today. 

Aisha: What advice would you give our Arewa youths that are finding it hard to get jobs in current Nigeria?

Khalil: Maybe I’m speaking from a place of privilege, obviously I know I’ve been very lucky…I don’t want to dictate to people and they’ll go ‘oh, its because you already have a job and whatnot’. On a serious note, if I’m talking to an individual Arewa human being right now…a very young person coming up, you need to understand the context of the times you’re living in. You need to understand where we are in history. Having done that, would you be able to explore the opportunities that may arise. So what you ought to do is revert back to basics. You need to take out time in solitude, have a rough idea of who you are and develop the cognitive skills. I always say that…it’s the way you evaluate your thought process in terms of how you think, how you learn and how you actually solve problems. So you develop that, you have a little bit of basic psychology and how you operate. Going out into the real world, you already have 5-10% clearer vision than the next person so whatever opportunity comes up you’re able to pounce on it. I think we need to restructure the concept of what a job is. A lot of us go to school, have thoughts of ‘I have the degree, I’ll apply and I’ll get a job’ ….but I feel like once we do all of these things in terms of introspection and understanding history, understanding how the world works, we’ll probably end up inventing a job rather than getting a job. A lot of us will have careers in the future that don’t even exist right now. So why don’t we think along those lines rather than ‘oh, Dangote didn’t take me on?’ So what? He’s a billionaire and his time is booked up for the next 20 years. When you look at the world in this digital age, what are you doing to add value to society for you to even end up creating your own job and become a job creator moving forward?

Aisha: I’ve seen your involvement in Bitcoin for the past years and I’ve witnessed the growth, what are 3 points of advice you’d give anyone trying to get into the cryptocurrency market?

Khalil: Okay…I’m strictly Bitcoin so I’ll not speak for Etheruem and the others. Advise number 1: read read read. Really understand the space. If you don’t understand it, then don’t even try it. Advice number 2: put an amount that you’re not scared to lose and use the technology well. Download the apps, try and send money, see what the whole hype is about Bitcoin. A lot of people think you just buy and hold onto them. But that’s not it. It’s a monetary network, it provides a lot of solutions. You make transatlantic transfers with no extra charges. Advise number 3: if you do the first two, find out how you can also add value into the space. It’s the future, honestly. It’s a protocol layer, even we don’t know where it’ll go in the future…it’s like investing in infrastructure or telecoms. Money is digital, money will be digital….it’s just in what form or shape it’ll take. 

Aisha: As a fellow Economist trying to get into tech (which is extremely diverse), what advice would you give and what aspects should one invest their time and resources into? For instance, data science?

Khalil: What aspect of the computing or the tech side? I’m biased already. Okay, advise number 1: if you’re very very smart, obviously you’ll just go and learn Computer Science on your own. You’ll just become self-taught. Computing is really….you move at your own pace. Forget school, a lot of the people I know, even my younger brother, they’re all self-taught. There was no school, nothing. Just dived in, they’re smart enough and they do it. But if you’re like me and you’re not smart and gifted….from an Economist’s point of view, find the intersection between Commerce, Economics and the digital age. Try to understand the evolution of money itself, how monetary evolution and the systems work, how it’ll evolve over the next 100 years. You don’t have to know all the programming languages, you just have to know what effects all these technological solutions would have on the way we transact, make payments, commerce, being entrepreneurial and so on. Position yourself as an advisor, an Economist and the opportunities are endless. For someone like me, 2/4 years back…I’m an Economist, and I’m also into Bitcoin. But how do I capture value? That is how my brother (Abubakar Nur Khalil, CEO of Recursive Capital) and I came up with going into venture capital fund, since we were both into Bitcoin. But I handed that over to him because I went into Public Service. Look into it, and you can create a career out that doesn’t even exist like Bitcoin Economist or Remittance Transaction Blockchain Advisor. The system is fluid, there’s no one-dice-fit-all. Be curious, learn and then plug yourself in. 

Aisha: I see you’re also an extremely curious person that turns to books to get answers, what three books shaped your philosophy? Both on life and finance?

Khalil: On philosophy, I’m mostly a stoic. So stoic philosophy more or less, Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. I’m quite big on psychology…a technical one would be Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. On risk philosophy and probability, Incerto series by Nassim Taleb.

Aisha: I think it’s time to turn this interview around…what two questions has no one asked you yet? Or you wish people would be more curious about?

Khalil: Interesting. I wish someone would ask me….there’s a book I’m currently ‘trying’ to read (I don’t read as much as I can anymore because there’s no time) but there’s this book I think I’m reading, The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation is the Key to an Abundant Future by Jeff Booth. Booth talks about how technology is making things efficient so everything would be profoundly deflated. But from my post-Keynesian background, I know there’s deflation and I know it’s bad. The question is, “Khalil, what do you think? Is deflation good or bad for us going forward in the next 100 years?”. I think that’s one of the questions I wish someone would ask me. I don’t have the answer to it yet but it’s thought-provoking. The second one is, “How do you see money evolving and the evolution of money in the next 100 years?”.  Money is layered over time. We went from gold, to gold coins, to paper money, to debit/credit cards and now there’s digital money which is layered again with cryptos like Bitcoin. (We both would like answers to these questions if anyone knows).

Aisha: You’ve achieved a lot in the space of a few years, but I have a feeling the sky is the limit. What directions do you see yourself heading in the next few years? Where do you hope to take Kaduna to?

Khalil: If I’m found worthy enough to continue in public service, and I’ve added value and so on, my principles and how people feel I’ve added value, I’d love to transform every single public institution I come across. You people complain too much (laughs). I’d love to leave a legacy that’s revolutionary, sustainable and would actually make a difference. I would also love to see Kaduna transcend even the days it was in it’s prime as the political capital of the North, I’d love to see it be the hub and centre of excellence across all dimensions. Economic, education, city administration, etc. When you think Kaduna, you just think ‘the future hub of Africa’. On the other hand, if I’m not in public service, I’d just be building infrastructure for Bitcoin across Africa. That one is pretty obvious (laughs). 

Aisha: How have you been able to deal with expectations people have on you? 

Khalil:  I’ve been in the system for 3 years which feels like 30, to be honest. What we have been able to do, what we have been able to learn, under His Excellency Governor Mallam Nasir El-Rufai, has just been insane. You learn everyday, there’s always something new. People on the outside wonder how these young people get this accelerated promotions but people fail to realise that a lot of great things were built by people doing it for the first time. What hasn’t been achieved in 35 years can and has been achieved in a very short while. 

Aisha: This brings us to the conclusion of this interview. I’m sure a lot of people are curious about this….how do you do everything? How do you balance work/personal life? I’m sure you’ve experienced burn outs a lot. How do you de-stress? What is your safe space? 

Khalil: Wallahi we just work hard. I just realised I have little to no personal life, unfortunately. We couldn’t have reached this level without sacrifice, one way or the other. That was what we had to sacrifice. First of all, I’m more conscious of my health. I used to totally have no diet, just coke and suya. Just that, and I did that for like 2-3 years. I eventually crashed health-wise, so since then I’ve been more conscious of my health. If there’s no body, there’s no work. I’m a little bit more conscious of that, so the moment I feel my body telling me to relax, I just blackout. Days where I just sleep. My safe space is…if I happen to have a day where I watch one movie or read a book, then I know I’m de-stressing, which is extremely rare. It’s all work at the moment but over time I’ll slowly learn how to structure my life. I take breaks on Sundays, and by break, I mean sleeping longer than usual. But I still come to work everyday. 24/7 365. Even with the 4-days work week, that’s for everyone else. I think it’ll gradually reduce over time as I figure out ways to have a structure but for now, de-stressing is not on the table. Unfortunately. 

This brings us to end of an insightful and though-provoking sit-down with Khalil. My biggest takeaway is he’s very futuristic. He looks for ways to add value to whatever space/environment he finds himself in. What do you think? What questions would you like to ask Khalil if you had the chance? Which other youth leader would you like to read on this blog? Comment your answers!