Page 14 - Audacity Edition 2

1. The Operating Environment. If we fix that, we fix the continent. If we

fix Nigeria, we will unleash the latent potential and energy and creativity

of our people. Indeed, we would have more Steve Jobs out of Nigeria and

Africa.

2. Ease of Translating Ideas to Actions. The mechanism, the transmission

mechanism that takes ideas to action is extremely important, but it is also

tied to the operating environment and tied to ourselves who have ideas –

who must realize that the easiest thing to do is to dream dreams but the

most difficult thing is to translate those dreams into action. And as you

have been told, that journey and process is usually tough, you must be re-

silient to be able to bounce back if you encounter challenges.

Our people are creative, hardworking, and extremely enterprising. They

experience a stifling operating environment. They lack support; they deal

with neglect, god-fatherism and the absence of meritocracy. They need a

hand-up, they need a little push and for so long we have carried on with a

little entitlement mentality that others will develop and solve our prob-

lems. These issues and reflections led me to some conclusions and deci-

sions. One, only us will develop Africa and the world should rethink

how to engage with and intervene in Africa.

If despite the sum of more than $500 billion spent in the past 10 years, we

still remain perpetually dependent and the poverty reduction needle has

not been moved significantly. By the way, let us not be shy to say to our-

selves that Africa remains largely undeveloped. A new development

model is therefore needed, a development model that embraces shared

value, local value addition, long term investment, private sector develop-

ment and ultimately entrepreneurship.

Our people have ideas and are ready to work, they want to be given op-

portunity and a helping hand just like Steve Jobs, Bill gates have in their

time. Can we imagine if Steve Jobs was from a different continent, or coun-

try? Today he is dead but he has left behind a company that has value of

about $800 billion and cash of about $300 billion but he’s dead. If he was in

a different environment, it is possible he would have gone to the grave

with his ideas and who knows the amount of people in our environment

who go to the grave with their ideas and the amount of losses that we as a

continent suffer from this.