Page 14 - Audacity Edition 2
P. 14
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.