A short paper I delivered on “Making a case for more — curiosity, empathy & urgency.”
Good morning ladies and gentlemen.
It is such an honor to be speaking to this group of great minds on this day that we celebrate Nigeria’s independence.
I will also like to thank the host — Shola, his team, the volunteers and all the other organizers for setting up such a novel platform where we discuss the very important matter of the advancement of our country Nigeria.
First off, let’s do a brief topical situation analysis of where our country is, within the context of the rest of the world, shall we?
- JAMB was recently in the news for again reducing university admission cutoff marks.
- Nigeria’s total oil revenues are about $8bn, while the budget of San Francisco city is $10bn.
- Uber is valued at almost twice the entire Nigerian Stock exchange.
- Today in the west, 100’s of millions of dollars is being invested into ag. tech companies that are building disruptive technologies like robots that harvest fruits thereby threatening traditional jobs in the agricultural sector globally.
- There were more babies born in Nigeria in 2016 than in the entire EU put together.
Ladies & gentlemen, to sum this up — our education is in ruins; we have so far over depended on oil; our economic output is too meager; the world is tending towards a universal basic income; all while we sit on a ticking population time bomb!
In the face of these grim facts, I ask — is there anything worth celebrating today? Is there still hope for our country Nigeria?
I think yes.
And you, are what hope looks like.
Here is why I say you are Nigeria’s hope;
- When one thinks about young Nigerian’s building payment technologies & infrastructure that enable cross border payments across Africa — thereby creating much needed financial inclusion and making the exchange of goods and services more seamless — you feel hope.
- Hope is when two young men build an ag. tech platform — Thrive Agric — that is connecting smallholder farmers all over Nigeria with urban dwellers, to enable investment in agriculture — simply through the power of technology and thereby increasing overall farm output about 3 fold.
- When I meet the founders of a startup called — Fyodor, who have designed and patented a rapid do-it-yourself test that enables one test for malaria at a fraction of the cost and time of a traditional lab test and that is administrable in the comfort of your home — there is hope.
- Hope is when my wife in Abuja, gets an automated report on her mobile device from a health tech. startup called Gerocare who have just sent a doctor on a scheduled routine visit at mama’s home in Owerri to check on her health and report back on her vitals in real time. With Gerocare, we smile full off hope, knowing mama will be alright.
- When you begin to unravel the mighty seeds being planted by young Nigerian software engineering leaders who are organically building communities like Forloop — which represents fertile ground to improve digital literacy, empower the jobs of the future and advocate for the next billion users — you feel very hopeful.
Indeed there is a silver lining, and you are that silver lining.
Young Nigerians who will not accept the status quo but rather channel their precious energies to build or become co-builders within transformative ventures and platforms — are our best shot at making lemonade out of the lemons we have been handed.
You are the silver lining.
I believe that the future of Nigeria and indeed Africa will not be built by governments or grants alone, but by entrepreneurs and “intrapreneurs” that leverage technology for scale. These much needed agents of change, view — building a startup, working in one, serving in government, making a film or doing whatever their life mission calls for as a duty!
That is why my team, partners and I at Ventures Platform are committed to building the future of Africa by investing capital and providing much needed support to 100 startups across the continent over the next 3 years.
But much more needs to be done. We need to do this at scale and with ambition.
And as we look to do so, I believe 3 things are needed by every young person here today and maybe by our leaders too.
- Curiosity — This is the desire to learn or know more about anything. This is the inquisitiveness to question everything. The awareness of our environment and the yearning for better.
- Empathy — This is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another being. This is the state of seeing beyond oneself and not being selfish with our awareness, gifts and abilities.
- Urgency — When something is calling for immediate attention.
In other words;
- you need to be curious enough to question the status quo of everything around you. You need to view every inconvenience you face today as one needing a solution and you need to get so attracted to a cause that you decide to do something about it;
- then you need to work at expanding the capacity of your heart and become empathic enough to personalize the pain of others and in-fact the pain of all of Africa — such that the problems you seek to solve are approached with scale in mind. Your gifts and abilities must be shared with the world;
- and then you need to gain a sense of urgency that propels you to identify and quickly master the tools that are now abundant — in a truly flat world — to build platforms that solve these problems with dispatch.
The good thing is there is abundant economic reward for those that heed this call. But on the flip side, ignoring these realities spells doom for us all. Not in some distant future, but pretty soon.
The combination of a rapidly exploding population and equally rapid advancements in artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotic technologies can swing either way — depending on what young people decide to do today.
We, are the last hope and as the last hope we need to be curious, we need more empathy and we need to have urgency.
Now back to the context I set in the beginning; we must build new digital education platforms that will leapfrog our sick universities. We must hold our leaders accountable and insist that merit and standards be maintained at JAMB. As we build other startups, we must also build startups that make actual things, and urgently diversify our economy so we can truly become the giant of Africa. We must build those unicorns and then list them on the stock exchange to boost the value of the NSE. We must train our youths for the jobs of the future and prepare them to build and master the coming robots. And very importantly we must have vigorous and hard-nosed debate on population control.
We are the last hope — not governments or grants.
I must pause to clarify here that I am not suggesting that we can build the future we want in-spite of poor governance and uninspired leadership — as I once used to think. Rather I propose that we apply the same vigor and disruptive force we are now leveraging in tech. enabled enterprise development to the field of governance and make the revolution total. This revolution will not take us to the promise land in a vacuum.
Without a doubt — I know this is possible especially when one looks at what our ecosystem has achieved with little or no government intervention.
From Yaba in Lagos to Ventures Park here in Abuja, to Colab in Kaduna, and nHub in Jos. Young Nigerians are coming together, building platforms, mastering skills and building the future.
As we celebrate Nigeria’s 57th year of independence from colonial rule and ponder upon the future, I invite you to join the revolution by putting on the
spectacles of curiosity,
wearing the breastplate of empathy
and charging forward with the spear of urgency.
You are hope.
Thank you.
