TECHNOLOGY: NIGERIA’S PLAY FOR VANTAGE

Joshua J. Omojuwa writes that there is much to learn from tech entrepreneur, Olumide Soyombo

I have been reading Vantage: My Life, Starting Out and Startups by tech entrepreneur and super investor Olumide Soyombo. Vantage is an essential read on the tech ecosystem in Nigeria and indeed beyond. Whilst the book offers a lot more than the author’s lessons and experiences in the tech world, that bit inspired my thoughts on this piece.

Nigeria has paid lip service to technology and its development for years. With the flux around petroleum pricing and availability globally, it’s been clear for so many years that we need to expand our revenue base. As with many things, the path to building a sophisticated economy has proven to be an arduous one. As it is, we are now in a must-swim or sink situation. Certain pointers indicate we are looking to swim.

Bosun Tijani’s appointment as Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy by President Bola Tinubu is one of the clearest indicators yet that we intend to play this sector of the economy with the seriousness and sense of urgency it requires. I have already bet on his success. During the controversies that surrounded, I posted a piece to my Medium page that captured, in my opinion, why I believe all the controversies were not enough to get in his way. I wrote at the time, “Bosun is one of our own because he represents the most critical and most powerful force of change in the world today; the world of technology and its capacity for disruption. He has lived that life; he has been that life. He is that life.”

More than anything else though, this is about that ecosystem and its twin-capacity for disruption and wealth creation. The foundation we need to build the future on is on data and identity. Technology offers us the best tools and opportunities to get started with both. We cannot afford to design development agendas blindly. When we create policies and programmes without data, we are merely designing wishes. In the same breath, if we do not know every Nigerian, we cannot say we have committed ourselves to building a secure and prosperous nation. Security is hinged on identity; you cannot build prosperity for people you don’t know.

I think it was Jim Collins in Good To Great who said to build a great company, you needed to start out by hiring the right people. So then, with Bosun, we have the right person. I believe he’d then going to build with the same people who have been part of Nigeria’s impressive tech numbers through the years.

Without a necessarily focused plan, Nigeria hasn’t fared badly in the space. Paystack’s acquisition changed the game forever and the fact this happened about the same time Flutterwave achieved unicorn status meant the space had become impossible to ignore.

According to the “2022 African Tech Startups Funding Report”, Nigerian fintech startups raised $976 million of the $3.3 billion total investments that was raised in Africa during the year. Nigeria led numbers for the highest number of total investments whilst Nigerian fintechs raised more money than every country on the continent. Nigeria altogether received 29.3 per cent of the continent’s total investments.

These numbers suggest that were we to develop a focused agenda for the sector, we could be doing multiples of these numbers. One essential element of tapping into the immense potential offered by this economy would be to skill up the population with Digital Skills. It is interesting to note that the Minister has already advanced a plan to make this happen. When he finally shares his agenda for the ministry, we can expect some more clarity on the future.

Reading Vantage shows the power of what’s possible where there is intention backed by purpose. The author’s dad, Mr Kayode Soyombo, set out to nurture his children into responsibility members of society. Despite his own resources, he found a way to make them have just enough for whatever they needed without making them feel he was a rich dad. He also managed to provide the environment that meant that his children had access to the computer at home, in the mid 90s, when many Nigerians had not seen one and the privileged ones may be had them in school or offices. He taught them the power of purpose and the power of commitment. In the end, he went beyond that to then invest in their businesses. This changed everything.

From his 2008 N5 million equity investment into Olumide’s Bluechip Technologies which he co-founded with his partner, Kazeem Tewogbade, they have gone on to build a multi-million dollar company and have also invested into startups that have gone on to raise hundreds of millions of dollars and billions of dollars in collective value creation. This is what is possible and it is a design Nigeria as a country can commit to. It’d take making stories like that of Olumide Soyombo available to the average young Nigerian. This sells belief. Sometimes, people do not just believe certain things happen or are possible in Nigeria. If we don’t tell these stories and then share them, they’d not have the capacity to inspire generations of people.

Nigeria can do more than lead the African numbers for startup investments, we can start to dream and play bigger. We already have a mostly energetic and enterprising population. It is always shocking to hear the country’s median age is 19 to 20 years. That is a young impressionable country. Are we nurturing them? How are we nurturing them? Are we building them? What are we building them for? What sort of indoctrination process are they passing through in our elementary schools? Are they also being taught that “government should” do everything or are we raising a generation that knows government cannot do everything and that if we must take our pride of place in the world, we must build a people who aren’t afraid to lead their own government to the future.

That said, it is the place of government to provide that environment. It is my belief that we are on course.