Innovation & Ingenuity as Heritage, A Need for Recovery and Directions for the Future - Emeka Okafor

[Music] hello everyone and welcome back to another segment of our virtual symposium disruptions breaks and ruptures with me today is Emeka Okafor who is reimagining ecosystems and Emeka is also the tEDGlobal curator and the co-founder of TED Fellows Emeka know thanks for having me okay today we're going to have a conversation around innovation and ingenuity as heritage and need for recovery and directions for the future so I have some questions to ask you the first one is what is the connection between heritage and in generating well thank you Shama for having me it's a delight to be part of this event I always hoped that I could attend it physically in London and I I was looking forward to having attended in and cyka but here we are yes the question about heritage and innovation is something that many of us ponder because we try to ask the question where does innovation actually come from not too often the term innovation comes across as a buzzword something that is seen as icing on the cake something that is external not intrinsic and because particularly in Africa in general but in southeast Nigeria and in a bowl and in particular the term innovation is seen as something with an other nests attached to it people don't see it as something that speaks to where they who they are from within and if you do not focus on that intimate connection of it being something that is intrinsic to your being it's something that doesn't seem natural it's something that you can't really build upon because it's coming from a place that is not that connected to who you are so for me I like to challenge myself and ask what we mean about what do we mean when we define innovation from an ebow standpoint and unfortunately this isn't subject matter that has been discussed as much as it should but they're those who have begun to ask those questions and provide some sort of visual trail of clues to help us answer those questions I'd like to start with the thread from a site called guru for those who might not be familiar it's spelled UK PU are you and this particular thread is titled innovations from the e-book area focusing on indigenous structures indigenous social structure as it relates to technology arts and architecture and I'm not going to linearly go through this entire thread because it's fascinating but for me in my sort of questioning the subject of innovation that it pertains to that part of Nigeria I find it to be foundational because if we're to get grips with the essential necessity of innovation and its relevance we need to know where we are coming from where we are and where we wish to go and in this particular thread it starts off with a photograph this 4,000 year old iron slag heap in a place called ledger and I might be mispronouncing it but it's smelly and it also highlights the e-book when a zero bronzes and in addition it speaks to it folks it has some photographs that point us to this y-shaped currency known as that is also from a different time frame so when you look at this thread and those three instances that I spoke to when looking at 4000 years maybe 900 years and maybe going back a hundred or couple hundred years and in each of those instances we see physical objects that where the where the outcome of processes that dealt with ingenuity and ingenuity that was refined that was turned into products and I think one of the most tangible ones is the Y shaped currency piece called Abba because it's a current a product that is used at an exchange of value which is what currencies are so for me that these three items and that thread I really recommend very strongly people go to see it sort of speak to ingenuity that was intrinsic to the societies that produced them what then happened and I'm not a historians I'm not going to speak with the sort of authority of a historian what then happened when we encountered the colonialists is that that thread was broken and devalued so we went from the place where there was a tremendous amount of ingenuity in various areas and they three examples I gave when the metalworking area to a place where for supply civilizational reasons the colonizers felt that they didn't want competition with their own metalwork nor did they want any other form of currency etc etc and these links to this system of ingenuity were broken and devalued and sort of taking down more than a few notches to the point where they they didn't exist so when we think of the type of energy ingenuity that existed up to four thousand years ago back to about 900 years ago with EBU GU and a few hundred years ago prior to the advent of Cologne colonialism you can see that the period when we had actually intrinsic ingenuity went back almost ten millennia and here we are a couple of hundreds of years maybe a few hundred years or two from colonialism to a place where it seems as if that ingenuity has vanished and this was ingenuity that was fundamental to the society it wasn't like some sad on that was being sprinkled or let's do some innovation and have some innovation meter no this was ingenuity that drove the society so when I speak to ingenuity and heritage and if you look at other societies whether it's the Japanese and their steelmaking or various groups in Scandinavia and their cheese-making the idea of being creative and tending that creativity that creativity allowing you to ideator from the ideation you become inventive and that innovate inventiveness then leads to tangibility which is what products are you can always see how they they always look back to whether it's the Japanese steel or it's the the cheese making abilities of the Scandinavians or it's the wine growing from the Mediterranean and that lineage is critical because it's embedded in who they are so if we're to talk about ingenuity but to talk about innovation and to give us a sense that it's something that comes from within it's very important to look at where we were coming from because if we're now going to look at where we are today and where we might be in the future the extent to which were able to recover that base ingenuity is essential if we're going to see this something that we can take into the future and as you said in the title which is innovation and ingenuity as heritage and a need for recovery the recovery I'm speaking to is looking at what happened before and then sort of taking it where we are now and saying well we have we molding it into something that it has utility today and it's that foundation that we can then move into the future so heritage is intrinsic and in it in some case it was always there but we ended up losing most of it and it's that basis that we will need to use if we're looking to build the type of innovation society that we all hope to have not just now and in the future so I don't know if that answers the question but it reminds me of the same how how do you know where you're going if you don't know where you've come from exactly yeah you know one of the earliest blog posts I made it seemed so long ago was and I think in 2004 2003 and it was a post where I was highlighting an article about how Africa missed its industrialization and one of the points that was made in that particular post was that when up till the time we obtained independence in many African countries our elite overlooked and devalued the very things that other societies had sort of built upon when they were thinking about how they were going to industrialize and some of this wasn't a fault of the elites at the time the political elite in Nigeria and other countries some of it was the result of as I mentioned earlier an intent around the colonial powers to devalue any technologies that we had and sort of quote unquote strangle them in the bed and so we had this big rupture that sort of made us not see these things as intrinsic to who we are and what we've been doing ever since is scrambling thinking that innovation is something we can import from elsewhere between poor things you need to understand the basics but if you don't even understand the basics how are you going to build on top of so yes I that's how I would characterize it beyond freh was a seminal moment from a science and technology perspective when you have the research and I think research and development section that was able to carry you know the country for over 30 months what would you think we might learn from that experience I think there's so much value in the bafreux science and technology experience that we must examine more closely you know when we speak about this chain of ingenuity that was another place where the chain was broken it was also a period where no the chain was broken then this ingenuity momentarily reappeared during the bathroom wall and there were it was they reappeared because of pressure they reappeared because of necessity but that period of science and innovation and not just products but things that worked albeit for purposes of combat and some purposes of logistics is unparalleled in ebo history and in Nigerian history this oversight the oversight of not acknowledging what happened during the BRM war is even something that was recently acknowledged by Nigeria's current vice president yummy OC banjo he lamented in early this year he lamented the inability of Nigeria encoding to leverage on the engineering and technological ingenuity that emanated from the defunk Republic of Biafra during the Civil War it's somewhat bittersweet to have that kind of lamentation 50 years after the fact nonetheless I in some ways it's a useful acknowledgement to have because when we throw a we're around terminology about research and science and technology and emerging countries and so forth one of the key aspects we do not seem to recognize that necessity of survival which in many cases comes from war is some of one of the biggest rivals of technological progress it's not something that people like to acknowledge because we associate rightly so war and battles with death destruction and suffering but there those who argue that one of the reasons Europe was able to dominate the rest of the world over half a millennia is that they have so honed the tools of war and they were so tightly bound in killing each other that when they were then unleashed on societies that didn't have that level of endless ingenuity and innovation they were unstoppable and so we saw a glimpse of that during the behalf of the war the Science and Technology organisation whose name escapes me but we can put a link to that on down somewhere at the end of this talk encapsulated the the best of what could be done under pressure because people's lives were at stake whether you was there a unique we're weapon systems which in the hands of other societies would have formed the basis of a defense industry which in the hands of others would have formed the basis of a major weapons manufacturer and once again I don't want to harp too much on the death and destruction aspect of weaponry but I think it's important for we as enable as Africans as Nigerians to look at what the West has done with these industries the very Nobel Prize that even the peace-loving people nominate people for was founded by Alfred Nobel Alfred Nobel made his fortune from explosives if anything the Nobel Prize was established as a south to his conscience it was it wasn't stated explicitly but there's a very tightly bound connection between the tools of how we can defend ourselves and the foundation of science and technology but beyond the weapons systems like you know the various explosive devices used during the war there was a tremendous amount of risk refining going on because the southeast they didn't have access to refineries for purposes of world that they would use in their transport systems so that was a missed opportunity after the war they Nigeria founded an organization called Prada but unfortunately Prada never lived up to its promise and these reasons one could argue range from strategic neglect to understand misunderstanding of how commercialization and innovation work and why is this important there is this constant confusion within Nigeria about invention ingenuity and criminalization and innovation they're not the same thing you know I remember growing up in an igloo and every now and then would go to one of these trade fairs and I think it was Polo Park yes or opposite colored Park in an igloo and they would wheel out this Geary frying machines from Prada periodically but it never sort of moved beyond the prototype something was missing something was not there to turn the process from the ingenious prototype to the product and what was somewhat sad is that those who knew how to do it took that basic understanding mostly from the Far East and started producing the product that we in Nigeria ended up buying and by default putting foreign exchange in the pockets of others so I remember like the young pounder there was a time the young pounder and I remember thinking why are we importing young pounder from I think it was Japan or China exactly they don't eat yeah but but they um be must have made an observation that we do and we eat a lot of pounded yam and I wouldn't be surprised if they came across these prototypes that came out of places like Prada so Nigeria lost out and not building upon what quote-unquote the defeated side had come up with it was a big oversight many people I'm sure are familiar with America's Apollo program which launched men to the moon the Apollo program was essentially built on the knowledge of German scientists that Americans captured after World War two Wernher von Braun was the person who ran America's Apollo program he was a German I'm not sure he was a Nazi the point I'm trying to make here is that our shortsightedness at the time actually undermined what could have been tremendous progress and I think there's a lesson to be learned from that so anyway in terms of Biafra itself it was a shining example of what could have been from a technological standpoint because when they designed these tools they had to work ok may they may not have worked perfectly but they couldn't sit around and discuss whether the person who designed it had a PhD or not out of work I did it I think the history of that effort from a technological scientific standpoint should be explored more usefully because when we come to today and where we begin to discuss what should happen tomorrow we'll begin to see how it all sort of happened then and hopefully learn lessons from that process unfortunately most of the people that were active around that time I'm not sure they a lot I don't know if a lot of them are still around or even if they had notes to what they used in our doing you know the war but and that's the story for another day okay actually there's a book that was written about that restrict center and but I'll provide details for that I have it ready yet so I don't know how detailed it is but it could be a starting point yeah and then we also you know you keep pairing or you know so many problems in Nigeria but you also wonder the the hasn't as you said nobody has ever thought of going back to work then so now you know sort of use it to solve the problems of Nam yeah yeah okay um do you think innovation is critical to our future and what its relevance was in the past do you you've touched on it like talking about the ledger you know I mean walking us through how you know with the buku bronze and then but how how do you think a society should become sustainably prosperous well it is quite relevant well when we begin to look at where we are today and where we might want to go so to use concrete examples the foundation for evil business and trade one could argue is around the cities of uh nature may we about and other places but those are sort of this the main fundamentals engines and one of the main drivers in those three cities is comest in the exchange of goods and to varying degrees manufacturing between a bar and new e-commerce is increasingly moving away from physical interactions it's been somewhat amplified by what we're living through today you'd Cove it many individuals across the world who wouldn't even consider the idea of working virtually or using products and services that are virtual have been forced to do so even in Nigeria so prior to COBIT and its it being a function that is forcing people to act in a certain way there were other currents that were beginning to undermine some of the advantages that these markets had Alibaba the Chinese Bahamas the massive Chinese Amazon equivalent what do they do they trade they trade products and if you go to Alibaba they might not have varieties of egusi seeds or Gog and all of that but how unlike me is it that they want in the future and as more and more people even in the remotest parts of Nigeria the monist parcel and Libra and everything else else begin to become comfortable with these tools that allow us to transact and exchange funding without being face to face as these things evolve who do you think is going to be marginalized one of those constituency's over time maybe not immediately will be the very big step that very a group of stakeholders who trade will it go completely virtual maybe not in the next generation or so but a substantial amount of trade is going to move from how it's being done now to where it could be done where how it's going to be transacted in the future and that erosion of numbers is going to affect those who rely solely on face-to-face trade so the question becomes to what extent to what extent is that demographic that could be affected by this issue beginning to consider how it might affect them or are they going to be blindsided because they didn't make the effort to see this as a threat secondarily as we know in Nigeria B we're moving from an economy that was based largely on oil revenues to one that is having to diversify and one that is having by that diversification also looking to export a large amount of products or an increasing amount of products the it's a very different ballgame where you bring things from outside and you sell them within you open you better contain as you know to now having the structure and systems to compete at an exporter it's the the the skill sets are completely different not to say they don't require diligence hardwork adaptability and I built a sense of seeing opportunities where there lie which ebo traders good at india ferrah and unparalleled in that sense but it's a different set of problems and innovation is required because to understand how it's done you have to think differently but you also need substantial understanding of the tools that I used in other parts of the world well global export excellence is a marker and I say that because we have to look at who will we be competing against over the next 10 20 years Nigeria just joined after AF CTA which means that maybe not immediately but over time our borders are going to be less controlled and we're going to be subject to more competition so innovation is critical for the southeast because the land is shifting beneath our feet the things that were considered the purview of the commerce generating engines are gonna be flipped on their head because oil is going down in value and export and sorry foreign exchange is going to be determined by what you produce and what you manufacture and what you export there certain didn't need for standards that you might be able to get away with when all you are doing is breaking up in a container and having people come and buy things so innovation is critical if merchants the merchants the manufacturers the importers who will not be important as much now have to look at markets that are very different to the ones we have today so but I see this as an opportunity I see it as an opportunity for those who are quote unquote working with certain tools to work with this group of traders and businesspeople who provide the foundation of commerce in the southeast and hopefully if we're able to work well enough together we can say we can be looking to having evil corporations that are like Alibaba that are not just focused on their success in a narrow subset of the country or the country itself but are just as comfortable selling items to people in Japan they are to keep them away and the hats of it is also um transport and logistics so all design you know sort of things that are currently impeding you know sort of manufacturing and so any sort of manufacturing and export exploitation can't even go far until they figure out how to move these Goods essentially true and I think this is where we may need to have thinking that taps into the collective resources of the diaspora from a financial sense to build those critical corridors not everything but the critical corridors financing mechanisms that say well yes to what extent can we finance the dredging of the Niger privately because if we can do that then we can use barges to move containers from places like our nature out to sea ports this is not government has a role to play without government certain things just will not happen but there is an opportunity to think about things differently and be very sort of focused a critical juncture a critical aspects of infrastructure that could be financed privately you know I had no idea that some of the oldest ports in Germany and canals in Germany we're actually financed by merchants two three hundred years ago with with with the assistance of of the state but the point being is that government does play must play a role but there's a lot of a combined private sector and the aspera could do if it was very focused and intentional and that is something I hope these conversations um because I know you're a big time maker and a lot of people when they saw that you were one of the you're going to participate in this event we're like oh the the king of the makers so could you tell us if there are examples of contemporary innovation in the southeast and it's that's where that you would like to share with us yeah I sometimes feel like an imposter when it comes to being a makeup because I can barely hold a screwdriver straight but I I admire those who do because I see them as intrinsic to and every society whether they're designing you know integrated circuits or they're building a table what I find most intriguing now is less the individuals who are inventive and ingenious of which there are a few or maybe a number of but more the people who are working to build the systems that can nurture and propagate and replicate what those individuals have done because too often in the past and I'm sure you you're familiar with this you'd hear of a story of Omo Cao Lu moto this guy built a car this guy built a plane or invented this invented that and you never hear about it again and this is not just particular to the southeast this is a Nigerian why Africa why challenge so one of the takeaways from being involved in making for Africa for me and others was how do we begin to encourage these spaces virtual physical and otherwise to become sort of a safe space for people of that disposition and one of my favorite quote called safe spaces for that is actually in a bath it's called the Clinton L in an Innovation Center found about this young man called tôchuken it's CIC and what CIC is doing is that taking young people there doing a number of things one is that it there's a business aspect to it there is an educational aspect to it and there is a sort of practical how do you implement it on the ground aspect of it which are key components if you're going to get innovation going and the Clinton L Innovation Center which I urge anyone who is watching to seek out is building the kind of space that we need many Maura if we're going to move from what was described earlier as this sort of prototyping society or copycat Society and will notice a copycatting is is wrong but a system that moves from being able to copy but also being able to do it on a scalable basis and on a sustainable basis so Clinton L Innovation Center is one of them another one is the Ala waka Institute in Oh Mary and which actually I believe is now certified all of our Institute of Technology and then in and suka there is this intermediate space called roar roar Nigeria ROA Nigeria that is a partnership if I'm correct between the University and others to build a space where people can absorb the thinking that's happening in the university but they can also be brought to into contact with the way businesses are built and structured and one of the startups from that particular Institute I think it's called aro n our own drone systems is actually looking to build cargo drones that could be used for distributing supplies regionally and then the last place which is much younger but is has a similar sense in the need to bring together all these elements into collabs in in but once again we need we haven't even scratched the surface we need similar environments that foster agribusiness agro-processing chemicals Metalworks biotech from Atal pharmaceuticals and so on and some of these spaces need to be like the ones I mentioned where they stand alone some of them hopefully will work with institutions of higher learning some of them will learn with post-high school institutions because it's not just about in DJ university it's about those who have the ability to build with their hands but might not necessarily be interested in pursuing underneath so those are the systems that I think are critical for us you know I would like to use examples but not not for the wrong reasons one of and I'm going to refer to Israel and I'm referring to Israel not because of any Jewish connection that some people might have which doesn't add up but more to how they've taken systems like the camaraderie in their army to build the type of thinking and innovation innovative thinking that could then be used in business but one of the things that they had to focus on was how do you bring these necessary elements together what do we have that no one else has that would form a foundation and one of the things they had that no one else had when Israel was still a very young country in the 50s was very arid land where there was no that much rainfall it was very difficult to go crops Asia became a world leader in the irrigation of dry lands and the an agricultural sector that was based on that kind of climate so the point I'm trying to bring in here is what is it about the southeast that we have that could be seen as an impediment but could be turned around into an advantage is it the concentration of trading in the three cities I mentioned earlier is it the cluster of schools in places like in that could sort of complement each other we have to look at the things that we have that no one else does or if they have don't have as well and build that into the innovation systems for those of you who might be familiar with indigo for example now this region in ago called coal camp where beyond the spare parts that they once sold they were very known for fabricating whatever you need it why haven't we set up a space that sort of speaks to the needs of those individuals and build off that as opposed to setting up something that is fancy that will not last beyond the funding that is provided to it so I may be going off on a tangent but it's for me it's about the systems now the systems and the institutions that we need to focus on much more so than the individual who comes up with something that is brilliant because so many of those brilliant individuals end up being frustrated and and and somewhat unhappy that they produce whatever they produced or they invented whatever they invented and because they expected the government to step in which inevitably they didn't and even if they did it was very for a very short period of time many of them end up being quite bitter about the whole experience but if we're able to support the spaces I mentioned and build more of them than those individuals when they appear we'll have a much more nurturing environment and one last thing I'd like to mention is the role of women in all of this I think that innovation too often everywhere in the world but more so in our more recently patriarchal society tends to overlook the level of innovation that happens with half the population and this is innovation that in many cases around food systems and areas that some consider less important we need to find ways to bring along our girls our women as much as we're bringing along our young men and all the people who who are male this has to be a concerted effort across all age groups and all genders innovation isn't just about science it's about how do we take something like our a keylogger dance and take it to Broadway and build an industry out of that but if you're not having the conversations with those individuals when we're speaking about innovation people are just going to think it's about computers and engines which is untrue so I just wanted to sort of bring that in because it's easily overlooked their eyes glaze over and I think oh they're thinking technical exactly the people who smoke fish and do it well that could be a multi-billion dollar industry right there that you know I remember attending a fair a number of years ago in New York a Fancy Food Fair and walking past the aisle for all of oh no it wasn't all about it was for Italy or Greece I can't remember exactly which country was and I was flabbergasted to see the number of companies that were in the olive oil business we have not just palm oil we have you can make an oil out of every single nut or vegetable that we have out there the process of taking the time and making ten different grades of palm oil that's innovation and that's innovation that can provide employment for hundreds of thousands of people if it's done in a particular way so this is sort of I'm sort of tying innovation back to what matters to us now what we never what are our deficiencies today I'm speaking of innovation and palm oil there's a company called Brook oil I think it's spelt B ruk oil or broken oil mills that's is actually in the business of building the machines that press the oil and turn it into a product and it was founded by some young men whose names I don't have with me but I can provide for later reference and if I remember correctly these individuals actually came from outside they studied outside Nigeria went to some fairly good schools outside Nigeria but they saw the value in being able to innovate with something so fundamental back here and the funny thing is that their conglomerates and businesses that are going to be built from these things that we overlook because we do not attach the same understanding of inhibition to them that we should we tend to see innovation as that thing that is flying in the sky no it's it's the person who can turn off Julie into a business as big as a soy oil right so we have to move from looking at it as something that exists up that something that we hold in our hands or we encounter every day for example all these things like beetle even oh boy some people you know swear by it to be useful you know sort of medicinal purposes so there's just so many things and them as you were talking I just remembered about Malaysia someone was telling me oh Malaysia is you know I was telling someone that my Malaysians actually came to Nigeria to learn about palm oil and the person said it was a lie so as you were talking I just remembered you know when you talked about palm oil and I just remembered how Malaysia is taking over the supply of palm oil to the world this is something we could easily you know sort of resurrect again yes and I like the fact that used the word recent resurrect because the title of this conversation one of the words and within the title of this conversation is recovery and I think we're seeing a recovery process happen but it's not happening at the pace that it could you know when you mention Malaysia Malaysia along with Indonesia the largest producers of palm oil and unbeknownst to a lot of people camel is the most widely traded vegetable oil in the world it's used in absolutely everything but beyond even palm oil which we can look to resurrecting and look to branding in ways that no one has thought of you have a slew of indigenous vegetables you mentioned bitter leaf that have medicinal qualities but could also be used or potentially be used as a replacement for hops in beer so my point is if you if you went to Google Scholar and Titan any one of these items you be surprised at the number of academic papers that have been written about them what hasn't happened is translating this research as we spoke to earlier into products into globally competitive businesses that produce the products and that is what will bring prosperity much more than any amount of oil or contract that we would get domestically but for that to happen there needs to be that connection between those who are curious those who have done the research and those who have the ability to move things from an idea and a research item to a viable product that could be used in any number of places or instances so yes the opportunities are there but the systems need to be in place and the spaces that I was referring to earlier are part of the puzzle that you need to get those systems in place ok we all know so many people are unemployed in Nigeria and in the southeastern woodland and a lot of them are you know sort of young people wondering what to do all of them are looking for you know sort of government job and that brings up the next question and because before you spoken to didn't need for an entrepreneurial class could you talk about why it's important yes why is it important to have an entrepreneurial class well part of it has to do with an understanding of how economies work because as a prelude to the question you just asked you spoke to how people were looking for work or they were looking to government to provide work for them an entrepreneurial class to a degree we already have in a bowl and if some could argue that as a group Ebel's might have more more of an entrepreneurial class that everyone else that said there seems to be a disconnect between our entrepreneurial class and what some might argue is the non entrepreneurial class so they're those you know who speak English as they say and and and live in places like in GU or a middle class and they don't see themselves as that well connected to these groups that you have not just in places like only China band Naomi but in places like Legos and any other cosmopolitan Centre in Africa were they Sierra Leone where I was recently or Angola you see groups of entrepreneurial evil people in all of these places and even beyond Africa Asia and America and so forth but it's an entrepreneurial class that doesn't even seem to realize the potential clouds you could have because it hasn't connected its financial heft and its trading ability with the meaning of power everything is sort of isolated if you look at large diaspora groups I would say the most interesting diaspora groups from from China from the Indian subcontinent from Lebanon and one of the better known ones that has been around for thousands of years the Jewish Diaspora there was a very strong connection between this merchant class and the intellectuals and the scientists and whether it was something that was planned or intentional or or laid out or organic I'm not entirely sure but it was this cohesiveness that gave them a certain power that I see lacking with the entrepreneurial and intellectual and scientific classes of the Buddha aspera both within and without there's this lack of bridging between the view of being the various groups and that lack of bridging has undermined its power to be politically powerful not just domestically but internationally and the reason I also like to use the word entrepreneurial is that people who are entrepreneurial by their very nature tend to ask questions they tend to be curious they tend to be problem solvers because if you are not selling the product that you made or you got somewhere else you're not going to put food on the table so I see the word entrepreneurial being abused as something that people do because it's cool to be an entrepreneur but for me it boils down to something much more intrinsic which is to what degree are you problem solvers to what degree do you see an issue and say we're going to find a way around it and that is what those folks that we were speaking to earlier in Biafra we're doing they had a problem and they had to solve it they didn't say well where's the contract to make the bombs and they didn't have the luxury of trying to live I mean they have the luxury of time so one of the sad aspects of the Nigerian state is that it's turned an entire many generations of Nigerians or most Nigerians this is not just particular to be boland in to those who are looking for others to solve their problems for them so we have this very sort of disconnected citizenry that doesn't see a problem as something that they have to figure out and entrepreneurs by their nature try to figure things out because if they don't figure things out they don't survive so when I am speaking to an entrepreneurial class I'm speaking more to that than it being people who are the business of entrepreneurship but to sort of absorb those attributes you need to be fused or quite tightly coupled with those who do and if you look at very effective diasporas whether it's the non-resident Indians but the Chinese diaspora that for hundreds of years was being doing what it was doing before China became the China it's become in the past 30 years they became very effective because they were able to bring all these elements together and in a sense they sort of complemented each other and till you have that you're going to have people going off in various directions and at the end of the day essentially not getting anywhere and that so that's that is my sort of understanding about having an entrepreneurial class because an entrepreneurial class also will not take the kind of nonsense from bad leadership that we seem to be taking at the moment because people are bought off they they celebrate things they shouldn't be celebrating they become much more cohesive because they know how to solve problems at least that's my thinking what thoughts do you have on the you know sort of the business class in fostering an innovation pipeline yes you know we've touched upon it somewhat earlier the the reason I feel this is important is if you look at the great commercial concerns of today whether it's the 1.3 or 1.5 trillion dollar valued Apple computing or Alibaba that I mentioned earlier or or Tesla or companies that are not publicly traded but I'm massive like a DM or olam all that means out of Singapore even they were started in West Africa one of the reasons these concerns are the way they are is because they have a philosophy that is about innovation when we look at the commercial concerns in our part of the world they consist of people who are smarts who are flexible who risk-takers but to the extent that they're innovative the jury's still out because if they were we wouldn't be in a position where it seems as if with each generation the companies of the previous generation are not the companies we have today and I know this is not just about innovation it has to do with continuity and and structures and governance and all of those things which others have spoken to you but there needs to be an understanding of why you have to innovate and why if you bring people in if they're not innovative your company is not going to be nimble it's going to die because there are others who will come in and eat your lunch all the time you only have this window where the opportunity exists and when that window is gone there are others who try to do what you are doing or even do it better so this is not something our commercial concerns and businesspeople should run away from because it's the very thing that's going to guarantee their long-term survival you know Andy Grove one of the founders of Intel wrote very famous I don't know if it was a book or if it was an essay about how only the paranoid survive and he wasn't meaning paranoid as or they're gonna come and shoot me or kidnap me no it was more paranoia that what I need today someone is going to make something twice as good tomorrow and I think that the e-book business class has been able to survive under the toughest of circumstances but this seems to be this limiting factor around how innovative they are and the degree to which that can be embedded in their organizations who actually in my opinion be an advantage and who knows maybe there's an opportunity to do this by having some of the types of spaces we spoke to earlier working with them or having them fun spaces like that I don't know but I think we need more cooperation and interaction where you don't have the successful business people over here looking at the startup folks over there and the trade are saying what are those funny people doing over there we need so much more cross-pollination effective cross-pollination between all these groups if we're going to build the types of concerns that I think we need to build to hold our own ok I'm 2 years ago I had am I gave a talk I mean it was possible and that my mother what food the basis of my talk is that in in earlier like 100 years ago in evil and women where the the traders women were the you know sort of the ones pushing commerce women were more powerful prior to you know the Colonials coming so um what I want to ask you next is ok right now it's it's not so we may not you know as we know more like marginalized so what I want to ask you now what I really lose them out by not having women in the business of innovation well I I know you talked about it yeah yeah I thought the point we're losing out tremendously and we need to find ways for women to recover the ground that they lost over the past so it will make us stronger if you find ways to do it one of its like you're fighting a battle with one hand tied behind your back when you don't fully incorporate everybody that's what we're losing you'll fight you're fighting or producing that you are 50% of your capacity I think that's the most literal way to look at it yes because we men are 50% of the population exactly and and and in your total in terms of mind share you're talking in terms of perspective you're talking in terms of the the workforce itself it's interesting because we were not patriarchal prior to the onset of colonialism if anything a lot of these patriarchy is a result of the Victorians and and so on so there's a certain equivalence that we need to build back up and I think one of the ways to foster this is to support systems that are being built or could be built by women in areas of Commerce and Industry across the board I don't think there should be any favoritism giving to any group we should just have people who shine have the support that is necessary and encourage them to and when we see those who are doing the work rally around them so too we bring the numbers up to where they could be we'll be at a loss and I'm not just speaking about people working in these spaces or industries or companies I'm speaking about the market women how do we bring those systems of market women into these spaces where their collective financial and productive worth can be enhanced the cooperatives that we could build with these various groups so not doing so is actually self-defeating and self marginalizing and culturally and otherwise we need to find ways to overcome it not just in terms of the cultural wars but in terms of Commerce because if we as Africans in general Nigerians in general evils in particular did not build power bases of Commerce we're not going to be at the table with anyone else the struggle we see in the world today that is becoming much more nationalist you're in the UK I'm in the u.s. all these countries are taking a turn for it's about them it's not about others it's a less forgiving world that we're stepping into it's a world that is less ready to care about anyone else and societies that do not build a financial and commercial heft an industry are going to be very very vulnerable in a world that is becoming a lot more scary so it behooves us to bring to the table all of our assets which includes half the population if we're going to fight by at least an steadfast about what seems to be simmering on the margins traditional educational institutions equipped to foster prosperity at the time of a rapid change no they are not and in many ways they've become a problem the role they should be playing you know we were speaking about Enugu earlier on in urdu i don't know how many schools in Teague has but thousands so but the question we need to be asking ourselves is what happens with the people who leave these schools are they leaving these schools to build society are they leaving these schools to create systems that employ people we should call these institutions to account if you have an institution that the employment rate of its graduates unemployment rate is in the 90s and 80s what's the point of having that school all you're doing is creating unrealistic expectations with young people who quickly becoming disillusioned you create a sense of entitlement for people who feel they were educated but really I'm not able to do anything of practical value so I think we need to hold these schools responsible we should put their feet to the fire and ask hard questions how many of your students are employed how much wealth has your school generated post employment how many companies were created by graduates of your school because the schools that a lot of elite Nigerians want to send their children to outside Nigeria answer those questions when you hear of MIT one of the first a metrics or statistics you hear about MIT is the economy of MIT the number of companies MIT graduates have created those are the things these schools are being valued by that's the same with Oxbridge what you don't hear is that we graduated students this is not an egg production factory because we're ruining the lives of these young people if we do not equip them and we're ruining the future of the country if people are unable to be productive and the more young people you have that are not productive the more treacherous the society becomes this is subject matter than others have spoken to much more eloquently than I have but the thing is there's no point having a million schools if there's no value post graduation for those schools and I'm speaking not just about tertiary education I'm speaking about primary education we need to have yardsticks and metrics that asked really hard questions and if those questions are not answered then something needs to be done and done quickly because we don't we have a very we have a window that's closing to get these things right and the traditional institutions I'm sorry to say have failed that here and there you see a few initiatives that are worthy like earlier on I mentioned raw Nigeria that is that UN n but we need like a thousand of those types of efforts having one is no it's literally insignificant again when there's more then they become more competitive each one is striving to you know sort of you know better get better than the other the competition shouldn't be all we have X number of graduates with first-class honors it should be our graduates have gone on to to build future companies builds future institutions so it's also good for the school because if they're financially successful there because the element I will come back here they become the seed corn for future endowments Harvard Stanford the endowments don't come from government then god endowments come from largely very very successful alumni so if you don't play a role in making your graduates and your students very successful and then later on you're complaining that no one is thinking of the school I think these schools need to put up a mirror and look very harshly at themselves and ask why those that change that behavior will see results that will pay dividends fairly quickly and this is what we should be looking at in my opinion so I'm not trying to be too harsh here but the schools have largely failed and they need to course-correct okay um there's been a tremendous unsuccess in sort of in a creative industry like Nollywood literature music and so much more so how do you think innovation can catalyze and amplify these fields you know sort of even more you know the creative spaces have been the one area that we're so proud about because despite all most apps absolutely no support from the Nigerian state it's the one area that we have consistently been proud about whether it's our writers our filmmakers on performance artists across various fields so first I'd like to applaud individuals in this space for sort of flying the flag of excellence and ability and creativity and all of those things at the highest possible levels you know there we there's nothing that we lack in terms of the quality of the work that is coming from these areas compared to where we are lagging so I think it's important to acknowledge that I would like to see more nonfiction I think we need to see more stories about for example everyday stories everyday stories about what was Camas the women who built commas in pre-colonial Nigeria what was that about no III think that but that's just a personal aside for me in terms of innovation it ties in with what I was saying earlier on you know we scratch the surface but boy is that surface ten miles wide you know for each one of our folklore stories there's a Lion King waiting to be made so once again I'm talking about the system of wealth creation the system of not just there's a book but to what extent I were beginning to see that can the book be translated into a film can that film be turned into a series and it's happening but it's not happening as much as as happening as quickly as some of us would want but perhaps technology will enable us to do this even more so you are a publisher Chama yourself in in the area of language and innovation I will I would argue has assisted you in that quest to move beyond what would just have been a book sitting on a shelf to something that could be packaged for not just an artist in a particular geographical area but globally and not necessarily just for people who are vivo heritage so these opportunities I think could and I already are assisting the creative space but we're not completely there yet and the degree to which we can speed and accelerate that process the better because the more we can inject resources into this space that in my opinion is doing better than many others that velocity financial liquidity will impact all these other spaces and I think it's not a case of well we have one book or two books that have been turned into novels and into films and into podcasts we need that we need 5,000 more of them and even the stories that have been told can be retold 20 times the West does that all the time that every time people don't realize that um companies like Disney use stories in the public domain and then they rush and rehashing and then you know for example we could take the most important one famous one anymore landed the tortoise I mean what stops us from creating stories with a tortoise and using a mobile phone or doing something in the modern world yeah exactly and and the evils are very well known for their idioms and idioms can be animated they can be repackaged they have a power that we're not even utilizing if you looked at the full sort of landscape of multimedia mini stories and um those encapsulate our worldview at the same time you know in in very sort of brief and and with pithy ways so the the full range of media whether it's on our device in our hands or it's in the cloud and whether it's theatrical production we we haven't even begun to exploit it but there are ways to do it differently that didn't exist 20 years ago I remember watching these koto dramas from Japan who traveled the world globally and these guys just were very maniacal drummers right think of the various instrumentalists that we have in Ebel and that are equivalent to folks like that oh give me people under exactly play Nadja you know so many things but what has happened with these societies is that they found ways to package their work and disassemble it in ways that we could - and we could - with less resources than we required in the past so there's just a plethora of material cultural material that technology now enables us to access in ways we couldn't in the past that I think more of us should take advantage of unfortunately the examples exist so it's not a case of you have to learn it from scratch it's already being done so I think the already burgeoning cultural space will Bergeon will actually do much better in the future if we find more ways to accelerate the process and if we find ways to take that into the world of commerce you mentioned Disney what does Disney do you know we our folklore can create everything Disney has on more if we are able to please put these elements in place because they don't even make their money from the films it's the merchandising that's where their money is yeah so anyway let's move ahead a number of countries and city states could be characterized as startup Nations or cities or regions how can Ally will become one of them yes and thanks for that question you know I read a book called startup Nations and other people have by was based on what the country of Israel have done but not only Israel you see similarities in Singapore Hong Kong some might argue Dubai and these locations they they have a number of similarities that we could we could sort of look at because if we were able to build on what we already had and set for ourselves ok when I say we I'm speaking about the the southeast there these elements of an interest in trade and a certain openness you know because Evo's generally had to leave their part of the country and travel everywhere else for reasons that might have to do with population density and the fertility of the land evils actually very open they're very accommodating they are not that suspicious of outsiders contrary to what many people might think there's a certain openness that you have there's also this sort of industrious Ness that comes with all these constraints and and and need and an interest in learning the languages of others almost to a fault where many people myself included aren't as fluent as we should be because there hasn't been as much focus as there should on what is intrinsically ours the educational aspect the the even though as what many would argue our education is not what it could be but generally speaking Evo's are a group that feel knowledge matters and when you look at these start up nations or starts up city-states the key startup nation people who says Israel they don't also have resources Israel had no oil they barely had any water they had some of the most infertile land out there so they had to use their most important resources what recited between their ears their brains and brains are useful if their individual but they're actually more powerful if collectively you can harness that brainpower and this sort of more ties into what I was speaking to earlier about bringing at aspera together bringing these segments together where the dance instructor the person who knows what he or she knows about that log want a dance group sees the value in someone who has studied dance in the UK but that person is then saying well we're not that good at marketing but we know someone who went to some of the best schools in the world and is a great marketing to build something collectively and some would argue that that is a starter it so it's a start-up way of thinking where you're bringing together teams of individuals teams of people to address market opportunities wherever they exist and if you do that on if you're able to replicate that process enough you form the foundation and the basis for what could be a startup nation a startup nation is not going to come from a communique which out our leaders seem to be fond of it's not going to be a dick taxon state house know if we have governments that were effective and I'm not going to get into bashing our governments because in my opinion at least for the time we are here together that's not productive I would say the state had a really important role to play here but here we have those kinds of governments we need to find waste so to do that with the cards we've been dealt and the degree to which we can assemble these kinds of teams of people across various industries various institutions if we're able to be successful at that over time which I think we can then you have the foundation or the feedstock for what could be a startup nation if we had effective governance yes you would sit down with people who called himself governors I called himself governors but I don't consider them to be governors because they don't act like governors and people in the legislative arm and the local government arm and say these are the things we need to put in place but that doesn't seem to be the case but it doesn't mean we shouldn't work towards it by doing what we can while we wait for that to fall in place and a startup nation is a nation that things like that a nation that is cohesive in terms of thinking what its product could be and in this case its product is it's people who go on to create build and structure and deploy in the educational space and the business base the health space and so forth so that could be the roadmap toward a startup nation while we're waiting for the governors and politics situation to settle itself but till then I think these could be some of the measures we could embark upon to begin the process of solving the problems with what we have and not wait for things to be perfect my final question what role do you see for bottom-up development it's everything I think we mentioned women earlier and I mentioned market women the salt-of-the-earth are critical for us to build whatever needs building what do I mean by that you know the women now quote say in the market the the men who are the engines of rice production or yam production they constitute the bulk of our population or the the the petty trader their numbers are much more than those who sit in cafes and discuss you know whatever is sexy on Twitter the degree to which those people are part of the conversation that we're having today is critical if we're to make progress no societies have moved if they haven't included those individuals all along the way we need to have them there while these decisions are being made and there's a reason for this because our politicians have already figured out how to get to the people who are the salt of the earth the things they only get to them every four years and the people who mean well of having discussions that I believe we are trying to have at this event haven't found a way to connect to those individuals that form the bulk of society so what then happens is when the political class does what it does they know they'd have them in their pocket and they just are able to control that conversation so not having the bottom up constituency or the people at the bottom as part of the conversation has actually undermined our the ability of various groups to achieve meaningful power economic and political power and speaking the language that is understood in those areas where the basic necessities are difficult is critical if we're if society is going to move forward in lockstep so I don't know how to go about doing that in terms of them you know a single or a few answers but this is something that has to be part of the process the process must be something that when the traders knowledge the markets knowledge the the shoe makers or leather producers in a bar or the spare parts folks in navy and all the others in between how do that bulk of the ebo foundational space become part of the conversation and to we're able to do that we'll be having this conversation 10 years from now because it's going to be a conversation that is up there in the ether but doesn't trickle down to where should if anything should be trickling up and if you look at societies that have been able to change socially they were able to do it whether it's the Scandinavians whether it's the Chinese you know the mechanisms were different once again we have to discover those mechanisms ourselves you know we can't copy and paste and expect it to work because the language is very different the ways of being are very different and they extent to which innovation and ingenuity will be a feature on a factor here I don't know exactly how but it's something that needs exploring from both ends and but one of the ways you do that is by bringing those individuals to the table and having them speak in an unfiltered way so that they can be heard we can hear them and they can hear us and we can speak or deliver something together that is meaningful and impactful so I don't know but that's my sort of really vague sense of things this has been a fantastic conversation so many Nuggets I think every five seconds that's you know something so valuable that someone you watching out there can use and grow from here thank you so much Emeka and of course you I'm not even gonna ask you you are going to come to the next you know installment of Lemoore conference and hopefully we're hoping you and sook I will still hold next year so you know we look forward to seeing you again on your conference I don't know if I'll have much more to say that hasn't already been said but I look forward to being an instructor and having conversations with people I think we need more of these types of interactions and it's fun to say the least so thank you again [Music] [Music] you

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Length: 92min 19sec (5539 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 17 2020