If you are Nigerian and all you cared about in the 90s and early 2000s was catching the Saturday Cadbury breakfast show[1] you are probably familiar with “Vision 2010”. That was the answer to the many long nights we spent without electricity supply – Vision 2010 – somehow by that year, Nigeria would have transformed into “A united, industrious, caring and God-fearing democratic society, committed to making the basic needs of life affordable for everyone, and creating Africa’s leading economy”.[2] That was short code for things like stable electricity, access to quality education, efficient transportation systems, employment, a non-import dependent economy and an improved standard of living for every Nigerian irrespective socio-economic class.
While we are still far away from this ideal, we definitely made a lot of progress before the deadline for the Vision 2010 agenda lapsed. However, a lot of things remained the same – unstable electricity (“Up NEPA”[3] was and still is still a thing), poor public infrastructure, a less than excellent educational system, corruption and insecurity among many other things. But we being Nigerians, probably the most resilient people on the face of the earth, decided to look ahead to a brighter and more rewarding future, and what better year to pick than 2020? A decade away, plenty of time and with rhyme and repetition- just like “moin moin”[4] or “puff puff”[5]; something to truly get excited about…“VISION twenty twenty”.
So “Vision 2020” – what’s it about? What are we doing about it? This is 2015, and so five years from now, would we have achieved all or much of what we set out to?
Thankfully, these questions are not the “if you ask me, na who I go ask?”[6] type. First, the overall goal is clear – “to position Nigeria to become one of the top 20 economies in the world by 2020”[7]. Second, it is evident going by certain government initiatives and private sector involvement in areas of the economy like agriculture and information and communications technology, that [insert your favourite politician or CEO or entrepreneur’s name here] is working. So far in the past five years, we have made significant progress becoming the largest economy in Africa. However, there remains a lot of work to be done to live the ‘aye foreign’[8] that we want for ourselves and future generations of Nigerians. We need to make more progress to bring to world-class standard the very factors that largely determine the extent to which we accomplish the goal of having all relevant governments, news houses and history books acknowledge and record to our delight that Nigeria has finally arrived – effectively becoming part of the G-20[9] and probably forming her own “you can’t sit with us”[10] group.
What is my role you may ask, at this point?
With oil prices currently down to the point of yeepa[11! And the dollar up currently against the Naira to the point where we feel “shogged h’up”[12, the hand-writing on the wall is clear. We need to put in work more than ever, in order to create new sources of income and reduce our dependency on crude oil revenues. Thankfully, a lot of us have been taking this very seriously and are increasingly taking advantage of the Internet and new technologies – social, mobile and cloud to make a living for ourselves and create employment for others. We have many examples around us from online businesses like BellaNaija, Konga, GingerBox, Jovago, to offline businesses that do a good job of engaging clients online like BM|Pro, Tara, GTBank, Chef Fregz to name a few. ‘Ello friends, we are effectively moving on from an era of exclusive ‘oil themed parties’ where only the really privileged get to attend, to a type of market democracy where any and everyone with big dreams and some gut can bake a pie for themselves and for us all to eat! The people that coin buzz words for the rest of us to mouth and feel smart with, call this the ‘knowledge economy’, KE.
The KE era is on full throttle and even more exciting is the start-up culture that characterises it. Here, all that “Uche, face your books” and emphasis of studying hard to make straight A’s or anything close makes a lot of sense now, but not in the way we know it. The ‘la cram, la pour’[13 method, and studying just for the sake of “me too make I just go university”[14, just doesn’t cut it in today’s world. The key to actively playing a role in advancing our Vision 2020 objectives lies in you, you, you and me assessing ourselves individually to discover our talents, passions and uniqueness and ultimately working to acquire complementary knowledge and developing the requisite skills to help us fully exploit them. It may seem that the odds are against us in terms of infrastructure and our struggling educational system but we do have things working in our favour. First, the World Wide Web is an excellent learning resource – and thanks to low-cost smart phones and data plans, we are increasingly able to access its many resources to learn just about anything that interests us. From blogs, to new sites, to video sharing platforms like Youtube, Vimeo, Dailymotion to Massive Open Online Courses like Coursera, Udacity, EdX, FUN, FutureLearn, Udemy amongst others to Open Educational Resources like MIT OpenCourseWare, Codecademy, W3 school and to indigenous solutions like Prepclass, Efiko, Passng, PassNowNow and co, the learning and related career opportunities are limitless.
Back to start-ups and still on learning – especially learning an important skill as computer programming or simply coding – an exciting new company Andela, in the tech-education space is offering an innovative way to encourage people to do just that and even earn money while at it. It does this by recruiting aspiring and motivated programmers into its four year fellowship program where they can learn to code, work on real-life projects from all around the world and get paid for the brilliant work they do. So if you have discovered you have a knack for software and web development or even artificial intelligence, this might be a good opportunity for you. My thoughts are there are a good number of whiz-kids from the Computer Villages around the country who this program might be perfect for. PushCV is another brilliant start-up in the capacity development space and in fact represents the full picture of what KE demands of us – know what you do and do what you know. Their mission is to help people discover and forge careers in their areas of competences regardless of educational background. This is good news for us Nigerians especially as we have a system that is for good or for bad, designed to make excellent bankers out of trained physicists! If you have not gotten in on the start-up rave, take a tour around Yaba, from the market till you settle in the so-called Yabacon[15 area, home to several start-up firms like Andela and incubators like Co-creation hub, Leadpath, iDeaHub and co. Visit as many companies as you can, speak with people, ask questions, share ideas and try to see where you and your dreams fit in KE.
Remember, there is work going in every sector, from agriculture to the beauty industry to e-commerce, education, trade and technology. “The train is moving… [and] the train is ya train…”[16]. Do your best to hop on as soon as possible.
Vision 2020 is possible with you and me.
Live long and prosper, Nigeria(ns)!
[1] Early morning breakfast show with highlights like Fresh Prince of BelAir – best enjoyed with the best tasting yam and eggs or moin moin and ogi or akara and ogi or Agege bread and Ewa Aganyin or a full English breakfast. All choices usually went with a generous cup of Cadbury Bournvita or any other chocolate drink. Hello, Milo kids!
[2] Vision 2010 report, full text. Available at http://nigeriaworld.com/focus/documents/vision2010.html
[3] Shouts for joy doubling as praise for the state owned electricity board formerly called, National Electric Power Authority and supplication to God to make it last for as long as we ‘need’ it.
[4] Steamed beans pudding; every one swears their mum makes the best one. Best eaten out of banana leaves and served with jollof rice at Nigerian parties. See:
[5] Deep fried snack made of dough. Usually served by road-side traders and best eaten from a soiled newspaper sheet. See:
[6] Line from popular song by Omawumi Megbele one of Nigeria’s most celebrated female singers. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPiP-EF01hg
[7] Nigeria’s Vision 2020 Economic Transformation Blueprint, Accenture, 2009
[8] Nigerian slang for the good life.
[9] The current top 20 major economies of the world. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-20_major_economies
[10] Popular quote from the 2004 American movie, “Mean Girls”.
[11 Nigerian exclamation for when one is in real big trouble. Language origin: Yoruba.
[12 Slang popularised by rising Nigerian music talent, Falzthebahdguy to mean ‘choked up’ which when pronounced in a thick Yoruba accent, comes out as ‘shogged h’up’. See: https://instagram.com/p/vrRwzwvB3r/
[13 Studying without deep reflection or understanding – with the sole intent of repeating information from text-books or class notes to pass required exams.
[14 Pidgin English for I will just go to the university, because everyone’s going there.
[15 See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yabacon_Valley
[16 Nigeria’s First-lady, Patience Jonathan’s latest famous words at a campaign rally this year.