Something remarkable is happening in Nigeria. There is a new generation of pan Nigerians emerging onto the scene. A group of young, driven, hopeful and hardworking dreamers, developers, and leaders who see beyond the limitations and drawbacks of political and socio-economic issues and are buying into a vision of a new world, a vision which is exploding at an exponential rate worldwide. A dream so big that it overshadows with ease, decades past of mistakes and offers incredible opportunities for the future and indeed the very present.
This group of people is not from Mars. They are amongst you and your friends. As a matter of fact, many of them have been dismissed by you and your friends as pipe dreamers or whatever else you might choose to call them. Call them what you will but they are here to stay and believe it, so are their dreams. I attended a conference recently where the majority of attendees were young entrepreneurs between the ages of 19 and 35. These folks and those following behind, represent the generation of new thinkers and visionaries who have adapted to the challenges which confront us on a collective and considerably grand scale. Contrary to what many skeptics believe, this demographic is not necessarily oblivious of the enormity of the challenges we face, ranging from food security, education, healthcare and the plethora of issues that come to mind. However rather than oblivious, what this group is, is highly motivated and for good reason.
We believe that at the intersection between technology and social challenges, lies the potential for growth at an exponential rate. Therein lies the key. The possibility of developing solutions which have the positively disruptive capacity to impact thousands of lives, in a short amount of time and without requiring enormous lump sum financial investments. Various startups are emerging from even the most obscure corners of the country and in different sectors of the economy but with a singular ideology and vision in mind which is to provide what I will call garage solutions with potential for national and indeed global impact. It is a truly exciting time. And what is even more exciting is that there is less talk about "what government needs to do" and more happening along the lines of individuals and groups taking on responsibilities which before now were absolutely unfathomable from an individual or private sector point of view but which due to the explosion of technology is now available quite literally, at the fingertips of two or three dedicated computer programmers.
We are living in what is undoubtedly the most advanced period in the history of mankind. If you can grasp the full implications of this fact then I believe I need not say more, but I will! It is a most compelling realization that you and I as we sit in our bedrooms have in our hands more computing power than what was available to the most powerful governments in the world, barely 30 years ago! Think of this in terms of capacity for impact. It means that you have access to more knowledge and actionable data than President Ronald Reagan of the United States sitting in the Oval Office in the 80's. If you are a pattern analysis junkie like some, you will immediately recognize that the generation of whom I speak, Generation X, is the 80s and 90s babies who were born into a world of exponential growth and possibilities. A generation that is not hungover on civil wars, dictators and "federal characters". It is a generation of go-getters and hard workers who are building instead, a new national character that is characterized by an almost dizzying sense of urgency. Of serial entrepreneurs who stay up till 4 am drafting proposals for their grand ideas while waking up to bootstraps, art dealing and hauling potatoes from Jos to Enugu on the weekends. It is a generation of 13 employees running a billion people and dollar business from a small garage office in a valley.
I know what you might be thinking, "well yes this is true but that last bit doesn't exactly apply to us here in Nigeria because our issues are still of the 1980s nature and nobody here is running a billion people business anytime soon" right? I know because I myself have made this very argument before but I humbly submit now that it couldn't be farther from the truth. The reason is simple; if a tiny company in Silicon Valley can impact on your life to the extent of daily dependence then there is no reason a small garage company here cannot impact on 1 billion people globally in the next few years. All it takes is an idea and a dedicated team of good heads as we have seen it being done!
I am not talking about quantum mechanics or artificial intelligence and robotics. While I am convinced that it is only a matter of time (a few years, tops) before we will need to concern ourselves more seriously with those technologies, for the purpose of this article, I am willing to limit the focus to the possibility of developing solutions for some of our more "primitive" challenges through the deployment of technology, ethics and supporting policies. It is here and it is happening right now, in your neighbour's bedroom where he is coding the next breakthrough app and in his sister's backyard where she is building a first of it's kind for both local and global challenges. All that they need from you and "your government "is just a little faith and some money to keep the lights on in the building. The paradigm has shifted. More and more people are willing to take their destinies into their hands and more and more of them are thinking globally which is a huge deal. This is because the world economy of today is radically different from that of the 90s and early 2000s. It is a much more interconnected and interdependent system. By the time you would have finished reading this article, over a billion emails would have been sent and received, more than 20,000 GB of data would have been stored, uploaded or
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