A little drop of goodness in an ocean of nonchalance is perhaps the best way to describe the deeds of Kola Oyeyemi, General Manager; Consumer Marketing at MTN,- as he marches onward on his laudable venture of bringing young Africans back to the book.

Pastor Oyeyemi, who authored the first ‘marketing book’ by an African, recognised an emerging generation of Nigerian youth with an apparent indifference for reading.

With limited resources, largely from his personal purse, he established an initiative to bring young people back to the reading table, the libraries, and the bookshops.

 

Starting the Ignite Africa project alone without any help in the early stages, Oyeyemi felt the pinch in his pocket but the fulfillment derived from making positive changes in the lives of people, made it totally worth it.

With the help of his publisher and project coordinator, (the latter spear-heading the movement and the former, defining the project), Ignite Africa now has 63 book clubs in primary and secondary schools in Lagos and Rivers state.

Exuding an evident passion for the cause and reveling in the fulfillment and satisfaction derived from the noticeable impact of the project, Oyeyemi quipped: “In some of these areas, we have people who are brilliant and intelligent but have never read anything in their lives.”

“We have volunteers who read the book and meet with their group of 11 and discuss the book after everyone has read it. Their vocabulary, comprehension and engagement is improved after we started the project,” he added.

With the expertise of a programme director, who has extensive work experience in the United Nations, the students in some of the areas covered, have become very passionate about Ignite Africa because they now have something to pump their energy into after school while the corper-volunteers derive a sense of value from being involved in the project.

“Even after some of them finish their youth service, they stay back to recruit new corpers to continue where they stopped. When you have a good cause, some people just catch the vision. I’m hoping that someday, it will become big and cover the entire country.”

Possessing a passion and concern for the 65% of the nations population- youths, Oyeyemi says he could not look the other way as a large percentage of the youth drifted into aimlessness.

Harping on how his concern emanated, Oyeyemi said: “Even if you live in the highbrow areas, when you step out of your gate, you’ll find a lot of young people drifting aimlessly through life. Some are not in school, some are still in school but they are one leg in, one leg out. They are into all sort of things from drugs to crime.”

“When you look at that and see their sheer number, it gives me worries because apart from the fact that they constitute a major source of concern today, in the future they will give birth to children who are going to follow their path of aimlessness and crime. No matter how secure you think you are, when you have a huge percentage of people uneducated, unemployed and angry with the world and you do nothing about it, those 90% will eat up the 10%. That’s the genesis of my concern.”

In the midst of all this laudable progress made thus far, a reality is not lost on Oyeyemi, which is that the reading culture of Nigerians has drastically declined in recent time.

“There is something wrong with how much we embrace reading in Nigeria. Right now, there are hardly many functioning libraries in Universities and even fewer bookshops scattered all over the place. Students don’t read therefore the bookshops cant survive and if this happens, publishers can’t thrive.

“So I said to myself, how can I contribute to arresting. I can choose to join everybody and complain about the problem or I could choose to say you can be bright in your own corner and light a candle and help somebody else light a candle and together, the aggregate of our lights can provide a difference.

“I’m not a wealthy person but within my little income, I have chosen to make a difference and as I do it, I hope some people would see the impact and help expand it and make it a bit bigger. Pockets of light across the country can blossom into a bug light that will make a difference.”

Hence the birth of the Readers ‘R’ Leaders’ Destiny Walk, which will hold in September, in Lagos. A bunch of book-loving entertainers, like Sound Sultan and Praiz, and several others will lead thousands of youth in the walk aimed at bringing back the reading culture in Nigeria.

Despite being unable to offer an e-library to young people at the moment, Oyeyemi set up the IgniteAfricaLibrary.org platform which “is a library that allows you to borrow order for books and pick them up to read and return. You register, get an identification card and then can borrow physical books.”

Speaking of the challenges that has deterred Ignite Africa from running an e-library, the marketing genius said: “We cannot do e-library for now because if you give people access to borrow books, some will transfer it to other people and that will afect the income of the writer. Secondly, we have over 3,000 books from different authors presently and doing an e-library would mean that we’d have to do copyright agreement with all of them and that will really slow us down.”

Having made a huge impact with limited resources, Oyeyemi believes that with even more “books, logistics and volunteers and a pyhsical location for the books”, the Ignite Africa project can be more wide-reaching and become a major source of reading materials for Nigerians, and ultimately Africans.