by Johnson Abbaly

“If you want to go quickly go alone, if you want to go far, go together”
– African Proverb

The folktale is told of the King who was on state visit to another kingdom. He had a diminished entourage and to make up for the short fall he swelled his ranks with his servants garbed as nobility. On arrival at the other kingdom, while true nobility moved on, the “noble” servants took off their foot wares at the entrance of the palace. On arrival, the host king was bewildered at the sight of shoes as he wondered aloud “what slaves were here?”

Any kind of change imposed from without is quick fix.  Behaviour modification without an alignment with the inner vision of self is insufferable.  Genuine change is impossible outside of vision. Every true change begins with a philosophical or spiritual commitment to a personal or corporate vision.

Vision…   the operative word.

What you see shapes what you become. Success is something you attract by the person you have become. If you want more, be more.

Someone who steals doesn’t just stop stealing in response to pontification.  People don’t just suddenly change their ways. To change people you will have to deliberately interrupt their patterns.  Nothing interrupts patterns as powerfully as a clearly elucidated, compelling , burning vision of what is possible crafted by a leader true to a vision he has seen.

Nigeria needs a rallying vision! And only leadership can fix that.

People are ready to align where the purpose is clear and the conviction is unflinching.  Nigeria is a good investment. It is an incredibly good product to sell. The potential of this nation remains staggering. Every global organisation that seeks relevance in the future has  an African strategy- and given Nigerian’s people and resource base- a Nigerian strategy.

In the coming decades the big story will be Africa and Nigeria will be its major plot.

IMF in a recent World Outlook projects that non commodity Africa will be the fastest growing part of the world, even higher than Asia. That truth is here with us already. The entire oil revenue in Nigeria captured from the Niger Delta only accounts for 15% of Nigeria’s Gross Domestic Product. Meanwhile, Lagos state, a non-commodity economy accounts for 30% of Nigerian GDP.

It is quite easy to see how a small shift in vision from a commodity based economy to a value based, investment driven economy can alter the fortunes of Nigeria. This is a good place to paint a vision for people to see. People need to see how their concerns and interests are accommodated in the new bold vision of an evolving nation.

Nigeria is a big deal in the demographic future of the earth. Nigeria is poised to grow its population by a factor of 8 over the next hundred years and she currently has one of the youngest populations on earth; 74% under age 30.

What is the 50 year plan for this demography? A nation that is blessed with a youth bulge must build institutions and structure to harness them.

Here is the stack: You have a resource rich nation, 80 million hectares of arable land, favourable climates, natural landscapes, pristine forests, 170 million people three quarters of whom are under thirty. Now you have the basic economic fundamentals for wealth.  It remains to see what you would do with them.

Here is my recommended first step:  Revamp your people process! Policies are only as good as the people who implement them. And by people I do not mean your fifty year old politicians. I refer to your 74%. Revamp the educational system and realign it with this new vision.

People believe and become what they discover that’s what education is about. You don’t spend billions just to transmit information from faculty to students especially where the information is generic and can be gleaned from a thousand possible online resources.  We have to get smarter with how we raise the next generation.

120 million migrate from rural to urban areas globally every week, creating a new 3 billion middle class. That’s the future of markets and its estimated to create over $50 trillion of new wealth. They will need food security, technology, lifestyle tools, etc.

How do we position to leverage our advantage in this new economy? That’s the question an education system is designed to answer.

The present curriculum is overloaded with irrelevancies. Young people spend several years in the sector and emerge completely unfit for purpose. We tend to adapt the student to the curriculum rather than adapt the curriculum to the student. If young people don’t learn the way we teach them, then we have to teach them the way they learn.

The core of an educational system is for learners to master the critical building blocks of arithmetic, language, logic and critical thinking. People should be taught how to learn so they can take control of their own learning. A professor’s business is not to rehearse content that the learners can acquire on their own. His fundamental function is to lead his students to conquer new frontiers of knowledge and build core transversal skills that will enable them to dominate high skill and high wage global industries of the future.

Your educational system is your human capital strategy to raise the critical mass of engineers, scientists, doctors, software writers, technocrats, entrepreneurs, lawyers, system integrators, soft service providers  etc  required to drive our collective economic vision.

The change we need is fundamental. It goes beyond window dressing and catch phrases. It needs to be rooted in vision and driven by a passion of a people who know that their moment is now upon them!

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Op–ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija

Mr. Abbaly is the Convener of “Situation Room Africa” and a Conference speaker. He tweets from @JohnsonAbbaly, [email protected]and lives in Lagos.