If necessity is the mother of
invention, why aren’t we creating much?
There
is a deafening buzz once you get into the town centre in Aba, most of it coming
from the swarming ‘ina-aga’, the motorcycles which take Aba residents and visitors
back and forth at a fraction of the cost of taxis. The rest of the buzz is the
sound of the busy, the overwhelming music of enterprise which animates a city
that was central to once favourable comparison between Nigeria’s South East and
Japan, the beacon of technological progress in the Orient. Today, Aba is a
symbol of the industrial underdevelopment which has slowed innovation in the
non-oil sector of Nigeria. Where the city was famous for its strength in
manufacturing, all that is left is the traders’ reputation for imitation. The
term ‘Aba-made’ is a byword for fake or copied goods, which are low in quality
and deemed inferior by the discerning buyer.
But
the buzz remains. Everywhere there is the grist and the grind, along every
street corner and in every market place. Whatever else is missing, few will
doubt the intensity Nigerians put into everyday life which often, if not
always, translates into enterprise. Take Lagos as a small-scale version of
Nigeria and you must accept that there is enterprise blooming in the most
unlikely spots of the country even around some unexpected products and
services. It would not be inaccurate to say that the average Lagosian is an
entrepreneur. Whether she is selling pepper at her mother’s stall or involved
in multi-level marketing programmes, the Lagosian will find a way to trade. And
that, in part, is the problem.
The
same people who remark on rising Nigerian industriousness will be the first to
note the fall in industrialization. Driving through Aba, it is easy to spot the
abandoned buildings which once housed standardized operations for breweries and
vehicle assembly lines. These days, the work is to be found in the market
stalls and on the streets. All across town, creativity has been channelled into
selling goods of all description, electronics and spare parts, and where there
are products actually being made it is the endless stream of tailors and
cobblers working with basic implements to stitch together clothes and shoes.
Their goods are doomed to be sold for peanuts because people consider them
counterfeit.
Nigeria
is close to the bottom of the Global Innovation Index 2014 in 110th
place out of a total of 143 countries. The index is an initiative of the World
Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), which aims to capture the multiple
areas of consideration which make up innovation in order to recommend tools for
long term growth and policy shaping. To put this ranking into context, Nigeria
sits behind tiny Southern African country Botswana and even smaller West African
neighbour Cape Verde. Rwanda, which still bears the scars of the horrific
genocide of two decades ago, is also ranked higher than Nigeria. Add to this
the Francophone nations of Burkina Faso and Senegal to which the average
Nigerian would seldom consider a visit, and you can see what is wrong. Their
verdict is plain: Nigeria is not innovating enough.
The
question is why?
I
was born in Aba, and, as a young boy, I used to visit often after we moved
away. I recently returned there, a long while on from my last trip. Time seems
to have stood stock still for two decades. The street where we lived -Omenazu
road- looks even worse than I remember. That is to say, I probably took less
notice of the gross maintenance failures then than I do now, with adult eyes.
Factories which housed growing industrialisation in the post-independence
years, remain a shell of their illustrious past, as they lie unattended in a
deteriorating city. Aba now seems little more than a hive for worker bees doing
the same thing they have been doing for many years without change.
Necessity
is the mother of invention, or so the saying goes. What this usually means is
that people will find a way out in the most trying of circumstances- some kind
of device that will help solve the problem. But this is not how the story goes
in Nigeria. People will and do find ingenious ways to get around some of the
basic challenges of everyday life (just spend a day in the Lagos island slum of
Makoko if you doubt that a people can survive on little and be happy) but there
does not seem to be much desire to progress from mere survival to thriving.
Whole townships can seem unevolved even after decades of technological
advancement have passed by.
For
when we talk of innovation, we speak of two things. First, there are the giant
leaps that have been taken in Silicon Valley, where technology has become the
biggest tool for social transformation in America, with such far reaching
global consequences that the catchphrase for the near future began as nerd
argot, the ‘internet of things’, a world where every object is connected by a
remote controlled weblink. Amazon is already making same day deliveries by
drone drop; Google is about to greenlight automated cars that do not require a
human driver; Facebook has acquired powerful virtual reality technology that
may one day allow you to visit anywhere in the world without ever leaving your
living room. An elite class of these promising tech startups now known as
‘unicorns’ is raising record investment sums in venture capital and private
equity funding to do things as varied as making disintegrating messages and
mapping the human genome.
On
the other hand, innovation need not be these original inventions which Silicon
Valley has become known for. Malcolm Gladwell once wrote a profile in the New
Yorker magazine on Steve Jobs’ stint as the iconic boss of Apple, the most
valuable company in the world. In his opinion, ‘The Tweaker’ was a man whose
‘sensibility was editorial not inventive’. Unknown to many, what Jobs remains
famous for is his talent for taking other people’s ideas and refining them.
This ability to innovate in small measures led to Gladwell’s parallels between
Jobs’ style and the industrial revolution of the Victorian era. That period in
history was dominated by Britain because of its ‘resourceful and creative’
skilled population, engineers and artisans who focused on achieving efficiency
by making incremental changes to every little process. In the same way, Apple
is the predominant technology brand in today’s world, not because it makes
original products but because it makes stuff a good deal better than its
competitors. The iPod was not the first of its kind. Still it became the
benchmark for mp3 players when Jobs honed its design until it was irresistible.
Along the same lines, the iPad is cooler and more desirable than every other
tablet owing to this tweaker mentality, a philosophy of constant improvement,
of kaizen and reincarnation. Besides coming from a stronger design ethic, these
products are functional and accessible to people who would not otherwise be
open to new technology. Consider that my father, who spent many a year running
from the computer, now replies emails speedily on his iPad. That is the measure
of good innovation.
Transplant
this concept to Nigeria, a nation of creative thinkers and dreamers, and one
would imagine that tweaking, if not inventiveness, would prosper. Our markets
heave with imports from the staple food we consume right down to the humble
toothpick. Even without original inventions, what needs doing is to take what
is coming in and enhance it with tweaks here and there. There is no reason, for
instance, why the expertise which courses through Computer Village cannot be
channelled into locally-made electronics adapted to withstand the extremes of
heat and water damage that affect many homes and shops. This know-how, properly
directed, can also be applied to make antennae, in radios and satellites,
better able to draw signals even when network service is bad.
Look
around and you will find that Nigeria is Africa’s largest mobile phone market
but despite nearly 150 million subscribers to the Global System for Mobile
telecommunications (GSM) (65 million of whom boast data service subscriptions
to surf the world wide web), the pace of innovation in Nigeria lags behind
other African countries. Take Kenya, where the M-PESA service processes 25% of
the country’s GDP through a mobile money platform and M-KOPA provides customers
with cheap loans to buy solar power. Even more worrying, a recent article in
the Economist titled ‘The Pioneering Continent’ took a look at impressive
innovative advances in Africa without once referring to Nigeria. All of which
makes our claims to be Africa’s foremost economy suspect. Granted, I have not
surveyed the happenings in the closets of Yabacon Valley, as the tech cluster
in the Lagos suburb of Yaba has come to be known, so it would be difficult to
say for certain if that small corridor of Lagos disproves this theory, but Yaba
is a small strip of Lagos and elsewhere I have hardly come across
forward-looking innovation geared towards solving basic Nigerian problems.
Think how much a company like DSTV would invest in the potential to prevent
disruptions that accompany heavy rain. Just think about it. Since it appears
that no one else is.
The
innovation deficit is tied to the unbearable truth that there is no power in
the majority of Nigerian homes a lot of the time. Generating under 4000MW of
electricity to serve its 168 million people, the electric power sector cannot
support the creative habit. In South Africa, with less than half of that
population, power output is greater than ten times that figure. But when the
lights go out in Nigeria, people do not break a stride. Candles and lanterns
appear at a moment’s notice in the ghettos and the countryside. In the teeming
urban centres where expensive refrigerators and air conditioners must run,
thousands of groaning generators ring through the night. Having learnt to deal
with the difficulties of power, there is little support for this excuse;
blaming the entire culture of stagnation on power failure is a red herring.
Of
course, let us not forget that some innovation flows from the restiveness that
the lack of electric power causes. 419. In Western depictions of Nigeria, the
fraudster caricature dominates the larger narrative of a corrupt state held
back by its own greed. Some Nigerians have found the will to profit from the
innocent and from the state, through internet-based scams and every other form
of cheating. Even when this corruption is not online, it is ever present. All
signs point to a ruling class that is happier to get fat on the public purse
than to spend on development. The reasoning seems to be that there is no harm
in budgeting inflated amounts on infrastructure while spending a fraction of
that on actual projects. So, vast millions are skimmed off and put in offshore
accounts while the work is eventually carried out with money that is not
enough, if it is done at all. In that small but crucial way, Made in Nigeria
has emerged as a byword for shoddy design and poor execution, to be avoided
wherever possible. Which makes it all the more ironic that the newly-elected
government swept into power using the traditional broom, that most backward of
implements, as its symbol of change.
Even
‘Made in Nigeria’ students, the homegrown and locally-trained, are considered
second rate in the job market. No surprise then that kids learn from an early
age that to get the best value you have to go abroad. These kids also face a
system of education focused on passing examinations rather than problem
solving. What is the relevance of solving puzzles and doing crosswords, when
there are books to be read, Nigerians might ask? Read your books! Read your
books! This is the Nigerian teachers’ chorus- all learning is to be found in
books. Finish school and you can do whatever you like, is the way Nigerian
parents tell it to their kids, forcing child prodigies in music and drama, in
visual or applied arts to sit through book-based study sessions when they would
rather be sweating at some instrument, getting creative. Any social media user
is likely to have come across memes for ‘Why didn’t you come first? Did the
person that came first have two heads?’ Academic excellence, then, is accounted
for by sole reference to examination grades. When those grades are awarded for
the ability to ‘cram and pour’ everything in the exact way that it is delivered
in textbooks, there is little attention paid to the unusual forms of
intelligence which are the hallmarks of the creative and the innovative.
Brighter children with a world of possibility at their feet are guided towards
the favoured professional disciplines of medicine, engineering, law and
accountancy when some of them might be better off as lithographers, sound
technicians and archaeologists. For a people who make a big noise about the
value of education, what is being taught is limited.
Perhaps
the fact that kids are supposed to be seen and not heard in Nigeria contributes
even more to underdevelopment than limited education. In this way, many
youngsters across the country drink up whatever it is their teachers and elders
might be telling them without being given the opportunity to question and test
its veracity. Nigerian parents would much rather accuse the questioning child
of disrespect or of talking too much when they could be reading their books.
Social hierarchies of this kind hold back out-of-the-box thinking that
stimulates innovation. They convince growing children that the sole goal of education
is to follow orders. As such, trying to change things becomes taboo.
There
are other cultural matters so deep in the national DNA that they programme
Nigerians against innovation. Superstition is one such matter. Anyone who has
read ‘Things Fall Apart’ will recall how the Umofia villagers held the evil
forest in fear. When the missionaries came and built their church in the centre
of this vile place where demons were supposed to convene, it was an eye opener.
Still too many of these myths are alive in the diverse cultures of Nigeria.
Myths which dictate what vocations different genders are called to and flawed
ideas which prevent people from exploring certain corners of the map that
should be better researched. The paradox is that formal education for the
sake of it has acquired some mythical standing as well. Almost as if when
the missionaries built their church in the evil forest to explode the superstitions
surrounding it, they cultivated a new superstition in its stead, which later
germinated into a hard and fast rule about brilliance- read your books!
Tuface
and Wizkid and Davido are wildly successful, well beyond their wildest dreams.
Far removed from humble beginnings, at least in the case of the first two, what
they have in common is that the establishment sees them as rebels. That they
skipped school to play music which the educated elite thinks of as tasteless
means they are not the role models presented in schools. Their success is
chalked up to ‘yeye’ behaviour, in the lingo. Some of this is their own fault.
When you scroll through music on your iPhone, it is grouped into genres- soul,
rock, jazz, blues, folk, electro, disco, house, dance- while the entire
kaleidoscope of sounds of modern Nigerian popular music is under the broad
heading of ‘Afrobeat’. In the first place, this is a slight to Fela who
invented the style, and on the other hand, it undersells the variety between
‘African Queen’, ‘Ojuelegba’, and ‘Dami Duro’, respectively hit songs by each
of these artistes.
Among
other things (including Western ignorance) this is down to a bandwagon attitude
which is the biggest threat to innovation. Someone once said that if you want
your music in Alaba market, where most records catch fire in Nigeria, what you
need is a party beat, an addictive hook and some nonsensical made up word that
people can repeat. ‘Sawale’, ‘Gobe’, ‘Akpako’, ‘Yahooze’ are the titles of club
bangers even though the words may not have existed before those records. For
the reason that this formula is followed relentlessly, a one hour radio
programme playing back to back Nigerian songs can sound like different versions
of the same jam on rotation. Because musicians are not taking the time to
particularise their own unique method, too much of the music in the charts
sounds just like everything else. Although, to their credit, the production
gets better and better every year, the music itself is not as evolved as it
ought to be.
As
someone put it, the vision is to blow- the Nigerian dream is to get lucky and
hammer, that is, to make money so help us God. So the thought of striving for
the singularity of an idea alone rather than for selling out of units of a
product is almost, in a sense, laughable. Nigeria’s patent system is lifeless
and one is better off going to other countries where the Nigerian government
has reciprocal treaty agreements to register inventions. As a result, everyone
is happy to do things just as they have always been done. A system which does
not innovate remains in flux, resisting the rule that the only constant is
change, so that rot and disaster become inevitable.
Here
we are then, at the conclusion to things. Even in Aba, where markets are such a
strong element of local history, many people prefer to do their shopping
online. Of all the business solutions that the internet age has birthed,
Nigerians have latched on quickest to the e-commerce phenomenon. Online malls
are everywhere and out of control. Jumia, Konga and Mall for Africa are
examples of one-time start-ups who have gone on to raise vast millions of
American dollars from technology investors for ambitious expansion. All that
money is being pumped into ventures dedicated exclusively to selling in a country
that is struggling with an innovation deficit? It is a known fact of
development that an economy and a people must move beyond the business of
service provision to manufacturing which serves as the platform for true
progress and a measure of lasting wealth. Online shops are service-driven
businesses unlikely to expand beyond a certain point unless the growing economy
is supported by a strong manufacturing engine. Manufacturing is fueled by
innovation and, in turn, drives creativity.
Tim
De Lisle writes in the September/October edition of Intelligent Life that
‘wealth, even obscene wealth, aspires to more than itself. It aspires to
intelligence, style and culture.’ In Nigeria, where there is wealth and there
is obscene wealth, this is not the case, most of the time. We can only draw
hope from looking back on the highly developed cultures of the bygone Nok and
the Bini, Igbo Ukwu and Ife, and looking now to the clutch of Nigerians winning
awards in diverse parts of the world for forward thinking in science and the
arts, in philosophy and the law, in policy and in politics. I say to them,
bring innovation back and bring it home.
Originally published in VenturesAfrica
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