When will Africans stop pointing the finger at everyone but themselves? When will we accept responsibility for our past, present and future? When will we realize that blame suggests we are inferior, powerless and irresponsible? Whoever we blame for our predicament, we invest them with power over us and divest ourselves of responsibility.

It is no news that Africa has been pillaged and continues to be, from within and from without. Who is responsible? If the "world powers" are responsible, it means we are irresponsible. Who but Africans permitted Africa to be ravaged? We are deeply spiritual people but instead of using our spirituality to defend and develop ourselves, we use it to fight and kill each other, in pursuit of daily bread.

Empowerment begins with realizing that Africans are the cause of Africa's problems, not colonial masters, not America, not China. If so, we have the solutions and not the foreign NGOs and social entrepreneurs trying to "help" us. No amount of aid or social entrepreneurship can help a people who have disempowered themselves mentally and spiritually. Social entrepreneurship is easy, aid is easier. Mental transformation is harder work and can only be achieved by Africans but is prerequisite to sustainable progress.

It is high time Africans stopped blaming their "masters" and started taking responsibility for their continent and future generations. It is high time Africans stopped looking outside for salvation and started looking within for solutions. This approach will be resisted by salvation and solution peddlers but there is no moving forward without it.
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Another McKinsey quarterly issue focuses on Africa. Africa is obviously becoming trendy. The magazine has an article by Paul Collier titled "The Case for investing in Africa". The challenge is to not turn Africans into large scale consumers but to enable truly sustainable, human-scale, people friendly, poverty-alleviating solutions that not only help Africa but help the rest of the world. 


I think the existing risks and costs of doing business in the remote regions of Africa create opportunities for those who are thinking beyond just profit but actual development. The opportunity in Africa right now is not just investment opportunities but development opportunities. One of the challenges is to create investment opportunities that benefit everyone, from the development opportunities that exist presently.
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There is a time to be born and a time to die, a time to cry and a time to laugh, a time for everything under heaven, says King Solomon. There is a time to be small because smallness has advantages that bigness does not have. Having read E.F. Schumacher's Small is Beautiful, I see even more, the advantages of smallness. However, smallness has limitations. 


In Africa right now, we have pockets of good things happening all around but they are so tiny compared to the magnitude of the challenges that I am not sure keeping initiatives small and localized is advantageous, especially for systemic change. That is why I like Bill McDonough saying that growth is not necessarily bad. Afterall, there is growth that at times bothers on excessive, in nature. The question is what do we want to grow? I think we need to grow our initiatives or link up small initiatives happening around so we can have systemic change. 


I think the new JoinAfrica initiative led by Kayak's Paul English is a great idea. I think the time for localized good initiatives is passé and this is the time to scale up good ideas that have the advantage of being local but broader and much more widespread. 

In Africa, we have experience in being small and local but what will completely change the landscape for the better is having many good small and local initiatives linked up to become not just fringe ideas but the new reality. We need truly game changing initiatives with the intention of addressing existing Africa-wide inefficiencies rather than within a tiny geographic area. I think this is a time to take local global.
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I stumbled on the article with the above title on Pambazuka News and I thought to respond here and on their website.
 
I think this is a great analysis linking this recent oil spill in the gulf of Mexico to the regular spills in the Niger Delta that have destroyed lives, livelihoods and ecosystems and continue to do so while no one is held responsible as BP is being held responsible for the gulf of Mexico oil spill. 

I think we will continue to suffer such injustices as we suffer in the Niger Delta as long as we (Africans, Nigerians) place more value on money than we place on life. The US, Multinational oil companies, our governments will keep doing what they do - exploit and destroy the poor and voiceless as long as we don't give a hoot what happens to our brothers and sisters or to our natural environment so long as we are comfortable. 

While I am not an expert in Yoruba proverbs, there is one that means "The way you treat yourself is the way you will be treated by others". The US government will treat us and our environment differently than they treat their citizens. How can we expect outsiders to place value on life when we don't? 

Sadly, oil exploration will continue and there will be more focus on the African continent for exploration, and exploitation will continue until we have more voices speaking for the voiceless and increased, stronger and effective resistance to exploitation. I don't expect such resistance and leadership to come from the governments but from ordinary citizens and citizen groups. Hopefully, with voices like the writer of this article and platforms like Pambazuka the negative tide will be stemmed.
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Africa Rising 05/05/2010
 


Last week, I started to read Vijay Mahajan's "Africa Rising: How 900 million African consumers offer more than you think". The book does a very good job of showing Africans and non-Africans the market opportunities that exist for goods and services tailored to the hundreds of millions of African "consumers". I think the book is well written and supported by facts drawn from first hand experience. Africa is a place of seeming contradictions, for sure. How for example, can people earning less than $10/day be able to afford cell phones, live in a house, even own a house? As a Nigerian, it is clear to me and the book supports it - Africa is not a place to ignore, as a market opportunity.

I see the opportunity in Africa not merely as a market opportunity or a wealth creation opportunity but primarily as a development opportunity. Right now, we have the opportunity to build Africa not with a greed motivation but a love motivation. The opportunity right now is an opportunity not just to sell products and services to Africa's grassroots but to enter into an interdependent relationship with Africa's grassroots, whereby everyone benefits. 

I think (and this is a bit of digression) even though the world is gradually moving towards a "trade not aid" approach to Africa, there can still be a sense of "we are trading with you to help you". In Africa, what works is humility and a sense that Africans even at the grassroots have at least as much to teach as they need to be taught. I agree with the Australian aboriginal woman who said, "If you are coming to help me, you are wasting your time but if you are coming because your liberation is bound up with mine, then come and let us work together". I think this is a mindset that will lead to sustainable results in Africa.

Where there has been little or no development, there is now an opportunity for development as though people and life are sacred. Right now, compared to the developed world, we have a blank slate. We can either develop with the mindset of "greed is good and foul is fair" or with the mindset of "do unto others as you would have them do unto you". I think we have a chance to correct mistakes of first world development, that tended to desecrate and denigrate all forms of life, in the pursuit of profit. 

Thankfully, we have it in our genes to put people before profit. Hopefully, we will take responsibility for doing so as we make use of our opportunity. One hopes that Africa is seen as an opportunity to develop by creating advantages for the hundreds of millions living in poverty rather than an opportunity to take advantage through marketing of tailor made products and services. 

Personally, I don't think there is reason for competition, especially at this time when the needs are so great and numerous that it can be a challenge deciding which one to focus one's attention, energy and resources on. This is a time for collaboration within and across various forms of boundaries. Shortsightedness will make us compete with each other for developed markets but a holistic view and a large heart will help us to see that there are more undeveloped markets than those that have been developed. Hopefully, we can have a collaborative approach to development rather than a competitive one and carry that through for the benefit of future generations.

As an African, I think this is the best time to be alive.   


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Yippeee!!! 04/13/2010
 
I am super excited to start blogging here on ResurgeAfrique's website. I started Zenith Cleaners, in Montreal, while studying for my MBA at McGill University in 2004. Zenith Cleaners has been a sort of training for me in how to create and run a venture whose purpose goes beyond profit. 

For a while, I have been sensing the need to do something different, with bigger impact. Then I attended Social Venture Network's conference in fall of 2009 and I saw that I needed to take bolder steps to realize my dreams. I met a number of people tackling problems I would have left to God to solve, because of the magnitude and seeming impossibility of the problems. One of the guys I met is Mark Hanis, who founded the Genocide Intervention Network. His story encouraged, inspired and challenged me to dream differently and step out of my comfort zone.

ResurgeAfrique is an attempt by a small group of people to tackle some of Africa's challenges, at the grassroots. It is exciting to be partnering with some of the world's most outstanding innovators and inventors creating products and solutions that are designed to make life better for people like me, at the grassroots in different parts of Africa. Products and solutions that actually work. We are engaging in development entrepreneurship, not alone but with other like minded organizations and individuals within and outside the continent. This makes me want to wake up in the morning.
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