Innovation and The Nigerian Recession
About a month ago, in the midst of a conversation with my five-year old neighbour, Tonye, she asked me what I thought to be a surprising question: “Dozie, what is a recession?” According to her, she had heard the word almost every day over the preceding week, on the radio, as she was being taken to school by her mother.
For her age, she is a very smart girl, and curious too, and already has read books by Achebe and Chbosky. Of course, she pretty much mangled the pronunciation of the word, calling it “rechechon”, rather than “recession”, but I very much understood her question. Sadly, it is a question a lot of people have been asking, over the past year and half.
We are in the throes of an economic recession. That is not news. The price of rice has tripled over the past year. Tonye’s father is striving to feed his family and pay the exorbitant school fees for his four children, the eldest of whom is just eleven. My mother, a teacher in a public school in Nigeria, has had to go stretches of over four months without the payment of her salary. My Uncle, Fred, a doctor in Bayelsa, has had his salary paid in only three of the twelve months that have made up the past one year.
Chika, who moved to Hungary to school in 2012, on a State scholarship, has been left to fend for herself, as the State declined to fulfill its contractual obligations well over a year and half ago. She has had to depend on generous assistance from unknown Hungarian missionaries who helped pay the fees for her last session when they reviewed her excellent grades. Many of her friends have not been as lucky and have had to leave school, their futures currently hanging in the balance. Even the little her parents here in Nigeria gather and send to her for her upkeep cannot be accessed, as banks no longer allow herself and others like her stranded in a foreign land, to withdraw from their Naira accounts. These are our realities today.
What I have noticed, though, is that while we all have felt the bites, the pangs and the pains of the recession, and despite the recent popularity of the word in Nigeria, , few understand exactly how a country’s economy works. Why is this important? We cannot help solve a problem that we do not first understand.
An easy way of doing this is to picture an economy as a human body. If blood is flowing round the body regularly, and there is no disease, the body is healthy. If you have to take certain drugs to maintain normal functions, then there are signs for worry. And if you are admitted into the hospital for a week, for instance, then there is a big problem. With that in mind, money is the lifeblood of the economy. And as long as the circulation of money around the economy is maintained or slightly increasing, through continuous transactions, the economy is healthy.
If the rate of circulation reduces, then policies to reduce this negative situation ─ drugs ─ have to be administered before the economy is ground to a halt, as we are currently witnessing. A recession happens when there is a fall in this economic activity, and the circulation and availability of money is reduced over a sustained period.
Now, beyond all of the negative news we hear every day, there is actually good news. If you look just below the surface, creativity is on the upswing, and lots of Nigerians are still finding ways to break new ground. The Nigerian spirit is one of grit and will. About four years ago, while discussing with a lecturer back in school, he said something that stuck: the average Nigerian is entrepreneurial and innovative in nature.
Now, for me, the question of who an entrepreneur is, is a redundant one. There have been different ideas on that. I usually prefer the simple idea of an entrepreneur being someone who creates value by making something people want, one whose objective is exploring new means of making wealth. The word innovation, itself, is so overused these days that it seems to have lost its flavour, its meaning. But when my lecturer made that statement, I was forced to ask myself, what really is innovation? Again, there are differing views on this, but I’d go with that of Peter Drucker who declared that innovation is an instrument that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth. So, if we narrow down on the linking feature of innovation and entrepreneurship, individuals are innovative and entrepreneurial if they seek to explore new avenues of creating wealth.
Vose, whose full name I’d lose my tongue if I tried to call, has always been passionate about making a change in the society, about helping others. But she had no money to finance some of the ideas in her head, such as re-facing the drainage in the street bearing her childhood home, in Borokiri, Rivers State, which always suffered massive flooding whenever the rainy season came around, or helping to connect all youth of Nigerian descent around the world. And so she, along with a couple of her friends, started a tutoring platform, a start-up, offering personalized learning to students in various fields. At first, traffic was slow, but as they begun to gain traction and reputation, more students were willing to try out their platform. It is her hope that it would grow fast enough, for her to have resources to pursue the other causes dear to her. And knowing her the way I do, it would take a brave soul to bet against her.
An innovative entrepreneur realizes that the best ideas are simply solutions to life’s many problems. For example, the need for alternative power sources has led to the exploration of solar and geothermal sources. In Nigeria, and around the world today, we have a problem of plastics which when not recycled, accumulate rapidly on our lands and waters. There is the need for cheap, easy-to-mass-produce plastics which can easily degrade, biodegradable plastics, and even serve as compost for farmers. In a country like Nigeria, with its massive consumer base, this would be amazing. And I say this because I tried this, and I understand just how well for our environment it would be. It would also create an awesome new source of foreign exchange for our country.
Innovation could be in finding new uses for old materials or even creating new materials altogether which in turn create new markets. It could be a product with low manufacturing cost and selling price offered to a large number of people or a business-to-business service, which caters to the specific needs of a particular industry, as we have seen with the explosion of middleman online payment-platforms.
From whichever way we approach it, innovation and entrepreneurship lead to the continuous flow of money throughout the economy, which in turn drives economic growth and development.
All over the country today, there is a new breed of individuals whose decision to look beyond their immediate environment for something better, has led to the creation of many small and medium-scale businesses, along the way creating jobs to fill wide gaps opened up by years of public-policy failure. There is a renewed awareness of what is possible when human potential is applied consistently to solving human problems.
So the question becomes, what role can innovation play in combatting the present recession? And what can we do to ensure sustainable growth in a hostile climate?
We can look for information gaps. What do we know that other people need to know? Where and how can we gather information from relevant sources? Who wants to get information out to the public or to specific audiences, and how can we help them? Where does information change faster than it is updated and would anyone pay for more current information?
Olisa saw the need for people to be informed and educated on real estate matters in Nigeria, and decided to start a business around that model, sharing information at a small price, to a large number of people. And he has consistently grown his client base, primarily through social media, because there was an untapped market. Irene runs an amazing blog in which she documents everyday reflections and experiences in an incredibly moving way. And she enjoys a large readership, because what she is in fact selling is a unique perspective, which people are willing to come back for it, over and over and over again.
Also, looking for things to standardize might be a wise idea. An area such as house-keeping or lawn-mowing, for instance, could have a functional organization built around offering those services to people who need them. Existing products or services could also be improved upon. Anything successful would very soon be copied. Sometimes, all that is needed is reverse engineering already existing products. That is, taking them apart, seeing how they are made and then making small, improving, changes in design and functionality.
Nigerians, such as Jessica Matthews who invented a power-generating football and Oyekunle Olukotun who developed his own version of multi-core processors, continue to demonstrate the power of making small steps to make the big leap. What we can see is that innovation is sometimes simply doing something in a slightly better way than was previously available. It could be taking a production process and optimizing it, making it more efficient, can also lead to growth opportunities. In all of these, it is vital to be aware of changing trends. Successful products are usually those that capitalize on trends, and are at the forefront of changes in demand and people’s attitudes.
Just as high tides cause flooding in one instance and yet produce electricity in another, we can make progress by examining our perspectives in the midst of trying periods. Through all the uncertainty in the present times, one thing is certain: there is always opportunity. I believe the key is simply in taking advantage of the little breaks afforded us by innovating to create value through making something people want. As we can see, in Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt, there is infinite possibility in Nigeria today. People are doing amazing things just about everywhere you turn. One after the other, value is created in a continuous stream of innovations.
And when one person succeeds at creating value, he is helping to move not just himself but his family and potentially thousands of others up the economic ladder. That way, the overall economy grows, and we all move a small step closer to living in the country of our dreams. And maybe when Tonye is a bit older, she would be witness to a period of economic boom in Nigeria.
Writer’s note: This article was first written on October 31st, 2016 and that time frame should ideally be the context through which it is viewed.
