thisday0520

Wednesday May 20, 2015
TRUTH & REASON
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MISSILE
CHRSJ to Labour Leaders
“Union leaders in the country have derailed from their mandate by always using
their platforms for selfish aggrandizement. They are always searching for worldly
materials during their tenure of office and there should be an attitudinal change
of the labour leaders in order to regain the lost glory of the labour union in the
land.” The Centre for Human Rights and Social Justice (CHRSJ) accusing labour
leaders of fighting for their selfish interest at the expense of the collective interest
of the workers.
TONY O.ELUMELU
GUEST COLUMNIST
Entrepreneur-led Devt as Model
Too many policymakers think in
terms of traditional aid when
they think of support for Africa
and the developing world. I think
of Shadi Sabeh. Shadi is a young
man from Sokoto in northern Nigeria – a
region currently struggling with a lack of
opportunity and economic engagement,
especially for the youth. Shadi might well
have become mired in frustration, but instead
leveraged his entrepreneurial drive to start
an education business in Sokoto that already
employs over 100 people.
As the recipient of the Tony and Awele
Elumelu Prize for Economics from Usman
Dan Fodiyo University, Sokoto, Nigeria, I
took him with me this week as my guest
to a White House event hosted by President
Barack Obama, and to a lecture I delivered
on ‘Entrepreneur Led Development: A New
Development Model for Africa’ at Georgetown
University’s McDonough School of Business.
In so doing, he served as a model for the most
promising approach for promoting growth
in Africa and creating stability and security
everywhere.
What Shadi’s story tells us is simple:
Entrepreneurship is the most effective way to
establish true prosperity. Only entrepreneurship
can create sustainable wealth – the wealth
that comes from employment and ownership,
and that results in thriving markets and a
healthy society.
Only entrepreneurship can create opportunity
where none seemingly exists.
To understand why this is so critical,
consider: By 2020, 122 million Africans will
enter the labour force. The number of new
jobs that must be created to accommodate
this demographic explosion is enormous.
Added to this are tens of millions currently
unemployed or underemployed, making the
human and economic consequences nearly
too large to imagine if job creation is not
seen as a priority.
This demographic explosion can spell an
economic boom or doom for the continent.
Traditional aid and traditional extraction
focused investment cannot provide employment
for the millions of young Africans entering
the job market every year – any more
than they can provide for the continent’s
massive needs for reliable power generation,
housing, transportation and financial services
infrastructure. Entrepreneur-led job creation
is necessary to overcome these challenges.
This realisation represents a fundamental
change. Traditionally, in Western societies,
the concept of African development has been
linked to foreign aid. Aid-based approaches
have much to recommend them – they have
improved untold millions of lives across the
continent.
But speaking as an African who is grateful
for the lifesaving anti-retrovirals that have
saved so many of our people, the vaccines,
the emergency food assistance and the debt
relief provided to my fellow African citizens,
I believe that it is the economic opportunity
side of the development coin that will have
more catalytic impact in driving development
on the African continent.
Job creation is at the heart of this process.
Each job means the chance to pull a family
President-elect, Muhammadu Buhari
permanently out of poverty, a wider tax revenue
base for African governments, a household
that can buy goods and services created by
African businesses and greater social stability
because minds are constructively engaged.
The result is a healthy middle class that drives
the growth of infrastructure, housing and
financial inclusion. And financial inclusion
leads to a safer, more stable world.
Such a private-sector driven transformation
is already in progress. African companies
like Dangote Cement, South African
telecommunications firm MTN and the United
Bank for Africa, which I chair, are creating
hundreds of thousands of jobs across Africa,
working to provide essential services like
mobile phones, infrastructure and banking
while integrating the continent.
Most of these companies – like others in
Africa and around the world – were created
by individual African entrepreneurs. If we are
to meet the challenge of creating jobs for the
millions of Africans entering the workforce
every year – and the millions who cannot
find work today – we must support today’s
entrepreneurs by creating policies that improve
Job creation is at the
heart of this process.
Each job means the
chance to pull a family
permanently out of
poverty, a wider tax
revenue base for
African governments,
a household that can
buy goods and services
created by African
businesses and greater
social stability because
minds are constructively
engaged
the enabling environment, so that millions
of these potential job creators can succeed.
I call this idea – that the private sector has a
profound role to play in Africa’s development
– Africapitalism. Africapitalism means that
we cannot leave the business of development
up to our governments, donor countries and
philanthropic organisations. We must instead
rely on and empower African businesses – with
entrepreneurship as its driving force.
Africa is rich in entrepreneurial energy and
talent. Many African entrepreneurs are already
running home-grown businesses and have
deep insights into local consumer demand;
they can spot unique gaps in the market for
specific products and services. These are the
people who can fuel Africa’s future, but who
often lack the capital, training and support to
take their small businesses to a national or
regional scale. In Nigeria alone, 95 per cent
of start-ups fail in the first year, largely due
to regulatory and infrastructure issues. But
many more of them can succeed with the right
support and the right enabling environment.
I have so much belief in the potential of
nascent and budding African entrepreneurs that
I have committed $100 million to support them
directly. The Tony Elumelu Entrepreneurship
Programme (TEEP) is designed to identify
1,000 African entrepreneurs every year over
the next decade and provide them with much
needed training, mentoring, financing, and
networking.
The initial reaction to the Tony Elumelu
Entrepreneurship Programme shows the
energy behind African entrepreneurship. For
the first 1,000 available slots, we had over
20,000 applicants from 54 African countries
and territories. The winners represent 52
African countries and territories as well as
a multitude of value-adding sectors ranging
from agriculture to education to entertainment
to technology.
But the Tony Elumelu Entrepreneurship
Programme alone cannot transform Africa.
Political leaders, business leaders and
philanthropists must embrace entrepreneur-led
development on a wide scale. I appreciate the
role that President Obama and President Paul
Kagame of Rwanda, as well as entrepreneurs
and philanthropists like Jeff Skoll, the Omidyars
and Richard Branson, have played in supporting
entrepreneurship as a development path for
Africa.
To those leaders I say, “thank you” – for
supporting the transformation of Africa by
supporting African entrepreneurs. To the rest
I say, “Will you join me?” My commitment
to entrepreneurship is unbounded. I count
myself among those who believe that five
entrepreneurs transformed the U.S. into what
it is today – John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius
Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford
and J.P. Morgan. Now it is Africa’s turn. But
I myself can only do so much. Let us work
together to support Africa’s entrepreneurs
– Shadi Sabeh and millions like him – and
secure Africa’s future.
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