What is an entrepreneurial mindset?
It’s a way of thinking and behaving that capitalizes on opportunities
by an unusual willingness to take risks and to pursue an idea until it
creates value and impact. The core set of ingredients that make up the
mindset of an entrepreneur are motivation, determination, passion,
untiring work ethic and hunger to succeed. A true entrepreneur has a
mindset that shuns mediocrity and would pursue until mediocre becomes
remarkable. Although entrepreneurship the process from which an
entrepreneur is named is fundamentally associated with business, the art
of having an entrepreneurial mind is broader than the circumscribed
world of business. A community or nation of people who have the
characteristics or ingredient that drives them to reject what President
Roosevelt called “a life of ignoble ease” can all be regarded to have an
entrepreneurial mindset regardless of the diversity of their
professions and vocations.
We know that the major problem of the drift of our nation since our
independence is our inability to transform the opportunities that the
whole world know we have in abundance to basic improvement in the
quality of life of our citizens. The absolute lack of entrepreneurship
which is defined as the process of making money, earning profits and
increasing wealth through risk taking, management, leadership and
innovation in the manner of governance of our nation has cost us thus
far the greatness that was hoped of our nation when like many other
nations we parted ways with colonialism. Our underperformance as a
country and people is directly traceable to our poor choice of mindset.
Simply, we have lacked the leadership of the kind that moved a nation
like Botswana from a 98% aid dependent economy at independence to one
that upon discovering diamond judiciously invested the proceeds to grow
itself into one of Africa’s very few upper middle income countries.
The wealth and poverty of nations inexorably depend on their domestic
productivity and relative competitiveness. Hence the economic welfare
of every citizen can only be guaranteed by nation-states that are
governed by people who understand this very basic economic thought. No
nation that has developed did so by having leaders who remained
complacent in the face of the stark reality of very poor and declining
performance of national productivity and competitiveness indices. No
nation became great without leaders who have the entrepreneurial mind
set.
History is replete with nations that were once great but became
complacent or distracted at some point only to be overtaken by nations
they previously looked down on. How many people still remember that
Argentina’s economy was once highly considered during its most vigorous
period, from 1880 to 1905, when its expansion resulted in a 7.5-fold
growth in GDP, averaging about 8% annually? One important measure of
development, GDP per capita, rose from 35% of the United States average
to about 80% during that period. Growth then slowed considerably, though
throughout the period from 1890 to 1939, the country’s per capita
income was similar to that of France, Germany and Canada. Compare
Argentina’s economic performance with those of these countries today and
you learn a lesson in how nations, like individuals regress.
Even more instructive is the history of many nations which were
several thousands of miles behind others economically but which today
are the locomotives that are keeping the global economy from completely
running out of steam. No economic discourse is today complete without
some perplexed acknowledgement by even the most cynical that China,
India and Brazil have indeed come of age and have become the economies
most deserving of the respect of all other economies. At another level,
many a Nigerian perennially recalls when Singapore, Taiwan (China),
South Korea, Malaysia and Vietnam were economic contemporaries of our
country. Nigerians rue the missed opportunities that made us the laggard
nation among these former peers. For each of these countries, the stage
was set for commencement of their economic transformation from Low
Income Country (LIC) status to Upper Middle Income Country (MIC), MIC or
close to MIC respectively by the advent of quality leadership at both
their political and public institutions that in turn resulted in high
public sector efficiency. At the epicenter of this efficiency was and
remains the investment in leadership of the kind that drove a national
vision which placed education, intellect, values, reward for only
strenuous effort and hard work at the center of their development
strategy. Once the public sector was set aright, it freed up the private
sector and the rest of society to aspire to perform at their maximum
possibilities. This explains why even for the US which is the bastion of
capitalism, it was through the instrumentality of its public sector
leadership that it used public policy, public investment, and public
institutions to set the stage for the world leading economy we all
admire.
Productivity and increasingly today, national competitiveness will
continue to be the lynchpin to ignite and accelerate the capacity of
nations to make economic advancements and play in the big leagues of the
global economy. Those economies that consistently improve their
efficiency, productivity and competitiveness are the ones that guarantee
their citizens progressive improvement in their quality of life. Every
government whether rich or poor after all has a universal responsibility
which if performed confers it legitimacy not just constitutionally but
from the hearts of citizens- and that is that through the leadership of
the nation-state, citizens will on a sustainable path enjoy increases in
standard of living. In recent years, the concept of competitiveness has
emerged as a new paradigm in economic development inferring that
increasing national productivity is not enough but the pace of that
improvement must surpass that of other nations to avoid losing share of
the international markets.
Government, business and citizens- through civic engagement- play
different but profoundly complementary and collaborative roles to
engender economic productivity and competitiveness. Of the three sectors
that interact to crystallize the productivity and competitiveness of
nations; namely, government (public sector), business (private sector)
and civil society, it is the political class and the public sector
leadership that is ultimately most responsible for how well the country
performs.
The Public sector is made up of these two key layers, the political
leaders who are subject to more frequent turnover based on
constitutionally-mandated electoral processes that promote democratic
competition on the one hand, and the tenure-track civil service of
technocrats which have a considerably longer term mandate to manage the
bureaucracy that helps translate the vision of the former into concrete
deliverables in the form of services to citizens. Hence, whereas the
political actors are subject to the electoral test in deriving their
legitimacy, the civil or public servants in the wider spectrum that
includes not only the ministries and departments of the core civil
service but also the agencies or parastatals, derive their legitimacy
from a competitive professional process that recruits them on the ground
that they are capable of implementing programs and providing efficient
and effective services. Usually of course, the political leadership can
to a very significant extent determine the quality of the leadership of
the technocratic leadership of the public service through the
appointments they make regarding the heads of public institutions and
the civil service.
Seeing that Government is the sector among the three that holds the
strongest levers and the authority to provide the compelling vision
around which all other sectors can construct their effective role
playing, should the Nigerian citizens not immediately begin to take more
than a passing interest in how entry into both the political and public
service leadership space is regulated for quality? Effective public
sector emerges at all levels of government where there is strong
leadership capacity for it at the highest level of political authority.
The criticality of the public sector’s role in national vision and
strategy formulation, oversight, and implementation compels every nation
aspiring to be productive and competitive to endeavor to have strong
dynamic leadership of its public space and all its institutions. From
the outset, the public sector in its vision setting role must have
persons at both political and technocratic levels that can provide clear
diagnostic of the problems facing the economy and articulate the
compelling vision and solutions that appeal to a broad set of actors who
are willing to seek change and implement global standard strategies to
keep the nation’s productivity and competitiveness on a never ending
race to the top of the global economic ladder.
It is the primary responsibility of politicians and bureaucrats to
set rules and practices that enable the productivity and efficiency of
their national economies and progressive improvement of their country’s
social indicators. When public decision makers possess the intellectual
competence, the value constructs and the resilient capacity to use
public policy, human and financial resources and institutions
appropriately they set the stage and enhance the probability that their
nation will climb up the league of productive and competitive nations.
The moral of my preamble therefore is that each of those previously
contemporaneous economies succeeded while ours failed fundamentally
because of the wide variability in the quality of leadership that
pursued their nations’ visions compared to ours. Every great performance
in life first starts with great ideas. As it is with individuals, so it
is with nations. It is in the realm of ideas of that leaders espouse
the kind of nation they really want to lead their citizens to build and
bequeath to future generations. The Elite of every successful society
always forms the nucleus of citizens with the prerequisite education,
ethics and capabilities operating in the political sphere and the public
service, providing the great ideas to build the nation and possessing
the moral rectitude to always act in the public interest. Access to
quality Education ensures that the elite group evolves constantly in
every society. For as long as nations have public education systems that
function, the poorest of their citizens is guaranteed to move up the
ladder and someday emerge as a member of the elite class through
academic hard work, strenuous effort and ultimate success at the higher
levels of education.
For every society that has succeeded therefore, it has taken such
progressively evolving elite class to identify the problems, forge the
political systems and processes, soundly articulate a rallying vision
and use sound Public Policies and Prioritization of investments and
requisite actions to over time build those strong institutions that
outlive the best of charismatic and transformative individuals. But it
always does start with quality leadership in the public space investing
in a sustained manner for lasting institutions to eventually emerge over
time. Institutions do not just happen or emerge in fast food style.
The absence of sustained quality public sector has meant that our
private sector which should by now reflect the vibrant entrepreneurial
mind that we have among our citizens is anything but deep. We have a
private sector which also reflects the state of the public sector- a
collection of businesses which mostly thrive not because of creativity
and innovation but mostly because of incestuous linkages with a corrupt
and inefficient public sector. Other than micro, small and a few medium
scale enterprises that thrive despite government, a deep analysis of
some of the private sector in our nation will reveal that profit comes
not from effort but because of access to the benefits that distortions
in public policy confer. Manufacturing and enterprise more broadly has
not been sincerely embraced by our political elite whose incentives are
warped by a culture of rent seeking behavior. In economics rent-seeking
is an attempt to obtain economic rent by manipulating the social or
political environment in which economic activities occur, rather than by
creating new wealth.
Our politics and those who run it have become our albatross. The
political system has unfortunately frequently attracted those who do not
seek to create any new value but simply desire to be given a share of
wealth that is already available. The crowd that makes up our politics
needs an entrepreneurial mindset in order to awaken to the reality that
our oil dominant economy has not only fallen way behind other economies
with less possibilities than us but that the future of the nation is
extremely bleak if they do not urgently lead us to the path that
diversifies our sources of growth. I am one of those Nigerians that
constantly pray that our oil should dry up or that the rapid quest for
technologies that offer renewable energy options as alternatives to oil
should emerge in order that the lure of oil politics in our nation may
cease. Oil is not the route to our greatness. Our human capital is not
just a route to our greatness but is in fact our greatness.
For our new Nigeria to emerge therefore we simply need a few good men
and women who can lead us away from the pain of the Dutch disease that
oil has afflicted our nation with for several decades. For many of the
awardees of SADC, it has been by sheer grit that you remained steadfast
pursuing your dream to create something of lasting value which today is
being celebrated. Yet the fact is that except the kind of values that
drove you to accomplish your respective successes are transferred to our
public sector and massively scaled up, we will not realize the
greatness that has thus far eluded our nation. Our governance has
underperformed over several decades because it has been deficit of
integrity or what I call character, lacked capacity, lacked competency
on a continuing basis. Above all however, it has lacked strategic
innovation which is the ability of discovering new things to do – things
for which there are no precedents.
Take for example the necessity to solve the biggest threat to our
nation which is the vast army of unemployed youths (half of our
population are youths between the age of 18-34 and about a conservative
estimate of 40% are unemployed). They are joined annually by an average
of two million new ones. This is a problem that demands a more
aggressive attention than is currently being given to it. I acknowledge
that some initiatives like You Win by the government is indicative that
government is making an effort, but I caution that this is too little
and too tepid the magnitude of the crisis that we have on our hands. We
have a major stock and flow problem that cannot be solved with solutions
that at best reach less than .001 percent of those daily losing hope
and making costly anti-social choices among our youths. The kind of
occasional glance that public policy seems to cast at this crisis which
reveals our inability to convert our youth bulge to a demographic
dividend is an indictment of all of us who have had the opportunity to
express our own talents in one form or the other. Governments at all
level should immediately declare a national emergency for addressing the
worsening state of hopelessness of our young ones who for now see no
clear path out poverty. The leadership of the Federal government working
with the states and local levels with both the executives and
legislature crowding in the collective wisdom of the private sector and
the citizens at large would be a signal to young Nigerians that it does
matter to their leaders that their talent is lying waste during the most
productive season of their lives. We must all collectively avert the
looming upheaval that could come from not giving this very angry
community of restless mind credible signal that our society cares enough
to work collectively take them out from the class that the
international Labor organization referred to as a “scarred” generation
of young workers facing a dangerous mix of high unemployment, increased
inactivity and persistently high working poverty”.
We need new big and strategic ideas to help resolve this protracted
crisis. I suggest that a tracking census of all unemployed youths be
launched in Nigeria immediately. Following that, a skills ad competency
diagnostic should be administered on these youths and a massive program
of diverse modules of entrepreneurship immediately developed and
decentralized throughout all communities within Nigeria. As then
Minister of Education, we designed a program that I called Tracking
Assets for Progress (TAP). It was the response to a diagnostic that we
had undertaken in 2006 to trace the graduates of our tertiary
institutions over the previous decade. The study led us to a small
sample of 120000 graduates of universities, polytechnics and colleges of
education who responded within the timeframe of one month we had set
for the paper and digitally administered survey. Analysis of their
responses showed at that time that over 68% were unemployed, 18% were
underemployed and the rest 14% were employed. We analyzed further and
discovered that attending certain institutions or studying certain
courses increased the probability of joblessness. For example, a person
who studied social sciences was five times more likely to not find a job
nor create some income activity for themselves. Another example, a
person that graduated from some particular universities was six times
more likely to be in the jobless group. Following this study, we
designed TAP working with top Human Resources specialists and some major
private sector companies operating in Nigeria. The one week program
sought to identify the attitude and competency gaps that the two fifty
that we invited to Abuja for the pilot needed to address in order to
equip them with the mindset and skills that are attractive to the labor
market or better still that could transform them to self-employed. A
diverse range of entrepreneurship training cohorts and knowledge renewal
modules were designed and offered. Placement programs with companies,
technical/ vocational and innovation enterprise trainings, micro credit
schemes with financial institutions, supply chain opportunities with
industries and such like were all part of the deliberate program of
converting the group to truly the Asset that they are for our country.
The next phase of TAP was to then launch a scaled up version that will
reach as many of the already teeming unemployed youths at that time. I
urge the Federal Government to revisit that initiative as a major
complement to all that it is currently doing.
The findings of the study also helped us move forward with some
important policy changes to improve the flow problem. For example, our
National Universities Commission annual accreditation process was
tailored to detect some of the inadequacies that the products of certain
institutions revealed, we included entrepreneurship education as a
component within the mandatory General Studies (GS) courses in all our
universities and we reflected some of the finding in the review of our
Basic and Secondary education curricular.
The importance of public policy for supporting businesses to grow
better and for new ones to be created is a major plank of economies that
have outperformed ours whether in Latin America or Asia. In fact even
in the more advanced economies of the United states where 75% of jobs
are created not by big business but by the small and medium ones; and
also in Europe, governments which have pursued responsible macro-fiscal
policies and sincerely carried out structural reforms have helped make
their countries low cost environments for the businesses to thrive in
the highly competitive global economy. Research shows that new and young
firms have been the primary source of new jobs in the United States
over the past three decades”. Economists know that entrepreneurship is
what drives economies back to health, According to a study, “The
Economic Future Just Happened,” challenging economic times can serve as
the rebirth of entrepreneurial capitalism, leading to the creation of
much-needed new jobs. This should send a giant red flag to policymakers
in our country to pull out all the stops to encourage and support
business startups so we can create new jobs and sustain a worldwide
economic recovery.” I hope some people are listening in this
neighborhood.
Yet for a more fundamental change toward a New Nigeria, we must start
afresh with our baby generation. It means that we must start afresh and
build a new generation of Nigerians that will grow up from age 2-3 and
subsequently with such entrepreneurial mindset, we must completely
rethink our educational system. Empirical evidence has shown that
nations which start off their children very young through kindergarten
education to be curious outperform. Children know a lot about being
entrepreneurs. Their natural curiosity about the world around them,
natural creativity, willingness to take risks, and unbridled enthusiasm
add up to the characteristics of our greatest entrepreneurs. By making
preschool a part of our education system and reforming all the other six
levels and dimensions namely, basic, secondary (including technical and
vocational/enterprise), tertiary (especially science and technology
education), special needs education and informal/adult education we can
transform our population to a huge base of human capital that uses
knowledge and innovation to our compete other nations. But we must start
now. We must catch our children you and offer everyone regardless of
their economic or social status the opportunity of a preschool
education. We must design programs that keep the entrepreneurial flame
alive in boys and girls, whose inventiveness and drive can actually
teach us something about being entrepreneurs.
Now let me congratulate Sunny and Esther Ojeagbese for their
integrity and consistency in nurturing entrepreneurship in our nation.
Your effort will forever be celebrated by the class of Nigerians who
cherish the life of hard work and effort which has built all other
nations that our citizens envy. The success attitude you have preached
and rewarded over the years is what will transform our nation once
leaders and citizens alike can catch your bug. When that happens, the
new Nigeria that shall emerge will not only be a tribute to your passion
but it will be the best award you could ever have received from all of
us who hugely admire your decision to stand out from the maddening crowd
of decadent acquisition over the years of your triumphant toil to help
build a healthy and productive society.
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