In the 1970s, in different areas of America, teenagers gathered and worked on what will be the future of computing. Some of them had to drop out of school to venture into business. Some of them were hippies and people thought they were crazy, in the space of 10 years their work emerged. Macintosh and some of their processing materials hit the market. Today, those boys are the likes of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Only recently Steve Jobs’s Apple became a three trillion dollars company. The GDP of Africa with about 1.3 billion people is 2.6trillion dollars.
In monetary terms, Apple is richer than the whole of Africa. Poignantly, if you put a price on it, Apple can buy Africa. Sad as it may be, it’s the truth. The ray of hope I see is that Nigerian youths are doing tremendously well, they are raising the bar while government is lowering the barrier. Only last year without government support tech companies raised over 1 billion dollars, close to one-tenth of government revenue.
It shows that without the government support, young Nigerians have been able to look for private capital and create value, they have even provided services and made more revenue. I honestly think the government should encourage and invest more money into technology development, because if they don’t, they will regret it. At the pace at which technology is going; I predict in the next five years, FDI from technology will eclipse government revenue and the bright tech stars will build an alternative economy. I dare say, it is the alternative economy that has cushioned the effect of poverty in Nigeria. Entrepreneurs doing great things in financial technology, digital currency and other sectors. I will call on government not to tax them, in fact they should encourage them to incorporate such companies in Nigeria. I have been talking to some stakeholders about states, where we can set up tax havens or reduced tax zones for technology to drive investment.
If the government can embrace such ideas, it would make the difference, build cities with infrastructure and make it tax free or reduced tax to attract technology investors and in turn boost economic growth. Ireland has strongly benefitted from this and we too can. In all, the fight with Twitter is useless, government should understand the need to attract technology companies, not chase them away. I suggest a comprehensive road map for technology development should be the priority of government. Let’s get to work. Microsoft also started by Bill Gates in one of those parks in the 70s in America is worth over one trillion. It’s time to think.
Rufai Oseni, rufaioseni@gmail.com
