Many of you know that I am passionate about youth development, hardwork and the success of Nigeria's next leaders. This is why any award to encourage and inspire hard work and achievements by our youths should be greatly encouraged. For this reason I have followed the future awards Africa with the hope that true talent and achievements would be rewarded in Nigeria and across Africa. However, this award fell not only short of these expectations, a closer look at it makes it a complete and utter joke! A peep of the award by other countries in the West or in Asia who are used to real excellence would look at it and reinforce their poor stereotype of Africa.

It would be very cumbersome to point out award after another to express my displeasure, however, permit me to hone in on two awards to reinforce my notion that the award is a complete waste. Let us examine these two.

1. Dr. Salihu Dasuki winner of the Professional service category

The singular achievement that has been touted for his nomination and eventual win is the fact that he obtained a Ph.D in ICT for development from Brunel University at 26 years. He now lectures at AAUN.
This guy is not the founder of a flourishing multimillion dollar start up company, he did not invent any code, nothing. Not like he went to the best ICT school?? So on what basis is this guy getting an award? Meanwhile we have many young Nigerians doing great things globally. If their criteria was to see who graduated a PhD the youngest. There are many. For example, Dr. Chinyere Nwabugwu, a young Nigerian graduated from Stanford University with a Ph.D in electrical engineering at 26. Stanford is the best engineering school in the world. She was in Lagos for her NYSC, rebuilt a dilapidate primary school in Ikoyi, and now works at IBM helping to build the next generation magnetic resonance imagine systems! Now that is impressive! She is not the only one, there are many doing great things in ICT and engineering bagging Ph.Ds in their early to mid 20s, and then this guy wins an award? And the judges expect Westerners to peep at it, and think greatly of Africa? Hell NO!

https://www.bellanaija.com/2015/08/check-out-chinyere-nwabugwus-renovation-project-at-ireti-primary-school-during-her-nysc-year/

2. Ifeanyi Orajaka winner of the business category.

Think about it for a second, do you think this guy deserves it? He started a renewable energy company. He is still building the company, it has not even started any significant commercial activity. It do not have any solid prove of concept. Those listed as team members are not drawing a structured salary from the business yet, but alas he won the award for AFRICA! Imagine? Is this how small minded we have become. This is not a personal attack on him, he sure has potentials but definitely do not deserve to win such award. Let me help Future Awards think for a bit and give them just a few names from the many that are deserving of such an award.

Tayo Oviosu - Stanford Business School Graduate who founded Paga, the e-money transfer system, grew the company from 2 staff to over 150 employees, with over 5million users! Drew a series B funding of $13 million from an American venture capitalist. Now this is a deserving CEO!

Seni Suleyman - Harvard Business School graduate, one of the brain boxes of Co-creation Hub and Andela, who attracted Mark Zuckerberg to Nigeria, and his pledge of $24 million series B funding for the company.

I can go on and on, but I would stop here.

At this point you all can see the point I am trying to make. These awards to an outsider makes Africa look mediocre. I don't even want to start with the twenty somethings in silicon valley that has created multibillion dollar companies. Imagine them looking at the awards and seeing someone who has not even hired any paid staff yet to his company winning an "African award".

I implore the founders, judges and advisors of the Africa Future Award, to review the whole goal of it and change it quickly. Enough of celebrating mediocrity and averages in Nigeria. Excellent people with great achievements exist. Find them!

Long Live the Federal Republic of Nigeria

-CramJones

cc: lalasticlala ishilove seun

PS: I hold no grudges against the winners. I am only using two examples to point out the defectiveness of the award

I hear you....very sad indeed