Katsumoto:

1. Yes, Caucasians do take more risks. Lets look at travelling for instance. Many Nigerians usually only go the the UK or US for leisure. How many Nigerian students go back-packing? How many do you see volunteering in places where they can be killed? Evidence suggests that you will find Caucasians volunteering in Afghanistan, China, India, Iraq?

2. People are inspired by what their parents did. In western europe, you find individuals who continually strive to compete with what was achieved by their fore-bearers. What are the rich people doing in Nigeria if not having or trying to have intimacy. Little wonder that Nigeria has become a decadent society with old pot-bellied men sleeping with girls young enough to be their grand kids. Even young guys have caught that bug. They make small dough and immediately spend it drinking and paying for sex.

3. History suggests that expansionist states were successful even though all empires will crumble eventually. Having 300 kings in a place like Nigeria suggests that the individuals at that time did not really have any grand ideas. They were content with their little villages. England and Wales were under one Saxon king before William the conqueror in 1066. Scotland was conquered several times before the Acts of Union in 1707. The picts did not become extinct; they became assimilated by a superior group and their language died. Did the Cornish people of Cornwall become extinct or their language did?

4. Please find Nigerians today who can compare to these past Nigerians - Sir Odumeghu Ojukwu, Sanusi Dantata, Sir Mobolaji Bank-Anthony, S. L. Edu, Emmanuel Akwiwu, Odutola, Ade Tuyo. Don't mention individuals who derived their wealth from stolen funds and monopolies protected by successive governments.

homerac7:

@ eku_bear, u dey kolo o! Na my alma Mata u mess like dat? B careful o, or else na your backyard d next bomb blast go sound. Anyway sha, I concur wt u to large extent on d subject matter.

PhysicsHD:

I honestly couldn't.  Not because I don't know any that can compare but because I really don't know the assets and wealth of many of the big names you hear about today nor do I know the wealth of many of the owners of companies in Nigeria today that you don't hear about. I'm actually quite sure there are a lot of legitimate Nigerian millionaires around, but the idea I was bringing into consideration is this: Are we sure we are not claiming that the first few great pioneers in an area (being a millionaire/being a business mogul) are vastly superior and the only real examples of their type (great business moguls/millionaires) when in fact, their modern-day equivalents or even superiors (in terms of relative wealth) are spread about more evenly and are more numerous but must necessarily be less noticeable and less glaring and famous than their predecessors were because of the different nature of the playing field today? I suspect this is really the case.

There are certain select parts of a long passage by James Gleick, in his biography of Richard Feynman, that convey what I'm saying here a bit more clearly, lucidly, and beautifully, though this deals with  "genius" (you can put in business genius/creativity here):

"There was only one Einstein.  For schoolchildren and neuropsychologists alike, he stood as an icon of intellectual power.  He seemed - but was this true? - to have possessed a rare and distinct quality, genius as an essence, not a mere statistical extremum on a supposed bell-curve of intelligence.  This was the conundrum of genius.  Was genius truly special?  Or was it a matter of degree - a miler breaking 3:50 rather than 4:10?  (A shifting bell-curve, too: yesterday's record-setter, today's also-ran.) "


"When otherwise sober scientists speak of the genius as magician, wizard, or superhuman, are they merely indulging in a flight of literary fancy?  When people speak of the borderline between genius and madness, why is it so evident what they mean?  And a question that has barely been asked (the where-are-the-.400-hitters question): Why, as the pool of available humans has risen from one hundred million to one billion to five billion, has the production of geniuses - Shakespeares, Newtons, Mozarts, Einsteins - seemingly choked off to nothing, genius itself coming to seem like the property of the past?"

"By understanding genius, rationalizing it, celebrating it, and teasing out its mechanisms, perhaps they could make the process of discovery and invention less accidental.  In later times that motivation has not disappeared.  More overtly than ever, the nature of genius - genius as the engine of scientific discovery - has become an issue bound up with the economic fortunes of nations.  Amid the vast modern network of universities, corporate laboratories, and national science foundations has arisen an awareness that the best financed and best organized of research enterprises have not learned to engender, perhaps not even to recognize, world-turning originality."

"Literary and music theory, and the history of science as well, lost interest not only in the old-fashioned sports-fan approach - Homer versus Virgil - but also in the very idea of genius itself as a quality in the possession of certain historical figures.  Perhaps genius was an artifact of a culture's psychology, a symptom of a particular form of hero worship.  Reputations of greatness come and go, after all, propped up by the sociopolitical needs of an empowered sector of the community and then slapped away by a restructuring of the historical context.  The music of Mozart strikes certain ears as evidence of genius, but it was not always so - critics of another time considered it prissy and bewigged - nor will it always be.  In the modern style, to ask about his genius is to ask the wrong question. Even to ask why he was "better" than, say, Antonio Salieri would be the crudest of gaffes.  A modern music theorist might, in his secret heart, carry an undeconstructed torch for Mozart, might feel the old damnably ineffable rapture; still he understands that genius is a relic of outmoded romanticism.  Mozart's listeners are as inextricable a part of the magic as the observer is a part of the quantum-mechanical equation.  Their interests and desires help form the context without which the music is no more than an abstract sequence of notes - or so the argument goes.  Mozart's genius, if it existed at all, was not a substance, not even a quality of mind, but a byplay, a give and take within a cultural context.
How strange, then, that coolly rational scientists should be the last serious scholars to believe not just in genius but in geniuses; to maintain a mental pantheon of heroes;"

"Meanwhile, before their eyes, the world has grown too vast and multifarious for the towering genius of the old kind.  Artists struggle to keep their heads above the tide.  Norman Mailer, publishing yet another novel doomed to fall short of ambitions formed in an earlier time, notices: "There are no large people any more.  I've been studying Picasso lately and look at who his contemporaries were: Freud, Einstein."  He saw the change in his own lifetime without understanding it.  (Few of those looking for genius understood where it had gone.)  He appeared on a literary scene so narrow that conventional first novels by writers like James Jones made them appear plausible successors to Faulkner and Hemingway.  He slowly sank into a thicket of hundreds of equally talented, original, and hard-driving novelists, each just as likely to be tagged as a budding genius.  In a world into which Amis, Beckett, Cheever, Drabble, Ellison, Fuentes, Grass, Heller, Ishiguro, Jones, Kazantzakis, Lessing, Nabokov, Oates, Pym, Queneau, Roth, Solzhenitsyn, Theroux, Updike, Vargas Llosa, Waugh, Xue, Yates, and Zoshchenko - or any other two dozen fiction writers - had never been born, Mailer and any other potential genius would have had a better chance of towering.  In a less crowded field, among shorter yardsticks, a novelist would not just have seemed bigger.  He would have been bigger."

""Giants have not ceded to mere mortals," the evolutionary theorist Stephen Jay Gould wrote in an iconoclastic 1983 essay.  "Rather, the boundaries, have been restricted and the edges smoothed."  He was not talking about algae, artists, or paleontologists but about baseball players.  Where are the .400 hitters?  Why have they vanished into the mythic past, when technical skills, physical conditioning, and the population on which organized baseball draws have all improved?  his answer: Baseball's giants[b] have dwindled into a more uniform landscape.  Standards have risen.  The distance between the best and worst batters, and between the best and worst pitchers, has fallen.[/b]  Gould showed by statistical analysis that the extinction of the .400 hitter was only the more visible side of a general softening of extremes: the .100 hitter has faded as well.  The best and worst of all come closer to the average.  Few fans like to imagine that Ted Williams would recede toward the mean in the modern major leagues, or that the overweight, hard-drinking Babe Ruth would fail to dominate the scientifically engineered physiques of his later competitors, or that dozens of today's nameless young base-stealers could outrun Ty Cobb, but it is inevitably so.  Enthusiasts of track and field cannot entertain the baseball fan's nostalgia; their statistics measure athlete against nature instead of athlete against athlete, and the lesson from decade to decade is clear.  There is such a thing as progress.  Nostalgia conceals it while magnifying the geniuses of the past."

"Of course genius is exceptional and statistics-defying.  Still, the modern would-be Mozart must contend with certain statistics: that the entire educated population of eighteenth-century Vienna would fit into a large New York apartment block; that in a given year the United States Copyright Office registers close to two hundred thousand "works of the performing arts," from advertising jingles to epic tone poems.  Composers and painters now awake into a universe with a nearly infinite range of genres to choose from and rebel against.  Mozart did not have to choose an audience or style.  His community was in place.  Are the latter-day Mozarts not being born, or are they all around, bumping shoulders with one another, scrabbling for cultural scraps, struggling to be newer than new, their stature inevitably shrinking all the while?"

Katsumoto:

You are conjecturing. We know more about legitimate business men from an age that data was scarce than we do about business people in an age where information is more readily available. I am not doubting that there are some legitimate business people out there but my point is that they do not compare to the business moguls of yester-years. The Nigerians who are just as wealthy as the guys I mentioned are the state backed monopolists and corrupt politicians/military men and their cronies.

PhysicsHD:

Well, I think going to the UK or US is also a matter of going to where their family and relatives abroad are located. You also have to consider that in terms of entertainment, the US is far superior to almost every other country, but most importantly, the US and the UK speak and write in English, the official language of Nigeria.

There are many Nigerians who go to Dubai, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Ireland, Netherlands, Canada, South Africa, in addition to the US and UK in order to eke out a living or for education, but sometimes only for holiday (well probably not Ireland, Saudia Arabia or Canada), and take the risk of enduring racism, humiliation (for being Nigerian), religious discrimination, crime, or the inability to integrate into or not be an outcast in their host societies, because they know such risks are better than staying in a bad or deteriorating situation in Nigeria.

I've met multiple  Nigerian Americans with relatives serving in the U.S. military, so that is an example of being in places where they can be killed, but yes by and large Nigerians don't intentionally run near death. The main thing to consider here is that volunteering is a luxury and volunteering in unsafe areas is an even greater luxury. People from places where foreigners might come in and volunteer to help development or help the sick are not really going to go to volunteer to help in Iraq or Afghanistan or China in significant numbers. I would consider Nigeria to be one of those places.

The back-packing thing also seems like a luxury thing to me and also a cultural thing. But I guess you mean here that hiking and outdoorsy activities are evidence of a more bold and risk-taking culture. I'm not too sure of that. When you live in a highly developed artificial city all of your life, going up a mountain or deep into a forest is like an exaggerated way to realize the desire of experiencing "nature" or something "new". It all seems like the kind of indulgence born out of development rather than any intrinsic characteristic. Afterall, when the European age of exploration started only certain nations among the white race (the developed/most advanced nations) had the luxury and the desire to pursue something "new." The rest of them were doing nothing as far as adventure and were rather insular.

I also think some of the more advanced or courageous nations amongst blacks took some risks too.

PhysicsHD:

Well I don't really believe the 300 kings thing, so maybe you can mention some of the kings you're talking about . Every ethnic group and sub-ethnic group may have later allocated itself a king or exalted a community elder to a king due to politics introduced by the British but I don't think there were ever anything like up 30 kings in Nigeria.

I think Kanem-Bornu, Sokoto, Oyo, and Benin did have grandiose plans, but you seem to be saying that because they didn't conquer enough, that they should be considered failures in certain aspects. You might be right. However, I think this suggests a lack of superior technology and numbers, rather than outright aversion to risk or unwillingness to expand due to contentment.

One other thing to consider, however, is that most places in Nigeria that could be called states were more like city-states. The situation was more like that of the various Greek city-states rather than like one where there is only Rome and Carthage or only Britain and Ireland. I don't think the Greeks were averse to risk or unadventurous before Alexander the Great, though.


Scotland was invaded and routed at some important battles, but I'm not sure they were ever really conquered by England. And yes Wales and England were one, but the Welsh never stood a chance for resisting off sheer numbers alone. They're a small group. You're right on the Picts, my mistake. The Cornish people did not get fully absorbed, as I understand it. Just many of them.

[size=13pt]There's a spirit of entrepreneurship – people seem bewildered if you admit a lack of ambition. Nigerians want to go places and believe – rightly or wrongly – that they can. That drive and ambition fuels their optimism; they're working towards happiness, so they're happy.[/size]

SEFAGO:

This is going to a white man good, black man bad discussion.

Sounds kind of Orwellian to me

SEFAGO:

This is going to a white man good, black man bad discussion.

Sounds kind of Orwellian to me

Katsumoto:

Not really

For instance, why is it that one man led kingdoms were easily able to conquer areas with multiple kings? The Spanish conquest of Central and South America; the French, Portuguese, and English conquests of Africa and Asia. Also, the moore's conquest of multi-kingdon Spain in the 7th century.

SEFAGO:

Yeah divide and conquer- or as it is referred to in history germs, guns and steel for Central and South America.

However, do you think Africa even if united together could have gone against the British in all their Naval Glory of that time with our canoes.

Anyways I get the point Africans are not even united, even Ghanaians and South Africans who we have helped hate and distrust us

Katsumoto:

I suspect you missed the implicit point I was making. European states became very creative so as to either conquer or avoid being conquered. For instance, Europeans used guns to sub-due many states but relied on gun powder that was invented by the Chinese. Chances are that you will caught unawares if you are content on being the big man in a small village, which was the case with many conquered states. Necessity is the mother of invention as they say. I go back to the point I made earlier. Our fore-bearers had so much time on their hands for pro-creation with many women in their villages while Europeans were conquering and making alliances with other states through marriage.

fstranger6:

Absolute balderdash

I am sorry!

Katsumoto:

You are just making really poor excuses. Are volunteers in dangerous places just looking to get out of the city or they are looking to make a difference by putting their lives at risk.

You will find Nigerians in all corners of the world but it is usually for educational or economic reasons. More often they are just barely surviving; they are not pace-setters. The simple fact of the matter is that we are risk averse.

How many kings are in Spain, England, Denmark, Sweden, Saudi Arabia? How many kings were in France? How many emperors did Japan have at a time? The fact of the matter is that strong nations require one leader and not many. Whether there are 300 kings or 20 kings in Nigeria, the fact remains that we have several kings who did not really attempt to assimilate other kingdoms. To make matters worse, there are several ruling houses in the kingdoms in Nigeria. When the House of Lancaster wanted the kingship of England, it challenged and defeated the house of York in what is known as the war of the roses. In case you miss the point I am making, you can understand why Africans are generally risk averse and un-adventurous by understanding the small mindedness of our kings. There were/are far too many small domains in Africa.

AjanleKoko:

All that talk about our history is just BS.
The truth is, do Nigerians, even Africans as a whole, even have any kind of skills? Sure we have a lot of certificates, but when you look at the profile of Nigerians across the globe, and even in Nigeria, it's easy to see why entrepreneurship is low profile.

In every overseas country, just check the blue collar portfolio: technical workers, small, medium, and large scale traders, etc. You find the following races: Lebanese, Indians, Filipinos, Chinese, Malays, Iranians, and nowadays a lot of Eastern Europeans. Apart from Somalis running parking lot businesses in Washington DC area, you hardly find Africans in most countries engaged in anything creative. They're usually students, high-profile white collar workers, or involved in one scam or the other.

Where you have African businesses, you only see them servicing African communities, unlike maybe Pakis and Indians in the UK, and Lebanese everywhere else. Are you guys aware that Carlos Slim Helu is half Lebanese, or quarter Lebanese? So I was told by a member of the Chagoury family.

I think Africans lack knowledge and skills to run and manage business on the small and medium scale, beyond the level  of subsistence.  At least that is what LBS has noticed, which is why they are trying to educate small business owners with their SME forum initiatives. I'm sure their research has indicated the deficiencies of Africans in these areas, and they are trying to upskill entrepreneurs the best way they can. Get a really good idea, nurture it, build a working prototype, make your prototype viable, attract investment - which African entrepreneur has the luxury to work within that framework, with hunger and family problems snapping at their heels? Also, the world is a village nowadays.

Are African entrepreneurs able to negotiate major deals and trades with Westerners (Europeans, Americans) or Easterners (Indians, Chinese, etc) without getting the short end of the stick? What practical detailed knowledge of global markets do Africans have, beyond our fresh business-school grads who rely on CNBC for their insight, and are always quoting their textbooks on Nairaland? No personal slight intended here mind you.

Creative entrepreneurship always starts on the small scale. Whether Ford, Gates, or Zuckerberg, it's always some little guys who provide that killer idea that strikes to the heart of what the people want.

tensor777:

Most people are running away from the isuue of CREATIVITY CREATIVITY CREATIVITY and have left this highly sublime issue to talk about highly banal issues like light, roads transport that are taken for granted in all Western countries.

AjanleKoko:

All that talk about our history is just BS. Let's just forget all that. It's just useless excuses.
The truth is, do Nigerians, even Africans as a whole, even have any kind of skills? Sure we have a lot of certificates, but when you look at the profile of Nigerians across the globe, and even in Nigeria, it's easy to see why entrepreneurship is low profile.

In every overseas country, just check the blue collar portfolio: technical workers, small, medium, and large scale traders, etc. You find the following races: Lebanese, Indians, Filipinos, Chinese, Malays, Iranians, and nowadays a lot of Eastern Europeans. Apart from Somalis running parking lot businesses in Washington DC area, you hardly find Africans in most countries engaged in anything creative. They're usually students, high-profile white collar workers, or involved in one scam or the other.

Where you have African businesses, you only see them servicing African communities, unlike maybe Pakis and Indians in the UK, and Lebanese everywhere else. Are you guys aware that Carlos Slim Helu is half Lebanese, or quarter Lebanese? So I was told by a member of the Chagoury family.

I think Africans lack knowledge and skills to run and manage business on the small and medium scale, beyond the level  of subsistence.  At least that is what LBS has noticed, which is why they are trying to educate small business owners with their SME forum initiatives. I'm sure their research has indicated the deficiencies of Africans in these areas, and they are trying to upskill entrepreneurs the best way they can. Get a really good idea, nurture it, build a working prototype, make your prototype viable, attract investment - which African entrepreneur has the luxury to work within that framework, with hunger and family problems snapping at their heels?

Also, the world is a village nowadays. Are African entrepreneurs able to negotiate major deals and trades with Westerners (Europeans, Americans) or Easterners (Indians, Chinese, etc) without getting the short end of the stick? What practical detailed knowledge of global markets do Africans have, beyond our fresh business-school grads who rely on CNBC for their insight, and are always quoting their textbooks on Nairaland? No personal slight intended here mind you.

Creative entrepreneurship always starts on the small scale. Whether Ford, Gates, or Zuckerberg, it's always some little guys who provide that killer idea that strikes to the heart of what the people want. I will challenge everybody, all of us reading and commenting on this thread, look at yourself. What do you really have to offer, beyond your copycat classroom ideas and your many certificates? Can you take, let's say for the sake of argument, oil palm business, by the scruff of the neck, run it by yourself with nobody helping you or making cash available, and make it profitable? Some people are doing it in Nigeria. Can any of you? Let's even go really low tech. Look at Baba Ijebu Lottery. An illiterate succeeded where heavyweights like the Ibrus and Kola-Daisis, backed by enough cash, government might, experts, and technology failed. meanwhile this was Baba's 8th lottery venture. The previous seven crashed.

I rest my case.

Creative entrepreneurship always starts on the small scale. Whether Ford, Gates, or Zuckerberg, it's always some little guys who provide that killer idea that strikes to the heart of what the people want.

Katsumoto:

The OP asked why does Nigeria lack Creativity. We know that there is a dearth of creative people; the question is, why? Your last paragraph points at creativity stemming from small business in most countries; are you seriously suggesting that the small business person in Nigeria is not affected by the causes mentioned by others above including the obvious ones such as bad infrastructure? Did Henry Ford and the creative people at Apple work without light? Did Mark Zuckerburg have to relocate to Canada because there was no power in the US and there were no venture capitalists in the US

How much creativity comes from very educated MBAs in the US and the UK?

You mentioned Carlos Slim but failed to realise that he made his fortune from controlling the monopolistic Mexican telecomms industry.

Dis Guy:

Backed forward looking finance institutions ready to put their money in ideas that has never been tested, doubt many banks in nigeria will back/invest in some little guys, how many banks will even listen to a 24year old for example, the big cats with business experience are finding it extremely difficult to get loans, how will the little guys survive when the banks for example start calculating the interest the moment you sign the paper?

Dis Guy:

Backed forward looking finance institutions ready to put their money in ideas that has never been tested, doubt many banks in nigeria will back/invest in some little guys, how many banks will even listen to a 24year old for example, the big cats with business experience are finding it extremely difficult to get loans, how will the little guys survive when the banks for example start calculating the interest the moment you sign the paper?

eku_bear:

^-- Lebanese have been immigrating since the 19th century, though. Having a 100+ year head start is a nice advantage.

AjanleKoko:

While we're at it, what about India? I've been privileged to visit both countries, and trust me, they are very similar to Nigeria in terms of infrastructure. The closest they have to Western type facilities in India is Bangalore and Hyderabad, which kind of looked like Abuja to me. But these guys are also major global players.

The idea of making money as a businessman in Nigeria -- long spurned by some of the elite as inferior to a high-powered job in the public sector -- is catching the popular imagination, demonstrating to an ambitious young generation that you don't have to be in the pay of government to get rich.