₦airaland Forum

I found this book somewhat useful some years ago:

http://www.mindview.net/Books/TICPP/ThinkingInCPP2e.html

Freely available online.

One of Abuja or California. Take a guess which.

^-- I found his statement surprising too.

There are these three Nigerian dudes I kick it with sometimes on the weekends. Here is a short description of each:

A) 27 yrs old, is one of the co-founders of a somewhat well-known tech startup (or at least, well-known within the social media/Web 2.0 world) out here that is considering an IPO.
B) 25 yrs old, founder of a web development company. Seems to be doing pretty well; has done work for some pretty big corporations.
C) 25, works for a biotech startup.

Granted, these guys don't necessarily speak Yoruba well and have lived mostly in the US rather than Nigeria, so maybe some might question their "Nigerianness." But overall, they are pretty good examples of entrepreneurship, I think.

[quote author=Orton1_0 link=topic=578769.msg7463127#msg7463127 date=1294183298]Na now you know?
They are even made to believe dat there are blessings in heaven for those who s*x, marry and convert  as much Women of the 'infidels' as they can.[/quote]Hrm, maybe my great-great-grandfather chose the wrong religion, lol. Islam seems to be a lot more pro male 

Hrm. Which leads me to a somewhat awkward question that I'm too shy to even ask directly.

If you are Muslim, and you have several wives. . .can you, wife #1, wife #2, etc all . . . at the same time, together? 

Hrm. If the economy doesn't growth quickly enough relative to population, then yes, even 60 years from now Nigeria will be a developing country 

Hopefully though we take the right steps and work hard so that the future is bright rather than dim.

So you are allowed to have concubines too in Islam?

Hmm, interesting.

Lol @ making the kids take paternity tests in the will

Kobojunkie:
How much did Depearl start up with? A loan from Grameen bank?

I don't think it would take a lot of capital to start up. The main costs imo would be:
1)The inventory you have in stock ($2-5k, max?)
2) Advertising/marketing (not sure of the cost of this in Nigeria or the best way of doing it. Perhaps radio, print. . .)
3) Paying someone to setup the website (a site like that would be $2-5k or so in the US, probably much cheaper if you outsource. No clue how much Nigerian designers would charge.)
4) Storage facility for your goods

The site is well-designed, and the dress shirts I looked at on there aren't badly priced. Depearl also has an AJAX app for customer support on the site, which is a nice feature.

Interesting post, Sefago.

kcjazz:
^^^Yeah, why I mentioned Grameen Bank is because they offer loans without collaterals and the country has no credit bureau to access creditworthiness but the creative part is to focus on productive women (94% customers) in the rural areas rather than the normal way the other banks do business.

Eh, it is creative, but that doesn't mean it is ultimately more profitable. And in any case, it isn't something that a small entrepreneur can do easily.

For Depearl, it is a start, from one shirt it gets to containers. As she gets more customers, she will be able to gain more negotiating power either with her suppliers or with the freight companies.

Fair enough, if you are OK with spending lots of time in that low-level stage where you are building up the business, fine. But for me, I cannot do that.

Even up till now Twitter is not making money to sustain itself but its building its base.

Twitter isn't necessarily profitable right now, but can monetize its product fairly quickly. Something like Twitter (or social-media in general) is in no way or shape comparable to the other two businesses you discussed, since the business model is very different.

I don't want to necessarily see the FG be the one managing whatever this $15 billion is spent on, though.

If we want power to work properly in Nigeria, it cannot be the FG directly in charge of it (at least, imo.)

There are ways for the FG to use its influence/money to support something without directly taking control.

oyb:
i'm not really sure about that

the palms, megaplaza, park and shop, and silverbird galleria seem to have plenty of traffic

though the palms is the only really big mall, when it comes to that

i do know they were building another in abuja, probably completed now

Hrm, I've been to a mall in Abuja a few times (Silverbird something). Whenever I go the traffic seems a bit thin. I usually go at night though, so maybe what I've seen isn't representative of the true traffic.

oyb:
the evils of all these financial freedom hucksters who scam people into believing businesses are built on creativity alone

what has been repeatedly cited are success stories of knowledge economies

Problem is that most of them have never built a thing before in their lives. Not ever written a piece of software, done any CAD, built anything in a circuits lab, machine shop, etc. Most of what they know about technology/engineering/etc is whatever they've picked up from reading the WSJ.

SEFAGO:
I would posit that there are several ways one can get past the energy issue. One can go into commodity/malls or basic business like Aliko Dangote, and then branch out into more hightech stuff.

However all the people asking for malls, how much customers do you think you will get in Nigeria if you open all those high class malls? I was working for a company in Nigeria two years ago in which I had to visit the malls, and market stuff for them so I used sit down in all those malls in Nigeria waiting to corner prospective customers to market the product I was trying to sell.

I could count the number of people going into the malls, and they were very few. You just dont have the culture of consumerism in Nigeria that occurs in America, Europe or Asia. These countries have lots of financial instruments to even encourage consumerism- credit lines to make people keep shopping, and propping industry. Its a different culture and economic environment. Nigeria might have the largest number of black middle-class individuals in Africa, but the middle-class dey struggle no be small.

Malls are pretty electricity intensive. And yes, I've noticed too that they don't have the foot-traffic of malls say in the US. We don't really have a "mall" culture in Nigeria like we do in the US. Though this may change with time (especially if credit becomes more widely available.)

Basic commodities can be good, it depends how you do it. I think importing commodities can be very damn good, things which will move quickly. But this is only my sense, I've not thoroughly confirmed this yet.

Agriculture itself is OK, not amazing. I chatted a bit with a Nigerian agricultural economist I know who consults on this stuff and dabbles in it himself, he says the annualized ROI is like 28-35% or so, if you want to do large-scale catfish/rice/etc farm. That is GREAT for western standards, but not so impressive when you consider that Nigerian banks charge like 22% interest rates.

Of course, if you can find someone willing to loan you $1 million or whatever to do farming even at this insane 22% interest rate, you go ahead and do it and make your profit on the differential. Or better yet, find some way to bring in capital from abroad at a more reasonable interest rate (say, low 10s).
I think this would be a pretty interesting proposition to foreign investors. Actually, now that I think of it, this same economist told me about a foreign agricultural group (cannot remember the name of the country they are from) that is doing large-scale farming out in Benue.

When you have tons of money you can find a way of getting past Nigeria's issue of power. However, what hightech product can you market in Nigeria at present? Most people like foreign stuff too- imagine buying stuff with a label "made in Nigeria."

Me myself I will not even buy that stuff hehe  

Hrm, hightech product? Well, there are two separate components. The design of the products and the manufacturing. Apple's stuff for example is designed out in CA, but manufactured elsewhere. I'd be happy if Nigeria could even just do design here, design is pretty profitable. But of course, to do design you need electricity

My strong suspicion is that some of these folks are people who spend a lot of time reading the WSJ, FT, Economist, etc, perhaps even have some experience in the business world from the financing perspective, but they aren't actually scientists, engineers, etc, people who actually build and do things.

It is very easy to say, "Gee, Nigerians should be more entrepreneurial!"

It is another thing to actually be the guy on the ground in Nigeria working in an industry in which 10-15% of the costs are electricity, and the Nigerian is forced to pay 3 or 4 times as much for his electricity supply as his competitors in other countries. Obviously, that is going to hurt your competitiveness quite a bit.

Of course, I suppose according to these folks, a little more creativity should be enough to oversome these massively increased costs of doing business  

Hrm, but I think they've given me an idea! Maybe to solve my business's electricity problem, we should employee a priest to make sacrifices to Sango so that the efficiency of the diesel generator increases, thus cutting down my electricity costs  

Here I am talking about fundamental basic infrastructure that is missing in Nigeria (roads, light, internet, loans) that dramatically raise the costs of doing business and turn what could be a profitable venture into an unprofitable one, and this dude is talking about the Roman Empire and esusu.

Gee, thanks for the insight.

It is clear that @Kobojunkie and some others here have actually spent time studying these issues or dealing with them personally, not just theorizing. Others here on the other hand (e.g., @tensor777) clearly have no clue what they are talking about.

Kobojunkie:
About your statement on India, I know for sure that it is not true. India is now decades ahead of Nigeria when you compare infrastructure available there today to that available today in Nigeria.

@tensor777 was simply talking making up stories. If India has worse infrastructure problems than Nigeria, then how come they have call-service centers there and we don't in Nigeria? How did all these US tech companies outsourced so much work to them, while Nigeria has zilch? If today I need a website/software developed, I can find some guy in India to do it cheaply (me myself, I hired someone in Poland to develop a website for me.)

Not to talk of their manufacturing industry (something non-existent in Nigeria.)

Tell us another story, uncle. . .

tensor777:
You keep on shifting the goalposts and bringing up entirely irrelevant issues.

Capital is now IRRELEVANT to entrepreneurship?

So now its about lack of start up capital. Who told you anyway that successful enterpreneirs WORLDWIDE started up with million dollar capital outlay.

Eh, who claimed 1 mil is required? But even the 20 or 50k required (something dead easy to get in the West) is quite challenging to get in Nigeria.

Anyway investing in an already saturated market is NOT CREATIVE ENTERPRENEURSHIP.

Depends on how you do it. The market for operating systems is heavily saturated, but clearly there are still opportunities there (otherwise companies like RedHat and Canonical [maker of Ubuntu] would not have been as successful.)

blacksta:
How dare you call good roads and broadband connectivity mundane issues  - if it is that mundane and Glo and Main 1 must be very silly spending billions  trying to connect West Africa to the high speed broadband gateway of Europe and America.

No joke. Basic infrastructure is what he is now calling mudane  

I wonder if some of these people actually live in the real world. Next thing he will say is that power is also a mundane issue, and I should generate electricity from firewood  

tensor777:
Steady on kobojunkie as we are not saying these things are unimportant but they do not explain the dearth of home grown enterpreneurs in Nigeria  vis a vis a country like India which has similar if not worse infrastructural challenges.

India has worse infrastructural challenges than Nigeria? Justify this BOLD (and almost certainly false) statement.

And name some of their entreprenurs in that country who have gotten the job done w/o capital, light, roads, and high-speed internet access.

What are we even saying when these same Indians even dominate busineess ownership in mainly Nigerian neighbourhoods in the developed West

What you say might be true in England, I dunno, never lived there. But not in the places I've lived in the US.

[quote author=Ma_J_Blige link=topic=578787.msg7460072#msg7460072 date=1294153941]Yet foreigners come here, ply the same roads, run into the same troubles, make their money and carte it in their millions back to their country while native Nigerians cry we cant use our brain because there are no good roads.[/quote]They are bringing in capital, are they not? Or are you say they come to Nigeria with no money and leave rich?

If you have even only $500k or $1 mil in capital to play around with, obviously you can get quite rich quickly in Nigeria.

But with less capital and only fuzzy "creative entrepreneurship" available, things are less likely to happen.

oyb:
let our admin tell us if power is not a major hindrance to his business

Yep. No doubt his server is hosted either in Europe or the US and he SSHs in/FTPs up his work, or something.

do you think the infrastructure and business environment  in nigeria can support a facebook or microsoft or cisco or intel

can you imagine the effect of our chaotic ports on JIT logistics?

the simple practice of pp on my part is severely hindered by nigeria's infrastructure.

say dude asks me to do some design for him, say a hotel

i can't do it at work, so until i get home.

that means i lose at least 1 and a half  hours - the 30 minute trip btw vi and festac is at least 2 hours because of traffic

i get home and there is no power, so i have to run a generator to do the work , which increases the cost of the work to me. depending on what is required, i may have to print and work very late into the night , which is more cost

with my internt uploading of large documents is out of it, so i have to meet with my client to deliver to him

thats on an individual scale - hampered by internet, roads, power. now multiply this a thousandfold for bigger entrepreneurs

Exactly.

Lack of roads, lack of internet access, lack of credit. . . purely lame excuses, eh?

After all, there are plenty of creative, profitable businesses started elsewhere in the world that didn't use ANY of these three critical ingredients, right? 

I'm hard pressed to think of any major recent success story I know of at least in my own area of expertise that did this without access to capital/high-speed net access. . .

Anyway, I'm not saying there are not very profitable things to do in Nigeria. There definitely are a lot of opportunities there. But most of them require certain other ingredients beyond just creativity.

@fstranger: Doesn't belong to us. We agitated for separation from Ondo, so now must stand on our feet alone regardless.

Cannot have your cake and eat it.

We will have to find something else to generate revenue.

Bah. What type of profitable business can I do with no electricity or roads, or even high-speed internet access? It is like cutting off a man's feet and right arm and wondering why he isn't a good sprinter. . .

The businesses that I've seen that are profitable in Nigeria and are possible to do at relatively small scales are construction and importing.


EDIT

sammy187:
http://www.nigeriavillagesquare.com/articles/olu-akeredolu/the-outrageous-costs-of-phoning-in-nigeria.html#replybox

Terribly written article, imo

This is a good thread, and seems worth bumping in light of the problems facing Lagos's Lekki road project.

Dude is a jackass.

State model isn't bad, I suppose. I prefer this other approach, but the end result probably won't be too dissimilar.

- double post -

^--- Agreed. The easiest way to scam this system is to get your village of 500 people declared an ethnicity. Then you could sell your vote in the Senate to the highest bidder for enough cash to make everyone in your village wealthy