NigeriansTalk

This is a review of a few, selected, blog posts that dis­cussed the Niger­ian econ­omy in the week that ended on March 14, 2009.

Man­asseh Egedegbe of the Stock Mar­ket blog at www.stockmarketnigeria.com says there is a sil­ver lin­ing in the Niger­ian econ­omy. In a post that he aptly titled A Sil­ver Lin­ing in the Niger­ian Econ­omy, he dis­cusses the advan­tages of the presidency’s deci­sions to dereg­u­late the petro­leum sec­tor, sack top PHCN offi­cials, stip­u­late a dead­line of Decem­ber 2009 for banks to con­form to a uni­form year end, and the pro­posal that all banks switch to the Inter­na­tional Finan­cial Report­ing Stan­dards (IFRS) account­ing. To under­stand why Mr Egedegbe is so pos­i­tive about the out­look of the Niger­ian econ­omy please visit his orig­i­nal blog post.

Loy Okezie of Star­tups Nige­ria won­ders why Nige­ria does not have many star­tups of note, save for Mr. Mike Adenuga’s Globa­com and a few oth­ers. Mr Okezie raises the idea that it would be good for inno­va­tion to have a place like Sil­i­con Val­ley in Nige­ria, a place where inno­v­a­tive ideas could be incu­bated and brought to fruition. He rec­om­mends Lagos as the site for a pro­posed Sil­i­con Valey, partly because the city is the com­mer­cial hub of Nige­ria and it is already team­ing with inno­v­a­tive peo­ple, and partly because of the pres­ence of the Lagos Busi­ness School and the Uni­ver­sity of Lagos. He sees the pos­si­bil­ity of hav­ing a vibrant Sil­i­con Valley-like area in Lagos. It just so hap­pens that I just fin­ished read­ing The Economist’s spe­cial report on entre­pre­neur­ship. Under the head­ing Magic For­mula, they dis­cuss the secrets of entre­pre­neur­ial suc­cess (for a coun­try). They cite instances of politi­cians who have tried to cre­ate a Sil­i­con Val­ley in their coun­try. Accord­ing to them,the only one that has suc­ceeded of them all has been Israel. One major point they draw atten­tion to is that there is no Sil­i­con Val­ley with­out Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity, Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley, and the big finan­cial cen­tre, San Fran­cisco. Loy Okezie writes that he hopes that the gov­er­nor of Lagos State would read his post. I hope, in addi­tion to that, that the whole of the Niger­ian leg­is­la­ture and exec­u­tive would read it. It is not impos­si­ble to cre­ate an envi­ron­ment of inno­va­tion and entre­pre­neur­ship — I guess that is at the heart of Mr Okezie’s inter­est in see­ing a Sil­i­con Val­ley in Nige­ria — but I think that no state gov­ern­ment can do that alone. It has to be part of a holis­tic effort by the Niger­ian gov­ern­ment. In short, the coun­try has to have it at the cen­ter of pol­icy for­mu­la­tion. At the last check in the Doing Busi­ness report, a report of the ease with which busi­ness can be started and oper­ated in a coun­try, Nige­ria ranks 118 in a list of 181 coun­tries. That does not exactly make for good atmos­phere for invest­ment, even if there are some peo­ple tak­ing care of the inno­va­tion side. Please see Loy Okezie’s orig­i­nal post for a fuller ver­sion of his ideas.

Over at the some­what longwindedly-named Nige­ria Gen­eral Debate Blog Web­site, Ade­olu Oyin­lola dis­cusses the moves of the Cen­tral Bank of Nige­ria to accuse bureaux de change in Nige­ria “of, among other infrac­tions, money laun­der­ing, non-rendition of returns and unbri­dled greed.” Please go over to the orig­i­nal post for the details of his discussion.

And who remem­bers the days when there was a mea­sure of schaden­freude on the part of some cit­i­zens of African coun­tries at the ill-fortune of devel­oped economies? Con­ven­tional wis­dom had it that the finan­cial mess was baked in Wall Street and Lon­don ovens, and that it’s ill effects were lim­ited to economies that had more than a cer­tain mea­sure of expo­sure to these major global finan­cial cen­tres. Africa was declared inno­cent in the mat­ter by Ms. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Man­ag­ing Direc­tor of the World Bank. But if any­one ever thought that the inno­cent does not suf­fer this is the time for them to wake up to the real­ity of the pains that African coun­tries are feel­ing. My friend Oz of mootbox.com has made a list of some of the rea­sons why any dream that the finan­cial cri­sis does not affect African coun­tries remains just a dream. Check this out at his web­site.

I end here. Till next week when some­one else will do another review of Niger­ian blogs.

Nige­ri­ans talk, we are just mak­ing sure that there are ears lis­ten­ing.
Loom­nie.