Martin

A matter of significant concern is the capacity of various African country governments to mainstream the apprenticeship and handholding models for prosperity creation effectively. The Igbo apprenticeship system has a compelling reputation for the compounded formation of employment and output at large-scale. Likewise, the handholding model of entrepreneurial growth orchestrates the sustained high profitable performance […]

The level of prosperity attained by any country is directly proportional to the size of entrepreneurial minds it houses. The extent to which entrepreneurial thinking feeds into the overall decision-making processes at the individual, corporate and government levels may be a factor differentiating countries, continents and regions in respect of the well-being they enjoy. An […]

The seeming absence of entrepreneurial consciousness among the governments of African countries considerably hinders their country’s prosperity. In Nigeria, for instance, only about four subnational governments are economically independent. The rest of the subnational governments depend on centrally distributed revenue allocations for survival. This inconvenient reality is avoidable in these governments internalizing the fact that […]

Africa is a continent bubbling with untapped potentials. The abundance of these untapped resources – human, natural economic – also points to the profundity of the underlying inefficiency in resource allocation. From the traditional laws on land which perpetuates subsistence farming and frustrates commercial agriculture, to the absence of motorable roads that will enable the […]

Over human history, experiences have repeatedly shown that the market left alone cannot satisfactorily deliver as much prosperity relative to when propped by a government. That is particularly true when the government is both inclusive and effective. The Ibo ethnic group in south-east Nigeria was reputed not to have had a king or ruler before […]

In a GreenTec Capital Africa Foundation and WeeTracker Media report based on data between 2010 and 2018, the average failure rate of African start-ups is 54.20%. Ethiopia tops the league with a 75% failure rate. Behind Ethiopia are Rwanda, Ghana, Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Tanzania and Nigeria with failure rates of 75%, […]

Achieving prosperity is assuredly faster when stakeholders collectively work on it. Unarguably individuals create communally enjoyed benefits while pursuing their selfish economic interests. Nevertheless, that argument without appropriate qualifications may oversimplify the reality of prosperity creation. The relative impact of individual actions cannot effectively supplant the highly impactful synergistic roles and preferences of institutions and […]

Regardless of the challenges, most African countries are making substantial progress in virtually all indicators of prosperity. Seychelles, a tiny island in the Indian Ocean, has been an excellent example with its very high human development index of 0.801. It is nevertheless the only African country among the sixty-two countries that are in that index […]

The tragedy of the Naira is that it has a single source of strength and many pulldowns. Its energy hails from the foreign exchange earnings from crude oil exports. 95% of the foreign exchange that enables us to make purchases overseas relatively conveniently are from this source alone. Other sources of foreign exchange such as […]

Although we have four petroleum refining facilities and issued licences for the construction of additional twenty-five, we import refined petroleum products like every other non-oil-producing country in the world. In 2018, the federal government spent N2.9 trillion on the importation of petrol only. It was a 50% increase over the 2017 petroleum import spending of […]