From landing at Lagos airport to meeting with young aspiring programmers and developers at Yaba, from jugging on the streets to eating pounded yam, from meeting President Buhari at Aso villa to his attendance at the much awaited Aso Demo day in Abuja, the Nigerian media, especially the social media has been bombarded with pictures, videos and stories of Mark Zuckerberg visit to the country, in fact we simply ended august with him as the big masquerade.
For the sake of writing procedure and the benefit of readers, Mark Zuckerberg is a young American entrepreneur. In Nigeria, the words ‘young and entrepreneur’ are usually adjectives that attaches no serious personality and swag to an individual; they are used to describe a young struggling young man. But to give a better picture, the young entrepreneur I am talking about here is amongst top 10 richest men in the world. He is worth more than USD350 Billion in investments and USD56 Billion as his personal riches.
He is the founder, innovator and inventor of the facebook application in your phone, and currently facebook is reckoned to have more than 1billion users across the globe. Trying to understand the speed or frequency of his income is like trying to number the drops of water rushing into the ocean. Of course not even a witch can do it.
His journey from an average citizen to a world shaker at the twilight of his age is an inspiration to millions of right thinking young men across the world, as he is said to have developed facebook at the age of 23, while trying to solve a simple problem of communicating with friends and colleagues in the college (Harvard University). On February 2004, the application was birthed as thefacebook.com, and after much research and continuous coding it metamorphosed to facebook.com, a domain name he purchased with USD200, 000.
Now to the main issue, what exactly did Mark Zuckerbeg come to do in the largest and most populated country in Africa, what were his activities in the country ravaged by insurgency, militancy and deadly diseases?
What was his mission to the country where he has the highest patronage in Africa, unfortunately the news of the recession was broke while he was still in the country.
Good enough Zuckerberg’s team were very good at using the social media to update the world on minute by minute engagements of the trip, all left is making sense out of the journey.
In his message, Zuck was quoted to have said “I decided to come to Lagos to meet the vibrant developers and entrepreneurial ecosystem you guys have here – I think the world needs to see that”
Although there has been a lot of facebook related development in Nigeria, one would expect Zuck to show more of his soft side to the real citizens of Nigeria beyond the Chan-Zuckerberg initiative investment of USD24million to Andela to support the training of young developers and create more ICT entrepreneurs.
Beautiful as this may be, without sounding immodest, I expected more from the visit of the 6th richest man in the world to the largest congregation of blacks in the world. To say the least I thought Zuck will get to see the real Nigerians, and possibly offer them a word.
I am tempted to draw a comparison between Bill Gates visits and activities in Nigeria to that of Zuck, but the spirit of the prophet is always under the control of the prophet.
The real Nigerian kids were not the handsome, well-fed and smiling boys and girls that he met at the co-creation Hub (CcHub) in Sabo, Yaba In Lagos State, Mbanu, they are the malnourished, homeless and kwashiorkor stricken kids dumped at different inhumane suburbs across the country with a sweet sounding tag of internally displaces persons IDPs. The real Nigerian kids were sitting under the sun and out of school begging for arms in the traffics, they are in Bakkasi, some crying to dead for starvations and lack of even a roof on their head.
Those are the ones Bill Gates foundation do stop over to visit ones in a while, in addition to his Microsoft interest in Nigeria.
Of course the visit was over all useful, beneficial and brought a new challenge to the table. At least most people including president Buhari talked about his simplicity and humility despite his achievements.
The praises of Nigeria having an energetic youth citizenry with entrepreneurial spirit, wiling to diversify the recessing economy from oil dependency to entrepreneurship focus was however worth it, but a little distraction from purely facebook.com and ICT concerns wouldn't be a bad idea.
Oh! Less I forget, Zuck’s visited Aso Rock Villa allegedly from Kenya, and I kept tarry on the net to see what they discussed, but absolutely nothing good enough to take to the bank. Except Buhari praising him for his simplicity and him praising Buhari for having vibrant citizens who are driving economic ‘change’ in Nigeria. He is said to have presented a facebook drone to the president, only God knows if anyone in our President’s entourage understood what he even handed them. Does our minister for ICT even have a twitter account?, or let me put it this way, how ICT compliant is our minister of ICT because I only got to know about his existence during this visit.
I think someone should have told him about the other side of Nigeria, and he would be tactically made to make a commitment either to invest in our ICT in such a scale that would create more impact and employment, or at least learn some support to any area of Nigeria’s numerous misfortunes. That is what people of his caliber do when they visit a country whose annual budget is less than their personal bank balance.
I am still glued to my gadget and the conventional media for a news that will help me deduce concrete gains of Zuck’s visit to Nigeria, until then, he was just an august tourist ‘making my first trip to sub-saharan Africa’, as he himself posits.
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