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For the second time in her existence, Apple Inc, the company founded by the two Steves (Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak) has been certified as the world’s most valuable company with a market capitalization of $772 Billion.
As I read the news on various news platform, I was struck by the comparisons of Apple with Nigeria and lessons we as a people could learn from this intellectual behemoth.
The first comparison would be that Apple is a company built on ideas. So for instance, while an American company like Ford is an epitome of the success of the industrial revolution age, Apple on the other hand is the poster boy for the knowledge worker age.
And nothing depicts this as dramatically as the fact that the former most valuable company, ExxonMobil, has a market capitalization that is only half of Apple’s ($382 Billion).
The first lesson for Nigeria then becomes that if our hopes for the growth of our economy is dependent on oil, ExxonMobil, the biggest oil company in the world, is a glaring example that we will continue to play second fiddle to those nations whose hope for the future is based on knowledge. Oil gave birth to ExxonMobil, knowledge gave birth to Apple. Go figure!
And when you look at the maths, you would see that the numbers are preaching to Nigeria in a way that words cannot.
For one thing, Apple, today employs 115,000 people who together are paid more than all the approximately 40 million employed people in Nigeria make in a year.
The above should probably put Nigerian Governors on notice that their plan to reduce the minimum wage from ₦18,000 is an intellectually lazy idea that will cost them more than it would cure them.
Secondly, In 2015 Apple has made $215 Billion so far. This figure looks set to increase with the expected sales boost from Christmas. In comparison, Nigeria has made 10% of that amount in the same period.
Technology is sometimes called wizardry. Here in Silicon Valley, where I worked for four years before joining President Jonathan’s administration, I see what others have used and are using their wizardry for.
But what do we use ours for in Nigeria? We use ours to destroy each other!
In Nigeria, we do not celebrate the type of creative intelligence that would give rise to an Apple. Instead we applaud critics and cynics who do not create and who sneer at those who do.
Since May 2015, I have been back in California where I live and just being on Social Media here surrounds me with a different atmosphere than what I went through in the four years that I spoke for President Jonathan.
Even in an election year, young people in the US are more interested in tweeting and facebook-ing ideas and insights and in positively networking with each other.
On the other part of the world, Nigerian youths are allowing their strings to be pulled by puppeteers amazingly nicknamed overlords, who use them to fight their political enemies (in Nigeria a rival is automatically an enemy).
This is going on even after an election has been won and lost!
I have been back now for six months and I was invited to an event at Bloomberg News in London which I attended two weeks ago.
At Bloomberg, the discussion was on why Africans prefer to spend money on foreign luxury brands rather than grow their own.
But how can we grow each other when we are busy blowing each other up?
The founders of Apple, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, are (were in the case of Jobs) called geniuses.
A lot of people are not aware that the word genius is actually a Latin word that means a guardian spirit present at birth which drives a person’s inclinations.
What we as Nigerians and Africans ought to ask ourselves is what is our genius? What spirit drives our inclinations?
James 3:14-17 says:
if you have bitter envying and strife in your hearts, boast not, and lie not against the truth.
This wisdom descends not from above, but is earthly, sensual, demonic.
For where envying and strife is, there is confusion and every evil work.
But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and compliant, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy.” (NKJV).
No doubt as a people we are very religious, yet religion is more reflected on the outside than on the inside. In other words it is an outside job, not an inside job.
Religion always want to reach outside rather than inside. It is the reason why many Nigerians were able to empathize with France and the French people over the recent terror attacks to the extent that we put French flags on our Social Media profiles.
We do this without being consciously aware that we have largely failed to empathize with our own brothers and sisters who are facing terror of the like the French people have not seen since the Second World War.
There are two million Internally Displaced Persons in Nigeria. Nigerians are largely unaware of this fact, but we are aware of the sufferings of French people. Religion you see: focus on the Outside instead of the Inside!
It is this same religious spirit that made our people kill each other because of blasphemous cartoons published in Denmark by a non Nigerian cartoonist.
Look around our nation. We do not have bookshops in our cities and towns because we do not have a reading culture. We copy the pleasurable cultures of the West like celebrating Thanksgiving and shopping like mad on Black Friday, but we will not adopt those parts of Western culture that call for intellectual effort like book readings.
What concerns me with African nations is the ease and giddiness with which we adopt foreign cultures but are unenthusiastic about projecting ours to others.
Take football for example. I schooled, lived and worked in England and I am very well conversant of the fact that the reason the English and other Europeans are so excited about football is because they bet on it and football betting is the single biggest pastime in England.
So when you see them so pumped up, the reason is because their money is involved. Something like 85% (my estimation) of the crowd at an English game are cheering for their money.
Now we Africans do not have a stake in these leagues and largely do not bet on them yet we get even more excited about European leagues than the Europeans themselves.
We buy jerseys of European leagues and learn everything about it and call these teams ‘our’, ‘my’ team.
We prove the adage that converts are more fanatical than those born in a religion.
The sad part is that we have our own leagues at home which we ignore. Who do we think will develop our leagues for us? Africans “emancipate yourselves from mental slavery”.
Even look what we have done with religion.
Before the advent of Christianity, we used to worship idols and demon gods for two primary purposes: in order to prosper and for protection from our enemies.
Is it not the same things we are doing with the pure Christian religion handed over to us by selfless missionaries like Mary Slessor and David Livingstone?
All we seem to be interested in in today’s churches are miracles, financial breakthroughs and fire prayer on our enemies. Where Christ taught us to love and pray for our enemies in Matthew 5:44, our churches are packed full of pastors and congregants praying for the death of their enemies “by fire, by force”!
It is this type of behaviour that made the fictional Captain Winterbottom of Achebe’s Arrow of God say about our attitudes to our own selves that this was a particular type of wickedness “peculiar to Africa”.
Right now Nigeria’s economy is between a rock and a very hard place and people are in churches praying for things to get better, but if we do not make attitudinal changes and begin to show love for each other, we will never be able to create the atmosphere that allows ideas and innovation to thrive.
And as long as ideas are not encouraged and highly regarded in our climes is as long as we would not be able to replicate the ideas that led to the birth of knowledge based companies like Apple (market capitalization $772 Billion), Microsoft (market capitalization $429 Billion) and Facebook (market capitalization $298 Billion).
Reno Omokri is the founder of the Mind of Christ Christian Center in California, author of Shunpiking: No Shortcuts to God and Why Jesus Wept and the host of Transformation with Reno Omokri (Sunday at 2.30PM on San Francisco’s KTLN, Chanel 25 on Comcast).
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