Join us at Tekedia Institute as we review the year ahead in our annual Outlook presentation.
Topic: The 2022 Outlook – Nigeria, Africa, Global: Potency of Entrepreneurial Cambrian Moment
Date: Saturday, Dec 18, 2021
Time: 4pm – 5.30 pm WAT
The Zoom link is up at https://www.tekedia.com/live/
Come and learn how the empires of the future would be built.
I like designs and electronics is my passion. In junior secondary, I fell in love with electricity. But every person wanted me to study medicine (a great call) but I was not a fan. The closest I got to medicine was writing JAMB in first year, while in Federal University of Technology Owerri, just to prove that it was not about any difficulty of getting in. University of Nigeria Nsukka offered admission for MBBS but I only revealed to family a day after the matriculation.
My message to you today is this: Do all to discover your passion. But do not pick a job (at entry level) because it is your passion. Rather, plan that career to do all necessary to have resources to accelerate and ascend into that passion.
In my experience, the biggest satisfaction comes when you know you are making progress on things which you have desired to pursue. And defining those things must come out of awareness, and understanding of many things which could help you to thrive in life. That is also where humility comes – what you have called great success may be things others passed over. But in the foolishness of a fool’s mind, he or she was thinking that was the pinnacle
Yes, if you studied chemical engineering and a bank job arrives paying 4x than what a small engineering firm is paying, take the bank job in Lagos. But have a transition strategy with a path to return to engineering at higher level. Do not allow the bank perks to disorient you because later you would regret it.
With a solid plan, the resources from the bank job can fund a foreign postgraduate degree which will set you ahead by miles. The energy to push harder in whatever you do typically comes when you have passion for that. Mine is electronics and daily I pursue a “vision of innovation in addressing the world’s challenges”. Discover your passion, and accelerate it.
This one may require a caveat, because you are part of less than 1%, with capacity to have clear vision, and a sound plan to see it actualised. This is not for average graduates, too much to ask…
There’s a certain ‘hangover’ that usually happens, when young graduates begin a career in high-paying sectors, the so called passion becomes muddled, and then gets redefined and adapted to the comfort of the new surroundings, with all the perks.
To be able to disconnect from such hangover, you must posses the mental agility and cognitive humility, to be able to see beyond your present ‘comfort’ and question your life purpose; that way, you may be able to pursue your higher goals. Money comes with deceitful tendencies, and in many cases – blurs one’s ability to think critically.
The first task for young graduates could be that of being able to link passion to wealth creation, without such link, the passion may turn out to become a source of misery. Not many things you have passion for can sustain you, the business element of such passion needs to be viable too.
In this life, your happiness or misery is hedged on your ability to discover your purpose; anything short of that, sorry!
NB: originally published 3 years ago
Avoid apologizing for the same thing twice.
Ndo na-ala uwa azi [An apology soothes all pains] is an Igbo proverb. No matter how strong or powerful you are, make sure Apology or simply Sorry is not excluded in your dictionary.
But saying Sorry is transactional. What really matters is doing all necessary to avoid repeating what necessitated that Sorry. And that requires taking responsibilities and fixing whatever one has to apologize for.
Have strength to apologize but IMPROVE to avoid even a need for it.
Comment 1: Here we have made it a culture to apologise for everything . “Apologies for your flight being delayed. Apologies for all inconveniences caused . Apologies for the power outage . Apologies for the poor customer service .Sorry ma, we don’t have your specific orders …We are so sorry,we could not make the supply as scheduled . Sorry we had a mix up …”
It’s now a culture . What we need is to deliver and stop apologising for the same thing twice. Multiple apologies on the same matter, is not sign of meekness. It’s a sign of insensitivity and gross inefficiency.
Comment 2: The sorry or apology is irrelevant, as long as you don’t repeat the same offense. Misbehaving and issuing sorry all the time is not what responsible people do.
The entire African continent has been left out of the burgeoning covid vaccine market, with estimated $150 billion pharma revenue projection in 2021-2022, according data published by Weforum.
Pfizer & BioNtech, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson and Sinovac are among the big pharmas at the top of the revenue chain, raking in billions of dollars as a thank you for trying to save the world. African countries have been on standby, watching as these companies, scattered across Asia, North America and Europe, in addition to providing vaccine, boost their countries’ economies through vaccine revenue.
This backdrop has ignited calls for African pharma companies to go beyond the norm and develop vaccines that will also help to breach the wide vaccination gap between Africa and other regions. Now a Nigerian company is rising to the challenge.
Merck, a leading science and technology company, recently announced that it has signed an agreement with Innovative Biotech (IB), a Nigerian biotechnology company to design the manufacturing process for the first vaccine production facility in Nigeria.
“We are committed to expanding access to life-saving and life-enhancing therapies to patients across the world and this collaboration is a testament to that commitment,” said Andrew Bulpin, Head of Process Solutions, Life Science business sector at Merck. “We are proud to provide the technical support and expertise that could help enable the first vaccine facility in Nigeria and localize vaccine development in the West Africa region.”
The collaboration is part of the West African pandemic readiness program, which aims to localize vaccine development in the African nations. The first phase of this integrated partnership focuses on designing the fill and finish facility, incorporating the company’s Mobius single-use technology, while the second phase will focus on enabling continuous manufacturing.
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of countries, especially in Africa, developing the manufacturing capacity to produce vaccines to address health emergencies, strengthen regional health security and expand sustainable access to health products.
Nigeria does not currently produce vaccines because the country does not have the infrastructural capacity to manufacture the vaccines so this collaboration is a welcome development in the right direction.
Innovative Biotech’s licensor, TechnoVax, is developing a virus-like-particle (VLP)-based vaccine to target variants of Covid-19. Provisional results from the preclinical studies of the VLP-based vaccine have shown promise for virus neutralization.
Technovax is a 2019 recipient of Life Science’s Advance Biotech Grant for developing a virus-like particle platform that facilitates the development and production of a range of vaccines targeting the prevention of respiratory diseases, hemorrhagic fevers, immunodeficiency, and cancers.
The Life Science business sector has been supporting Innovative Biotech’s effort with its BioReliance® testing services, technical transfer support, and single-use facility design. This partnership showcases the company’s commitment to supporting the building of manufacturing capabilities in the Middle East and Africa.
“By leveraging the company’s facility design expertise, we’ll be able to build the first vaccine production facility in Nigeria and manufacture high-quality and affordable vaccines locally,” said Simon Agwale, CEO of Innovative Biotech.
It is hoped that this move will spur further partnerships to develop vaccines that will minimize Africa’s dependence on Asia and Western countries.
The first attack was on September 13th, 2017. The second was on December 15th, 2021. On the first occasion, my sin was that I checked email messages from clients and colleagues. Before my very eyes, all the files and programmes in the operating system were damaged with the Lukitus. Hackers brought ‘Operation Lukitus Dance’ to my comfort zone. Lukitus formed from Lukko, a Finnish word danced with me for over 7 days.
The developers of the Lukitus felt that the best they could do to me is to hold on to my over 7,000 files created in the last 4 years through encryption and generated 352 threats on the PC. To decrypt all the files, developers requested $3,000 ransom!
Shgv is the name of the second virus. After several reviews of my system using a number of tools, I discovered 819 threats with the severity level at 70%. The people behind this want $980 before they could decrypt my over 100, 000 files created since 2017. Within few minutes I lost files worth over N10,000,000. Over 20 book manuscripts and hundreds of academic and applied research documents were lost.
It is ridiculous that your single action will deny a number of people and businesses from drawing significant insights from data-driven articles [with over 200,000 words] prepared for Tekedia.
As local and foreign engineers continue working on the system with possible solutions, I want to state it again what I said in 2017, you hackers can only encrypt my documents not my brain because God knows how He wired it and how it will be used.
By His grace, I will bounce back!