Several accounts have indicated that Islam is the world’s second largest religion. It is a religion being practised almost everywhere in the universe. Available statistics shows that the religion has over one billion adherents, representing 23% of the global population. This percent is expected to reach 26.4% or 2.3 billion of the world’s population by 2030. When Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) was asked what type of earning was best, he replied: “A man’s work with his hands and every (lawful) business transaction” (Al-Tirmidhi). In this book, I examine entrepreneurship within the Muslim global community, and Nigeria in particular.
From all indications, there is no excuse for Muslims not to involve in entrepreneurship. But, as exemplified by the group of Muslims who participated in a study that facilitates the writing of this book, it is obvious that there are challenges impeding Muslims from taking the entrepreneurial journey as encouraged by the Holy Book and Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him). I also learnt that they have some factors helping them to believe in taking the journey. Insights from the study reveal that Muslims, like adherents of other religions in Nigeria, are finding it difficult to discover sustainable opportunities and exploring them to their advantage. Based on the insights, I make a case for Enterprising Muslims (EM). By EM, I expect individual Muslim and Islamic organisations to draw from the principles regarding attitude towards business, experiences and risks taking, and Islamic organisations or movements’ roles in entrepreneurial growth in their localities and Nigeria in particular.
It is no longer news that the Coronavirus has moved from its index case which came into the country late February to 27 as at Sunday 22, March , 2020. Governments at all levels have taken drastic actions to curb the spread. Since Friday 20, 2020, almost all the states of the federation have closed down schools across the country. Public and religious gatherings of above 50 attendees have been banned nationwide. Some corporate organizations have also asked their employees to work remotely from home. The federal government had earlier shut the major international airports in Lagos and Abuja. As at the time of writing this piece, Nigeria could be said to have been under partial lockdown. This was unavoidable as the confirmed cases has been said to be 27. Thus, Media campaigns are heavy especially those that preach social distancing and other preventive hygienic measures.
Despite the government efforts at curtailing the spread of the virus, there are more imminent dangers of the disease spreading if more actions are not taken by both the government and the citizenry. As at Saturday 21, March, 2020, Nigerians were seen attending previously fixed private ceremonies which had in attendance more than 50 attendees. Not only that, some religious organisations also held programmes of large numbers. In fact, a pastor of a church was reportedly arrested in Osogbo for conducting church service which had members of congregation that were above the stipulated number. In Abuja, a particular popular church was also said to have insisted that its Sunday service would go ahead.
There are concerns that many worship centres open for service this Sunday defying the government directive. This disregard for the rule of law is more dangerous as it gives the virus the chance to penetrate and wreck more havoc. Global concerns of the virus spreading to Africa were high before it eventually came in. Stakeholders expressed their fears of the virus spreading in countries with failing health infrastructures. If the spread became extremely high, the health facilities could be overrun and more fatalities could be recorded. The novel virus had made nonsense of countries with developed healthcare facilities. Just on Saturday, Italy was said to have recorded 769 deaths from the COVID 19.
Earlier on Friday, The People’s Democratic Party had held a south west unification rally in Ibadan. The rally which held at a time government was taking serious efforts to combat the spread of the disease had come under heavy criticism. There were serious condemnation of the action of the party at a time state governments were considering closing schools.
In its reaction, the ruling All Progressive Congress through its Oyo State Chapter had chided the Governor Seyi Makinde-led government for daring to expose the state to such crowd at the time the general concern was public gathering. The party said “Few indices of the enormity of the pandemic will suffice here, for the populace to appreciate the gravity of maladministration going on in Oyo under the government of Makinde. China has 81,048 reported cases with 3,204 deaths, France has 4,480 reported cases with 91 deaths, Italy has 21,157 reported cases with 1,441 deaths, United Kingdom has 1,140 reported cases with 21 deaths, and United States of America have 2,952 reported cases with 57 deaths.” It further noted “likewise it was reported to have made great inroad to Africa with Algeria, Cote d’Ivoire, Egypt, South Africa and even Nigeria recording eight cases and most worrisome was a positive COVID-19 patient found to have being in Oyo for two weeks, only to be discovered in another state”.
Having come under heavy criticism, the governor, Mr. Seyi Makinde, accepted responsibility and apologized. In a statement made available on his social media handles, the governor regretted any lapse in judgement. He said “I have received your complaints about the rally that was held yesterday, and I feel obligated to state in clear terms that we acted based on the information we had at the time. In retrospect, it should not have happened and I take responsibility for that lapse in judgement.”
Moving forward, the following suggestions should be followed by government. One, citizens should be encouraged to blow the whistle against those who are flouting government order. Phone lines of government officials responsible for ensuring total compliance should be made available to the citizens. Two, if the partial lockdown is not going to be effective, let the government go full blown. If need be, let there be a curfew. Three, every Nigerian must see themselves as critical stakeholders and should be concerned on the effect of an unmanageable spread. May the country and the world be healed!
As coronavirus continues to spread with devastating impact, every country in the world is rolling out measures to quell the surge. Among the measures are social distancing and locking down cities and towns.
The Italian government is distributing a video clip showing how much havoc the pandemic has wreaked in the country, urging every other country not to allow their cases to spread to that degree. One measure they recommended is ‘lockdown’ of cities and ‘restriction’ of movement. So far, there are 277,310 cases and counting worldwide, with Italy taking the highest share of the casualties, the country has ordered every single individual to stay at home.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has recommended ‘stay at home’ and many countries are buying it.
However, these measures don’t come easy as they commit people to homes and deny them the opportunity to earn a living. Knowing this, governments around the world are making provision for the sustenance of citizens during this time.
The UK has announced that if a national shutdown happens, all workers will get 80% of their salaries during the time they stay at home. Canada was the foremost to unveil a robust quarantine assistance program, to enable its citizens to comply with the stay at home directive.
El Salvador has cancelled rent bills, water bills, internet bills, electricity bills and phone bills for the next three months for its citizens. These are few among other personal care initiatives that governments around the world are taking in the quest to contain the outbreak in their respective countries.
Africa was envied at the onset as the only continent that appears immune to the pandemic due to its limited cases. But that is rapidly changing. Over 600 cases resulting in over 20 deaths have been so far recorded in Africa, instigating fear that the continent is about to feel the full weight of the scourge.
Most African countries are now taking measures to halt the spread including limiting large gatherings. And the most populous among them, Nigeria is not an exception.
After many states in Nigeria announced the closure of schools and religious activities, the Federal Government said it has closed all international airports in the countries. The railway service has also announced that it is shutting down operation until further notice. Nigeria has recorded 10 new cases, seven in Lagos and three in Abuja, bringing the number of confirmed cases to 22. And the way it’s going, Nigerians are afraid that the numbers may skyrocket overnight and the country doesn’t have the health infrastructure to contain the proliferation.
Governments are under pressure to initiate lockdown in a bid to limit the speed of the spread from contacts, but there is a major challenge: “How would Nigerians survive a lockdown”? is a question many keep asking. Larger number of the population depend on their daily income to feed, and the Nigerian government, unlike others that made ‘stay at home’ provision, appears to have no austerity plan for people in that category.
A vulcanizer was asked if he would stay at home on the order of the government, and his answer was “no, I would rather die of coronavirus than hunger.” And that’s the sentiment an average person in Nigeria is expressing toward the possibility of a lockdown.
It portrays a possible faceoff situation between the governments and the people if a lockdown order is announced in Nigeria. Full compliance with such an order will depend not on the government’s determination to contain coronavirus but on people’s ability to endure hunger. They said coronavirus is deadly but hunger is deadlier.
Having foreseen the likely controversy that will ensue upon the attempt by Nigerian government to implement ‘stay at home’ order, experts have advised the government to facilitate modalities that will ease the pains the lockdown will induce, especially hunger.
Within the next ten years, a country will make the implantation of biochips (microchips inside humans) on citizens mandatory to help during pandemic and security paralyses. The GPS-embedded biochip will collect blood samples, analyse them in-vivo, and send results to a central server. On the server, the government will know where people with, say, a coronavirus, are located, and will pick them up for further assistance. Most privacy-related activism will fade and health surveillance will scale globally. I invite you to read this piece which Isaac Thani shared with Tekedia; Bill Gates predicted this pandemic to the money!
The year 2020 is a year that is going completely different from my general expectation. I could not have pictured this in my wildest imagination. I’m still trying to check all the predictions I can lay my hands on to see if any came close in predicting what we’re experiencing, yet to find much correlation between what we collectively thought will happen and what is happening currently. And we’re just in 1Q (first quarter). While the best approach to handling this definitely involves not panicking, it will be very useful to sit in reflection and retrospection. And we all actually have the time and space for this, so… I decided to pen mine down.
After reading Tyranny of experts by William Easterly, I learnt to be very careful with different “expert opinions” that fly around the web. It is very easy these days to get word out and many are doing that, so I reasoned it is only common sense to increase my bs-filters. This is not an expert opinion(I am not one), but just a few thoughts I wanted to put down and share. Jack Ma famously said “there is no expert of the future”. We’re all experiencing the future for the first time, and no one travelled back from the future(the tech does not exist yet right?). I have to add that I respect experts, people that have sound knowledge in their areas of expertise and are doing their best to inform the public.
A lot of things lead to the drive for globalization with it’s many benefits. IT brought a lot of good changes to the world, and we can sit and enjoy a lot of this as traditional borders in different sectors are gradually being eroded and removed. It is generally good. It is also humbling to sit down and identify some of its loopholes and vulnerabilities, and then we can be more prepared for the future. The spread of COVID-19 is a graphical illustration of the way we’re all connected. We have one of the rare instances when “divided we stand” is actually the case. Everyone is encouraged to social-distance and self-isolate, as we are all compelled to take measures these measures not just for personal benefit but for the benefit of our families, friends, and humanity.
Ebola was just a warning. I went back to rewatch Bill Gate’s TED talk about The fact that we’re not ready for the next big outbreak and it perfectly makes sense now, earlier on it seemed like there was more time before the outbreak.
We can see a fact clearly demonstrated, that all humans are born equal, irrespective of social status, financial net-worth, where you live, etc. COVID-19 can get you if the proper measures are not taken. This is has made me think deeper about others around me. Suddenly all the things that formerly mattered no longer do, the only thing that does is breathing and staying safe. Even a lot of our personal problems do not. We as humans should cohabit and coexist, we are really not playing zero-sum game, or a game where winner takes all, contrary to how it might seem in many circumstances. So while we will lose material things in different proportions and some people are more vulnerable than orders, we are fundamentally all grounded. This should only spur us to take more measures in lifting others, for we only rise by lifting others.I will look at inequality differently now, and I think we should all do. There are times when we cannot build walls high enough to keep others out and somehow protect ourselves from the problems that exist globally. What are we going to do, if we don’t actively think of finding effective, long-term solutions to those problems? We cannot hide from them, at some points we cannot ignore them. We have to confront them and solve them in effective and sustainable ways. COVID-19 is not a Chinese virus as some would like to think, is a virus going after humanity and only the poor, or those who live in “third-world” countries, the same way HIV is not only after the sexually promiscuous, and Ebola was not only after Africans. We should think deeply about these things.
Then I heard terms that were hitherto unknown to me – Herd immunity. It was flying around the internet and I had to try to understand it since some thought it could help the UK with COVID-19. But I also saw a different term demonstrated – Herd Stupidity/Covidiot. Now I am not trying to sound disrespectful to you my dear reader, or claim I am completely above this. I hope you believe me. The length we all can go when we are collectively in desperate situations is unimaginable. It became clear to me that the people desperately trying to escape war-torn, poverty-stricken and impoverished places en masse using extremely dangerous means are human – as human as those fighting for toilet paper and groceries, and maybe even more human than those trying to hoard those essential things and make a quick profit by taking advantage of others in vulnerable times. Next time I should first of all look at them as who they are;humans first, before giving them tags like refugees, immigrants, etc. I think it will make a big difference if we all do. We are all humans, and who says we will not behave in the same way or worse if I found ourselves in similar circumstances?
But I am not writing to make us feel guilty of anything. I just want to reflect more on the world as it was before 2020, because the world will never be the same again. A lot is changing drastically, and I don’t express that there will be a time when a reset button will be pressed, and we will all magically return to pre-2020 order. We have a chance to reflect and build a better world, one with better chances and opportunities for humans, irrespective of whether you’re born male/female, in a village in India or somewhere in Finland, to rich parents or poor ones. There are few times when we have a chance to slow down and fix things instead of breaking them, and this, I think is one of them. I want to use it wisely.
There are many other things happening globally, a lot of good news, but COVID-19 has grabbed the headlines. The story about locusts invading farmlands that will cause food scarcity is there. Climate change is still actual. But there are a lot of good things happening also, and we will live to share those good stories post COVID-19. We can see a new set of global business leaders who will think differently and more humanely I expect. Businesses who don’t want to make profit at all cost and ignore the true losses in terms of environmental impact of their business, global inequality and just risky consumerism. There are businesses we generally expect to be greedy capitalists responding quickly to need around them like 3D printing ventilators, Gamers thinking of using their beasts(gaming PCs) for our good, there are governments working to ensure people are catered for during this time. These are all good news we will one day share. While sometimes I ask myself if all these good changes will last after the crises and if it is not just frantic efforts to be noticed/avoid criticisms, I like to think optimistically now. We all need to be optimists now, but not in ignorant ways. And heroes are usually discovered in times like this. We should all allow the heroes in us break forth!
A special mention has to be made of the true warriors fighting for us all – health workers at all levels in all countries, researchers, scientists. Now we should know where to put our priorities. These people should never have to fight for their earned pay, and we should actually consider increasing them in places where it is nothing to write home about. There was a post making rounds on Facebook about researchers and footballers’ pay. While entertainment is good, some of our collective values and priorities have to shift to the most important things, and this should reflect in how we spend our collective income. We should not make our Doctors in Nigeria or anywhere else go on strike, the true cost in terms of lives) are unquantifiable in monetary terms. And so will our military budget be relatively irrelevant in times like these.
If we look sincerely, there is actually nothing new under the sun. All of these issues have been experienced before. Locusts, climate issues, diseases and pandemics, etc. Why do they somehow still catch us off guard? I don’t have an answer to that. But I think these are times for us to embrace new ideas that can help us foresee these things and avoid them where possible, or be better prepared to handle them. Joseph foresaw famine coming to The Kingdom of Egypt thousands of years ago and good measures were taken to help preserve humanity. So did Noah hear the voice tell him about an impending doom – the flood. We will not all be Josephs and Noahs. But we can choose to be wise and act wisely.
2 Chronicles 7:13-15 GNB
“Whenever I hold back the rain or send locusts to eat up the crops or send an epidemic on my people, if they pray to me and repent and turn away from the evil they have been doing, then I will hear them in heaven, forgive their sins, and make their land prosperous again. I will watch over this Temple and be ready to hear all the prayers that are offered here”
The passage above seems like a description of 1Q 2020. So it is not really new. But if somehow looks new every time. Below is a picture a friend shared on Facebook days back and it just captures my message.
There are a lot of things we need to fix. I should personally contribute in the smallest ways I can, as it will have a cumulative effect. It would be great if we all did.
“And when the danger passed, and the people joined together again, they grieved their losses, and made new choices, and dreamed new images and created new ways to live and heal the earth fully, as they had been healed.” ~ Kitty O’Meara.
