Can someone tell me when the politics of ideas will begin in Nigeria? I am very unhappy that parties are electing flag bearers without considerations on clear visioning systems and roadmaps for the constituencies. I have called my home state (Abia) asking what the candidates are promising and proposing. The responses have been palpable: they will put roadmaps but they need to get in first.

Good people: that is the problem. We elect before we can ask what they can do. It should have been the other way – they clearly explain the manifestos and we decide, even at primaries, if they have accumulated enough capabilities to execute them.

I will suggest we improve this system. Imagine if Nigeria will have a law which will offer the following conditions on major offices (gubernatorial and presidential) with access to state or national treasuries:

• No candidate can spend more than $50k during primaries in gubernatorial election.
• No candidate can spend more than $500k during primaries in presidential election.
• No candidate can raise more than $2k (individual) or $4k (corporate entity) throughout the election cycle.
• All parties will receive federal funds to ensure their party forms do not cost more than $10k per candidate per office.
• Once all primaries have been conducted, 6 universities (UI, UNN, UNICAL, ABU, UNIJOS and UDFS), chartered by law and rotated by INEC will do public polling across the nation at state and national levels:
  • Parties with at least 5% followership at state level will receive funding from federal fund to support the flagbearer in gubernatorial elections.
  • Parties with at least 10% aggregate national followership will receive federal fund to support the flagbearer in presidential election.
  • The amount will be determined and adjusted for inflation: gubernatorial and presidential will get $500k and $20 million respectively.

Largely, by removing money politics at scale, we can possibly move to idea politics. We need ideas to rule the nation and time for money politics and fractionalization must end.

With digital and electronic payment, Nigeria can execute this via BVN if strong criminal code deterrence is included. Yes, a violation means jail time. What we have is not working: winning party primaries should not be correlated with bank accounts.

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Just having a laugh while reading the piece, because it’s too idealistic to happen anytime soon. The reasons are very obvious.

First, to make it a law, you need a LEGISLATION, just take a look at both chambers of national assembly, and see if there’s a possibility of such bill going through second reading; do not bother about the outcome of the final votes.

Secondly, the universities must have the capability and strength of character to conduct a credible poll, otherwise you have a situation where desperate political parties will end up influencing those polls.

Again, you need strong institutions across board: beginning from INEC, then the security/intelligence agencies, CBN, judiciary, civil societies, etc; to be really performing at very high level. Once any of them derails, the entire process may be greatly affected, in a negative way of course.

Above all, you need ACTIVE citizens with a great deal of awareness, without which they may be incapable of probing and critically examining lies from politicians. You do not expect low information public, largely deficient when it comes to making choices that matter so much to their future, and somehow expect them to hold politicians accountable.

As I have noted before, nothing is more important in a startup than having the capacity to acquire new customers, easily. A startup must grow because without growth, the alternative is bankruptcy. So, over the last few years, we have seen companies introduce new roles like Head of Growth, Growth Hacker [we used that in a Lagos client two weeks ago], and Vice President of Growth. In a network effect business, the most important product is “many users” because the more the users, the more useful the product becomes.

You need to know that in a perfect online market, the marginal cost of a digital product, under most scenarios, is zero. But markets are not perfect. And that means you must find ways to deliver great values to users even as the marginal cost tends to near zero. Why? Customers in the digital space congregate more into an ecosystem when the marginal cost is very low. When you have a low marginal cost, customer growth improves and when that happens, you would experience a positive continuum of network effect where great products trigger more customers and more customers enable building better products.

Scalable Advantage (SA) is a nexus with numbers between 0 and 1 which is used to ascertain the organic capacity to grow an enterprise, by examining the inherent elements like marginal cost and external forces, within an unconstrained and unbounded internet economy, where if nearly perfect, all transaction and distribution frictions between demand and supply disappear, producing an SA of “1”.

Today, I want to ask you: What is your Scalable Advantage? Does it get towards “1” or “0”? The trajectory will determine how far that business will go. I have a simple chart to help below.

After this note ran, I received the private message: “Sir, Why did you put a paywall on Tekedia.com your blog?”

My response:

“To get people to commit to read great insights, the human psychology has demonstrated that paid content is typically appreciated more than free one. To help my readers invest the time to read the most exclusive contents, I pushed them to spend that $20 per year.  My blog has no traffic tracker as no one cares about traffic.  Though we can make it free, my understanding is that few will value it if it is free.”.

First, you can subscribe here to read past, current and future contents.

People, this is not a business but it does not matter. It is a hobby. But as I explain in my workshops, and coaching sessions across Africa and beyond, the greatest enabler to wealth creation is business model. You need to find ways to monetize even your hobby while making those consuming the output better. As I explained in the Inversibility Construct and the Law of Diminishing Abundance of Internet, there are many things you can do online to thrive.

For the Inversibility Construct, you need to turn a typical frustration in the meatspace into strength in the digital space. That means, you need to INVERSE the experiences of people, so that what annoys them in the physical becomes strength in the digital space. I provide some examples:

In this videocast, I discuss what I am calling the Law of Diminishing Abundance of Internet. It is a construct that some companies become poorer even when they are growing in numbers of customers reached.That applies to industrial sectors like publishing and telecoms. The lesson here is that risk in any business model must be examined from the lens of this mirage abundance which Internet has provided in some sectors.

Even in that hobby, find a way to help yourself. You have the skills and capabilities – build on them. Anything can be a business – it does not need a business plan before it can be a venture. The key is figuring out how to fix frictions in the markets and be compensated doing so.

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Even in a hobby, find a way to help yourself. You have the skills and capabilities – build on them. Anything can be a business – it does not need a business plan before it can be a venture. The key is figuring out how to fix frictions in the markets and be compensated doing so.

As I explained in the Inversibility Construct and the Law of Diminishing Abundance of Internet, there are many things you can do online to thrive. We are in the age of dollarized hobby. And do not make a mistake of thinking a career can only be built by working in an office. If that comes or if that is what you want, fine. But if there is no job, see if what you have can support you.

What is it that you do well? Improve on it and people will pay you for it.

I do not write for money on my blog, Tekedia.com, but a young lady in my office made a case that she could monetize the contents.  She did just that and I allowed her to do whatever that pleased her provided the content area has no adverts. She had explained that she was fine with only 1 reader per day than 100 free readers. She added the subscriptions. Her numbers look great.

She took off traffic tracker on the blog, making sure her decisions were not made on traffic. That is our community manager which many relate daily.

Understand one thing: we are in the age of dollarized hobby. Sure – even Nairalized hobby works.