In business, one must develop strategies for operational efficiency in all the key business components. A key part of winning is knowing how to tap into government supports and subsidies especially in some strategic sectors where government has clear pain points. There is nothing wrong with that. General Electric operated for years in U.S. over the last few decades without paying corporate taxes. It has mastered how to operate, taking advantages of government subsidies in some areas. Apple partnered with Ireland to reduce its tax exposure in the European Union (EU) triggering lawsuit from the EU against Apple.
From Dangote Group to Carlos Slim’s Grupo Carso, they impose Conglomerate Tax on us, and that is a certainty of living.
In these videos, I explain how modern conglomerates design and execute such business processes.
My blog crashed [now back up]. I was not happy because writing is part of my daily routine. Every day I commit 45-60 minutes to Tekedia and LinkedIn. Connecting with the community is part of the business. As the techies worked to fix the issue, I received a call on one of the articles I had written few days ago. It was the one where I shared my inaugural speech as the President of LinkedIn Nation [hypothetical nation but anyone that read the piece would know that we were talking of Nigeria].
To build a nation, I present these pillars. I invite you to come and join this government. We will make our nation the finest where all men and women will come to cherish.
Pillar 1 – Corruption & Business Reform: We will build a corruption-free nation where it would be extremely impossible to perpetuate corruption because technology will make things obviously transparent. All government systems must be structured to be corruption-resilient so that people that want to perpetuate corruption will fail. We will publish any government expense that is more than N10 million in a web diary which all citizens will have access to. This applies to all levels in the federal government, from ministries to agencies. For national security reasons, a segment will be available to the civil society and accredited press team. Our government will improve business systems and make doing business in our nation easier.
The Call was from a political party. They wanted more insights and perspectives. And then they wanted exclusive ones. I explained that they could lift the published ideas – nothing big there. However, nothing exclusive would come from me: I write for everyone to read but to no one, politically.
The interesting part: join us to become a Director of Strategy. I smiled. Yes, among others, I would have in my CV another role – Director Strategy for a political party. I did not accept. I do not want to join any partisan club now. I want to join the party of all Nigerians where all the clubs belong.
I have learnt one thing since I started blogging: part of our problem has to do with visioning capabilities at different levels of government. You may think the state is not executing as expected. But you have not examined if the state leaders have the capacities to think Big. Yes, you expect someone to offer what he cannot technically offer. That will not happen.
Before we assume those positions, the best we can do is to share. I am very happy that many of our leaders are reading. Let us make Nigeria a nation of ideas.
Today is the deadline to the Office of the Vice President’s Free Equity Funding. Some have noted that they are having issues on submitting the applications. I just sent an email to the Chief of Staff to the Vice President to extend the deadline. That way, they would fix the issues.
Of course, I am not affiliated to this project. Also, no one I know is applying. I am not applying [not for me, it belongs to people coming up]. This is a project which I have advocated we need in Nigeria. I am just helping.
North Central
Any Individual or start up who has an idea or a solution in Agriculture and Governance as it affects the North-Central Region or the nation as a whole. Your state of residence or startup must be located in any one of these states; FCT, Benue, Plateau, Kwara, Kogi, Nasarawa or Niger.
South East
Any Individual or start up who has an idea or a solution in Commerce or Fintech as it affects the South-Eastern Region or the nation as a whole.Your state of residence or startup must be located in any one of these states;Enugu, Imo, Anambra, Abia or Ebonyi
IDEA STAGE APPLICATION
If you are still at the idea stage of your product, you can apply to participate in the Startup Nigeria Hackathon from which you get a chance to qualify for incubation
Today, we experienced one of those hate-loves from technology. At around 10.24 am New York time, Tekedia.com went offline. We checked further and realized that Zenvus.com (our agtech business), facyber.com (our cybersecurity business), and other solutions were affected. These solutions are hosted on AWS somewhere in U.S.
AWS does not have a phone line. You just have to send them a support case hoping they would get to the issue. We have real-time back-ups of all services. The problem was not the data. The issue was the server. Apparently, one would need to pay for servers hosted in another location as a live back-up. More money to Amazon!
To the students taking quizzes on facyber.com from partner nodes, we sincerely apologize. To our farmers and partners, my apology and to Tekedia, we say sorry.
This does not usually happen. But when it does, it makes you feel bad. Interestingly, AWS has some fascinating guys there. One of the engineers wrote “when this happens, more often than not the load balancer is unable to connect to the back end web server.” He did not have a good sleep since it was obvious everything was sold by Amazon and it was his problem. But we are happy this was fixed.
Any Individual or start up who has an idea or a solution in Agriculture and Governance as it affects the North-Central Region or the nation as a whole. Your state of residence or startup must be located in any one of these states; FCT, Benue, Plateau, Kwara, Kogi, Nasarawa or Niger.
South East
Any Individual or start up who has an idea or a solution in Commerce or Fintech as it affects the South-Eastern Region or the nation as a whole.Your state of residence or startup must be located in any one of these states;Enugu, Imo, Anambra, Abia or Ebonyi
I have got a note that response from this call for application is still LOW. Yes, some politicians are telling youth not to apply. They want to frustrate the APC government so that the government does not have any easy win. I do not understand this, honestly.
Please ignore those politicians – they do not like you. These politicians have children who possibly do not need help as they are somewhere in UK, U.S. or China studying or working. Do not listen to them.
This is your money. It belongs to you. It is not Vice President’s money. It is Nigerian money. It is totally irrelevant who is sharing it. Your politician does not like you if he says you should ignore government.
I do not need this money because I have other sources. But I want you to apply today. If you need help on anything that could help you like website [I have no clue what they want], email my webmaster. She can help.
