I love agriculture. But I do not want to be a farmer. I want to provide the modern shovels and the cutlasses for farmers. I know one thing: agriculture in the next ten years will create more millionaires than any other sector in Africa.It is very obvious because from Ghana to Kenya, Nigeria to Egypt, the African agenda revolves around food sufficiency. This is massive and fascinating.

Africa is entering a golden era of agricultural production where technology will drive productivity. We expect continuous improvement in crop yield over the next few years. Everyone knows that fixing agriculture will fix Africa because more than 65% of Africa’s working population is employed in agriculture. So, it has the most catalytic impacts possible in raising millions of people out of poverty.

The path to making sure that farming communities are not hungry is a key strategic imperative of both the Gates Foundation and the African Development Bank.

The African Development Bank, AfDB, plans to invest about $24 billion over the next 10 years to accelerate the realisation of the food sufficiency agenda, its president, Akinwumi Adesina, said on Tuesday.

Mr. Adesina, who said the investment would be through the Bank’s ‘Feed Africa Strategy’ would require paying attention to the implementation of plans to achieve the green revolution in Africa.

Few days ago, it was reported that the Gates Foundation is committing about $30 billion to agriculture, and Nigerian farmers union are already tapping into the resources.

The Rice Farmers Association of Nigeria (RIFAN) says it is working to access the $30 billion agricultural grant contributed by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other donor agencies for rice production in Africa. Alhaji Aminu Goronyo, the National President of the association told newsmen in Abuja on Wednesday, that the association had submitted a template that would qualify it for the grant.

The amount of money in the agriculture is huge. From Western Union Foundation to Ford Foundation, from federal governments to state governments, there are many sources of intervention programs designed for the sector. Agriculture is where to be.

How You Can Play in Agriculture

Here are ways entrepreneurs can play in the sector (disclosure: I own Zenvus, an agtech startup):

• Precision agriculture by making sensors: this may be a little hard depending on your skill level
• Agriculture insurance technology: making insurance products geared for farming
• Agro lending technology: delivering capital to farmers at scale supported by technology
• Direct Farming: owning farms and growing crops and/or raising farm animals
• Farming ecommerce: expanding farmers’ markets by providing digital platforms for trade
• Pricing aggregation: facilitating trading through provision of produce price data
• Storage: African farmers struggle with storage of produce. Building solutions in this area will be catalytic
• Logistics: there is a huge opportunity to facilitate the delivery of produce from rural areas to urban areas across Africa with our poor road networks
•  Digitization of transactions: from payment to tracing origins of produce, we have a huge need to digitize farming systems in Africa
• Commodity trading: building exchanges for trading commodities
• Others: there are opportunities like making digital tools farmers can use. These could include farm diary, mapping solutions, etc

All Together

There are many areas any entrepreneur can participate in the agriculture sector. The market is huge. The head of African Development Bank noted that “the AfDB was leading a campaign to unlock the continent’s food and agriculture market, projected to hit $1 trillion by 2030”. In other words, Africa will have its first trillion dollar sector through agriculture. At that scale, you can see there will be many winners.

He [Akinwumi Adesina] said the Forum would be an opportunity to push efforts to make Africa self-sufficient in food production and transform agriculture into a wealth-creating sector.

“Agriculture is booming in Africa and holds the greatest opportunity to boost African economies, build rural economies, lift millions out of poverty, and create jobs,” he said.

He said the bank must work together with its partners, governments, the private sector, and development institutions to realise its objective.

In 2010, according to McKinsey, agriculture was a $100 billion business in Africa. It has since grown to a $330 billion business, i.e. 10% of the $3.3 trillion African GDP. That means AfDB wants to move the sector from $330 billion to $1 trillion in less than 15 years. That makes sense.

Nothing will match the scale of opportunities agriculture will provide for entrepreneurs across the continent in the next decade. I am in and liking what we see.

This is big news. Leaders NG reports that the “Nigerian Army says that it is monitoring the activities of Nigerians on the social media for hate speech, anti-government and anti-security information”. This is a huge deal, because if the Nigerian Army could do this effectively, Nigeria will be exporting the most sought-out social media technology to the likes of Google, Facebook, China, Venezuela, and indeed the whole world.

According to the information released by Director of Defence Information, Major-General John Enenche to Channels Television, the became necessary in the light of troubling activities and misinformation capable of jeopardizing the unity of the country….

Having observed the possibility that the social media can be misused the military has taken steps to address that. One of such steps is the establishment of strategic media centres.

“What are we doing? In the military, we are now taking on it more seriously than ever. We have our strategic media centres that monitor the social media to be able to sieve out and react to all the ones that will be anti-government, be anti-military, (and) be anti-security,” the military chief continued.

“We tackle them appropriately with appropriate responses. Ahead of that, we are also proactive. We have measures in place, scientific measures to be able to sieve this information and also to get the public and let them know that some of this information they are getting is not genuine are not true and their objective is an anti-corporate existence of this country.”

I sincerely wish the Nigerian Army good luck. I am hoping they succeed because if they do, our forex problems will be gone. From China to Russia, Facebook to Google, everyone needs fake news detector and terminator. If our military invents that and deploys it effectively, we could say goodbye to NNPC and just like that, our main foreign exchange earnings will be Fake News Detector and Anti-Govt Social Media Buster. Go figure, people.

Largely, I think the Nigerian Army is right to have a strategy to handle the misinformation which we are experiencing in social media. If we expect the Army to defend the territorial integrity of the nation in the meatspace, the cyberspace must be a fair game. it must be seen as a threat, depending on the veracity of the misinformation. It has to be dealt with and managed. That is why I think the Army is right on this.

Yet, it is very important that they handle this project with decency and civility, making sure that they do not use it to silence and oppress Nigerians. They must honor the tenets of freedom of speech while understanding that nothing is really free. No one that perpetuates fake news  should expect to hide under privacy and freedom of speech.

I wish the Army good luck as they work on the technology. They have to invent one that understands pidgin, Igbo, Hausa, Yoruba and indeed dozens of other languages. It will be a challenge indeed.

About five hundred years ago, generations that lived apart did not experience any major change in their standard of livings. Global productivity was very low and man was generally poor. Yes, there were empires and kingdoms, but on average the world was on static economic expansion.

But with emergence of mass penetrated technology, things began to change. The industrial revolution was a quintessential moment in modern history. Technology brought productivity and man became richer. Largely, human standard of living improved. It remains till today that when technology penetrates en masse in any economy, national productivity improves, and living standards advance.

There is another caveat to this argument: Intellectual property right (IPR) is a cardinal part of this productivity. Without it, technology will not improve and innovation is stalled. The old world was an era of absence of IPR and that contributed in no small measure to the lack of wealth creation. Sure, people invented things in arts, and science, but there was only minimal wealth created.

Lack of IPR prevented meaningful market success in one major way: It prevented the pursuit of innovation since ideas could be stolen and commercialized with no penalty. The return to innovation was very low. That was why the world had many inventors and few innovators.

Yes, we read about inventors that developed nearly all the engineering principles in use today. They had ideas, bright people and created prototypes. They were celebrated as icons and legends. But many died very poor. They could not transition from inventors to innovators, not because of market issues, but because lack of IPR made it difficult to attract funding, since there was no guarantee to success. No funding, no mass commercialization and no human impact. In our contemporary time, the legendary venture capitalists will tell you that if you want to get them involved, you need to have a protected intellectual property, if the business requires one.

Two things changed the world: technology and most importantly IPR. Between the two, IPR was more important. Why? Without it, we would still be celebrating inventors with no impact on human lifestyles (just note that I respect inventors.)

Nigeria’s Productivity Problem

That brings me to the Nigerian, or indeed the African challenge. In many parts of the continent, the IPR there is still like the one that existed 500 years ago. It does mean that Africa cannot prosper, if my logic is correct, until they get a practical and working IPR. It does not matter how much aids and loans they get from foreign agencies. Without IPR, nations cannot innovate (at deep technical level) and without innovation, any economy dies a natural slow death. IPR is the catalyst that drives national technology policy, making it implementable and sustainable. You cannot have a better technology policy than a strong IPR. With strong IPR, inventors could become innovators. Without it, everyone sits on his/her ideas and the nation suffers on productivity.

In essence, Global Productivity = Technology + IPR, and productivity translates into good standard of living. When nations cannot create technology, the LHS (left hand side) of the equation suffers. Also, if they have no IPR, that suffers even more.

See the reason why Africa is not making progress? It is an illusion when boys and girls in Accra, Lagos, and Nairobi use pirated foreign software, and think they are smart. They never know that it would have been better if their nations have laws to prevent the illegality. With such laws, they have an opportunity of not needing those foreign software by developing their own and selling them locally, profitably.

In the absence of the IPR, they cannot do business because immediately they release software in the market; it appears in all shops illegally. After three months, they close their shops! It is a vicious cycle that makes innovation difficult in Africa since no guaranteed return exists. Why invest your hard earned money when there is no law to protect your creations? Why do research? You see why our businesses prefer to import and distribute than create things?

All Together

When boys hawk Microsoft Windows for N300 (about $1) openly and no one arrests them, no major creative business can incubate in that land. Nigeria is not really cheating Microsoft. Rather, we may be making it harder to build an innovation system. This goes beyond technology: it also affects our arts where people pirate Nollywood movies and resell. The reality is that productivity cannot flourish in an ecosystem with weak legal protections for creativity. The creators will be scared to invest, and that is a problem for any nation.

Nigeria’s Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), an institution that coordinates tertiary education entrance examinations in the country, likes controversy. Otherwise, it would not have  made 100  (out of 400) a pass mark. There is no credible institution in the world where 25% is considered a PASS.

The Joint Admission and Matriculation Board, JAMB, had on Tuesday stated the cut off marks as 120 for degree awarding institutions, 100 for monotechnics and polytechnics and 110 for innovative enterprising institutes.

But JAMB has reasons. It wants to prevent Nigerians from sending their kids to foreign schools. So, it has to make the pass mark so low that everyone could possibly qualify to study in Nigeria. It does not really matter that the country does not have the capacity to absorb all the students.

THE Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, JAMB, explained, yesterday, that the decision by stakeholders in education sector to reduce tertiary institutions’ admission cut-off points, beginning with the 2017 academic calendar, was to stop the quest for foreign education by Nigerians.

JAMB has forgotten that the foreign schools have standards and will not have accepted those it is accepting with 25% score.

The Problem with 25% Pass mark

I do believe that JAMB does not collect retention data of Nigerian students after first year in colleges. That would have helped it to examine if there is a correlation between cut-off marks and freshmen (first year students) dropout rate. Empirical data shows that when you have extremely unprepared students, you end up having many dropouts. These students would have pushed their parents to take loans for the unfinished journeys, making things harder, afterwards, for the poor parents. Also, cultism is primarily driven by students that need help to keep going even when their brainpower cannot sustain them, in schools. They band together with their fellow cult members to stay in schools through any means possible.

I will share data from U.S. News which tracks the top U.S. universities.

• The average six-year graduation rate is 95 percent for the top 10 National Universities and 93.9 percent for the top 10 National Liberal Arts Colleges.

• The average freshman retention rate is 98.1 percent for the top 10 National Universities and 96.6 percent for the top 10 National Liberal Arts Colleges.

• For comparison, the average six-year graduation rate among all numerically ranked schools on the National Universities list is 71.3 percent, and the average freshman retention rate is 86.9 percent.

• For comparison, the average six-year graduation rate among all numerically ranked schools on the National Liberal Arts Colleges list is 75.2 percent, and the average freshman retention rate is 85.6 percent.

Checking the data, it is very obvious that students of the top 10 U.S. universities graduate; they record 95% graduation rate. These students are well prepared to pursue tertiary education. Also, they do not have many dropouts after first year of study, enjoying more than 98% retention rate. I can argue that the other 2% could be those changing to other schools which are recorded as dropping out even though they have merely transferred to other colleges. The elite schools’ average graduation rate contrasts with all nationally ranked schools at 95% vs. 71%. While the top 10 national U.S. universities enjoy a mere 3% gap between freshman retention and graduation rates, the whole ranked schools have a spread of 16% (71% vs 87%). Simply, the students survived first year but could not cope in subsequent years, causing 11% to further drop out.

This means that as the quality of the admission process increases, both graduation and retention rates correlate positively with it.

All Together

Nigerian authorities cannot be talking of poor educational quality, vices in our schools, and all challenges in the schools if they cannot manage the admission process. It is an illusion to think that everyone graduating from secondary school is ready for post-secondary education. We simply have to expand opportunities so that some students can go into vocational training and other endeavors, where it is evident they cannot cope with college education. Reducing the admission pass mark to 25% will not advance any known cause in Nigeria, except that we will have more graduates adding to the statistics of degree holders, but largely unprepared for emerging opportunities.

I am truly troubled by this decision by JAMB. JAMB is failing in its primary purpose to our schools. It is either it is not testing the right things causing the students to fail en masse or it is simply incapable of serving as a gatekeeper into our post-secondary institutions. It quickly needs to find a solution fast because what it is doing is very shameful to the nation. It is not JAMB’s duty to fix a broken secondary education by lowering pass mark into the colleges. That is so obvious that JAMB does not need to be reminded of that.