In this contemporary time, the most dynamic and evolving human field is engineering or technology depending on your choice. Such an observation may seem at first to be a mere truism but closer considerations of its impacts in medicine, entertainment, energy and security will rapidly dispel any such dismissive judgment.

Engineering is transforming all fields. Future medicine looks as a field where robots will seamlessly help doctors and surgeons get patients back to work or home quicker and healthier. The future of global energy looks promising because engineers are breaking barriers daily in the quest to deliver affordable, efficient and clean sources of power.

From entertainment to security, nothing is spared. Today’s wars are technology wars fuelled by engineering geniuses acquired, advanced and processed over centuries. The bravery of a modern warlord is the engineering feat of someone who may never have to shoot. We are living in an era where discovery is not celebrated, not because they have become easier, but because they are happening regularly.

Engineering practice has changed so much and in a radical form from what it was a few decades ago. The global energy problem is engineering problem. The global health challenge is an engineering problem, and daily engineers are faced with burdens to solve major world problems. While the politicians enact the energy bills, the engineers make the energy practically available.

The bold and optimistic challenge to help engineer bio-grade artificial human organs is an assessment that managing what Nature gives us has limitations. Why not get a new artificial brain if the one that exists is not functioning because of disease?

The Challenges

But these advances pose serious ethical challenges which the engineers are not providing answers. In most cases, that is not their job; someone has to regulate them and put them on the path of keeping sanity on this earth.

But regulating these activities is unfortunately not easy. One technology could do well but could also be harmful. In this case, the problem is not the technology, but the application and usage. It is like saying because nuclear technology could kill en mass, it must be banned in hospitals where they are used in many critical treatments.

But for a moment, let us leave the technical aspect of engineering progress. I am already aware that many cotton farmers in Sudan could be out of jobs if some of the experiments on lab production of cotton in universities in US and European schools work out. We could be creating security crises where suddenly the commodity market is destroyed because nanotechnology has provided alternatives to rubber, cotton and hosts of other materials. People will be out of jobs and crises will start everywhere.

My concern is the disparity in engineering development between the developed and developing world. The rich nations are pushing the limits while the poor are not contributing much. It is not that they do not want to contribute, they want but the environment does not enable them. We lose their ideas and perspectives, unfortunately.

Can the future of engineering be structured such that these people can get on the pathway of creativity and innovation? Can the world and technical associations provide an effective system, where boys and girls in developing countries could help to solve the global engineering challenges? How can this be done? In short, how can companies begin to give people at the bottom of the pyramid opportunities to shape the products that are designed for them?

The same problem that has undermined our abilities to solve major poor people’s diseases is what is affecting the ability of the world to provide technology in ways that the poor people can use them. Exporting Smartphone to people that just need the simplest phone is not a great strategy.

Developing GloCal Mindset

The world needs a redesign: we need a new way in looking at things. It will be tough because there are many components to the engineering question. A drug company may prefer developing drugs for cancer over malaria because people that suffer malaria may not bring good revenue. Yes, those that engineer drugs consider business before the quest to save lives. But there could be a balance. Why not have a system where engineering goes global and local at the same time? They can solve the drug dilemma, with their global expertise, but localized at scale for each market.

Answering, understanding and managing emerging developments of meeting the needs of every customer (yes, the broad and specific needs), in the highly fragmented world market will define the future of engineering. It will show our readiness to solve the world’s problems. It will make engineering fresh before all global citizens. It is going gloCal- having a world global strategy, but acting local in each market or community. It means helping people solve local problems with global ideas.

If we begin to do that, we have the possibility of solving these problems. It is so shameful that in a world of so much knowledge, many are very poor and dying. We have solved the refrigeration problem in Boston, but in a small village in Ghana, the citizens have no light and refrigerators do not have any value there. So, can we say we have indeed solved how to preserve food?

The global food problem is an engineering problem. Even in Africa, they have enough during the harvesting season. But immediately that season is gone, many become hungry because they could not preserve the excess. So, you have a system where a man that threw away a basket of excess fresh tomatoes a month before is looking for a canned tomato for his family. What if he has preserved the fresh ones? We need solutions.

Now is the time to redefine what engineering research is. People at the bottom of the pyramid are not interested in nanotechnology and genome project. They just want simple ways to live and if entities can understand those challenges by providing simplicity through engineering, everyone can look at engineering future with optimism.

My African kinsmen care not if you can travel to Mars. You have not assisted them to preserve the mangoes they harvested to last longer and feed their families. So while the Mars race is on, they expect to find ways to store their excess food. If that happens, they can confidently look at the future of discovery and engineering with hope. A little support and devoting the engineering powers of the advanced nations to the “nonsense challenges” of the developing world could solve many problems.

There are engineering challenges across the developing nations and it is time we put resources to solve them instead of being obsessed with sending private ships to the moon. Engineering must be global and yet adaptable to local needs:- we need gloCal engineering for the future. Let engineers be engineers, irrespective of boundaries and make this world a better place. Until then, many will not understand why they matter. That process will help us make GloCal products. We have hailed legends that created products like iPhone and Tesla Motors. But always remember that in most places like Chad and Myanmar, the iPhone feat is just a cup of clean water. Right now, that clean water is not possible. And that is bad. The world will hail people that think global even as they help locals have solutions they need to live.

Today, in Nigeria, anyone with more than fifteen years of working experience, who loses a job in banking, telecom and oil & gas sectors will be very lucky to find new employment that pays similar wages and benefits. Being a largely poor country, Nigeria does not have much use of experienced professionals at the top of the management pyramid. A banker departs banking sector and not many other sectors can absorb that individual because few have capacities for the top-notch experience. Also, because of the size of the markets, the companies weed the pyramids so early. If 1000 people join the banking industry in a year, after 15 years, less than 20% will remain. There is a preference, over time, of using lower experienced people, and that pushes many experienced people out of the industry. This is not just in the banking industry; Nigerian military, the Police, etc all do the same.

What is happening is a redesign of  systems as a result of technology and productivity. You do not need too much experience to do a lot of things very well. So as you age with experience, you become expensive compared to a younger person who can effectively deliver that job at lower cost.

Indeed, Nigeria is undergoing a transformation that is breaking social systems from Kano to Lagos. Stock market crises, unpaid public sector salaries and series of other problems have seriously affected many key stakeholders, in both the private and public sectors, around the country. Everything has changed. Being a university graduate is not enough for a decent living wage. That seems to be the smallest denominator in Nigeria.

The Dislocation

Nigeria has a new normal: economic uncertainties until it can decouple its existence on petroleum. We are struggling with roadmaps on how to navigate out of the valley of spiraling economic difficulties. In this convoluted world with high level of interconnectivity, one economic problem leads to another. Nothing seems to be working in fixing the economy. Sure, the nation is making progress.

The national unemployment rate is rising and what used to be the problem of the uneducated citizens is creeping into the world of experienced professionals. Unfortunately, the rate is not going down anytime soon. Why? Besides the fact that our formal economy sector has not significantly expanded,  many other things are in play. As Elon Musk had noted, the future of human workforce will be challenged. We will have the  byte and bit workforce but that will be limited. Even before the expected disruption of AI, powered by supercomputers, to compete with humans, Nigeria is already seeing the impacts. Nigerian banking is seeing productivity owing to deployment of technology, from ATM to Mobile Banking, resulting to dislocation of workforce.

As technology penetrates, we will continue to experience displacement across all the key industrial sectors, at global level. We have already phased out the industry that hires special secretaries to work the typewriting machines. The ticket masters have been replaced by websites. Increasingly, apps and websites are offering professional counseling from finance to romance that humans used to do. A new generation of smartphones will displace the language interpreters, when we have mature language translators inbuilt in our phones. Today, an engineer equipped with computer aided design tools will do better than ten engineers a century ago.

In nearly all industries, technology is enabling firms to do more with lesser human power. Human productivity has consistently improved over the centuries and our standards of livings have correlated with it. However, while the industrial age technologies made sense of the factors of production of labor and land, the new age calls for knowledge. Through robotics and automation, hundreds of man-hours can be replaced with a simple machine that never asks for benefits.

For Nigeria, that maturity level is still far. If the country industrializes, we will expand our economy. That will create more jobs in the long-term. That should be our concern before we begin to think of displacement of labor in the long-term. Our challenge is making sure we can actually industrialize.

Digital Startups Will Not Save The Day

We all like our fintech. We like internet. Nigeria is going through the digital front. They are very critical. So, unlike the industrial economy, having more startups may not translate to more jobs, because in most cases those startups create technologies that eliminate more human jobs across the industries. You can run an Internet-only bank with 15 staff if you deploy AI, cloud and many other emerging technologies, at scale.

Specifically, for every one person that is hired in most Internet startups, a displacement could result to, at least, loss of two jobs across all sectors. When ten parents decide to use a website to help their kids improve their mathematics skills, part-time teachers are displaced. When a big bank opens a web portal that enables customers to make informed decisions, financial planners will be cut. In general, who needs a stock picker, when most websites offer quality analyses free? Our society is changing, and people and firms must give things free to compete. That is why websites that require subscriptions are seldom popular.

This is a global redesign and it is very important that policymakers understand that what worked in 1960 may not necessarily work now. Information is moving fast and the reaction of the consumer is spontaneous. They are being rewired through online communal ties resulting to new patterns of lifestyles.

Nevertheless, what we are seeing today is just the beginning. The future of the African continent is one where many people will be unemployed unless we can do what other advanced economies did: industrialize at scale. This is besides any effort to digitize. We will continue to innovate, digitally, however, that will not create enough jobs to change the trajectory of continental unemployment rate. Our efforts on digital are ephemeral with no core industrialization component. Unlike the advanced nations, we are not connecting into the transformation of industries. We are simply seating on vapors of imaginations. Those will work, but they will not produce scale that will put millions to work. Anyone that tells you that more farm apps and websites will create more farming jobs over industrialization of agricultural systems (e.g. processing of farm output) is not honest. But funding apps makes us feel good. That is unfortunate.

The biggest crisis is coming. It will come when nanotechnology would have matured from lab to the market. First, it will help displace millions of cotton, rubber and agricultural workers across the globe when engineers can make these devices in the lab. They can hire fifty people to produce the same quantity of cotton one million people produce in Sudan. They will displace those workers and clusters of wars would take place across the developing world.

There would be unprecedented cycles of revolutions as unemployment increases. Commodity market will morph into technology market and millions will lose heritage and culture because human innovation has disrupted them. I have called this the ‘war of nano’.

As we indulge and celebrate the innovations we witness everyday in technology, it is important to note that nothing like this has ever existed. A man can become a media company, without a distribution network and the delivery men. A company can exist entirely on Internet, cutting off all the real estate professionals. A bank that used to employ 5000 staff could use 60 people because it has modernized its infrastructure. Technology is competing with us and we are losing the battle.

Yet, most governments seem not to understand what is going on. When you continue to measure the characteristics of the knowledge economy with the tools of the industrial economy, the world cannot be governed right. Pushing government funds to create startups and new companies in the hope of reducing unemployment could be fallacious. This is not an industrial age new companies that hire in legions. The best companies work to eliminate head counts with the powers of microprocessors. From US to UK, human productivity due to technology has accelerated faster than job creation and the old labor equilibrium distorted.

It will be hard for any government policy to radically change the structure of labor in the long-term since daily we are encroaching into new territories with new technologies. The launch of Google created millionaires, but also crushed many industries. Sure, it created new industries, but those employ fewer workers, in average. It looks so evident that the cinema, bookstores and all those traditional networks that employ humans will be completely replaced with websites in the near future. Unfortunately, the business model of internet is knowledge-based, requiring few skilled workers. Unlike the factory model, it takes just a few to run those companies. But for most industrialized countries, this balances out. They can have these firms and still create jobs because they have resilient anchors: the infrastructures. That is different in Africa.

The Opportunity

Nigeria needs to understand that increased productivity and technology penetration will change our labor model, forever. Now is the time to begin that process of designing systems to manage our society. We must change the way students are trained and educated.

Our present education model is job-centric: the brightest students expect to be hired. That is why most companies are not created by the valedictorians and best students, but middle of the pack who struggle sometimes to get good jobs. The former gets accelerated corporate infusion and they rarely have to create new firms. With getting job in mind, our education loses the very purpose of education: the liberation of the mind. Until we change that paradigm to enable students get mental and entrepreneurial readiness, many will be unemployed. The truth is that anyone with skills, in anything, has a big market to succeed today than ever. Focusing on that element of personal discovery will help students prepare to graduate in a society of fewer jobs and prosper.

Globally,  governments must modernize those industrial age tools they use to track unemployment. There are thousands across the developed world that make decent livings on web ventures, yet are classified unemployed because no one has developed the right tools to capture the ‘informal Internet labor’. Technology makes it possible for people to build personal wealth in Beijing while living in San Francisco, and technically classified unemployed. This supports my notion that lack of quality data is affecting government ability to develop a strategy to reduce unemployment since most of the ‘unemployed’ people are working. That technology that displaces jobs through higher productivity can also help improve government statistics.

For Nigeria, we need to focus more on the industrial systems because the idea that we can leapfrog bad roads, inadequate electricity, and good education is an illusion. No website, no matter how dynamic can fix that. Besides supporting digital companies, the government must ensure it has a plan to deepen our meatspace companies that build the core infrastructure. A vision that will make government to understand that funding a postal system will be more catalytic than giving grants to e-commerce startups which will surely struggle without a functioning postal system.

Now is the time: we must create opportunities at the top, by expanding our economies. We can win the war of nano, bits and bytes, if we prepare well.

Zenith Bank has made a 30% loan loss provision on its loan exposure to 9Mobile (formerly Etisalat Nigeria). I do think, the next step will be to convert all the loans into equities in 9Mobile. I do not think anyone will expect 9Mobile, as #4 telecom operator in Nigeria, to have the capacity to pay any of the loans in the next five years. That is impossible considering the level of competition in the market. So a 30% loan loss provision is just for the books. There is risk the other 70% could also be provisioned if the issues are not well managed.

 Nigeria’s Zenith Bank has made a provision on 30 percent of its loan to 9mobile, the country’s fourth largest telecoms group formerly known as Etisalat Nigeria, the bank’s chief executive said on Monday.

“We have taken about 30 percent … as a provision which we believe is very prudent as the company is undergoing restructuring … to prepare for a new investor,” CEO Peter Amangbo told a conference call.

Nigerian regulators stepped in last month to save Etisalat Nigeria from collapse and prevent lenders placing the country’s fourth biggest telecoms group into receivership, prompting a board, management and name change.

9Mobile had taken out a $1.2 billion loan four years ago from a consortium of banks but struggled to repay it due to a currency crisis and a recession in Nigeria.

Zenith Bank is the largest lender to 9Mobile, one source familiar with the matter said. The bank has declined to disclose its total exposure to the telecoms group.

My recommendation for the telcos will be to convert all their loans into equities, consolidating the total loans within 49% equity and then help 9Mobile to raise new capital at the remaining 51%. That way 9Mobile will have capital to run its operations. By doing that, provided the banks can go long, they can recover the money. If they do not do that, it is possible 9Mobile will struggle since it still needs capital, and having the huge loan exposure in its books will make it extremely challenging to find investors. The loan line has to go, turning it into equity, and then help the telecom operator to raise fresh capital, offering the risk taker the majority ownership at 51%.

We all know that being a #4 telecom operator is not a strong position. Only the top two operators matter. The #3 operator is also there, but #4 is never a factor. So, 9Mobile needs a real risk taker to come and pump capital into it. Only the banks can help to make that possible.

What The Data Shows

From the NCC data, it seems many Nigerians are even dropping their phones. Except Glo, all the telecom operators lost users between May and June 2017. So, the industry is  experiencing negative growth, implying that you cannot practically expect 9Mobile to magically make money to pay the loans. That is a reality the banks already know.

How many times have people told you that you should buy quality things? Many times. There is nothing wrong with that. We all want quality in our lives. The problem is not the quality, but bounding the quality. Why? Quality is an illusion which cannot be left unbounded for it to make sense.

You have a small startup and you want to have the best stationery (yes quality papers) to send your business introductory letters. The imagination is that the best stationery will do the magic. That itself is not the problem. The problem is that you have not figured out that you could save money on the stationery and still get the same value.

Why should you pay for a laptop with 100GB of hard disk, when before you get to 40GB, the laptop has been decommissioned. Technically, you have simply wasted 60GB and the extra money spent for it. You rarely take the old disk into a new one. A new laptop will come with its own disk.

We waste so much money in the world. In the illusion of value, swayed by marketing, we make stupid decisions. The higher the price of wine, the better the taste, even though the makers of the win pour the same liquid and assign different names at different pricing points. We congregate and waste money.

You want to buy prescription glasses where one company controls more than “20 brands”. You happily select the  trendy one, which is always the most expensive. But behind it is the same product priced at different points.

When celebrities do this, it is not a problem. But when entrepreneurs do, I feel bad.

Entrepreneurs Need to Create Value

Creating value is not just in bringing more revenue. It can also come in the way you spend your investors’ money. For all the things Apple plans to do, on display, I know there is a physical limit, on the human eyes, after which improvement in resolution on the smartphone will not have any material impact.

Yes, most human eyes can do a resolution of about 180 dpi at 20-30 inches. So, if someone comes to you with 300 dpi with all the marketing, you need to understand that it makes no practical sense. As they increase the resolution in the smartphones, we all think we can get better value. Have you asked yourself the maximum possible resolution a human retina can resolve?

The fact is this: it is highly unlikely that any human can resolve the difference between 2160p and 4320p in a 4.3 inch smartphone. It is impossible for man to achieve that feat. But we are ready to pay and waste $500 extra for something that adds no practical value.

Yes, I have also heard people that can listen better with a $250 musical system cable. Yes, they are from the outer space. They can hear and listen better with better cables. Nonsense. You see them throw away $230 for something that is naturally indistinguishable by the human cochlear.

Sure, there are improvements but they are MARGINAL for the money we pay for them. Thinking of the Return on Capital Expenditure (ROCE), and  Return on Investments (ROI) must not be far away.

All Together

My point is that quality must not always be associated with price for the best derivable value. If you focus on the price of the item, you will miss the whole point. iPhone will continue to up the specs for years, even when the value is marginal. Yet, we will continue to spend that money. When we go to buy cars, we check at Honda and Toyota even though we know there are Lexus and Mercedes Benz. We want to keep that extra saving to deal with other things in life.

Here, we are thinking of value, bench-marking the money spent to the intrinsic value of that car. But when we come to electronics and IT, we lose that discipline. Marketing is to be blamed. In America, you do not need the fastest speed from Comcast or Verizon in your home because the average speed is just fine. Yet, they keep asking us to upgrade, spending and wasting money on things that offer only marginal value.

Do not fall for the marketing trap: be disciplined on the things that matter. That is one way your startup funding will go a long way. In all practical sense, a $2400 laptop is a waste of money and yet entrepreneurs spend that kind of money when a $700 one will do. That does not mean there is no technical difference, but the saving could have helped you add an intern to support the growth team.

Earning value through saving makes an entrepreneur an earned value entrepreneur, just as free media is earned media.