Entrepreneurship is Vital to Africa’s Prosperity

“The US was built by entrepreneurs. I know Africa can be built in the same way.” I happened upon these statements while surfing the net one day and they excited me. This was because they said in a simple way a conviction I have: that a multiplicity of successful entrepreneurs across the African continent is fundamentally necessary for lifting it out of its poverty.

The material prosperity or wealth of any society depends on its economic growth. Economic growth may not take care of how the wealth is distributed but it goes without saying that it must underlie the quest for wealth creation or prosperity in any society.

One of the most outstanding works ever done into why and how nations become wealthy is Adam Smith’s ‘An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations’, a title usually shortened to ‘The Wealth of Nations’. In it he argued ingeniously that the true wealth of a nation was to be found in the produce of the labour of its people. The increase of this produce is what is referred to as economic growth. Robert Reich in his introduction to the book summed up Adam’s Smith’s view thus: “To him, the ‘wealth’ of a nation wasn’t determined by the size of its monarch’s treasure or the amount of gold and silver in its vaults … A nation’s wealth was to be judged by the total value of all the goods its people produced for all its people to consume.”

Entrepreneurs are at the core of economic growth. This is because they are the ones who organize production in a society. They put together the society’s resources of land, capital and labour to produce goods and services. The more entrepreneurs therefore, the more goods and services are produced. The more goods and services are produced, the more a society becomes materially prosperous. This is, however, just one aspect.

True entrepreneurs innovate. A special report on Entrepreneurship in the Economist (March 14,2009) carried this definition of an entrepreneur:someone “who offers an innovative solution to a (frequently) unrecognised) problem. The defining characteristic of entrepreneurship, then, is not the size of the company but the act of innovation.” Through the acts of innovation more value is created and by implication more prosperity. Paul Romer, a Stanford University economist put it beautifully: “Economic growth occurs whenever people take resources and rearrange them in ways that are more valuable… [It] springs from better recipes, not just more cooking.”

To alleviate poverty in Africa, we must create wealth. To create wealth, we must put our people to work. To put our people to work, we need entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are vital to Africa’s prosperity.

 https://dennisobeng.wordpress.com/2010/04/03/entrepreneurship-is-vital-to-africas-prosperity/

‘How I finished my PhD … just 30 years after I began’

Feeling in my bag for the ceramic turquoise hippo my mother gave me as a good-luck charm when I was a teenager, I took a long, deep breath. It was almost 2pm on 12 January 2015, minutes away from an event I had been working towards for much of my adult life. Like a finalist on The Apprentice approaching the last challenge, there was a lot riding on my performance. Only this wasn’t reality TV, this was my life. I was about to defend my PhD thesis in a viva. And my journey to this point had taken longer than most. Just over 30 years.

This is still difficult for me to explain. No interesting or successful career had diverted my energies; no extraordinary life events, dramas or emergencies had forced me off the expected path. In retrospect, I’d rather fallen into doing a PhD. Back in 1984, having just completed my BA in social anthropology at Soas (School of Oriental and African Studies), I had no clear career aspirations. But because I graduated with a first, the university encouraged me to stay on for a doctorate. With help from a tutor, I chose a research subject – women and work, a hot topic at the time – and formulated a proposal. On the back of this, I was awarded funding for three years. The anthropological approach places particular demands on the researcher. Its core methodology, participant observation, requires not so much adaptation to the local culture as immersion in it: living, acting and experiencing everyday life among the community under study. For many, it is an intensely personal experience. But on leaving the field, anthropologists are expected instantly to switch back into academic mode, distance themselves from their fieldwork, analyse it and write it up.

Re-entering academia and adjusting to life back in London was harder than I expected. For the past year, I’d spent almost every waking hour in the company of Minangkabau – an Indonesian people known for their Islamic faith and matrilineal traditions (where descent and inheritance are traced along the female line). The tolerance, generosity and genuine care they extended to me during my stay had been truly humbling. Returning to the anonymity, individualism and materialism of urban life was an unwelcome shock. I’d become so absorbed in the Minangkabau culture and so emotionally attached to the people, I couldn’t – and didn’t want to – detach myself from it, let alone write it up in a thesis. How could I do justice to this life-changing experience through the narrow framework of academic discourse? Under pressure to finish, I attempted writing my thesis in an experimental, quasi-literary style, basing each chapter around the narrative of a single Minangkabau woman. It was a disaster. My supervisor didn’t know what to do with me.

‘I’d become so absorbed in Minangkabau culture, I couldn’t – and didn’t want to – detach from it, let alone write it up’

As the funding dried up, earning a living took priority. I planned to find work in social research, but the unfinished doctorate proved a stumbling block. I was either underqualified (no PhD), or overqualified (having started a PhD). Taking any employment I could, I ended up following my partner as his career took hold – Bedfordshire, Cambridge, London, Oman, Bristol, Nottingham, Hampshire, Abu Dhabi, Hampshire again – raising a family along the way.

The PhD, though pretty much abandoned, was not forgotten. Its incompletion felt like a dark shadow of failure. It haunted me. I held on to the idea I might return to it. Wherever we went, I dragged the boxes of fieldnotes and files with me, my own emotional excess baggage. Occasionally, I dipped my toes back in. While pregnant in Oman, I wrote as much as possible from my fieldwork notes before motherhood subsumed my life. In Nottingham, I caught up on theory in the library while my toddler was at nursery. During summers home from Abu Dhabi I bought books and photocopied articles to read while the children were at school. But it wasn’t until 2006 that a combination of events pushed me back on the path to completion.

Working as a freelance journalist, I wrote a piece for the Guardian on unfinished PhDs. Speaking to other “non-completers” in the course of this opened up the wounds – the sense of waste (all that work!); the guilt over invested others (the Minangkabau, funding authority, university, family); the deep disappointment at not finishing what I’d started. I needed to seek some resolution.

I began investigating alternative uses for my data and indirect ways to insinuate myself back into academia. But there was only ever one solution: to finish the thesis. By chance, I met some old university friends the following January. Shocked by my non-completion and adamant I should return, they pressed me to contact the university again. I sent an email the next day and in October 2007, aged 45, found myself back in the academic fold.

With a new supervisor, it looked promising. We were optimistic, predicting submission within two or three years working on it part-time. It took seven. Every stage seemed to take so long: the reading, more than 20 years to catch up on; the writing, much slower than in my younger years; the editing, rewriting, rethinking, further reading, amending. It was a hard slog.

A year before the final deadline, it was all pretty much done, but my supervisor decided to throw one more curveball. We could use the remaining time, he said, to make it even better – just rewrite the introduction and conclusion, split one chapter into two and rejig the others. I was exhausted. I’d rather have bathed in a tub of acid than spend another year on my thesis. But holing myself up in my bedroom, my long-suffering family tiptoeing around me, I got it done: 10 days before the deadline, 900 words under the limit.

At first, all went according to plan. A literature review was conducted, a report written and approved, a research visa received and 13 months’ fieldwork in Sumatra completed. That was the honeymoon period. After coming home, the problems started.

Four months later, I was facing my viva. My supervisor told me to smile, relax and enjoy the discussion, but warned me the outcome was unpredictable: one student’s viva had taken a whole day, another was told to rewrite her entire thesis, and some had even been sent back to do more fieldwork.

Beset by self-doubt, I walked into the viva room, ready to confront my fate. “Before we start,” said the external examiner as I shakily sat down, “we’d like to tell you that you’ve passed, with only minor typographical corrections.”

“This is huge”, said my supervisor afterwards, clapping me on the back, “not just for you, but for me too. This was a big challenge!” Yes, it really was.

The corrections took me little more than a day and soon after, I received email confirmation of my award. But it wasn’t until my graduation ceremony at the end of July, on shaking the hand of the Soas president, Graça Machel, dressed in my doctoral robes of gold and red, that I felt genuine pride. It was over.

Now all I have to do is finally find a suitable career. At 53, that could prove the greatest challenge yet.

Source; http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/aug/18/finished-phd-30-years-after-began-doctorate

Student leadership or Student politics; the bitter truth 

Politics and life are not bipartite concepts. They are so inextricable inter-twined that in the helm of life lies politics. It must be well noted that politics emerged as soon as society emerges where people come together to make rules and decisions to guide themselves.

I agreed with Aristotle on this that, man is a political animal and every man plays politics so far as we live in societies. He said anyone who is apolitical is either a beast or a god. For the purpose of this article, let me briefly explain what politics is.

Politics entails the authoritative allocation of values, appropriation, disbursement and distribution of resources, raising of funds and development.

Politics is about different kinds of government whether democracy, monarchy, anarchy, oligarchy, phitocracy, theocracy, aristocracy or other forms of dictatorship.

Democracy for instance, embraces participation, expression of opinions, addressing diverse issues of concern, voting, and civic education and other entrenched rights of citizens to achieve mutual goals.

There is no denying the intriguing fact that student leaderships and politicking played a major role in the liberation of our country from the manacles of colonialism.

Despite all these, naivety, apathy, betrayal, lack of awareness and enlightenment have rendered the efficiency of our student politics fallible and prone to many criticisms.

These criticisms overshadowed the relevance of student politics. The perception of people toward student politics nowadays is so disastrous that, many view student politics as mere jingoism, friction, and exploitation of the student populace. In the Rotarians communities, they refer to politics as “Politrick” (playing tricks on people).

This perception has convinced enough people that student politics is not something to accept as part of our national politicking.

Like national leaders such as Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana), Nnamdi Azikiwe (Nigeria), Julius Nyerere (Tanzania), Patrice Lumumba (Zaire), Jomo Kenyatta (Kenya), and Abdul Nasser (Egypt), many students such as the late Mekki Abass of university of Ghana have shed their blood, sweat, tears and sacrificed their lives for the student movement.

It took some students of old to cook what is the biggest best organized student body in the history of Ghana– the National Union of Ghana Student (NUGS) founded in 1965.

NUGS is credited with the creation of National Service Scheme since it was the union that advocated for its establishment. NUGS is no doubt a great institution.

However, its reputation has been soiled by petty squabbles in recent times between national executives, where in 2010/2011 and 2011/2012 academic years for example, NUGS had two persons both addressing themselves as presidents of the union without any sense of ignominy.

A contributing factor to the above issue is the irrefutable fact that the union is been controlled by the invisible hands of the dominant political parties in Ghana- the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the National Democratic Party (NDC).

Sad to note that these two parties see their political fortunes and survival in the nation’s geopolitical terrain as tied to the apron string of NUGS and have sparred nothing in their attempt to divide the union, not to talk of the Government-sponsored impeachments of NUGS presidents in 2005 and 2010.

Believe me, no sacrifice can be considered too great when it is a question of carrying through the purpose of the student movement.

It is inexcusable to see student leaders of today, conducting themselves in ways that dash the confidence of the Ghanaian people in the student leaderships across the country.

By their actions, student leaderships such as Student Representative Council (SRCs), National Union of Ghana Students (NUGS), Trainee Teachers’ Association of Ghana (TTAG) and University Students Association of Ghana (USAG) across the country have been halted and the rights of students are constantly being trampled upon by those who are supposed to know better.

Modeling a more responsible and responsive student leadership, the ultimate objectives of our student leaderships are to pursue and champion the general interest of all students. Student leaderships must among others advocate for the following:

1. Prevail on Governments and Heads of institutions to do their best to create a congenial atmosphere for students to excel academically. Call for reforms in our curricula to be sync with the dictates of the 21st century labor market.

2. Give policy guidelines to national government by insuring that, quality education is made available and accessible not only to the rich but also to the poor and the impoverished. Student leadership must insist on changing our educational policy from quantity to quality to safeguard against poverty.

3. Must fight poverty and mass illiteracy together with government with student leaderships leading the way. Examples are seen, where a group of students led by a former SRC president of University of Ghana, Agbana Eric Edem, formed a network called Volunteers Ghana, and the Volta Region Students Association (VORSA) and countless of other student initiatives which I cannot mention here, seek to offer Voluntary Teaching Services and Community Impact Projects to deprived communities within Ghana to alleviate the suffering of the Ghanaian children in these deprived communities, where we share our expertise, knowledge and life experiences for the younger generation to learn from. This spirit of voluntarism is what we need as a country to progress forward.

4. Must desist from opposing policies of governments and university authorities without providing workable alternatives which must be based on thorough research and consultation of appropriate authorities.

Finally, student leaderships need to lead the crusade to sanitize our national political discourse as is done elsewhere in Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt and the USA.

Leaderships have to maintain decorum in their affairs and bring sanity to our body politics as the various blocs seek to elect new executives in the-not-too-distance-future. Let add to our faith a conscience quick to feel, hope and to hope and good leadership conscience.

There is a call on us to leave a legacy that inspire the future generations and generations yet unborn.

Banini, Kwasi Philip. "Student Leadership or Student Politics; The Bitter Truth - Graphic Online." Graphic Online | Home. N.p., 3 July 2015. Web. 6 July 2015.