It is perhaps appropriate that I go straight to the question that I very much wanted to put to Aliko Dangote but decided not to when he gave a talk at Harvard University on Thursday, October 29, 2015. This is the question: Why is it that our business moguls have never given the slightest indication that they realize that the solution to the perpetual crisis of fitful and unreliable generation and distribution of power in our country depends as much on them as a group as it does on the state, the government? Having begun this piece with that unasked question, perhaps the next thing for me to do here is to admit that I did not put the question to Dangote because I realized that it would have been a bit unfair to put the question to him in that particular context, quite apart from the significant fact that the audience at the talk would have so completely misunderstood the intent of the question that they would almost certainly have read it as a deliberate provocation to Dangote, an attempt to detract from the extraordinarily buoyant and euphoric mood of the reception of his talk. What is the background, the context for these observations and musings?
Sponsored jointly by Harvard’s Center for African Studies and the Harvard Business School, Dangote’s talk was the first in the so-called Hakeem and Myma Belo-Osagie Distinguished African Business and Entrepreneurial Lecture. In my ten years at Harvard, this was quite easily the most well attended lecture given by an African at the University. In saying this, I have not forgotten that other notable Nigerians like Olusegun Obasanjo, the Sultan of Sokoto, the late Professor Ade Adefuye (former Nigerian Ambassador to the U.S.) and Babangida Aliyu, former Governor of Niger State have all given lectures at the University since I have been teaching there. Unquestionably, part of Dangote’s appeal is due to his fame as not only Africa’s wealthiest man, but also one of the world’s richest and most influential transnational business moguls. Ours is one of the poorest regions of the world and so far, with perhaps the single exception of the commercialization of religion, the efforts of our wealthiest entrepreneurs to effectively run global business operations have failed woefully. Reported by Forbes to be worth about 80 billion dollars, Aliko Dangote would stand out in any region, any nation on the planet; in Africa in particular and the global south in general, he is like a colossus. Thus, Dangote’s fabled achievements in entrepreneurship assume legendary proportions in the African context and this was reflected in the turnout for and reception of his lecture at Harvard on Thursday, November 29, 2015.
Beyond these important but external factors, Dangote’s talk was also the very essence of relaxed, poised and, on occasion, witty delivery. Human self-identification with achievement and celebrity, especially in wealth, is a phenomenon known all over the world and at all times in recorded history. The good folks at Harvard, one of the world’s most prestigious universities, are no exception to this norm. Thus, those who showed up for Dangote’s talk – the great majority of them either Africans or of African descent – dutifully laughed at every joke that he gave and indulgently cheered every turn of phrase through which he expressed a solidarity, an African oneness with the audience, despite the aura surrounding his person and worth. Above all else, the man was absolutely in command of the occasion; he not only gave his talk fluently without any prepared notes, but he did so with a mixture of candor and a complete absence of pomposity. He has probably given versions of the same talk in many other contexts; all the same, the combination of straight-from-the-heart anecdotes concerning the origins of his wealth and the highlights of his business activities greatly endeared him to the audience. Moreover, he was very forthright about the challenges of doing business across virtually all the regions of our continent, without obscuring the really daunting obstacles or blowing them out of proportion as many ‘roving’ entrepreneurs on our continent tend to do. To crown it all, during the “Q & A”, Dangote was very attentive, very solicitous towards his questioners, especially the young students who, it seemed, came to the talk determined to milk every ounce of intimation from the great man on how to strike it rich, how to become billionaires themselves some day.
In that context that I have taken such great care to describe as fully and as positively as possible, it would have been thought completely out of place and perhaps also out of order for me to have put that question to Dangote: why is it that our business moguls fail to recognize that the solution to our perpetual, crippling problems with the generation and distribution of power lies as much with them as with the government? No one in the audience would have missed the implication that behind this question lies a suggestion that our business moguls are as much to blame as “government” for our problems with power generation and distribution. No matter how much I tried to hide or blunt this implication behind the question, the audience and perhaps Dangote himself would have felt that I was putting him in particular on the spot; I was making him personally answerable for a problem that everyone thinks lies solely with the “government”. Also, it would have been thought that even if my premise was right, this was not the right place, the right occasion to bring up such a matter for discussion.
At this point in this piece that I am writing more than a week after Dangote’s lecture, I must now openly admit that this idea was and is indeed on my mind: the most powerful and influential among our business elites are as responsible as “government” for the fact that almost 200 years after electrification became indispensable for industrialization and the modernity that came in its wake, in Nigeria and most of our continent we are still literally and symbolically in the “dark” when it comes to dependable, efficient and life-changing and life-enhancing electrification. In making this assertion, I wish to state that if it seems like an accusation, a bitter indictment of our business elites, my aim is to generate productive discussion, not to try and condemn the “accused” thoughtlessly. As a matter of fact, to the extent that virtually everyone thinks that the ‘problem’ lies solely with “government”, to that extent have discussions on the failure of effective, regular and dependable electrification in our part of the world been extremely tortured and unproductive. If this is the case, the very last thing I wish to do in this piece is to shift the venue of frustrated discourses on incomplete, imperfect and frustrating electrification away from “government” to “business”.
I do have a response to this perfectly logical and understandable query for my claim that without exception, all our business elites are as responsible as “government” for our problems with power generation and supply. The Dangote Group may be the largest African-owned industrial empire in our continent at the present time, but its apparent self-sufficiency in power generation and supply is neither unique nor atypical. As a matter of fact, it is so typical, so normative that it stands as a mark of the peculiar kind of “industrialization” that has come to replace the nascent, vestigial “industrialization” that was first introduced by the colonizers into our country and the rest of the continent. It is this mode of “industrialization” which, at least so far, subsists on incomplete and vastly imperfect electrification that I wish to explore in this two-part series.
I locate this peculiar mode of “industrialization” in post-independent, postcolonial Africa against the background of the universal dream of all mankind at the dawn of electrification as a linchpin of modern industry: power supply everywhere and for everyone, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, year round, year after year. This is no longer a dream in those parts of the world in which electrification, having been extended to all areas of life, is no longer restricted to “industry” as a privileged site. In next week’s conclusion of the series, I hope to show an iron-clad collusion between our political and business elites in the separation of “industry” from “life” as a primary cause and effect of our perennial problems with power generation and supply.
NATION
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