An economist and chairman of FIT Group of Companies, Chief Loretta Aniagolu, has tasked Nigerian youths to reduce constant complaints about the ills of the country and turn such situations to wealth creation.
Aniagolu, who described the nation’s younger generation as the catalyst for developing a new economic frontier for the country, also advised the youths on job creation rather than job seeking.
She spoke as one of the panelists at the inaugural edition of The Nigerian Hamilton Project: A National Dialogue Series on Development as Attitude, organised by the Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG) in Enugu.
The event saw policymakers, thought leaders and private sector players gather at the Enugu International Conference Centre, to dissect the nation’s developmental challenges and leadership philosophies.
According to Aniagolu, the earlier young people started turning the nation’s adversities into fortune, the better for the country.
“Young people must stop spending time complaining about what is not being done right. Whatever that is not done right is an opportunity for you to take up the gauntlet and see how you can use it to your benefit.
“I have tried to give examples of when some of us were starting up in the private sector. I used to read the newspapers and every time I saw negative news, I asked myself, how can I change this negative news into business.
“I want to tell the story of a young lady that started pure water business in Enugu. Of course she has grown into bigger things now. Where she lived, there was no water and what she did was to figure out if they were paying too much money to access water from the water vendors in cans, which was not even drinkable. She decided to make the water drinkable and sell it. That’s how the word, pure water, came about. Then, I was an adviser to the government and she spoke to us and the rest was a story.
“So, as much as there is difficulty in the country, there is a lot of opportunities for anyone who wants to see them.
“Unfortunately, a lot of young people don’t realize how much work they need to do to be able to get to these opportunities.
“In Nigeria, everybody wants to eat, who’s going to do the work?
“As much as there is disappointment on the part of leaders, you also have to task yourself. There is the Internet. The world is at your palm. There’s so much you can learn and work on. Young people need to use their creativity and God given talents to think out of the box. There is no job. But there is an opportunity everywhere,” Aniagolu said.
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The author of the book, Development as Attitude: a national dialogue series, Prof. Osita Ogbu, stated that from his many years of research and travelling, leadership is not just the leaders; but what the leaders bring, such as their ideas, their knowledge, values and ethics and ideology and what they bring into office.
He said, “If a governor does not have the framework, a philosophy that governs his governance, his advisor is not going to go far in his job”.
Ogbu, a one-time presidential economic adviser, disclosed that he put the book together to begin to share that kind of conversation to ensure that leaders are clearheaded about their leadership philosophies.
“The future is also moving. You have to be fast paced. When leaders are not clearheaded, they don’t know what they stand for and it will be difficult for them to govern well,” Ogbu said.
An official of the Nigeria Economic Summit Group (NESG), Nnanna Udeh, said as a policy think-tank that promotes the private sector economy, the group decided to shift from its tradition of organizing dialogues mostly in Lagos and Abuja on specific sectors of the economy that it believed will transform the Nigerian economy.
“When this book was published by Prof Ogbu, we in the NESG read the book as a community and it triggered a couple of questions that surrounds the work that we’ve been doing.
“We just believe that this should be a platform for promoting dialogue in our environment not just within our traditional Lagos and Abuja but taking it across the across the country.
“With this book, it seems to us like a solid body of knowledge around nation building and we, as a think-tank, are strongly convinced that if we take the conversations that this book elicited across, it’s going to build the foundations of a stronger and more viable economic nation for the country. That’s why we decided to not only invest in this book but also take it across the country beginning with Enugu the home state of the author,” Udeh said.