You ran into Wenike Oruwariye at a book reading session at the Terra Kulture in Lagos recently. Wenike who is a book enthusiast is also the Chief Executive Officer at Impasse Technologies, an infrastructure development outfit that is based in Lagos. He is a writer and an engineer. In this interview with Yetunde Oladeinde, he talks about writing to inspire young people, especially young engineers and explains his understanding of adopting “a pure water” strategy to market books written by Nigerian authors
You just talked about the pure water strategy for book marketing. Can you expatiate on this?
Basically, it comes from the saying that the more, the merrier.
How did you arrive at that?
I didn’t arrive at this strategy. It is a rule in business that says, the more clients you have for an affordable and beneficial product, the more you will have a positive and sustainable cashflow.
The pure water strategy is built on the acceptance and strength that “water is life”. Everyone needs to drink water to survive. Being involved in this type of business where you are catering for the mass market provides a belief that success can be achieved by making your products attractive and affordable to the masses. This is when a business revolves around a game of numbers. The decision to provide drinking water in sachets is designed to target the mass market.
When you see a truck that is carrying pure water today, you don’t see it carrying one sachet of water, you see it carrying and conveying thousands of sachets. Several business decisions had been taken to arrive at this unique solution, the primary being how to reduce the business capital and operational overheads. A look at this business sees three key components; ahygienic flexible plastic sachet with printed inscriptions of the merchandise that is supplied in a continuous roll that is made up of several thousand sachets, a reliable source of clean and potable drinking mineral water and a sealing machine. The process involves each sachet being filled with the water and then being sealed.
Selling water for drinking in sachets is something; I never thought I would see in my lifetime.
The more you can capitalise a particular market, the more you are likely to increase your returns. Basically, if you have acheap and affordable product that could be in demand and it is promoted and advertised properly, you are likely to develop a market for this product.
How come our writers are not using this strategy?
Sometimes, you are locked in your own little world. A creative writer who is locked in his own little world,most times, can’t think outside his world of creativity. They require some inspirations which come as a prompt from an outsider or third party.
Our writers need to be enlightened as to how they can adopt this strategy in marketing. In the ideal world, the ultimate goal is to be able to provide education for all. Education involves tuition and tuition is mostly driven on the written material. Writers who create this written material need to embrace modern technologies that can enable a wider market.
Looking at the history of the telephone should illicit some thoughts. This device in the past was only affordable to the rich and affluent. Today, this has changed with the advent of mobile telephones. These mobile telephones have now evolved to emulate mini computers and the emphasis on voice communications is fading with a steady shift and migration to data communications and the use of the Internet.
A version of “Encylopedia Brittanica” is now available on the internet. This is a technological advance where the entire content of these encyclopedia have been transformed from a paper medium to a digital one.
We have a lot of educated people in Nigeria and a young generation of creative thinkers who I feel, if challenged can design a migration from the traditional paper medium or format to digital medium and keep this in the affordable realms.
Could it be that this is because book writing is elitist?
Writing in the past was seen as elitist. Only properly educated people were trusted to produce written material. It was perceived elitist because writers associated their works with the celebrated academic writers. It was deemed appropriate to have this sort of association.
Today, as with most things, there have been major changes in the ways written material is crafted and assembled. It is no longer an elitist profession. The advent of technology has changed the way the people of the world communicate and the written word has followed this change always evolving.
Today, there are software applications that can capture the spoken word and interpret and convert this direct to a digital written script thus enabling just about anyone to become a writer.
Writers are a special breed of people who are gifted with being able use written words in various styles and techniques to communicate ideas.
Book writing is one thing, reading is another. When you write, you have to keep your writing in line with your story. A good writer selects their words carefully. Words matter. Your words (what you say) and style (how you say it) are your most cherished (and undervalued) assets.
Do you think that the electronic media would help Nigeria achieve this kind of pure water strategy?
Yes, it can help.
You are an engineer, how did you get into the business of book writing and reading?
I write a few engineering journals and I use the electronic media to reach my target audience.My engineering journals are developed for young engineers who I feel need professional advice, enlightenment, directions and sometimes encouragement. These journals provide an engineering guide that is extracted from my life experiences.They all contain information on what I call; the three T’s – Tips, Tricks and Traps.
What is the inspiration behind this?
I have always been interested in imparting knowledge. This stems from my upbringing where I became a repository of engineering information at an early age. This has impacted on my choices in life and has continued to influence a lot of my decisions.
As part of our business strategy, we used to operate an”incubator program” that involved young engineering students. These students were selected during a “milk round”. The “milk round” involved trips to universities, colleges of education and polytechnics to seek out those students who were hoping to do their Industrial attachments and offering the most promising students a position in our organisation for this industrial attachment.
We had this running for about nine years and started with students from the University of Lagos. Our goal was to introduce and expose them to technologies that they would have had to experience over a 10 year period in a “fastrack” programme. We managed to offer this exposure to about ten sets. As the program progressed,it got so expensive to coordinate, operate and run that we realised that the class of students had degraded and were not even appreciating the exposure and training. Their only interest was to receive our participation acknowledgement. However, we did have some great achievements, the curriculum was right, the exposure was good and they (the students) were literarily sought after by blue-chip industries to work on and handle live projects. For most of them, this was something they never imagined would happen.
Where have you worked as an engineer?
I have worked in the United Kingdom, In Malta, Italy and France in Europe, In Libya in North Africa, Nigeria and Ghana. In Nigeria, we have an outfit called ImpasseTechnologies. Prior to this I had worked as a Senior Consultant at Resorcery Limited and prior to that, I was a partner with Spectrum Communications Systems in Apapa, a company of Telecommunications Engineers.
As a child, I was brought up in a family of four children. Our father was a medical doctor and our mother, an English teacher. Dad was a medical doctor who had a great interest in African history, while my mother , who was of mixed descent, insisted on us speaking and writing Queens English. My dad was also very interested in technology and was surrounded by gadgets such as clocks, miniature cameras, reel-to-reel tape recorders, all sorts of radios and his pride 8 & 35mm cinema cameras and projectors. He realised that we all had talents and to harness these; he set up engineering workshops for us at home. These included metalwork, woodwork, electrical and mechanical workshops. We had teachers from each respective industry come to teach us at home. This early exposure gave us a foundation in our latter year studies and also galvanised our interest in engineering.
That exposure would have made you come out tops at school?
No, it didn’t turn out like that. We had to play it down. We didn’t need to excel all the time, otherwise we would have been stigmatised. We were tactical with what we knew and had no academic problems. In fact we were sometimes asked to assist with practical explanations and in rare cases, we challenged our lecturers on their theoretical explanations.
