RememberIndia' It is our new Britainthat is, our new destination for medical treatment, for business, for vacation, and even for education. It was a headline in The Guardian of November 9, 2011 that sent me thinking about India. The headline reads: Nigeria may lead Africa to one billion mobile subscription mark. The occasion for the headline was the forecast by Informa Telecoms and Media that Nigeria would maintain its lead in Africa with over 152 million mobile subscriptions by the end of 2016, when mobile subscriptions in Africa are expected to hit one billion. I quickly checked the subscription rate in India and discovered that the country would hit the one billion mark sometime next year. That is not surprising as Indians number over one billion and had 851.70 million connected lines as at June 2011, whereas connected lines in Nigeria stood at 120 million as at September 2011. There is, of course, a discrepancy between connected and active lines because not all activated lines remain active.The relatively high rates of mobile line subscriptions in both countries underscore the high rates of purchases of mobile phones and mobile services, including voice calls, e-mail, SMS and MMS messaging, and internet browsing. You would have thought that mobile phone manufacturers would be courting both countries equally just as mobile service providers have been doing. But that is not the case. While mobile phone manufacturers have been willing to set up retail shops in Nigeria, theyve been anxious to do more in India. Nokia, Samsung, and LG have set up manufacturing plants in India while Research in Motion, makers of BlackBerry, initiated the process last March. Their goal is to make India an export hub for the Asia-Pacific region comprising 18 countries. In addition to manufacturing, India is also a site for outsourced tech services, such as providing online chats and answering customer service calls, such as American 800 number calls.These developments have enabled India to move beyond consumption to production and to boost youth employment. Moreover, having learnt from working for major tech companies at home and abroad, Indians have now become technological innovators at home. Heres how Thomas Friedman put it in a recent article on Indias innovative entrepreneurs: Indias young techies are moving from running the back rooms of Western companies, who outsourced work here, to inventing the front rooms of Indian companies, which are offering creative, low-cost solutions for Indias problems (The New York Times, November 6, 2011, page SR11). Friedman goes on to tell the stories of three Indian innovators, who are now CEOs of their own companies.The most interesting of the stories is that of Vijay Pratap Singh Aditya, the CEO of Ekgaon. According to Friedman, Ekgaon built a software programme that runs on the cheapest cellphones and offers illiterate farmers a voice or text advisory programme that tells them when it is the best time to plant their crops, how to mix their fertilisers and pesticides, when to dispense them and how much water to add each day. What is more, Ekgaon draws on cloud computing to tailor its advice to each farmers specific soil, crop and weather conditions. The ultimate goal, Aditya emphasised, is to help Indian small-scale farmers to increase farm productivity. Is the Nigerian Minister of Agriculture following this story'Ekgaons venture is just one in a series of technological innovations to come out of India in recent years. Just last month, an indigenous tech company, came out with the worlds cheapest tablet computer. The company says it will sell it to the Indian government at $45 each, while the government says it will pay a subsidy of $10 per computer so that schoolchildren and teachers could purchase it for only $35. Recall that India already produced the worlds cheapest car, the compact Nano, for just over $2,000, about the same price Indian doctors now charge for open-heart surgery!It must be acknowledged that India has been engaged with the electronic industry since 1965 when the government began working on space and defence technologies. This long-term engagement with technology prepared the way for Indias current status as a nuclear power. Once India turned its attention to consumer electronics especially in the last two decades, many Indian youths turned to engineering and IT schools. The critical question is: If Nigeria is going to lead Africa to the one billion mobile line subscription mark, why are mobile phone manufacturers not willing to make Nigeria a manufacturing and export hub for Africa comprising over 50 countries' The answer is not far-fetched. Nigeria is simply not ready. Tell me, which foreign company would want to set up a manufacturing plant in a nation that is notorious for insecurity, involving terrorism, kidnapping, and armed robbery; inadequate infrastructure, including irregular and inadequate power supply and poor transport facilities; poor educational system, which produces unemployable graduates; and abysmal health facilities, so poor that its elite go overseas, including India, for medical treatment'How about producing homegrown innovators' That also is a dream deferred. True, there have been successful Nigerian inventors and innovators; but we need a regular flow of such geniuses, not just occasional sparks. Unfortunately, our educational system is not only at its lowest ebb right now, it also has yet to pay sufficient attention to quality Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics education. True, we have many so-called Universities of Technology, and President Goodluck Jonathan just added nine more, they are so grossly underfunded, underequipped, and understaffed.Most Indians may be poor just as most Nigerians are, but the Indian government has never neglected its educational system. India produces about three million graduates every year, including about 1,000 PhDs; and about 300,000 engineers and nearly one million in other professions. India has numerous Institutes of Technology that compete with the best in the world.So well-trained are Indian electronic engineers that they now work for major IT companies around the globe. Heres how Electronic Engineering Times put it ten years ago: Graduates from the Indian Institutes of Technology usually have no difficulty getting employment and having U.S. companies sponsor their work permits (EE Times, May 16, 2001).But enough of India; lets return to Nigeria. Whats most bothersome today is that we once reached the same status that India now occupies but lost it. Peugeot and Volkswagen once had assembly plants in Nigeria. Leading pharmaceutical companies were here. Even our own local Adebowale Industries was assembling KDK fans, TVs, refrigerators and airconditioners. Today, they are no more because successive federal administrations ruined our country and our chances. By putting ego and corruption over patriotism and country, our so-called leaders condemned us to a life of consumption of foreign goods. Even petroleum dug from our own soil has to be shipped out, refined by foreign companies, and then resold to us to fuel our cars. Shame of a nation, indeed, as Casmir Igbokwe titled his column last Sunday (SUNDAY PUNCH, November 13, 2011).And these cheats watched, and are still watching, shamelessly as things began, and continue, to fall apart. And they have the guts to quarrel with Professor Chinua Achebe, the author of Things Fall Apart for twice rejecting their award.
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