I appreciate the need to do this - Africa needs good stories and Dangote looks like one. But I cannot stress this enough - Dangote is *anti-development*
If I time travelled back to 19th century America and swapped Dangote for George Bartholomew, the US will be a different country today and not for the better.
Once you take him objectively and look at what he’s actually done (not what he says) and the actual effects of those things, you would not wish him on a poor developing country.
God is so merciful in geographical distribution.
Imagine a government that can't repair Agbor-Benin road having to deal with the aftermath of an earthquake.
10 years ago, I learned in a Development Communication class that if a government sacrifices human/capital development on the altar of infrastructural development, the infrastructure will suffer in the hands of the people.
Ten years later, the theory still works.
Moving fast is a trainable skill and you can learn it too.
There's a space between when a task appears and when you act on it where discomfort lives, and if you dwell on how you feel about the task for too long, that space grows.
People who default to action never open an internal debate about the task in the first place. To them, tasks are not something to negotiate with. They are just something to do.
When you remove how you feel about the task from the equation, execution becomes surprisingly simple.
Full grown adults that can’t swim, cycle, skate, backpack, take a gap year, vacation, play an instrument or speak multiple foreign languages. Just a lifetime of hustling and trying to leave survival mode. These are subtle poverty metrics that no one really talks about.
which is why I urge you desperately to not submit yourself to the uselessness this country conjures in its people.
it’s harder work and you may burn out.
but it is important that you don’t lose your optimism. your joy is under attack and nobody but you is coming to save you (and maybe a few good friends and family members if you are lucky).
we place so much value on physical things that get stolen. but the things that are unseen tend to be far more valuable that objects that can be touched.
That interview of Hamzat telling young Nigerians to go and stay with their parents as the answer to a housing price crisis should be everything you need to know this human will be 10x worse than Sanwo
I once talked about how many people get tired of marriage because marriage is boring and many people can’t deal with boring. I got many backlash because “how dare you call marriage boring?” lol
You must understand that a beautiful life is a peaceful one, you don’t need something to always be happening for you to be ok, sometimes, just soak in the little things, live and enjoy the moment.
If you cannot just exist without something dramatic happening, staying married might be difficult
Keep your problems smaller than your life. A flat tire is a flat tire. A bad meeting is a bad meeting. A canceled flight is just an extra two hours. These things become catastrophes when you let them. But they stay manageable when you remember the depth of your real life- the people you love, the work you care about, the beautiful years still ahead. Zoom out. Fit your reaction to the size of the problem.