Amara

nigerian billionaires, if you’re serious about industrializing nigeria, invest heavily in local talent too. you can build all the factories, energy companies, banks and infrastructure you want, but eventually you need engineers, scientists, researchers, operators and managers who can actually run, improve and reinvent those industries. you can’t keep fighting over the same tiny pool of talent forever or be bringing in expatriates to fix our local problems forever. you don’t need to start another university from scratch. our best universities are painfully underfunded, and i genuinely think we need to start treating them as industrial infrastructure. imagine $1b strategically spread across selected regional universities in nigeria for labs, research, engineering facilities, faculty, scholarships, commercialization and strong industry partnerships. and i say regional universities deliberately because young talents shouldn’t have to travel far across regions to access quality education. industrialization isn’t just about building companies. andrew carnegie was one of the defining industrialists of america’s industrial era, but part of his legacy was also investing in the institutions that would produce future talent. the school he founded eventually became carnegie mellon, which today is one of america’s strongest universities in computer science, engineering and ai, producing talent for firms like openai, citadel and others. y’all need to start building institutions that will keep producing the people capable of sustaining and reinventing the companies you build long after you’re gone. @AlikoDangote @realFemiOtedola @asr_rabiu @TonyOElumelu