Yorubaland shares entrepreneurial culture with Israel and Singapore

‘One Nigeria’ Nigerians boast about the size of the country and the fact that the population will double in 2050 to overtake the US. However, this is growth that has not been easy for Western companies to exploit. Of the 14 countries with over 100 million population in the world, only the US and Japan are wealthy. Europe’s wealthy nations of Luxemburg, Norway and Switzerland have fewer than 10 million people. Since the 1990s, the per capita GDP has risen faster for smaller nations than for the bigger ones.
 
Israel and Singapore are very successful small nations. They have very little by way of natural resources, yet they have outperformed their larger neighbours. This is because they have a culture of entrepreneurship. They play to their natural advantages. Singapore’s only asset is human capital, and the same could be said of Israel. These are countries that have acknowledged their limitations and turned their disadvantages to advantages. Israel exploited its instability to innovate through its army and form a symbiotic relationship with the Silicon Valley. Singapore offered itself as the Asian guinea pig where giants of industry could market test and prototype.
 
The Yoruba share entrepreneurial characteristics with Israel and Singapore, which would make us succeed as a nation exactly as they have done. Pavinder (1947) in ‘Yoruba-speaking peoples of Dahomey’ chronicled local trade by Ilesa and Ondo traders. Awolowo in 1955 laid the foundation for a culture of education. In the heady days of the 1950s, the Yoruba established the first television station (WNTV) on the continent of Africa aimed at mass education. Indeed, I appeared on a weekly TV programme in the early 1960s called ‘Youth Rendezvous’. There was the Cocoa House in Ibadan, then the tallest building in sub-Saharan Africa. Yes, we can succeed on our own. Help us get our own  homeland. Support, sign, spread, donate, share, retweet http://chng.it/QJp8yJ6hPs to enable us to present our case to the UN Security Council.