In Africa, necessity is not the mother of invention

Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention. In Africa, despite the huge necessity gap and the rampant abject poverty among the citizens, the number of innovations is small. People are short of ideas on how to live well. But why is necessity not the mother of inventions and adversity not the father of innovations in Africa? It has been established that one of the major reasons why Africa remains the poorest continent is that there are few inventions and innovations that have come out from there. Most African countries lack infrastructure, food security, finance, modern technology etc. In the 2023 Global Infrastructure Table by World Economic Forum (WEF), Nigeria was ranked 125th out of the 137 countries surveyed. Nigeria’s infrastructure deficit is 40 percent short of World Bank standard. Also, Nigeria was ranked 24th out of 54 countries in the Africa Infrastructure Development Index (AIDI) in 2020.

Nigeria’s power generation hit 5,105 Megawatts in the second quarter of 2024, while Nigeria is aiming for a meagre 6,000 Megawatts in December 2024. The Association of Nigerian Electricity Distributors claimed that Nigeria needs to generate about 33,000 Megawatts to have stable electricity which can be generated in at least eight ways. These include: thermal (steam turbines that use fossil fuels, solid wastes, gas, biomass, etc); hydro (water turbines); wind vane (wind turbines); solar photovoltaic; nuclear energy; biomass; solar thermal energy; and geothermal. Depending on the amount of physical activity engaged by man, about 60 to 180 Watts of heat generated by metabolism in the body is exchanged with the environment through heat convection and radiation. The waste heat recovery from the human body of a group can be a reliable way to produce electric power to light a hall or street.

Food is the most basic need of man. And Nigeria is in the tropical region of Africa with arable land that can be farmed all year round. In the road infrastructure sector, gravel, sand and cement abound in Nigeria. It is only iron rods that we need to import to make reinforced concrete roads. Yet we lack adequate roads. Housing is next to food in the hierarchy of basic needs of man. This essential housing remains a challenge in Nigeria. Youths of marriage age between 32 and 36 years are finding it difficult to get rental accommodation and to settle down. Affordable housing is a function of cost of construction versus sales price. It is dependent on the cost of the composite materials that are used in assemblage of a house. Simple reasoning shows that only through adoption of local building materials can affordable housing be achieved in Nigeria. Local building materials in Nigeria means the use of abundant cheap laterite as block materials, timber as windows and doors.

Imported building materials in an era of high foreign exchange rate cannot yield affordable housing to the people. We all know this but most of us in charge of policy implementation of affordable housing are already accommodated and see affordable housing not as a social product but an economic venture. There are the Atlantic ocean and numerous water bodies like River Niger, River Benue, River Ogun, River Osun, River Kaduna, Lake Chad etc that can be used to breed fish and halt the importation of this healthy source of protein. We lack because we lack ideas. In America, a capitalist country, people invent and innovate to make money. That is why America has the highest number of patents in the world! From aeroplane manufacture to phone and needles, we depend on foreign nations like America for supply.

Basically, there are two main reasons for our lack of ideas in Africa. The first reason is corruption. Corruption is dishonest or fraudulent conduct by those in positions of trust or power, typically involving bribery, stealing, fund misappropriation, budget padding, contract inflation and abuse of position. Corruption is a double-edged sword that hurts both sides; it depletes the resources of a nation and makes people to be lazy by depending on short cuts and crimes as a way of life. The problem is that when corruption is allowed to reign for a long time, it becomes the culture of the people as we have in Nigeria now. Everybody now sees making it through corruption as a blessing of God. In a community where there is a high rate of corruption, people cannot invent or innovate. They will rather depend on corrupt practices to improve their standard of living. We now have a situation where the judiciary, the executive and the legislators do not trust each other. The masses are not left out in the distrust game!

The only way out is the adoption of rule of law. People will only innovate and invent in Nigeria if there is transparency and accountability in government. Our leaders must be ready to be a role model and not “senior Yahoo boys” (the act of obtaining by tricks). They must be modest and reduce their standard of living so that there can be easy connection between the leaders and the followers. There are three ways a man can get rich: firstly, hard-work (discipline, innovation, inventions, being educated and getting good jobs, trading, singing, writing books, etc); the grace of God or connection (secondly), and thirdly, crime. Crime is not a choice in good climes, because it is illegal. It only becomes the vogue in a country without rule of law as it is less tasking. A situation where political office is seen as an opportunity of making money and not an opportunity to serve does not augur well for efficient invention and innovation.

The second reason for our lack of innovations and inventions is that there is no level playing ground in the country. Some people are enjoying the commonwealth of the nation because they are in vantage position to our commonwealth! This has made everybody to relegate hard-work, innovation and invention, and now have the belief that the easiest way to wealth is corruption.

• business a.m. commits to publishing a diversity of views, opinions and comments. It, therefore, welcomes your reaction to this and any of our articles via email: comment@businessamlive.com