USMAN IMANAH

I have been hearing that Nigeria has a lot of hidden potential since I was a child.
I have heard it so much that it is now like a cliché.
Another cliché is that we are the giant of Africa.
These titles are accurate, but we have not been able to capitalize on these opportunities to make significant progress.
Our case is that of a living dog is better than a dead lion.
Or an active ant is better than a sleeping elephant
In this case, we are the sleeping elephant.
You’d need to be a hopeless optimistic to still see these opportunities amidst the chaos that we go through every day. Not just day to day life but also on social media.
But the facts are there
Nigeria is one of the leading oil producers. We have rich oil deposits; we have huge gas reserves. We have arable land and we have precious metals.
We have Lithium!
So regardless of the decision that the world takes as regards climate change, we should be all right.
We see all these information on paper – but the sad reality is that life is not lived on paper but on the streets. And the streets are not smiling.
If you pay attention, you will get enough negative stories to push you into depression if you are not careful.
But in the midst of it all, there are some glimmers of hope.
Hope.
That’s the only thing that can keep you going.
Because with hope, you can strengthen your faith and belief in better things to come.
I was talking to a mentor last week after being frustrated by people that we owed money and wondering why things are so tough. He told me that Nigeria is for those that are not waiting for things to be done for them. He said, if you are that kind of person, its best for you to Japa.
“But you are not that kind of person Usman. You are one of us. You make things happen”
I wish I could make my account balance happen.
This is coming from someone that left the UK to set up one of the biggest and most innovative real estate companies in Africa. I was encouraged.
I think that it is important to surround yourself with the right set of people. People that understand your struggle. People that believe in you and encourage you to do what you set out to do.
It is tough no doubt but people are making it happen and those people do not have 2 heads.
I follow some YouTube channels that celebrate developments in Nigeria- channels that share the stories of Nigerians that are doing great things amidst the chaos. I have discovered that apart from being inspired to keep moving, it also helps with my mental health.
Last week, an entrepreneur friend of mine called me to discuss partnership/ collaboration in our businesses. This is one lady that has been on the grind for close to a decade. She is playing in an industry that the world takes seriously but one of those that Nigerians have refused to pay attention to – COFFEE
The joke we share is that one day, she will be the Queen of Coffee in Africa and I will be the King of Tea.
Princess Adeyinka Tekenah is the CEO of Happycoffee. An indigenous coffee brand.
Globally, coffee is a $104bn market. Cocoa on the other is about $43bn
Global revenues from Coffee in 2022 is in excess of $400bn
The potential is staggering but as usual, we only see it on paper.
If we pay a fraction of the attention that we give to cocoa to coffee, we will unlock significant value.
According to the Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International (CABI), a United Kingdom-based organisation, Coffee is a source of livelihood for more than 12 million households in Africa.
Over 38% of the population of Burundi, 23% of Tanzania, 22% of Uganda, 17% of Côte d’Ivoire and 14% of Ethiopia, for example, depend on coffee farming. However, Nigeria has not been recognized since the crop production has, for over two decades, been on a downward spiral.
There are two coffee varieties in Nigeria – Arabica and Robusta. Arabica is grown on the Mambilla,Taraba State; Jos, Plateau State and Obudu in Cross Rivers State.
Robusta is produced in Abia, Osun, Ondo Ekiti, Kogi, Edo, Plateau, Kwara, Ogun, Oyo, Benue, Delta, Nasarawa, Niger, Kaduna, Lagos, Rivers, Ebonyi and Enugu states.
In 2015, miffed that though Nigeria grew coffee, people were drinking imported products, Princess Adeyinka launched Happy Coffee.
From the pop-up café, the company started bagging its house blend, which is freshly roast coffee from farmers. She is among a new breed of entrepreneurs hoping to cash in on coffee. They are betting that wealthy Nigerians will cultivate a cafe culture that can also spur consumption of local crops. She is supporting research across the industry supply chain, from the farm to production.
I think I will not be out of place to say that we are the source of our problems.
We so badly want Nigeria to get better but we hate everything Nigerian.
It like stabbing one’s self and crying out at the same time.
One time, when we were in one of the markets activating for our baby food, a distributor boldly told us that he doesn’t deal in local baby food. He only sells foreign imports. The Irony is that the same dealer will go on social media and lament that our FX rate is unfavorable and that there are no jobs.
I digress but you get the point
Princess Adeyinka has taken on the challenge of opening up an industry with potential. What we SHOULD do as Nigerians is support her by buying her products. We are working together to roll out a product that will revolutionize the coffee industry in Africa
You can support her by making sure that Happy Coffee is an option for guests in your homes and offices. We must not just buy Happy coffee; we must promote it and give constructive feedback. This is how countries grow indigenous brands to become multinationals.
This charge is not for just Happy Coffee – it is for all Nigerian brands that are produced locally. Brands that source their raw materials locally and employ Nigerians in their factories.
That is TRUE Patriotism.
Patriotism is not about going on social media to rant and lament / publicize the negatives of our country.
When you buy from a local brand that manufactures and sources its raw material locally, you are not only reducing the pressure that imports put on our foreign reserves, you are helping that brand keep its doors open, creating jobs and empowering local farmers that grow the raw materials.
I have heard people say that Nigerian products are substandard – A very valid argument indeed but the truth is, most standard brands today started with substandard products. They relied on the patronage and feedback of customers that believed in them to improve by investing in R&D. Why should we be different.
Don’t just buy from a local brand, give them feedback that will help them improve.
Enough with all the lamenting and complaining. We need to start doing what needs to be done to see the result that we desire.
For the purpose of this piece, I have deliberately left out politics and leadership. I am not blind to the fact that leadership plays a huge role in these things. We can fix leadership with our PVCs and by holding our leaders accountable. We do not need our PVCs to patronize and promote local brands.

If you run a google search for “Salary is the bribe quotes”, you will get about 33,600 results in 0.33seconds.
Salary is the bribe the employers pay you to forget your dreams.
For years, I listened to motivational speaker after motivational speaker vilifying employers and their establishment and painting career employees as spineless individuals who are unable to take risks. I started out always wanting to be an entrepreneur but for some strange reason, I just found myself progressing in my career. Some people say its my attitude to work, some say it’s the can- do spirit but the more I moved up in my career, the more I wanted to leave to run my own thing. I was finally able to transition in 2020.
These days, when I meet former colleagues, the conversation is mostly about how they would love to be in my shoes, about how they want to quit their 9 to 5 and transit to entrepreneurship like me and how their job has held them back from accomplishing their dreams.

Well, this was me back in the day so its OK
But if you are reading this write up and wallowing in self pity about how your job is holding you back, please STOP IT! Do not let anybody make you feel like a second-class citizen just because you chose a career path or to serve someone else. Don’t allow anybody to make you feel like you are wasting your time.
Don’t get me wrong. I still believe in entrepreneurship and setting up, running and owning a business as the natural progression after a career as an employee but I do not think that a 9 to 5 is a deterrent to achieving your goals.
I do not believe that a Salary is the bribe that they pay you to forget your dreams. On the contrary, if you play your cards right, you should be grateful to your employer for a tuition free MBA and an allowance while you are at it.
Okay that may be going too far but hear me out
When I resumed at Stanbic IBTC in January 2014 as Corporate Communication Manager, I didn’t know what to expect. I had been told that Stanbic was not like other Nigerian banks and that the culture was a healthy one – and indeed it is but coming from my previous life as Public Relations Manager, Samsung West Africa where I would travel to CapeTown together with my MD Brovo Kim, and Management team for a phone launch and we would party together to “Uber gangnam style” all night to a commercial banking environment was a huge culture shock. I struggled to adjust. The decision-making process, the size and complexity of banking operations was on a different scale. In Samsung there was Mobile, IT and Electronics – Stanbic IBTC on the other hand, had 11 subsidiaries, each with its Chief Exec and Management team and numerous departments in addition to shared services in Nigeria. This is asides the matrix system and manager that one had to contend with from South Africa. I struggled to connect the moving parts but could not and it showed in my performance.
Then in 2015, the organization decided to upgrade its core banking software (I forget the version now) but it was a big deal. An enterprise-wide project that had people seconded from different parts of the business as this core banking software was the backbone of the bank’s operations. It was like the nervous system of the bank.
I was seconded to this project as communication lead.

I felt like an outcast. The project was a make-or-break one. If successful, we would be heroes. If it failed, heads will roll.
I resumed at the project office with mixed feelings but when it we launched the project officially under the leadership of one of the most amazing leaders I have ever met – Wole Adeniyi, I started to meet and make friends with great minds like Wole Adesiyan, Ruby Onwudiwe, Ehia Erhanor, Solomon Ayodele, Cletus Imimion, Vivian Aigbe, Tunde Majiyagbe, Odinaka Ikejigbe, Victor Adewusi and a host of other great personalities from different parts of the organization.
Being at the centre of project communication allowed me to meet with and rub minds people with and understand how the different moving parts of the project and by extension, the organization worked. My friends from the project were always happy to answer questions on the organization from operations to risk to audit to sales to finance to admin to innovation to financial control to investor relations.
In the end, the project was hugely successful. We all got recognitions and I was promoted but best of all was the priceless opportunity to understand systems and make lifelong friends. One way or the other, these learnings became useful in setting up and running Friska.
The opportunity to learn how a system works is one lesson that every employee should be grateful to their employer for. The opportunity is there but most employees will not take it. They will rather do their work and go home. I have seen many talented people focus on only their role because they do not want to do more than they are paid. In their selfishness they lose the priceless opportunity to understand how a system works.
A study of some of the most successful individuals showed that they all had this skill in common -the ability to detect, understand and replicate patterns. But they only truly became successful when they were able to create systems that automated this process.
Systems run everything
Human beings are made up of systems
The earth is made up of systems
A system is what differentiates a roadside shoe maker and the owner of a shoe making company. The same output but different levels of operation.
The ability to detect patterns, understand them and build systems that create them is the bedrock of any great organization. You can learn how to build systems from the best business schools but you will never really get it first-hand if you don’t immerse yourself in a working system.
Dear 9 to 5er. Instead of wallowing in self-pity and blaming your job for holding you back from your dreams of becoming the next Elon Musk. Focus on understanding the systems that run that organization.
Make friends across departments. Ask questions
Understand how Admin, Operations and Sales work together to deliver value to the customer. If you are able to understand this and apply it to any side hussle that you decide to pursue, you will one day feel guilty for ever collecting a salary from that employer.

Yesterday, I was in my office trying to figure out how best to structure a couple of ideas that I had into one single flow when a call came in. It was from a close friend of mine – Orighoye or OY for short. A close friend and fellow entrepreneur. She is not just any type of entrepreneur, she is the “never say die” type. I had sent a link to her to apply for a “women-only” program in December. I actually sent it to a couple of female entrepreneurs. Many of them foot dragged and spent weeks over processing it. OY applied immediately. She didn’t procrastinate, she didn’t overanalyze, she just applied. The call was to inform me that she had won a pitch competition on the program. It came with a cash prize of one thousand five hundred dollars.

I was very happy.
She was grateful.

We couldn’t really talk for long because she was still on the zoom call. She just wanted me to be the first to know.
In 2009, OY left her budding 8 years Nuclear Weapons Specialist career with the United States Airforce to come pursue her dreams – To run a catering business in Nigeria. A typical Nigerian family will blame village people for this switch but luckily, hers was a supportive one. She had gone to culinary school in the US, mastered the art and relocated to Abuja to set up the business. Business didn’t quite pick up as expected in Abuja so she moved to Lagos where the population and parties were. Lagos was better. She quickly established herself and started catering for multinationals and corporate organizations. Then she set up a restaurant at the heart of Yaba serving fresh – order to eat meals and the struggle started. Customers weren’t pouring in as expected.

The food was good
The ambience was on-point.
The Menu was rich.
But the customers weren’t pouring in and for the life of her, she couldn’t figure out what to do. Business was bad.
One day, I visited the restaurant to try it out for myself. It took 20 minutes for me to get my meal. When I complained, I was told that it was being prepared fresh from scratch. It was very easy to see what business wasn’t picking up. It was the location.
Yaba is a middle-income part of Lagos. People in Yaba will drive to the highbrow Victoria Island and Ikoyi for such services. But in Yaba, what they wanted was an affordable QSR (Quick Service Restaurant). They were not ready to pay premium in Yaba. I looked at all the successful food businesses in Yaba- they all have one thing common – They serve it As e dey hot
It can be very difficult to see the flaw in your business model if that business is something you are passionate about. As smart as OY was, she was blind sided by this fact. I quickly called her and told her what the problem was but as expected, her coconut head will not allow her to see reason over the phone.

I remember the heated argument when we had a face to face to discuss the matter. I was still in paid employment then. I told her that the location is a miss match for model. And that she will not make the kind of money that she was looking for with the approach. It was like a strategy session. She was adamant. Understandably – seeing that she had invested money to set up the place, was in debt and could not even dream of relocating to any other location – especially if it was highbrow. I couldn’t even suggest the regular QSR model to her. She would have bitten my head off.
One thing she was clear about was the vision she had for her brand. She wanted her business – Nylah’s to be a household name. She wasn’t doing all this to be a pop and mum shop. She wanted to scale at some point.I told her that as long as her income was tied to her time, in this business, it will be difficult to make a lot of money or to scale. She was furious. We ended that session without any headway.

I am of the opinion that if the value that a business creates is dependent on the availability and time of its driver, then it is not full-blown entrepreneurship. It is Self-employment or Employment 2.0 because it becomes very difficult or expensive to scale.
One year down the line things were worse. She asked that we have another session and I agreed. I made it clear that I still wasn’t convinced that the model (Catering and QSR) would make her the type of entrepreneur that she wanted to be. This time, she agreed. At this point things had gone from bad to worse and she was almost contemplating packing up and relocating to the US. I told her that I saw her as an entrepreneur that had a food product.

Luckily, by that time, she was already producing bread, granola, and lemode to augment her income at the restaurant. So we agreed to package the bread and granola properly and apply for NAFDAC approval. This was in March 2019. We started the process and by August 2019, she got the approval and NAFDAC numbers. We processed her barcodes and repackaged the products and she was in business – skeptical but hopeful. She was still in the food business, but not just how she had envisioned it.

I remember telling her that once she gets her NAFDAC, she would stop accepting catering jobs. She smiled and told me that catering is her passion. She would always cater when the opportunity comes.
In late February 2020, just before the lockdown Orighoye called, and with tears of joy, told me that Shoprite had agreed to stock her granola and bread in all of their outlets. The Shoprite order opened a flood gate of outlets that reached out and started retailing her products. The next time we spoke, her problem was different – money to fund the orders and buy bigger equipment to scale.
If she hadn’t pivoted before the lockdown, she would have seen pepper!
Today her products are in more than a hundred outlets and her business is profitable. Her products were featured on CNN through one of the outlets that stock her products. She has been invited to speak on Radio, TV, and at Entrepreneurship events.

If you are an entrepreneur reading this piece, there are 3 things I want you to take from this write up

1. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Anybody can have ideas. You can get ideas online. What really matters is the tenacity that you put into execution.
2. You need to separate passion for the business and the business of the business. You can be in the right industry but with the wrong model. If you cannot be objective, seek other people’s opinions. It’s not about what you love doing – it is about what the customer is willing to pay for
3. Great businesses don’t always start out perfect. Stay focused but do not be afraid to pivot when the need arises.

In 2009, the world was introduced to blockchain technology with the launch of Bitcoin. But things were very different then. Technology was very limited, compared to what we have today. Facebook was still young and Blackberry was the only smartphone available. Access to finance was limited to banks and a few other players in the financial services sector and loan sharks. There were no fintechs or technology enabled peer lending platforms available.

If you were an entry to mid-level corporate executive, your only source of credit would most likely be the bank in which your salary account was domiciled.

When the bank that held your salary account stopped honoring loan requests from staff of your organization, then you knew there is a big problem. You were left with loan sharks.

That was the situation my colleagues and I found ourselves in 2009.

The bank that housed our salary accounts stopped honoring loan requests from our organization. The bank also put a cap on what its own staff could borrow, making it almost impossible for most junior staff to get access to reasonable credit.

If you think that salary earners were having it bad, small businesses that did not make a sizeable turnover and were not really attractive to the newly capitalized banks were getting it even worse.

This might not have been a problem for the major players in the financial industry, but it was big enough for a couple of young visionaries to build a business around.

My earliest recollection was one late night in mid-2009. We were working late as usual. It was on the 4th floor of a leading Investment banking outfit on Lagos Island. Nonso, who was a technical assistant to one of the executive directors, now CEO of VFD Group, had called me to his office, which was on the same floor as mine. They (he and a couple of friends) had been able to put together a business model around the “access to credit” problem and needed some form of identity – a logo to represent the business. I sat down in his chair, in front of his laptop, and with him and his colleague by my shoulder, quickly put something together on Microsoft word. It was a yellow and green circle overlapping each other. It was tacky but good enough.

I remember Nonso talking to me and a couple of colleagues about investing. Many of us didn’t see the vision. I remember some of the early meetings. There was no office so we used Federal Palace Hotel. Over a sandwich and soft drinks, Nonso, supported by Niyi and Bolaji would articulate the vision. They were so audacious in their goals that I can bet I was not the only person who thought they were hallucinating.

They raised capital from friends and family and started lean. Everything was limited – except their vision. They didn’t have a borrowing license in the first 3 months they started so they filled the gap by creatively structuring a lease buy back arrangement where you borrowed money based on an asset. Actually, that was the form of security they could get to de-risk the lending.

In very simple terms- You sell your car to them and buy it back gradually. In the third month, their borrowing license came through – covering only Lagos State.

They grew the business brick by brick and today, VFD has grown and has within its group, a microfinance bank, an asset management company, a real estate concern, a mortgage bank and a host of other businesses.

On April 16, 2021, BusinessDay published a story on its website – VFD Group Gets SEC Approval for Proposed N4.13bn Rights Issue.

A friend of mine sent the link to me and asked “Where them they see this money?” He couldn’t wrap his head around it. How Vbank has managed to get Donjazzy and a host of other A-list celebrities in its corner.

There was a time when the group operated without an office. There was a time when all the key players had to hold regular jobs because they couldn’t afford to do it full time. People don’t see this side of the story. They don’t want to see this side of the story.  I wasn’t ready to go into history mode to school this friend.  I desperately wanted to but a voice deep down inside spoke to me – Resist the need to shalaye.

I heeded the voice. My response was short. You don’t wake up and become a butterfly; growth is a process. Big Businesses start small.