Nations rise when pioneering entrepreneurs emerge. Without those pioneers, the capacity to combine factors of production to redesign economic structures and fix market frictions stall for all entrepreneurs.
Before the American steel industry, Carnegie had to emerge. Before the US energy sector, Rockefeller existed. From JP Morgan to Mellon, men were ahead of the government in setting the ordinance of US banking. And in this era, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Richard Branson are unlocking broad space tourism, as pioneers, with tons of goodies coming from the government, to make it possible.
When you look deeper, governments are handing over money to these pioneers via tax waivers, incentives, etc. As I write, CHIPS for America has awarded over $19 billion of the over $36 billion in proposed incentives funding allocated to date. Simply, the US government is giving out grants and monetary incentives to companies in the semiconductor industry because it wants to re-develop its local semiconductor industry.
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As I wrote in my book (The Dangote System: Techniques for Building Conglomerates), nations sometimes have to offer enormous benefits to category-king companies to do things the governments are unable to do. In other words, as Nigeria has struggled to build and maintain a refinery, giving goodies to pioneering entrepreneurs to build refineries is fair game.
Good People, even in China, that is how it is done. South Korea does the same thing. Nigeria cannot have it the other way around: the government has never led anything and we cannot expect everything to be anchored by bureaucrats. The challenge for Nigeria is that we do not have many pioneers, and because of that, we see everything as favouring the few playing at that level. Dangote was bullied away from Dangote Steel because think tanks were offended by a do-tank entrepreneur is going to solve our steel problem!
Like Nollywood, Nigeria’s movie industry, which emerged without any memo to the government, our pioneering innovators must do the same in other sectors. Sure, when you do it, they will come with a tax bill. And that is the beauty of it.
Africa needs PIONEERING entrepreneurs – they are the high priests to shared prosperity and future abundance in nations. They redesign economies and unlock latent opportunities, driving optimist exuberance for national political leaders because they build things!
The EV purchase tax credit scheme was created to help Tesla, the no-sales tax collection was for Amazon, etc; if such should happen in Nigeria, editorials will rant of cronyism. But in America, the government does what it has to do!
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The education and enlightenment need to be louder. We lack many things but above all, we lack enough men and women who actually understand how economies work and have the character strength to convey and drive same. It is not enough to yammer on what needs to happen, you must also have the open mind and intellectual stamina to push these things through and be ruthless too. Weak people don’t get things done, and there are too many weak people here.
We complain about everything and blame everyone. We do not know what we lack, but we are too loud to convey ignorance and disdain as though we are making sense. Wherever you have a large number of people who are big in noise but know little or nothing, there bound to be chaos and dysfunction of highest proportion. Dangote finished building a massive Refinery, what happened next was both predictable and cynical. The NNPC on the one hand couldn’t guarantee the quantity of crude oil they promised, and other hand it’s busy distorting the information space that it now has working refinery in Port Harcourt. These are issues, but you must know how to see to be able to see through the facade.
Cronyism helps every economy to advance, you may not know how, because it’s above your pay grade…