Harnessing Opportunities from Crises

When you tell people to find opportunities within the crises around them, many of them turn around to tell you, you are wicked, selfish, inconsiderate, greedy, and all. Some of them make it look as if it is a crime to take advantage of what is lacking or wrong with your society. But what many of them fail to understand is that many professions thrive in a crisis. And by this, I don’t mean negative professions; I mean those prestigious ones we all aspire to join. Let’s look at some of them one after the other.

You cannot be a medical doctor if there are no sick persons to attend to. Many parents want their children to study medicine in the university because, apart from the profession being looked at as prestigious, these parents are sure their children will not be unemployed when they become certified medical doctors. The doctors that want to go for their consultancy, first of all, check the commonest type of medical crisis in the country and then pass through thick and thin to be certified as experts to handle those cases. By the time they become consultants, they become the kings in their professions. But no one ever sees them as wicked or mean.

What about the lawyers? If people start living in peace, our law courts will close down. These people need you and I to trample on the rights of others to feed. They can’t survive in a Utopia. They won’t even want that imaginary world in the first place. But we all hail them, don’t we?

Let’s leave “white collar” jobs and come down to those that know how to find money in the dirt.

I was looking at my plastic water tank the other day, wondering if I would have bothered buying it if I had access to constant water supply. I wouldn’t have bothered storing water if the resource is always available, now would I? I actually went for the tank due to the water crisis Enugu is known for.

What about all these people going into agriculture recently, especially after the federal government restrictions on food importation took effect? Don’t you think they were envisioning a food crisis and wanted to benefit from it when it happens?

The truth is, every profession is established because there is a crisis that it will tap from. We are told that professions come up to handle needs in society but what those that taught this that avoided was telling us that crisis are the causes of those needs. For instance, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought a lot of opportunities, which will thrive for years, if not decades. Climate change is also bringing more opportunities to our doorsteps. What more? The insecurity in the country has caused many people to establish private security firms. People avoid holding cash these days because of robbers and for that, tech companies have devised cashless transactions. ENDSARS happened and POS has started giving jobs to many youths. These are just the few that we can see all around us.

So, what about you? What crisis are you planning to reap from? Are you going to lament about them while they make millionaires out of your neighbours? Look around you and start now to count the number of individuals and businesses that thrive because of one type of crisis or the other; maybe that will help you to understand the theme of this text.

Whatever you do, always remember that opportunities are born out of the crisis. So, locate one and reap out of it. It is not a crime. It is not inhumane. And, it is not a sin.