The Wisdom of Bill Gates (1)

Bill Gates

By Adeola Akinremi

Don’t give up yet on Nigeria, we have made tremendous progress, even in the past two and a half years since President Goodluck Jonathan came to power.  It’s hard to believe, but that is what Bill Gates will tell you. And if you love statistics you will not be able to fault him. For a digression, my first real knowledge of how Bill Gates thinks, especially when it comes to putting his mouth where his money is was in November 2008. I was in a session where a senior programme officer of his charity, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was present. It was at a resort in Limuru, a suburb of Nairobi, Kenya’s capital city and we were putting heads together to raise fund for a cause.  As we struggled to fine-tune different pages of the proposal, we came to ‘specific outcomes’ part of the proposal and for a moment we heard from Gates’ representative. She said: “Gates is like a mathematician. He likes figures.”

What she was simply telling us was that if Gates is putting his money into a cause the proposal must demonstrate that XYZ outcomes will be achieved, because it is that critical part that will inform his decision.

So last week while the World Economic Forum (WEF) was going on in Davos, Switzerland, Gates was out there telling those who care that the world has changed dramatically from what it was, even in the last 20 years. Yes, that will be at variance with what many people think around here. But trust Gates, he gave indices and cleverly showed through graphs and figures that we are no longer tied to the past.

First, he dismissed the notion that the world is steep in poverty to the vey lips with reference to Africa. To Gates, the basic premise of such notion is false and according to him the fact is, incomes and other measures of human welfare are rising almost everywhere, including in Africa. And with the aid of a graph, he told the story of a camel with two humps.  In Gates mind, things have largely changed in the world and Africa has risen from its own ashes.

A half-century ago, he said, the distribution of income in the world looked like a camel with two humps. The first hump represented the so -called developing world. The second hump represented people in wealthier countries (mostly in the west). But the world is no longer separated into the West and the rest. More than a billion people have risen out of extreme poverty, and most of humanity is now in the large drometary-like hump in the middle. In one of his tweets last Wednesday, Gates said: “The world is better than it’s ever been, but I’m struck by how few people know this.”

To be sure, Gates narrated how almost all of the global economy was in the West in 1960.  For instance, Per capita income in the United States was about $15,000 a year. (That’s income per person, so $60,000 a year for a family of four.) Across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, incomes per person were far lower. Brazil: $1,982. China: $928. Botswana: $383. And so on.

Years later, Gate said, “I would see this disparity myself when I travelled. Melinda and I visited Mexico City in 1987 and were surprised by the poverty we witnessed. There was no running water in most homes, so we saw people trekking long distances by bike or on foot to fill up water jugs. It reminded us of scenes we had seen in rural Africa. The guy who ran Microsoft’s Mexico City office would send his kids back to the United States for checkups to make sure the smog wasn’t making them sick.

“Today, the city is mind-blowingly different. Its air is as clean as Los Angeles’ (which isn’t great, but certainly an improvement from 1987). There are high-rise buildings, new roads, and modern bridges. There are still slums and pockets of poverty, but by and large when I visit there now I think, Wow, most people who live here are middle-class. What a miracle.”

And for Africa, Gates is not comfortable with the prophets of doom. “Don’t let anyone tell you that Africa is worse off today than it was 50 years ago. Income per person has in fact risen in sub-Saharan Africa over that time, and quite a bit in a few countries. After plummeting during the debt crisis of the 1980s, it has climbed by two thirds since 1998, to nearly $2,200 from just over $1,300. Today, more and more countries are turning toward strong sustained development, and more will follow. Seven of the 10 fastest-growing economies of the past half-decade are in Africa.”

Of course, when I made my research to confirm his figure of 10 fastest-growing economies, I found that Libya, South Sudan, Sierra Leone, The Gambia and Mozambique, all made the list. All the countries listed in the top 10 have a growth rate that is above 8 per cent. Shockingly, South Sudan is the world’s fastest growing economy with a growth rate of 32.039 per cent. The second and third positions are taken by Libya and Sierra Leone. Now Africa’s middle class has tripled in size over the last 30 years with a figure of 313 million people, which is greater than 34 per cent of the population on the continent.

In Africa Nigeria is ranked one of the seven most favourable countries for trade and investment. Why? It is because there has been some changes which Gates alluded to in his wisdom of how to view the world now as contained in his 2014 Gates Annual Letter. And if we sit back as Nigerians for a true reflection in the midst of many myths and unfair comments about our country, we can truly agree with Gates that we are not doomed to stay poor. If we could achieve growth rate that is above 7 per cent while we are still struggling with power generation, what will happen when we finally become a country with 24-hours uninterrupted power supply?

In 2013, Nigeria attracted over $7 billion in Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) making Nigeria as the number one destination for investments in Africa, according to the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).
We have listen to and read the testimonies of a booming non-oil sector including mobile phones and cement. For instance, Nigeria is Africa’s largest cement market. Cement output capacity has expanded to 28.5 million metric tonnes in 2013 from 2 million metric tonnes in 2002.

The largest number of active mobile phone subscribers in Africa is in Nigeria (121.8 million). Nigeria’s 56 million internet subscribers are helping to drive electronic payments. Now, the value of e-payment transactions in 2012 was N2.09trn (US$13.2bn), of this amount N1.98trn was from ATM transactions. We have seen some progress made in infrastructure revamp in at least more than 15 states of the federation and of course the story of MINT- Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey  grouped as emerging economic giants is another one.

Agreed, the cost of running the Nigeria government is high. Adding to this cost is the inefficiency and leakages that have since become monumental, but shouldn’t we rather look at Nigeria the way Gates is looking at the world now?

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