The dust raised by Mark Zuckerberg’s visit may have settled in the news but not so for those of us who has been frontline advocates of faster and deeper broadband penetration in Nigeria and Africa. It is very easy for us to just treat Mark’s visit as a mere celebrity billionaire visit to a 3rd world country and fail to see the lessons in it. Below are some keynotes you must take away from his visit:

Nigerians are world class in creativity. From Jobberman to Konga and on to Andela, Nigerian youths have proven to be equally as creative as their western world counterparts. We have created things worthy of global interest and business competitiveness. Mark Zuckerberg’s visit and even in the most of his speech buttressed this fact that “a Nigerian youth is capable of creativity that can impact the world”.
We only need a platform. Any Nigerian youth can stand shoulder-per with any other youth from any part of the world. Mark was almost rhetoric with his phrase “I love the entreprenural energy here”. We got it, really. We only need the platform to be showcased to the world.

The platform we need is internet! Every Nigerian youth entrepreneur or start-up that has reached the global stage was found just in our place: the internet! I am also a personal testimony to this. The number of Nigerian talents being discovered and placed in strategic positions globally has been on the increase, most of which were discovered for their talents showcased online via recruitment portals or testimonials to projects they’ve successfully delivered. Flutterwave, Jobberman, Konga, Andela, Printivo are just a handful of Nigerians who were found and taken to the global stage via internet.

What now are we doing in line with this revelation? That is the question I’d ask everyone I’ll meet today and till the very end of this year. We are all crying recession when we have the very one resource that can change our common lot, HUMAN CAPITAL, not that we need heavy budgetary allocations to bring them to the global stage, just the right broadband penetration strategy policies and perhaps some intervention funding in mass deployment of the infrastructure to make the end user bandwidth subscription even cheaper and much more readily available to sell talents, products and capacity on the global stage.