Little Things Done Well, Key to African Industrialization

Man aspires for greatness and tries to attain it. He seeks to associate and be associated with lofty things. He will put all his efforts to be recognized. On the other hand, things deemed little and of less honorable value do not get his attention.

However history has proven that most times the little unrecognized tasks are the necessary frame work for large complex systems. It is the basic part of a system however simple and dishonorable, that make up the complex and honorable system.

The human body for example and all other biological systems consist of the cell which when compared with the entirety of the body is not spectacular. The amazing world of computers wouldn’t have been real without the unimpressive and lone-standing 1s and 0s.

The lesson to be drawn for us in the African context is that we have to go back to the basics of all the endeavors we trade. Somehow, in our bid to catch up with the developed world, we have jumped the basics and have held on to the finished complex systems. The effect is that when things malfunction, as they are bound to, we do not possess the know-how to address them. We then have to reach out to the developed world for help; this has kept us dependent.

When machines in our factory break down even though it is a simple device, we have nothing to do than to invite expatriate staff. A new multi-million Naira equipment is bought, then develops a fault but nothing can be done about it, so the machine gathers dust forever. There is a need to train people in the basics of machine designs.

A researcher seeks baseline data for his work and obtains for other developed nations but then cannot get those of his country whereas there are thousands of researchers in the universities. How do you do science without baseline data, how do you explain concepts without a basic framework? We need to go back to the basics.

Leaning they say begins from infancy, so stories and poems are read to infants, illustrations are made for children, and comics and novels are made for teenagers. Such learning materials are expected to be readily available and relevant to the social context of the recipients. Educators therefore put lots of time in developing these simple and “non-scholarly” learning aids. In the Nigerian context, these aids are not readily available while available ones are outside our social context. Developing learning aids with the local context though a non-spectacular task is necessary for progress.

In summary, we as Nigerian need to look through all aspect of our live especially the technologies we got from the developed world and seek to gain the basics so we can become thoroughly independent.