As for me what I want to achieve with this post instead of tapering off is to discuss how the rest of Africa (specifically the talented youth that are prepared) be given the opportunity in multitudes to be world class. I don’t now if you notice but the world and the way it works can only be best described as a winner takes all game. When you are highly skilled as Cal Newport described in his book So Good They Can’t Ignore You :

“The good news about deliberate practice is that it will push you past this plateau and into a realm where you have little competition.”

Meaning when highly skilled individuals emerge from hard work and years of deliberate practice they are worth a lot more than the average performer.

Let me give a shabby explanation of that 80/20 theory? Remember it? If you have never heard of it, it was discovered by Pareto in Italy. He was an economist and while moving in his garden he noticed that 80% of the pods that were produced were from a smaller group of the plant populace in that garden. He applied this new idea he stumbled upon to the Italian economy. And he saw quite the exact same thing; less than 10% in fact of the population possessed more than 90% of the economy’s wealth.

The top 10-20% developers that are world class will and are grabbing 80% of the market ‘dollarzz’ and the rest will be left with just 20% to fodder on. That’s terrible, isn’t it? But this is what has been happening in Africa compared to the wold . For years. And to bring us back to the issue of China being a bitter back stabber, they were as a nation in the same pot of soup. Data doesn’t say they are ahead of the Western/Russian powerhouses yet but the nation doesn’t ship in software as it used to before present.

China as of now sells their software to other countries same as the applied materials and semiconductor market. China’s local companies whose state of technology was being overshadowed by foreign manufacturing giants in that past now win international contracts in Australia and the likes.

Here is what Nigeria is spending on software importation :

Here is what we make from software exportation in Billions

Are you kidding ? You were expecting a graph?? That thing is non-existent.

The Orientals applied what I call a three-pronged strategy to alleviate their lack of domain knowledge, it didn’t fix it. Not a golden bullet in a way but China now ships their own software/manufactured products out to the abroad and win contracts in foreign countries. Even giving the U.S. a run for their money in mainstream industrial production.

If that was Nigeria wouldn’t that solve the ‘Developer Quality’ issue we all agree and believe we need to decipher?

The Three Pronged Plan to Set Africa in the Right Direction

What this plan should do is create an environment where well-grounded traditional software programmers can emerge from.