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| Alhaji Atiku Abubakar. |
Former Vice President, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar has revealed
how he made his first business decision as far back as 1971 in Nigeria.
Atiku made this revelation at the
Africa’s Youth Entrepreneurs Conference and Award night where he was bestowed
with the Honourary Achiever Award in Lagos, an award of “Honourary African
Outstanding Entrepreneur” which he dedicated to Nigerian youths, urging them to
have more drive towards entrepreneurship.
The former vice president says, “I
came to Lagos on June 29, 1969 and after my two years training (with the
Nigeria Customs Service); I was posted to the border station of Idi-Iroko. At
that time, the Badagry Road had not been constructed and the only means of
transportation to the rest of the West African corridor was through the
Idi-Iroko border to what used to be called Dahomey and what is now known as
Benin Republic.
“On getting to Idi-Iroko, my first
posting, I was not married and what I discovered was that the most promising
business was transportation. Many pickup vans were transporting women traders
from Ajase (Port Novo) to Lagos every morning, and every evening from Lagos
back to Port Novo.
“So I asked myself, how I can seize
the opportunity of this moving business. I came over to Lagos and in those days
SCOA were the sole distributors of Peugeot, so I went to SCOA and I signed a hire-purchase
agreement and bought four of those pickups and gave them to four different
drivers and every day they will bring their returns to me and at the end of the
month, I will go to SCOA and pay them.
“I wasn’t married, so my salary was
intact and in addition I was saving from what I was getting from my transport
business. So, sometime, to be an entrepreneur you must have the ingenuity to be
an entrepreneur.”
According to the former Vice President, “the educational
system we operated in the First Republic provided our students then the
opportunity to either go to universities or go to technical colleges or to go
to crafts schools. There was never a dropout in that kind of educational
system. The dullest was trained on a skill and given the capital to start a
business.”
However he says, we regrets that “suddenly, Nigeria moved away from that to a system of
education where you train only job seekers.”
He pointed out that the products of
this educational system don’t know how to do anything else other than to seek
for jobs, adding that they cannot self-employ themselves. “So, what I am trying
to say is that my Nigeria is possible and your own Nigeria is possible”.
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