In the last two decades, Nigerian governments have been preaching skills and entrepreneurial knowledge as the only way our youths could extricate themselves from the bondage of unemployment. As virulent as this campaign seems to be, some hearkened to this campaign while some decided to turn deaf ears to the clarion call.
Governments had ceaselessly preached the need for youth to stop relying on white collar jobs and be innovative to be able to remain relevant in the 21st-century economy. It was under this context that some youths had yielded to this call and Akin Alabi, founder of Nairabet, was an exemplary innovative youth who is making a wave in the entrepreneurship sector in the country.
Alabi started NairaBET, Nigeria’s pioneer and leading sports betting platform in 2009 after he identified what he calls “a starving crowd”. He knew Nigerians are sports fanatics and he decided to tap into this opportunity and it worked out.
Besides the NairaBET company, he has also diversified into football business, book-writing business, digital marketing, business coaching and seminars, and is also contesting for the House of Representatives in Oyo State, to be able to expand the scope of philanthropic gesture to humanity in the coming elections slated for February.
Alabi, 41, is one of those few youths whose doggedness known no bounds. He is an incurable optimist, who is not easily weighed down by challenges. Like the revered late Prime Minister of Britain, Williams Churchill, he said: ‘an Optimist Will always See Opportunity in every Difficulty’ and make a profit out of it. After his visa got rejected in 2001, he never wavered. He remains undaunted to move with the tide and he decided to collate his experiences navigating the complicated visa application process and sell that knowledge online to first-time applicants.
He said: “So anything I learned, I created the information pack and I put it online and sold it,”
“I started downloading information tutorials and videos about the Canadian application process. I put all the information together and said some people will be interested in this so let me put it out there for sale. So in January 2003, I launched my first business, which was selling information products, and the first information product was this Canadian visa package,” says Alabi.
“I went there myself and I did everything myself and I was surprised I didn’t need a lawyer. So I created another information product – how to register your business with the CAC without a lawyer in 21 days or less. I put that out and people were buying. So anything I learned, I created the information pack and I put it online and sold it,” says Alabi.
His innovative power has gone beyond the shores of the nation. During his sojourn to the United Kingdom, he dazed the white men by his creativity and skills in digital networks, but for his glowing love and confidence in his country, Nigeria, he decided to return to his fatherland to help propagate the message of role modelling and reignite the passion for self-made success among his peers.
“I got to the UK and wanted to work. I looked at the potential of what I could make and after four months, reality dawned on me. I didn’t want to become an illegal immigrant and felt I was better off doing what I was doing in Nigeria. So I said ‘I had something going for me, it might not be big but there was potential’. I said ‘let me go back and make it bigger’. I was not investing in the business so it was time to do it properly.”
It marvelled many to see an accomplished young man, who had made so much prominence and wealth to ever thought of plunging into the
Nigeria’s murky water of politics. But his answer to this nagging question reverberating on the lips of his admirers was simple: ‘Man does not live for himself alone, you have to live for others”, he said.
This philosophical assertion was in line with what Mark Twain said: “Forget yourself for others so that Others will never forget you’.
Alabi promised that he would make tremendous positive impacts in the lives of his people if given the opportunity to serve. He considered the little he had given to humanity as tips of the icebergs compare to what he would offer if freely given the mandate to serve his constituents as a public officer.
He said he had built a towering reputation that had gone beyond the confine of the country and won’t descend so low to smear those respect his business had brought to him as one Nigerian and African youth, who could be a good ambassador and role model wherever he goes.
Alabi promised that his own style of giving back to the populace will be unique in the sense that he believes sovereignty lies in the people who give the mandate to the leader in trust. He said he won’t pay lip service to the bottom-top approach being canvassed by politicians but had never been operational, except by few leaders in the country.
“My own type of leadership will be distinct. I will allow people to take ownership of the government. I won’t personalize governance, because I have made it in life. I am not going there to amass wealth but to give to the people of my constituency.
“I know poverty is in our land and I have at my own personal level tried to alleviate it, but having a broader platform in government will help me a lot in contributing my own quota to the upliftment of my people.
“I know that knowledge economy remains the best. I will contribute in giving scholarship and bursary to students, give empowerments to unemployed graduate youths to be able to stand on their own, social security for widows and widowers and I will expose my colleague youths to creative business ideas that can make them employers of labour rather than to be job seekers”.
People are not skeptical about the fact that Akin Alabi’s forayed into politics will be a paradigm shift in the country’s body polity and help in reshaping our society to believe in putting a round peg, in a round hole.
Ahmed Salami, A Political Analyst and Media Consultant Writes from Ibadan, Oyo State
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