I like the way the Internet intrudes, without warning or apology. Days ago, in a small town in the south west of England, I sought a hotel room, last minute, as I often find myself doing. I tried my luck by showing up at the front desk of some fancy hotel in the middle of the town, but it was beyond my budget. So I did what every sensible person does these days – and what I should in fact have done well before that moment – I went online.It didn’t take me long to find a suitably priced option, just outside town, which I promptly booked and paid for using my Nigerian debit card.When I got there I discovered that the proprietor – an Englishman who looked to be in his fifties – had only just signed up for online bookings, and wasn’t yet used to the idea of having people book for his rooms off the Internet. He asked if I had paid online, and moaned briefly about how long it would take to get his money from the booking site. For someone used to people showing up and paying in cash, this new reality would take some getting used to.But it was also clear that he was resigned to the idea of the Internet as a business tool. It was here to change the way he was doing business, and he was going to have to play along and adapt. The Internet, like the globalisation with which it is inextricably intertwined, is a bully of sorts; people and countries and attitudes are going to be dragged along kicking and screaming.What the Internet does best is provide simpler and cheaper and faster ways of doing things we used to do without the Internet: sending messages, buying stuff, raising money, finding news, protesting government foolishness, publishing, etc. It shamelessly favours efficiency, which by implication often permits the new and small and nimble things of this world to confound the big and wise and established.The Internet allows me to become my own travel agent, to do all my airline and hotel bookings by myself, and put old-fashioned call-to-book travel agent in trouble.Adire merchants in Abeokuta are using Whatsapp and Facebook to advertise their wares; spare parts merchants are using 2Go to coordinate their supply chain structures across their outlets in Lagos and Nnewi and Aba. It may not be the most efficient use of the Internet, but it is a radical departure from yesterday’s offline scenarios. The same energy yahoo-yahoo boys deployed a decade ago, to scam greedy victims in Western capitals, is now finding outlets in more legitimate entrepreneurial endeavor.Not even the sex business will be left behind; soon the girls that today line Sanusi Fafunwa Street and Allen Avenue in Lagos, will realise that they can move their business online, break free from the grips of greedy pimps, and evade the gangs of policemen whose stock-in-trade is arresting them and extorting money and free sex.And the revolution has only just started; there’s still plenty of untouched terrain. The opportunities are immense, and Nigerians, having long demonstrated a knack for deploying entrepreneurial energy in amazing ways (from Nollywood, which started out as an inventive way to sell VHS tapes in bulk, to the late Otunba Gaddafi’s money-spinning ‘shit’ business), are well-placed to prosper online.This column is meant as a standing challenge to Nigerians – entrepreneurs and investors alike – to go all out and embrace the opportunities the Internet offers. And these opportunities can only get bigger, as Nigeria’s relatively insignificant middle-class expands, as the generation of young persons, raised on the Internet, grow up and start exerting their spending powers, and as Internet access gets faster and cheaper.It would be tragic if Nigerians sat back and allowed foreign investors and their capital – admirable as they might be – to monopolise the opportunities on the Internet. Tens of millions of dollars in foreign capital has flowed into the country in recent years, from the US and Germany and Sweden and elsewhere, to fund internet start-ups focused on markets here. Paypal launched in Nigeria in June, a huge first step in connecting Nigeria to the global economy by making it easier for cross-border transactions to take place. The story of Nigeria’s Internet revolution cannot be written without these adventurers from abroad.But it would be great to see Nigerian capital and Nigerian investors also play big, and match foreign inflows naira for dollar. I should point out that this push for home-grown ambitions is not for reasons of xenophobic bias, but instead for very practical – and quite simple – reasons: Nigerian businesses will enrich Nigerians and the Nigerian economy in ways no foreigner can or will.And the capital is available, right here at home. I haven’t got any data (so any useful pointers would be welcome) but anecdotal evidence suggests that there is a lot of idle capital in Nigeria. People with money they have no idea what to do with. A lot of it is illegimately acquired money, no doubt (corrupt dividends of bureaucratic and political adventure) but provenance notwithstanding, all that money would do far more good supporting local e-commerce ideas and initiatives than shuffling around inflating real estate bubbles in Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt, or sitting in bank accounts in Geneva or Johannesburg.The obstacle to this productive use is knowledge. Many people with money in Nigeria would admit to not “getting” the Internet. They get – i.e. understand – oil and gas, the property business, and shipping, and even manufacturing. Of course they get “contracts”, but the Internet – nah, too complicated. And so all that money they have no use for does nothing for the country that has allowed them to earn it. So herein lies an opportunity for those who know and ‘get’ the Internet (and Internet-based commerce generally) to explain it to those who don’t, but have got the money to invest.I don’t want to be accused of painting an unjustifiably rosy picture of the possibilities the Internet offers. It’s a brutal field. Most internet commerce ventures will not succeed; they will lose money, and deflate the dreams of those who created them. But that’s no excuse to not try. Of those that succeed, a handful will do so to an astounding extent, creating billions of dollars in value for founders, investors, employees, communities, and countries, and making up for the losses chalked up by the failures.Two weeks ago Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba went public, instantly creating a company whose market value exceeds the total capitalization of Nigeria’s stock exchange. If only one Nigerian Internet/e-commerce business succeeded to a level a fifth that of Alibaba, it would instantly push Dangote Cement to a distant second place on Nigeria’s list of most valuable companies. And it would very likely be a business story in which a capricious government license or concession wouldn’t have a starring role.Follow me on Twitter: @toluogunlesi
Via @FreshMindWorld
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