The Making Of 106 Millennial Billonaires, Is Africa Backwards?
TECH DIGEST – Among all children that were born between 1981 and 1996 across the globe, 106 billionaires have emerged.
While 33 of them are Americans and 23 are Chinese, NONE has emerged from the whole of Africa!
In a way, this is some kind of scorecard for the African education system and by extension, a reflection of our parenting choices in the last 40 years!
Please, do not dismiss this as vanity upon vanity as we always tend to overcompensate in Africa.
The richest Millennial in the world today is Mark Zuckerberg and you will agree with me that his $97 Billion USD net worth is not all there is to his achievements. He gave us Facebook and everything that comes with it!
It is easy to say he dropped out of school, but we often ignore the fact that he did not leave school because he was a dullard or because he never learnt anything.
At a tender age, his father taught him how to write codes and even hired a professional tutor to train him further. It might be that these private lessons were just enough for him to start out something that grew into Facebook today.
Like almost every other person in this list, Mark’s father was very intentional about his child’s future. He set him on a path, tech path.
Of all 106 billionaires in the world that are between the ages of 25 and 40, more than 30 are also into TECH business! while another half of the remaining are doing businesses that are powered by TECH!
A great number of the rest are into Media, Entertainment and Fashion!
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Yet, African parents have strong aversion for introducing their children to TECH, arguing that they must go through the rigours of conventional learning processes.
Presently, there is a raging argument against the use of android phones by secondary school students in Nigeria!
And, I always wonder, to what effect?
So that our statistics will blow up by 2050 with numbers of unemployable youths?
And, that will be just fine because after all, we were able to stop them from accessing YouTube and TikTok while growing up?
I have read arguments that the disadvantages of exposing children to technology out weights the advantages of it!
Our choices in the last 50 years or so, pertaining to education processes have been nothing short of mediocrity!
While China was encouraging their children to develop themselves in technology, we were doing what again?
And by this, our generation has relegated Africa to a continent of little or no consequence on the global stage.
Unlike previous African generations that compete head to head with the rest of the world with innovations and advancement, ours is a copy and paste generation that is always at the mercy of the western world.
As a nation, our economies do not contribute to the rest of the world. In frontiers of innovation and technology, we (as a nation) do not have anything to offer.
Instead, we are suffering a great deal of brain drain, bleeding us of our young talents!
Today is the right time to start putting in place new mechanisms that will dictate a different, better outcome for the next African generation.
We must chart new paths for today’s African children so that in the next tide of global affairs, Africa must rise again to it’s rightful position among other continents.
