By Nkiruka Nnorom
Ejike Nwuba is the founder and CEO of The Renaissanceafrica Company, a corporate training and consulting firm. He is a lawyer, educator, corporate trainer, and personal development consultant, who believes that everyone is capable of achieving greatness with the right education and proper orientation.
In this interview, he gave an insight into the underlying message of his new book, “THE MAKING OF CHAMPIONS: How to Unleash Your Innate Greatness”.
Congratulations on the publication of your book, “The Making of Champions”. What would you say informed the choice of that title?
The book is called ‘The Making of Champions’ because it is a book designed to raise a new breed of leaders and visionaries who will turn the table of fortunes around for our great continent, Africa.
A Champion is essentially someone who wins a fight or cause for others. A champion is a hero. Africa has been in the doldrums for centuries because we have a dearth of heroes. We lack champions who are ready to pay the price to change the African narrative.
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And champions are made; they are not born. There is a champion in each and every one of us. Each of us has something spectacular to offer this great continent. We have immense potential to impact the world but without the proper orientation and training, we may never discover and maximize our potential.
And so this book is tailored to help our people unleash the champion, the hero, the innate greatness in them and impact the world.
Is the book targeted at any particular group/audience and what message are you seeking to pass across to Nigerians and Africa with the book?
The book is largely targeted at the heartbeat of our continent – the youths between the ages of 15 to 45. 70% of the African population are youths. The book is also an invaluable resource for leaders in diverse fields, policy makers, mentors, parents, guardians of all ages with the responsibility to raise the younger ones.
Our youths are in dire need of direction. Unemployment in Nigeria, for instance, is scandalous. As at August 2020, the National Bureau of Statistics reported that unemployment rate in Nigeria is at a whopping 27%, while underemployment rate has increased to 28.6%. Mind you, these are very conservative estimates! University degrees are becoming worthless. A lot of our best brains and top professionals in diverse fields have given up on the country and the continent and are migrating abroad in droves in search of greener pasture. It is very disturbing today that a lot of our young men have taken to internet fraud and a lot of our young women have taken to prostitution to make money.
Beyond that, today there is a serious erosion of values. A lot of our young people (the ‘Instagram’ generation,) want to make money at all costs and they want it all NOW! Today, we have reality TV shows that “reward” young people with millions of naira for lasciviousness, debauchery, and promiscuity.
A lot of our young people are just despondent, hopeless, and directionless. A lot of our young people have settled for a life of mediocrity and obscurity, shrouded by a defeatist mentality. Most of them never look inwards- they never develop and maximize their innate potential. Our young people really need guidance. They need help. They need it now.
This is why God inspired me ten years ago to put together this seminal book to equip, teach, inspire, motivate and provoke our youths to look inwards and discover, develop and deploy their innate God-given potential to impact the world.
The message of the book is that there is untold greatness in each one of us locked in our potential. We must look inwards to discover our purpose, calling, gifts, talents and passion, and develop and harness them to solve the problems around us. Like Aristotle rightly said: ‘Where your talents and the needs of the world cross lies your calling’. We want Nigerians and Africans to realize that our destiny lies in our own hands.
What is your scorecard for Nigeria and Africa in terms of youth development?
Zero. Like I have always said, the greatest resource of every nation is its people not its natural resources. For years, African nations have abandoned and neglected its most precious and most appreciable asset – human capital, people, the youths. This is the immediate cause of Africa’s current predicament. Great countries build great people and great people build great nations.
In the recent December 2019 United Nations Global Human Development Index (HDI) which measures human capital development in income, health and education, African nations, including Nigeria ranked the lowest and poorest out of the 189 countries assessed. 31 African countries with the most dismal scores in the index had Low Human Development, including Nigeria which ranked #158.
Our governments have not invested in our young people. Our educational sector has been totally relegated to the background. What is our annual budget for education? UNESCO has long advised that at least 26% of the annual budget of developing countries should be devoted to education? But what is the reality today in Nigeria and other African nations? The budget for humanitarian and disaster relief dwarfs the combined budgets for education and health combined. You can see we have not set our priorities right.
Look at Singapore. How did they metamorphose from a third world country to a first world country in less than 35 years? In 1959, 45 million people died of hunger and starvation in the great famine of China. That’s about the entire population of South Africa. But look at China today. China is the world’s second largest economy with a GDP of over a princely 19 trillion US dollars. How did they achieve it? Education, human capital development. Developing their people not natural resources. China has the largest educational system in the world. China has free compulsory basic education from nursery school level to JSS 3 Level. They have a well-structured elaborate and qualitative vocational education system at different levels. They have been able to create a very skilled population. So, the biggest corporations in the world have moved their factories and manufacturing hubs to China. China is the leading manufacturer of goods in the world today. That is why they are successful. I explained all these elaborately detail in my book, “The Making of Champions”.
Is that to say our schools, parents/guardians have not done enough to help the youths maximize their potential?
Yes. First, our formal schools are in a deplorable condition. The standard of education has fallen. Our public schools are an apology and this is where we are raising our leaders!
In spite of that, the formal education we acquire in school is only an aspect of education. We have formal education and informal education but I tell people informal education is way more important and that is lacking today in this part of the world.
Jim Rohn, the great business philosopher said: “General education will earn you a living, but self-education will make you a fortune”. What young people acquire from schools mostly is general education. Our educational system today is for the long-gone industrial age and not our present Knowledge Worker Age/ Information Age. Informal education is largely self-education – education you give yourself through personal study, training and practice in your field of interest. World over, the most successful people have tremendous self-education in their fields of interest. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook started coding at age 10. Serena Williams started playing tennis at age 4. Tiger Woods started playing golf at age 2. Steven Spielberg started learning how to shoot movies at age 6. Chimamanda Adichie started writing at age 7. They didn’t wait for university degrees or formal education. This is where a lot of our young people are missing it.
In this book, we redefined education. We have the whole of Chapter 2 devoted to it. Education comes from the Latin word, ‘educo’, which means to educe in English, that is to ‘bring out or draw out from within’. So, real education is actually bringing out a person’s innate potential, not the mere acquisition of certificates. Real education is the development of a person’s innate potential and this is something general education cannot achieve. This is explained in detail with illuminating illustrations in the book.
You believe in entrepreneurship and grooming a new generation of youths that do not put their destiny in paid jobs. How does this resonate with the message of the book?
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The book is about looking inwards and unleashing your innate greatness in whatever field of endeavor you are called into. It is not limited to entrepreneurs. Every human being on this planet has a gift, a calling, a purpose.
Like I said earlier and explained elaborately in the book, to unleash your innate greatness, you must use your innate potential (gift, talent, passion, dreams) to meet the needs of the world around you
Unemployment is a humungous problem in Nigeria and many parts of Africa. In 2014, Nigerian Immigration Service advertised 4,000 vacant positions for mass recruitment and a whopping 6.5 million young people applied. 100 people were injured and 23 people died as a result of the stampede at the screening centers. In 2019, NNPC advertised for recruitment and a whopping 26 million people applied! It’s embarrassing. There are no jobs. Who will solve the problem? You and I. We must stop waiting for the government. It is not the duty of the government in any part of the world to create jobs. Their duty is to create an enabling environment while it is the responsibility of individuals- you and I- to create wealth and create jobs. This is a free enterprise/ capitalist economy and not a socialist economy like the defunct USSR.
A part of the book dealt extensively with the power of entrepreneurship and the dire need for entrepreneurship in Africa. The solution to poverty and unemployment in Africa is entrepreneurship. I gave copious lucid illustrations of many entrepreneurs who built widely successful businesses against all odds in different continents of the world, and examples of many nations that radically transformed their economies by promoting and enabling youth entrepreneurship. You can imagine one single company, Walmart, the US behemoth retail chain is richer than the whole of Nigeria! Its annual revenue in 2019 was over $500 billion, while Nigeria’s total GDP as a whole country in 2019 was $446.5 billion.
There is so much poverty and unemployment in Nigeria and Africa because we have a dearth of entrepreneurs. We are in dire need of entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs create jobs and create wealth and our youths must rise to the occasion now! The poverty and unemployment in Africa is an immense opportunity for them to make a difference.
You mentioned that the book was in the works for 10 years. Why did it take that long?
I got the vision from God to write the book in 2011 and I wanted it to be a classic. There are classics on different subjects. For instance, “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” by Robert Kiyosaki is a classic on personal finance. “The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership” by John Maxwell is a classic on leadership. “Think & Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill is a classic on personal development. “Built To Last” by Jim Collins & Jerry Porras and “Good To Great” by Jim Collins are classics on business.
Classics are not mere books. They take time to assemble. It took 25 years to write “Think & Grow Rich”, over 6 years to write “Built To Last”, 5 years to write “Good To Great”, and over 20 years to write “The Decline & Fall of The Roman Empire”.
I wanted “The Making of Champions” to be a 21st century classic on self-actualization and personal development for Africa. So, I didn’t want to churn out anything shoddy, half-baked or mediocre. I finished the first manuscript in 2011 but I felt it wasn’t ready. It went through copious iterations before I was able to come up with the final work.
Mind you, it’s quite a big book spanning over 317 pages and it contains over 40 biographies.
10 years is pretty long anyway. I am a bit of a perfectionist. The demerit of being a perfectionist is that it takes too long to get things done, but the merit is that you get them done excellently.
What has been the response to the book among Nigerians?
Tremendous – not surprisingly. Most of them caught epiphanies reading the book. It was a powerful eye-opener and life-changing according to them. Some ordered more copies to give to friends and loved ones. Some have adopted it for diverse capacity building initiatives for young people.
The book was released towards the end of July 2020. We just started touring with the book, and the reception has been overwhelming. All the tertiary institutions we have visited have adopted the book for capacity building training programmes for their undergraduates. The book has also been adopted by a reputable international organization of high schools for a capacity building programme for senior high school students across Africa. Another organization has adopted it for their teacher training academy.
What are your plans of building on the message, or better still, the campaign, you have started with this book?
Thank you so much for that question. Like you said, it is, indeed, a campaign. The book, generally, is for African youths between ages 15 to 45 but we have a special vision also to catch them young. So, we are taking the campaign and crusade to schools.
In 2015, I got a vision to develop a course from the book: The Making of Champions Course – a training programme developed from the book for secondary schools/high schools and tertiary institutions across Africa. It’s a 5-day Course, delivered with PowerPoint Slides and Practical Exercises to help the students internalize the message and reprogram their minds for success and greatness. We also have a Workbook for the book to help the readers practically apply the powerful principles in the book to their personal lives. These were all developed two years ago.
The schools and organizations have largely opted for on-site classes. We are developing the online version anyway for international participants and schools/organizations which prefer it.
We will be going on an international tour from 2021 to take the programme to educational institutions across Africa.
We also have plans to collaborate with public-spirited organizations, and governments to organize free capacity-building programmes for some public schools across the continent.
I founded a human capital development and management consulting firm, The Renaissanceafrica Company, 10 years ago. One of our paramount goals is to transform the lives of millions of African youths and help them unleash their potential and transform our beleaguered continent. This book is the instrument for that positive change.
We will use this book to change the mindset and destinies of millions of African youths.
Are you concerned about the book not having a real impact considering dwindling reading culture among Nigerians and Africans?
That’s a good question. That is exactly why we have released the book. We are visionaries. I am a visionary. I have not come to conform to the status quo but to disrupt it.
They say: “If you want to hide something from an African put it in a book”. Most Africans have no reading culture. Look at where it has landed us! That is why Africa is behind. Ignorance and prosperity are not bedfellows. If we must chart a new course for this continent, we must become readers. Our young people MUST develop reading culture. It is non-negotiable.
That is our goal. We want to promote reading culture among the young people. That is the only way we can change our continent. Readers are leaders. This is why we have taken the campaign to the schools to catch them young.
We want to change the world, not conform to the status quo.
Like George Bernard Shaw, the renowned British playwright said: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man adapts the world to himself; therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man”.
What do you think awaits Nigeria in the next 30 to 40 years given the poor attention to entrepreneurial training and technical education, coupled with our poor reading culture?
Should the status quo remain the same, it portends grave danger to the future of this country. In fact, it may lead to a completely failed state and transform our youths who are supposed to be tremendous assets to our country into total liabilities and weapons of mass destruction.
70 per cent of our population in Nigeria and Africa are youths.
If the Nigerian government and the African governments are really serious and sincere about developing their economies, they must put their money where their mouth is; they must invest heavily in youth capacity building. They must invest in education. They must invest also in vocational and technical education, which our government has long abandoned at our own peril, to get our teeming youths skilled and productive. We need to go to China, the largest economy in Asia and the second-largest economy in the world, and Germany, the largest economy in Europe, and study the phenomenal job they have created with vocational and technical education. We need free compulsory qualitative basic formal education like China has done and we must provide an enabling environment, incentivize and promote youth entrepreneurship and the burgeoning of a virile private sector like all the advanced wealthy nations have done.
These things are non-negotiable.
Otherwise, this country and the rest of this continent will have a very bleak, dismal, and gloomy future. It is time to chart a new course for Nigeria and Africa. Absolutely anything is possible. Our destiny lies in our own hands and our time is now.
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