TET PRESENTS: Nadayar Enegesi

 

 

When I first started this new chapter on The Eféctive Times over a year ago, I never imagined that I would be interviewing the Nadayar Enegesi; a man of multiple talents and skills sewn into the very fabric of his highly entrepreneurial DNA. But here we are.

In speaking with him, it was clear that his success was certainly not an accident but one that was the perfect combination of grit and serendipity. These are important factors, especially when dealing with the unforgiving and harsh realities of the business landscape in Nigeria.

In 2019, after leaving Andela, Enegesi co-founded ‘Eden Life’ app with Prosper Otemuyiwa and Silm Momoh, venturing into the domiciliary sector. The app allows users to have an on-demand concierge service where they can book for assistance depending on their domestic requirements. As it stands, Eden’s services includes housekeeping, food delivery, laundry and personalised gifts. Set up as a subscription business model, for as little as ₦20,000 (£38) a month, customers can be afforded the luxury of not having to worry about doing chores.

The most conventional way that people obtain domestic help or as the Yoruba call it ‘omo odo’ is by usually hiring a (young) impoverished individual. An estimated 200,000 people are a part of this economy. This often leads to complications when there is no standard process of regulation.

We must be honest with ourselves - as Nigerians we do not have the best customer service. Nigerian vendors are notorious for compromising on quality of their products/services and tend to lack great interpersonal communication when dealing with customers. Enegesi having noticed the opportunity in fixing this problem says, “We know domestic services in the continent are broken. It is very difficult to get great service – we want to make it easy for people to get great service.”

The start-up’s demographic are upper middle-class Nigerian professionals who account for 2.5 million of the population. After a long day’s work and going through what feels like the Kamuku Forest trying to navigate out of the jungle that is Lagos traffic, it must be the epitome of success for one to be able to put their feet up once they get home. And for others, it could be the added benefit of being able to allocate more time on their side-hustles that will inevitably maximise their potential.

On average, Nigerians spend 30 hours a week in traffic which obviously is a result of the dreadful transport infrastructure in the country. Nevertheless, thanks to Enegesi and his team, Eden’s solution is on the right path to alleviate the contributing stressors that are part and parcel of living in a metropolitan city like Lagos.

Though Enegesi has much to be currently proud of in his career, it would be a glaring omission for one to mention his name and skirt over his previous achievements as the co-founder of the £500m tech recruitment monolith that is Andela.

After earning his Computer Science and Business Bachelor’s degree from the University of Waterloo, Canada in 2013, he hopped on a plane the following year back to Nigeria. Once he landed, he became the director of learning and development, where his role was to oversee the recruitment and training of the junior software developers.

Even though it wasn’t his first foray in entrepreneurship, Enegesi says his experience at Andela made him realise the importance of, “doing something that is going to make a dent.”

One of the great things about business is that when you have the right people around you, you grow together. His fellow co-founders Jeremy Johnson, Christina Sass, Ian Carnevale, Brice Nkengsa and Iyinoluwa Aboyeji have all gone on to excel further in their individual ventures and more importantly, continue to be supportive of each other’s ventures.

Similar to how over in the US they have the well-known Paypal Mafia which consists of the Paypal co-founders, I think it’s safe to say that Nigeria also has replicated that same formation with Andela.

The years of experience that Enegesi and his co-founders have accumulated provides them with the increased advantage of succeeding in subsequent projects.

In talking to Enegesi there seemed to be an acknowledgement of the fortunate position of being able to secure such a significant role as an individual in his early twenties. “Someone who doesn’t have a privileged background and does not have that network cannot get access to that level of capital to get started.” 

It is a very different outcome for most students in Nigeria today who come out of university with little to no job prospects.

And if that’s not enough stress, they have another (unnecessary, in my opinion) hurdle to overcome which is NYSC (National Youth Service Corps). This mandatory government programme to curb tribalism which was started in 1973 after Nigeria’s Civil War means that graduates must complete one year of service before they are then able to formally join the job market. During the graduate’s time as a civil servant, they earn a very low salary of ₦30,000 (£56) a month. And unless they studied medicine, a majority of graduates are assigned teaching positions irrespective of what they studied for their degree.

Probably the most public secret amongst corpers is that many a times students pay other corpers to sign the NYSC register on their behalf. This is to make it seem they have attended their post of duty so that they can receive their abysmal wages. Their living quarters are also known to be in subpar conditions. The obvious solution would be for students to gain skills that would maximise their potential on the job market. And even though we are seeing the simmering of a tech revolution in the country, Enegesi says, “every problem is an opportunity. We’re literally just in Chapter 1 as far as tech and ecosystem goes.”

As Africa’s youngest nation with an average age of 18 this is an issue that is dear and near to Enegesi’s heart. In 2018 he wrote a Medium post for Nigeria’s 58^th Independence Day, where he said: “Our youth are talented and hardworking, but they are also disenchanted because our country has failed to provide them with the opportunities to convert their brilliance into a desirable quality of life.”

The difference between a child being educated or not should have nothing to with their parents’ bank balance. It is in the country’s best interests that their citizens are both educated and employed.

The depreciation of the Naira since 2016 has also been a catalyst of the current recession. In addition, the coronavirus pandemic has caused there to be a 14% rise in unemployment. The combination of these economic downturns makes employers reluctant to hire new candidates.

Many young people have lost faith in the ability of a country like Nigeria to operate on meritocracy when its past is tainted with nepotism and oil oligarchs painting corruption and monopoly as the gateway to riches. There’s no denying that Enegesi and other entrepreneurs like him have helped lay the foundation and script for other aspiring founders to follow.

A free market exists with the purpose of fostering innovation within a nation. And that is what Nigeria desperately needs.

In the last few years, Nigeria has seen an explosion of entrepreneurial endeavours amongst young people, including people from the diaspora who have returned to Nigeria to assist in stimulating the country’s economy.

The poor business infrastructure in the country is why many start-ups de’ end up with K leg. As it stands, 80% of businesses fail in their first year in Nigeria and it makes scaling a business hard. Simple things such as electricity and internet data, that people take advantage of in other parts of the world are a luxury here.  

There seems to be a common theme with every entrepreneur that I interview which is their frustration with the government. For the life of them they (and I) cannot understand why Nigeria’s leaders are not more proactive about backing innovation. When I asked Nadayar what he thought the reasons could be, he was very mindful in the way he worded his response. “Maybe people don’t want to invest in a future they will not be a part of. […] It’s very tough for me to answer why it’s not happening when the reason it should be happening is so obvious.”

In 2019, Enegesi and his former colleagues had the opportunity to meet Twitter CEO and co-founder, Jack Dorsey and Facebook’s CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg. The presence of Big Tech giants gives the external validation that the country needs in signalling to investors overseas the abundance of talented founders that are working on scalable and exciting solutions within the country.

The injection of capital from international investors begged the question if Nigeria as one of the main emerging markets within Africa alongside Kenya, Egypt and South Africa, could stand on its own two feet. Whilst discussing this I was more optimistic that Nigeria indeed can indeed do it on its own but Enegesi was of the contrary view. “When you look at all the start-ups in Nigeria, most of the funding comes from outside of the country. Nigerian wealth is not investing in Nigerian tech development so when Mark Zuckerberg comes here, when Jack Dorsey comes here it is a big deal and important to us because it puts us on the map to be able to attract more of that foreign money because the people here aren’t doing it anyway. […] There’s a global shift with technology and we have to be a part of the conversation.”

His Eden Life team are alumni of Village Global accelerator programme and have also been backed by Samurai Incubate Africa, a venture capital firm based in Japan.

Talking of other success stories within the start-up landscape in Nigeria, Paystack’s acquisition by Stripe in 2020 immediately came to mind. Their £145m acquisition was the biggest to come out of the country. Speaking of this, Enegesi said, “It is very, very, very, inspiring. We’re all very excited. We’re all energised. The energy has changed here.” This happening was a reminder for other aspiring Nigerian founders that things like this can happen on home soil.

As the interview drew to a close it was finally apparent to me that the easiest way one can know what to attribute Enegesi’s success to is by observing his thought process. He’s a very careful listener and deliberate communicator who was quick to correct when he felt I was misquoting him. (I didn’t mind!)

Simply stated, he’s an executive who executes. In his words, he “understands how systems work.” Essentially the bottom-line of any engineer. And so, with that in mind, it will come as no surprise if in a few years’ time there’s a TechCrunch article announcing Eden’s exit.

For now, we wait. 

 

 You can find Nadayar Enegesi on Twitter. 

TET PRESENTS: Emeka Nelson

Wearing a plain white top, sitting on his bed, with a vanilla wallpaper as a backdrop and smiling to the camera during our Zoom call, he appears as your stereotypical millennial. Delve a little deeper and you realise Emeka Nelson is one of Nigeria’s most promising engineers.

Back in 2018, several news outlets such as Channels TV, BBC and Adeola Fayehun host of ‘Keeping it Real’ published articles and segments, heralding a young boy from one of the remotest villages in Nigeria that had created the way millions of Nigerians could power electricity in their homes via his hydro electric generator.

As with all things, the masses only see the finished product. What they do not see is the painful, slow-burning, lonely process it takes one to achieve such results. In writing about him I hope I do him justice through my words by showing the world the reasons why Nelson has magic pulsating through his fingertips.

Nelson at work on his generator

Nelson’s beginnings sound like the start of a mythological story where the protagonist has a peculiar upbringing which singles them out for an equally peculiar life.  He was born in coal-rich Enugu state within the rural area of Imilike-Agu on the 12^th January 1994 under a coconut tree along the village path. Maybe to the minds of the ancestors they would declare it as an onus on the baby that the world had bountiful expectations of him. 

As the saying goes, ‘with great responsibility comes great expectations’ and that could not be any truer for Nelson. At 26, he has a lot on his shoulders and even more on his hands. During our conversation, even when his responses were compact with hardships that many of us may never face, he always knew how to demonstrate - as the Igbo people say, ‘jisike’ that makes one admire his tenacity and cheerful disposition despite of adversity. ‘(My mother) always said I had an eighty-year old reasoning in me […] I felt that what I was going through was preparing me towards that.’

Being one of seven children, Nelson’s parents arranged for him to move in with a young couple in Awka, Anambra State and take the role of house help when he was five years old. This was and is still a common arrangement with large families from rural areas. His duties included taking care of the couple’s child and doing basic housework.

At this period in his life, his young, inquisitive mind was already being seduced by the tinkering sound of metal. “I’m easily attracted to technology [and] why things work, what makes them work and how to make [them] better.”

His curiosity was fuelled further by his incessant visits to his foster father’s workshop near their house who was an automobile tyre repairer. Despite several beatings, he was unable to stop the stubborn boy from visiting and a year later his foster father was forced to give Nelson a job role. This was the start of his apprenticeship for the young alchemist. Amongst the other mechanics in the area he was quickly known as, ‘Smallie’. He laughs proudly as he reveals how he came to have that name. ‘”I would go under the vehicle, under the engine […] It was so easy for me to move around to know what’s in the car.”

By the time he was seven years old he was managing the workshop with the competency of a senior technician. And even though he was thriving in his newfound career, the opposite was to be said in the classroom. Amongst his schoolmates he was known as ‘Nwa Nsukka’ (translation: son of Nsukka (a town in Enugu)) which is a term used by the students to insult those who they believed to be of a lower class.

Fortunately, like metal alloys, he was able to find an ally in a classmate named Chiemele Nduka. Together they would lay the foundation to the legacy that Nelson is till this day busy building.

The main difference between the two was that Chiemele could read and Emeka could not. The knowledge gap and social isolation in the classroom made Nelson determined to be literate. Unfortunately, the only source of light in the house was the kerosene lamp that had to stay in the living room at all times. This was a problem for Nelson who wanted to be in the privacy of his room to study his phonetics. “By then I had started working at the workshop, so I usually come back at night in the house that is the only time I had for my books.” 

When Nelson divulged this information to me my heart sunk. It's a sad reality for many of Nigeria’s brightest children. As one of the largest youngest populations in Africa, with a median age of 18, it makes the situation even more disastrous.

Despite the ‘Universal Basic Education Commission’ which the Nigerian government introduced over 20 years ago to encourage school attendance, there is little evidence to show its effectiveness. As it stands, 13 million children are not in formal education – the highest in the world. 

Children need stability to maximise their potential. The sparse electricity that is afforded to the population, an average 9 hours a day, means that for most they have to rely on self-powered generators. NEPA na’ be enemy of progress.

Nelson in his lab

For those of us Nigerians who have grown up in Western nations, we probably cannot imagine the thought of not being able to charge our phones or laptops when the batteries died, heating up our leftover food in the microwave, or simply turning on the light in our homes at our convenience. These are all things we do without a second’s thought.

But can you imagine using a torchlight to do your assignment?

Obviously, no child at seven years old can afford to purchase petrol. This frustration led to the Dynamic Duos having their lightbulb moment (pun intended) which was to create a cheaper alternative to illuminate his room for reading.

His passion for learning accelerated his reading level and within months he was using his pocket money to buy any book that came along his way. “I had two big textbooks. One was geography, one was physics. I was seeing geography as physics and I was seeing physics as geography. And that’s how I first saw a sample of a hydro generator and how they generate power.”

The first stage in the young boys’ enterprise was to obtain materials to build the generator. Because Nelson already had access to the workshop, he could get the materials from there but then they realised they needed a dynamo. As someone who is on the total opposite spectrum of STEM subjects, I had Nelson briefly ‘ABC’ me in what a dynamo was and how it helps generate electricity. Acquiring a dynamo was a comical story of its own; it involved them stealing the component from Chiemele’s grandfather’s bicycle.

It would be during this exciting time of any young enterprise, that Nelson’s dear friend, Chiemele would meet his tragic end at the tender age of eight. Ironically, his demise would be caused by inhaling generator fumes which was in his room whilst he was sleeping.

Despite being in deep grief over the loss of his best friend this was a pivotal point in the trajectory of what one may see as his accidental vocation. “If [Chiemele’s] brother can go to the market and buy something small like this to burn their house and end up killing somebody it means maybe I can create some stuff small like this that won’t use gasoline again. We can replace it with water and still use it in the house […] So I just wanted to correct that, that thing that actually took him […] I just wanted to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

For more than 15 years now he has been on the unwavering mission to find and create alternative energy solutions so that no one will have to go through the pain of losing their loved one through what could have been an unavoidable death.

Though steadfast in his purpose he has been susceptible to the many challenges any entrepreneur goes through in their efforts to make significant impact within their industry. This is no easy feat especially when working with - and let’s be honest here - incompetent infrastructure such as that of Nigeria’s energy sector.

His first real breakthrough was in December 2007, when his concept design of his generator was able to reach the power capacity of 100W. Prior to his eureka moment, he had taken a 6-month break after an experiment-gone-wrong caused an explosion. Talking of that time in his life he says, “I was almost at the point of giving up.”

Nelson's hydro electric generator prototype

So far, his patented technology is going through industry standard tests in the hopes it will end up with a minimum viable product which can be mass produced for the market. Currently the 1kw producing generator can hold up to 2L of water and power homes for six hours at a time.

And it’s just as well, because our near three-hour conversation was frequently interrupted with network failure and me not sure he could hear me I would say the typical line people say in these situations: “Hello? Hello? Can you hear me?”

It was clear minute by minute that as he kept filling me in on his colourful life his ambitions lie beyond him creating domestic energy products. Under his umbrella company, ‘Orange Genelectric’ established in 2016 he wants to infiltrate every avenue within the under tapped goldmine that is the green energy market which is a reported £700bn.

In other words, Nelson wants to zanku on the burgeoning energy sector just as South Africa’s treasured son, Elon Musk, has done over in the United States. He makes clear on his deep passion for the environment and has also gained momentum in using plastic waste to make gasoline.

Due to Nigeria’s favourable hot climate, solar energy is fast becoming a preferred alternative energy which Nelson also focuses on. Orange Genelectric’s main offering at the moment is providing solar installations and maintenance services for industrial companies.

Typical of any innovator, a large portion of our conversation was concentrated on the future. Specifically, the future of education.

A university degree has always been put on the highest pedestal and parents place the highest bets on their children to break poverty cycles in the family. As honorary custodians of culture and tradition the majority of us Nigerians will have heard our parents say one or more of the following phrases to us: ‘’face your books’’, “you must go university”. If you haven’t, your status as a Nigerian is to be questioned. I do not make the rules.

Nigeria’s out-dated education system fails to accommodate the people who don’t fit into the academic way of learning. With increasing university fees and a deepening recession which has seen the Naira progressively decline, common sense would dictate that things need to change.

And part of this change includes changing the way we view what quality education is. On this topic he further comments on how young people are not being encouraged to be creative in their answers. “Most of the young people that score low points in school, I don’t think it’s because they don’t know. It’s just because they find it difficult to buy one single idea [that the teacher] gives them that this is how it is […] if you programme [young people] minds that if not this then nothing else this is just how it is […] then I’m cramming not understanding.’

Clearly the ones that are losing out are as Anti-Fragile author, Nassim Taleb, calls them, practitioners who are paramount in adding to the prosperity of the nation. These include the hairdressers, the chefs, the artists, the engineers, just like Nelson, who though not academic, are nevertheless significant in contributing to the economy.

It defeats the purpose of university when young engineering graduates who have never had any practical experience throughout their degree are thrust into the job market but are unable to find work which allows them to apply their theory into practise. Nelson knows this from personal experience. ‘Some of my friends that went to university […] most of the things I ended up being the one to teach them things. They can mention names, call the name of things, compounds, chemicals but they don’t know even how these things work. Even if they see, they can’t even recognise it.’

Nelson receiving his award from University of Port Harcourt

 

 

 In Nelson’s efforts to affront this issue he started his own tribe of young, talented individuals within Nigeria and beyond which he named CMT² (Creative Minds Tech Team). Along with his team members, they have formed an art and engineering think tank and as it’s grown the group’s activity resides mainly online.

Despite not having yet earned a degree (which he hopes to do in the near future), amongst academic circles he is respected and acknowledged having contributed to some research papers. Last year, he was the award recipient to Technological Innovation and Excellence from the University of Port Harcourt.  

When he is not busy within the cocoon of his makeshift laboratory at home he is working as an instrument control engineer graduate trainee and taking his driving lessons. Speaking of his inspirations, he names home-grown figures such as Peter Obi commending his leadership style and entrepreneur Ezekiel Izuogu who was behind Izuogu Z-600, Nigeria’s first domestic car.

The Nelson archetypes are ones that as a nation we hear and read about all too often; humble beginnings, immense talent, great work ethic but the big but always is lack of infrastructure and opportunities within the country. Nevertheless, there’s too much riding on Emeka Nelson’s story which gives me the full conviction that his achievements to date are just a warm-up to his pending success. 

 You can find Emeka Nelson on Twitter.