During his electioneering days, Governor Ifeanyi Okowa of Delta State touted a five-point agenda captured with the catchy acronym SMART. It stands for Strategic wealth creation projects and provision of jobs for all Deltans; Meaningful peace-building platforms aimed at political and social harmony; Agricultural reforms and accelerated industrialization; Relevant health and education policies; Transformed environment through urban renewal. The Okowa campaign train was upbeat and ubiquitous, traversing the state with self-assured swagger.

Inherent in the SMART agenda is development. This article is not about how far the Delta State governor has pursued his agenda but about the fact that the Governor just got smarter a couple of days back.  Precisely on Monday, July 25, the Delta State Innovation Hub (DS-IHUB) was formerly commissioned. The event had all the trappings and toppings of a digital festival with top players in the nation’s ICT ecosystem in attendance.

DS-IHUB is a public-private partnership. The driver of the project, Mr. Chris Uwaje, better known as the Oracle in the nation’s ICT fraternity told me just ahead of the commissioning that the project was designed to be a knowledge laboratory where the brightest and the best in informatics, innovation and creative thinking would be nurtured to serve indigenous needs as well as transit to global knowledge-preneurs. He described the hub as a disruptive technology platform for re-engineering the blueprint for smarter processes, more effective leadership and governance for inclusive public service.

In reality, the DS-IHUB is much more than this. It is a factory, indeed a nursery, for hatching the next generation millionaires and billionaires. It will not only help the state get smarter in its operations, it will help create a new guild of globally competitive ICT-savvy Deltans and Nigerians in general who would be disruptive enough to become wealth creators rather than job-seekers.

Contemporary club of ICT billionaires and millionaires are men and women who questioned the status quo; who interrogated the course of conventional knowledge and dethroned old orders. Some were high profile school dropouts; some were rejected at job interviews while yet others simply stayed true to their dreams by chiseling at the pillars of digital knowledge.

Brian Acton, co-founder of Whatsapp was rejected in 2009 for job placement by both Facebook and Twitter because he was obviously considered not good enough by these two giants. But he was full of disruptive ideas. Driven by his passion, he teamed up with another dreamer Ukranian Jan Koum and together they created out of nothing the world’s largest messaging company and product. A few years later, the same Facebook would turn round to buy Whatsapp for a hefty $19 billion.

The geeky world of ICT is full of such fairytales. Men and women who woke up frustrated but retire to bed as billionaires. India, Singapore, Japan et al have a long list of young millionaires and billionaires fresh from digital high streets. They are the new generation of wealth creators who did not have to bemoan lack of job opportunities in their countries; who did not care if there was a drop of crude oil or any such mineral deposit in the subsoil of their environment, but men and women who trusted their brain and used it to shape the way humanity lives.

By housing an innovation hub, Delta State has laid the foundation for real development outside the receipts from crude oil. India is today known as the outsourcing capital of the world because she has been able to innovate to the point that she can no longer be ignored. In its 2016 budget, Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry voted  $1.12 billion to promote innovation, two and a half times the amount earmarked in the 2015 budget. Note that this budget was not the entire budget for innovation but targeted to promote research in Artificial Intelligence systems and to develop next generation transport towards 2020 Tokyo Olympics. India has an India Innovation Fund. Singapore is ever mindful of innovation and in her 2016 budget, she is shelling out $2.9 billion for research and development.

Nigeria desires to be among the top 20 economies in the world in the coming years. Such lofty ambition does not happen by trading off barrels of crude oil; it does come by burrowing into the subsoil for mineral deposits; it comes by digital knowledge and innovation. President Barack Obama (and what a terrific job he did Wednesday night at the Democratic National Convention when he wowed the audience with his vintage intelligence and oratorical gusto) once told the American people that the only way to stay at the cutting edge of the myriad global challenges is to win the future. He explained winning the future to mean out-innovating the world. Till this day, America has remained the world’s number one factory of innovation.

The new crude oil is not some viscous heavy liquid piped through creeks and oceans and sold in barrels. No! The new crude oil is digital knowledge. This is the knowledge that defines true sovereignty. A nation is as sovereign as her level of technological advancement.

Nigeria has all the ingredients and indices to stake a huge claim in the global knowledge economy: a brilliant army of youths waiting for empowerment, a huge market that dwarfs many around the world. For five consecutive years in the peak of the telecom revolution, Nigeria was rated the world’s fastest growing market in mobile telephony. Statistics have shown that the average Nigerian can out-perform his peers anywhere in the world if exposed to the right knowledge environment. There is always a Nigerian content in every global ICT powerhouse from Facebook to Microsoft.  These Nigerians were able to excel on the global canvas because they found themselves in the western world where they are exposed to the tools of innovation in school and out of school.

This is why the Delta innovation hub is much more than SMART; it is a smarter way to announce to the world that Delta and indeed Nigeria is ready to take on the world and create a brave new paradigm that would drive e-governance, e-agriculture, e-commerce, e-learning among others. To borrow the expression of Nigeria’s innovator-in-chief, Leo Stan Ekeh, “the DS-IHUB is a demonstration of the vision of the Governor and all those who have invested their money, time and emotion to make it happen”.

Given the drive and depth of the pilot of the project, Mr. Uwaje, it’s only a matter of time and Delta State would be exporting human capital who would positively disrupt the global markets and conventions far beyond what Indians and Chinese are doing today.

Nigeria is Africa’s largest consumer of mobile phones but who develops the apps, the software, who manufactures the phones and who repairs them? The DS-IHUB holds the key to answering these questions. It is a facility whose time has come especially as the world shrinks further and further into a miniature dot of knowledge-hungry cyberspace denizens.

• First published in Sun newspaper.
• photo: Gov Okowa receives his certificate after being certified at the DS-IHUB