Global Voices Online

This week, while perusing the Africa business bloggers section of my RSS reader, I noticed a peculiar thing, or maybe this is not so peculiar. But I noticed that a large number of the business blogs that I have been reading lately are authored by writers of West African origins. Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, and Cameroon are some of the West African nations have been brought into the spotlight by West Africa's business bloggers. Without delay let us begin by visiting a few of these bloggers.

The first that we shall look at is Emmanuel Oluwatosin. I first learnt about Emmanuel through the African Path. In his recent post, he urges readers to pay careful attention to the tenets of Mr. John D. Rockerfeller.

Emmanuel Oluwatosin of Nigeria writes:

…According to Nelson Rockerfeller, the one time Vice President of the United States, his father John D. Rockerfeller, Jr, gave each of his five sons an allowance “We got 25 cents a week, and had to earn the rest of the money we got.” To earn part of that extra money he raised vegetables and rabbits…” We always worked.

All the boys were required to keep personal daily account books. They were required to give 10 percent of their income to charity, to save 10 percent, and to account for all the rest.” They had to balance their account books every month and to be able to tell what happened to every penny they earned. The Rockerfeller kids were taught a specific pattern for dealing with their money. These are the Rockerfeller rules.

* Work for all you get
* Give away the first 10%.
* Pay yourself the next 10%.
* Live on the rest.
* Account for every penny…”

Africaincorp is a blog that I have been following for a few months now. This blog is written by an Ivorian blogger, Frederic Tape. He chronicles the story of an African entrepreneur who has recently launched an investment portal website:

…Africanselect was “Launched in 2006 with the goal to go beyond just creating an awareness of African Stock Markets but also offer a technologically advanced platform that allows African and international retail and corporate investors to take part in investment opportunities across the continent.”
This business could be added to the likes of LiquidAfrica,and Africanlion.com.
The one question that has been raised during our team meeting was the following: how can such company leverage the aggregating power of social networks such as Facebook, MyspaceAfrica, Afriville, Myafricasite, Edumela and Hi5 among others to reach out to the huge number of young African professionals and entice them to find interest in the Real estate, securities markets of Africa.
The reality is that many young individuals with disposal income, stay oblivious to the opportunities laying in the open in Africa. The incomes they generate in the western world is sufficient to make them potent players on these markets more so than in the American or European markets…

The Entrepreneur News Online is a group blog that is edited and published by a Cameroonian newspaper, The Entrepreneur. Snowsel Ano-Ebie discusses the style that many African managers find productive as it pertains to getting results in the corporate world:

…How can management be defined? Management is the process of administering and coordinating resources effectively and efficiently in an effort to achieve the goals of an organization. And a manager is anybody who plans an organization’s resources such as time, money and people in a bid to achieve the organization’s objectives, drawing from the contributions of Henri Fayol and those of Henry Mintzberg to management thinking. Thus any African who heads an organization or a part of it, and performs the four management functions of planning, organizing, leading and controlling can be called an African manager.

PROFILE OF THE AFRICAN MANAGER
What then are the distinguishing characteristics of the African manager? African managers for the most part represent the old view of managers. It should however be noted that the profile, which I am presenting of the typical African manager, could also be true of some managers in other parts of the world. But we can confidently draw a profile of African managers because we know them better than we know other managers. After all we live in the same community, we share the same public utilities and we can be contented with being only “ear-witnesses” of who they are, what they do, and what they stand for. The African manager thinks of himself as manager or boss. Others must relate to him only in that capacity. If you go to an organisation where the manager’s office is situated in a storey building, chances are that his office will be somewhere upstairs, maybe on the last floor so that he can seat on top of every other person and is physically seen to be doing so. Thus the African manager is happy to be referred to, as “Up”, not to say “God”…

Next we move on to Ghana to meet the Nigerian-born Global Voices Author, David Ajao, teaches us how to make money online:

…It is indeed very true that you can earn a steady income from working over the Internet. It is also true that there is no single magic wand to making money online. Some of the “offline” rules apply online too. Hardwork, entrepreneurship spirit, perseverance, and of course, Knowledge. You need to know what you are doing. Excellence they say, is never by accident.

In gathering useful knowledge, you need to consult experienced folks, who are already making money on the Internet. One of such folks is Emmanuel Oluwatosin. He is not only making money online, but also teaching people how to make it. Little wonder his blog’s tagline is: “Inspiring Excellence, Realising Ambitions”. His blog is rich with useful tips and ideas that can inspire and direct you. One such useful post is the one titled: “Carnival of Entrepreneurs: 12th edition Hits the Road Big Time.” Comes highly recommended…

The final business blogger from West Africa that we are going to take a look at is Mr. Omodudu. He is a fellow blogger after my own heart. He is a trained economist and a mortgage lender. Omodudu tackles the issue of foreign economists, “Onyibo economists,” attempting to dispatch policy advice to African countries that many of them have never even visited:

This article in WSJ caught my attention because the topic is close to my dissertation. Mr Wessel's ideas are cutting edge and definitely goes against the grain, he is essentially suggesting, though in a subtle way, that economists in developed countries do not get ‘it'. Which from my experience is absolutely true. A high school student from any developing economy can pick holes in the theories put forward by most of the best papers in developmental economics.
We are forced to live through these, day in day out, due to the imbalance of power. The stronger dude is right even when he is glaringly wrong. Academics of African descent ought to forge together in order to bring forth a formidable voice. A voice worth reckoning with. This guys do not know half of the things they claim to know. Developmental economics is unique as it can not be put in any neo-, post-, pre- box. It's case dependent.

Well, as you have seen the West African environment has spawned some wonderful business blogging talent. And guess what? This was only a few of them. Just start searching for business blogs about Africa and you will see for yourself. I will not finish this post without mentioning of of the key figures in African business blogs Emeka Okafor.

Please let us know what you think and we hope to see you again here very soon.