Every few months, a new conversation starts up about how Nigeria can create jobs. The rooms fill up, the panels get assembled, the hashtags trend, and then things go quiet again until the next cycle begins.
What rarely changes is who is doing the talking. Nigeria has never had a shortage of brilliant minds with sharp diagnoses and ambitious visions. The ideas, frankly, are not the problem.
What the country needs more of are people willing to stay in the room after the conversation ends. Builders. The ones who will take a half-formed idea and turn it into something with a structure, a team, a product, a customer, and a plan for next quarter.
The gap between vision and execution is where most promising initiatives disappear. And that gap does not close with more conferences or more frameworks. It closes when someone decides to build anyway, with whatever is available, right now.
Nigeria is not waiting on a better idea. It is waiting on more people brave enough to be boring, to do the slow, unglamorous work of actually making something real.
Originally published by BusinessDay.