Weekend Reflections with Excerpts from the IBD Founder’s Biography
“A Voyage of Boundless Hope” – Part II
This excerpt draws on the author’s experience abroad, where he came face to face with a clash of cultures while aboard a German train. This experience cemented his singular conviction to establish IBD as a youth mentorship platform which addresses the gaps and challenges of global awareness and barriers to cultivating the mindset of borderless global citizenship.
We are at a critical juncture on an exciting voyage of generational succession. Passing on the traditions and customs of the older generation to a new generation with radically different convictions, work culture and worldview poses a nearly insurmountable challenge.
Structured mentorships can help nurture and mature a culture of teamwork and timely responses to emergent youth leadership challenges, especially in Africa, where the youth are the majority. Thus, structured mentorships could well be the key to the passageway leading to the arena of sustainable competitiveness across generations. If institutionalised and sustained to survive transitions in political regimes, national mentorship programmes, such as Kenya’s Presidential Digital Talent Programme (which has been offering internship opportunities to fresh STEM graduates, linking them to local experts as mentors) and the FIG Mentoring Programme for Africa, can be a game-changer for future generations.
The Culture of Responsibility
As I write this piece, I’m on a Dresden-bound train from Berlin, Germany. The speed on the screen has been steady at 160km/h for quite some time now, a rather humble rate going by the super capability of modern electric trains in Europe. Fellow passengers in the compartment, evidently German, are either typing and thinking hard on their laptops or reading what can only be immersive books.
A tall man stands up in our compartment. The indiscriminate law of motion works on him as the train decelerates towards the next stop. No one is moved even as he hits his head hard against the hard glass window. My lone exclamation, “Sorry! Sorry!” betrays me as the odd one out in a culture of cautious planning and taking full responsibility for mistakes. The dampened reaction of fellow passengers seems to suggest he should have been cautious and steady. Little wonder, their normal reaction to such situations would be to say, “Vorsicht!” (Take care!).
The Curve of Competitiveness
The observed cultural orientation leaves no doubt that this is a people either racing to deliver punctually on serious targets or refining their talents to achieve sustainable competitiveness in a rough and tough world. This new world disproportionately rewards the efforts of the few top contenders in the borderless game of competitive exclusion.
Globalisation and the digital economy don’t spare anyone. What of deglobalisation? The spotlight must be thrown on the youthful demographic. They must take note. Jobs are up for grabs by automation, the adaptive and techno savvy elite, or better-qualified foreign experts. I also notice that the population of the youth is rather low on this train. This is not so much of a surprise since the median age in this European region is 47, far removed from 19 in Kenya, and in Africa generally. It is a similar pattern in the other places I’ve been to in this country of 82 million inhabitants comfortably residing on a well-planned land area just about 60% of Kenya’s land area, though still boasting a much higher forest cover at a sizeable 33%, in sharp contrast to less than 10% in Kenya.
The Crisis of Capitalism
How have the youth in this region been coping with the rapidly changing times? Who are their mentors? How are they equipping themselves to sustain the “Made in Germany” brand that has for so long been a trademark of superior quality? This nagging curiosity invites me back to the keywords defining the gap in equipping the African youth to be leaders who can solve current and future challenges: structured mentorship, innovative competency, and succession. It has been proven that having a dedicated mentor is a catalytic premium most youths can only dream of in a world characterised more by self-centred capitalist tendencies than selfless social and intergenerational responsibility.
The Creative Genius in Teamwork
Teamwork is an elusive art the raw ambition of the youth has been failing at. This is because they tend to overestimate their short-term individual efforts and underrate the long-term gains of joint and smart teamwork with dedicated mentorship. Has it not been said that we tend to overestimate what we can achieve in a day and underestimate what we can achieve in a year? Impressive synergy resides in constructive team engagements, a creative genius unmatched by the sum of fragmented individual pursuits. Again, has it not been cited in behavioural economics, that faced with uncertainty and risks, humans usually overestimate the probability of unlikely events but underestimate the likelihood of likely events?
The Curve of Timely Response to Opportunity
Timeliness grants us the choice of where the starting point of engagement should be. Thus, timeliness is like the y-intercept for the curve defining your rise to the aspirational future and destiny. What is the implication for the youth as mentees in any group? To speak for my mentorship group, Impact Borderless Digital (IBD), the natural expectation is a quick response culture and passion for teamwork. Mentees need to engage faster and regularly in a mode and mood aimed at exploiting the competitive potential of an organised youth group. Herein lies the secret to transformation by collaboration and the co-creation of sustainable solutions for a continent experiencing burgeoning youth populations scrambling for a limited and rapidly changing vector of opportunities. Consider and consolidate all the ideas you have had as individuals, then bring them to the discussion table as a team. These timeless gems have remained relevant through the generations we outlined in the graphic below.
The Challenge of Seven Realities
Is there any blueprint of realities the youth can measure up against? Yes, there is!
1. You have less than two years to lay a firm foundation for excellent delivery on a graduate research topic while the theme is still trending.
2. You have less than two months to write a paper that captures current interests in a trending topic.
3. You have less than two weeks to frame how to pitch ideas for a fundable research proposal and win on merit in a competitive selection process.
4. You have less than two days to fulfil the promise you have made to get back to a potential benefactor or mentor if you are to be taken seriously at all.
5. You have less than two hours to register a compelling interest in most of the competitive opportunities shared online for sponsoring the youth to participate in key training and leadership events.
6. You have less than two minutes to impress an acquaintance who can spare capital to invest in your idea and accelerate your growth trajectory. Acquaintances have rightly been referred to as rare divine encounters. I’ve been treated to many success stories that trace their roots to encounters with acquaintances that happened at an opportune time of preparedness with viable ideas. Are you prepared with a compelling purpose, life philosophy and principles that support your ideas to attract a worthy return on investment?
7. You have less than two seconds to press the button on the door of a train as the very last chance when it is almost leaving the station. How many trains of opportunities have left you at critical moments just because you failed to measure up last minute?
The Crux of the Matter
What is the key lesson from the seven points? This takes me back to the topic: “Ready-made success? A mirage!” This has become the title of the opening remarks to the Youth Talent & Career Fair series I introduced in 2019 under the “Impact-Borderless-Digital” brand. The key message includes a package of seven Cs meant to make the youth competitive in their networking and engagements: constructive, confident, creative, compelling, compact, concise, and convincing. The 4Ds, 4Es, and 4Ps round up the package of winning attributes and practices. The 4Ds are diligence, discipline, dignity, and determination. The 4Es are education, exposure, excellence with experience, and emotional intelligence. The 4Ps are purpose, principle, passion, and plan.
The Concluding Advice
Here is my concluding seven-point message to the African youth and leaders:
1. The youth must make it their foremost responsibility to have mentors as role models to learn from and emulate.
2. Mentorship opportunities and groups must be taken seriously and utilised as meeting points of progressive ideas. They are democratised thinking spaces for innovative ideation and regular brainstorming towards solving societal problems. Volunteering readily to lead in your area of gifting is always a reasonable response. Gifts only find value in serving others, making you debt-free.
3. Sustain the curiosity you had as a child and act in time. No one ever realised any breakthrough innovation without timely action on an idea before it became stale or got hijacked by competitors.
4. The sense of community and empathy, which is still much alive in the African culture, is a grand opportunity for mentoring Africa’s youthful population as the continent’s population races past the 1.3 billion mark and 43% urban.
5. As we involuntarily face the decade of delivery on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and similar “Vision 2030” goals, the progressive youth development agenda stares at Africa steadily without blinking. A timely and constructive response is critical.
6. To fellow African experts and diaspora who have volunteered to mentor the African youth to be borderless global citizens, the burden and enthusiasm can only increase. Join me in this exciting field.
7. For African governments, the digital age poses a timely challenge to empower the youth with the economic opportunities and skills required to reap a demographic dividend. “Brain drain” must be thrown into its rightful box of extinct excuses because an enabling governance and incentives framework can always tap into the rich international expertise and talents of African mentors in the diaspora, physical separation notwithstanding. In an era of information abundance and digitally connected communities, the secret to sustainable competitiveness resides in well-managed talents, timeliness, and teamwork. As Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum once described it all, this is the era of talentism, and technological advances can only superpower talented individuals for grand achievements that defy convention.