The thing about new economy Economic history scholars say the journey of the world’s economy started from the agrarian, arable and livestock, farming; to the industrial or manufacturing economy, with heavy machines that afford mass production of goods; to the information or post-industrial age, with white-collar professionals in insurance, accounting, advertising, journalism, and such like. It finally berthed at the New Economy, which is actually the Information Age, further enhanced by the convergence of computer, telecommunications, broadcasting, that is, the internet, and biotech, technologies. Maybe, the way to explain economic evolution, from agrarian to the New Economy, is to borrow the procedure that pilots go through in order to fly aircraft more sophisticated than the ones they currently fly: Pilots always undergo what is called conversion training to fly an aircraft of higher capacity. If they fail to do, they may be stuck with flying propeller aircraft throughout their career, as their contemporaries move on to jets, and the supersonic, even as computers are now used, from the ground, to control unmanned drones. Greek thinker, Heraclitus, who says change is the most permanent thing in nature, evidently agrees with the Bible’s saying that old things are passed away, and all things have become new. Both may have an issue with students of chemistry or material science, who insist that matter is neither created nor destroyed. But the seemingly opposing viewpoints have a common ground in the truism that matter can assume other forms, like water could be ice, liquid or vapour. Though that’s not the focus of this discourse, you may want to push the argument further, and say that while man may combine inanimate objects like rocks, glass, wood and plastic, to make bigger and bigger objects – like the Bhurja Khalifa, the tallest man-made object in the world he cannot combine animate objects, like animals, birds, trees, fish, reptiles, and insects or make them bigger than the size nature allows. Even when he grafts two species of animate objects, like mating a tiger with a lioness, the offspring, won’t be bigger than nature had endowed. The New Economy, generally agreed to have started in the 1990s, uses the new cutting edge technology to drive economic growth, by fashioning out new products and services. You never thought you could electronically transfer funds; neither did you imagine that a smart card rammed into an ATM on the wall of your bank can spew out cash or make a deposit. You didn’t even think you could pay for your purchases at a shopping mall through a POS machine that directly debits your bank account. Traditional knowledge of engineering is getting obsolete. Production technology is powered more by electronics than mechanics, as technology moves from analogue to digital. Your auto mechanic, now a mechatronic engineer, uses digital diagnostics to detect what is wrong with your automobile. Many don’t know that Henry Ford took a job with Edison to acquire knowledge of electricity, to build his gasoline-powered motor engine. The new technology, with its new products, services, machinery, equipment, work environment, work processes, and procedures, demands new skills sets from labour. It is agreed Nigeria’s high unemployment rate is partly caused by the lack of fit between the curriculum of Nigeria’s school system and the demands of the new technology. A repairer of gramophones and video players will yawn all day, while the repairer of CD player, iPod, iPhone, iPad, and the laptop (that will soon be phased out) will have too much work on his hands. A photographer using the analogue camera will have a hard time getting his films developed and printed into a photograph these days. The chase, engraved metal, has given way to Direct Image printing that sends digitally processed pre-press content through a computer, to the printing machine on the shop floor. If Procter & Gamble makes good its promise to digitise hygiene and health education through electronics platforms, more Nigerian girls will acquire requisite skills compatible for employment in the New Economy. Man doesn’t have to wait for the sun to ripen tomato anymore; the technology of the New Economy is not so much about the product, but the process: The quick service restaurants, with their choreographed food processing procedures, trade-off the “proper” taste of homegrown Nigerian potatoes, for imported, frozen potatoes to make bland, tasteless, potato chips. Think of half-caste Obama mulatto trying to “out-African” almost sculpted, Mandingo-looking, Grace Jones. If you haven’t heard of TV-dinner, then you don’t know about the overworked young-upwardly-mobile professionals, who feed on processed food that tastes like plastic. Jennifer Abraham of the Federal Institute of Industrial Research, Oshodi, Lagos, argues that “a nation is not made rich (only) by the volume of natural resources with which it is endowed, but by the quality of knowledge it applies to transform the natural resources into valuable goods and services.” True. She is vexed with Nigerian housewives who snub FIIRO’s pre-packed soups, flour mixes and other ready-to-eat foods. She predicts that the overworked yuppies, especially those uber-females, working in banks, advertising agencies and the stock exchange, who still want to keep their marriages, will sooner or later acknowledge the genius of FIIRO researchers, and adopt its version of TV-dinners. The New Economy, whose other name is globalisation, is run by the Svengali of Western Europe and North America. To retain control of the technology, they operate through franchises. You may have observed that the most successful businesses in Nigeria, from manufacturing, to advertising agencies, quick service restaurants, even high schools and modelling agencies, are franchisees of global brands. You should also have noticed the irony in Nigerian television stations hooking to international satellite platforms to reach their local target audience. From the old, static, ugly duckling black box on your office table, telephones have gone mobile-and beautiful! And you can take yours “everywhere you go,” to borrow a phrase from a popular GSM company commercial. The mobile telephone, which birthed Nigeria’s New Economy, is now an android, with capacity to transfer more than your voice: It can manipulate a legion of social network platforms, like the sms, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram – with their peculiar lingo. The android enables you to send a selfie, a photograph of yourself, as a member of the self-centred, individualistic 21st Century Homo sapiens. It also allows your absent cousin to see a live streaming of the videos of your wedding on the internet. Dr. Olumide Ajayi, a development economist, says the android is actually a computer that allows you to make and receive calls. To function in this New Economy, Nigerians must make a paradigm shift, and adjust their skills sets. Corporate walls are getting more virtual than concrete, as economic concepts, products, and services are being redefined. Search engines, like Google, are replacing libraries. Corporate America saw it coming, when it re defined wages as variable cost, and no longer fixed cost. You don’t get paid just because you showed up at work; you work to get paid. So Henry Ford’s assembly line is giving way to work modules, where varied professionals assemble, negotiate, and sell their products and services online and perhaps need a dispatcher only for bulky deliveries. So, the Federal Government won’t win in its plan to protect local industries that run on old technology; efforts should go into buying into the new technology of the New Economy in order to compete effectively. Copyright PUNCH.All rights reserved. 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Posted on: Tue, 20 Jan 2015 23:12:14 +0000
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