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As a young creative director at GetupInc, Lagos, Tomi Wale-Temowo leads a bunch of rare millennials that focus on creative strategy and visual branding. He tells NATHANIEL AKHIGBE in the interview his recent research on the behaviour of Nigerian Millennial Generation. Excerpts:
What does the millennial age mean for the Nigerian government and marketing in the country?
The millennial generation is at the moment the most influential generation in terms of taking opinion, marketing, and even vote. We have more people from the ages of 18-40 in the voting processes than for people who are above these ages, giving the normal life expectancy. They are called the millennial because they were born between 1980 and year 2000. This generation of people are now the ones making up that age. They are now in the forefront of advancement in the world. On what it means for the economy, some businesses started over 60 years ago. But if they continue to use the old method of advertising like for instance through only NTA news line, they will lose this millennial age who are always online through their smart phones. This generation use more of technology to get information. The Nigerian millennial has a huge marketing influence in terms of growing business. They are up to 80 percent. In terms of government, a government can win an election or be toppled via social media. It is not just what you read in the newspapers and radio jingles anymore. If you can teach this generation how to do certain things, they will do something beyond what you envisaged. They will carry things for you without spending so much money.
Some of this group of people you are talking about are very quarrelsome on the social media over PDP and APC. What is responsible for this behaviour among this set of people?
Let me take you back to the time these people were born. They were born at a time when things were very funny in Nigeria. Nigeria just finished the Festac 77 festival; a lot of things went into the economy; parents were trying to survive in the early 1980s to the 1990s. So, they grow up in a very harsh environment that their parents were going through. So, you are growing up and you want to raise an opinion and your parents shout at you to keep quiet that ‘you don’t have the right to say anything here’. ‘I am feeding you and paying your school fees’. That was the culture back then. So, this generation grow up with the culture of taking whatever parents and guardians say; not having their own opinion. They grew into adulthood and now can make decision for themselves; but are still acting in the former culture where they wait for people to make decision for them. Older people understand this scenario and say ‘let us tell them what to do. Let us use someone among them’ and thus, use them to turn against one another.
I have a very big problem with that and it is one of the reasons I came up with the millennial report. We are very dependent. We all depend on the American reports and all that but we don’t want to do independent verification on controversial topics. We always want to watch CNN and use it to judge what is happening in our country. We ourselves are not ready to go out and look for the truth by ourselves. That is the very funny thing I have realised with the millennial generation. We are just following someone’s opinion without efforts at finding out the truth for ourselves. But I think overtime, we are now having the culture of trying to find out things for ourselves. You can see that we are now speaking for ourselves.
If you go to the National Assembly now, it is filled with old people. How then do we address this dependent culture among this generation of people?
The people that fought Nigeria’s independence were not in their 40s. They were in their late 20s and early 30s. This millennial generation are angry but they don’t know how to direct their angers. Now they find the internet, and can sit down on the toilet sit and rant and nobody hears the voice. But for them to now take action is what they were not taught to do. We were never taught to take action. In our early days, to become a class captain you must be appointed by the teacher. You dare not raise your hand that you want to be captain. But getting the best out of this generation is a process. We have to start first by educating ourselves; finding out things and facts on our own. Knowing how to go into enterprise; knowing how to navigate a company from a start up point to an established organisation in this great country. If you can do that you will have some boldness and leadership qualities imbibed in you. You will have some courage and strong network so that from that angle we can take over the leadership of this country.
Solving Nigeria’s problem is not macro issue but micro. People vote in the kind of people they are. If you take Lagos people to Singapore and take Singapore people to Lagos, Singapore will become Lagos while Lagos will become Singapore. It is all about our mind set. When it comes to the issues of government, the youths first need to deal with the mind set before thinking of joining politics. Leadership is a long term thing. We need to first train ourselves for leadership role because sooner or later, the current leaders in the country will fade out. Time is coming when young Nigerians will take over the National Assembly. But let we young people build our enterprises first; build the SME into a beautiful thing, have a sound economy, and then we will now detect who goes into government. That is when our influence will be stronger. My thoughts are that in 20 years’ time, we will have a lot of young people in government.
What inspired you to do this project (Millennial Generation)?
When I was doing my study, I realised that most of the contents I was getting were from the western world. But it is a different ball game in Nigeria. A research on how to do business produced in the US can never be holistically applied to the Nigerian situation because we have power problem, which they don’t have in America. If you give $10 million each to a Nigerian living in America and to a Nigerian living in Nigeria, they can never achieve the same result because of the business climate in Nigeria. The one in the US will get to his company’s goal ten years earlier than his counterpart in Nigeria. And I wanted to do another report and the contents I got were from America and I shouted ‘but we are different in Nigeria’. The millennial report is to help us understand the Nigeria space.
What is the research methodology you adopted to reach this conclusion?
We used survey software online. We used Lagos and Abuja geography and some other places. But we had more from Lagos. We had 538 samples giving different opinion here and there. It was from those samples we got the content we have in the report. We lunched it first in February this year. We took the survey January 2016 and we lunched it 6th of February.
