Victor Ezeja…Business Leader Salutes Airvend, Flutterwave, Paystack, Others
AS many lament the negative impact of COVID-19 pandemic on organisational patterns, a business leader, Nze Chidi Duru, says the disruption presented myriad opportunities for many businesses globally.
In an exclusive interview with Prime Business Africa (PBA), Duru states that some businesses were affected negatively but a lot of them, especially in the online space, were helped to great success.
Nze Duru, an independent-minded entrepreneur, in discussing the post-COVID-19 dynamics of entrepreneurship in developing countries, says the pandemic has wrought significant disruption in people’s socio-economic activities, causing a revolution that has seen companies in the fintech, e-commerce, logistics, and associated online businesses perform more than they used to do.
“For us as a business, we came to understand that every event presents an opportunity, and COVID-19 impacted a number of businesses. Talk about the hospitality industry, airline industry, and a few other industries that were impacted as a result,” the chairman of Grand Towers Ltd, tells PBA.
“There are businesses that were enabled as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The online space was not as active and dynamic as it is now until COVID-19 happened and people began to offer their products and services online.
“What is very interesting is that, by the year 2020, you began to see those who were selling yam, garri and other food stuffs now sending you SMS and asking you to please book online if you want to buy, and it would be delivered to you.
“A number of logistics companies also were built around that which of course was enabled as a result of COVID-19, not to talk of the fintech space where you find companies like Flutterwave, Airvend, that we invested in; companies like Paystack became very successful as a result of the event of COVID-19, because more and more people were now buying things online.”
Nze Duru says the lockdown restriction following the pandemic brought about innovations on online financial services, making “more and more people to engage in online banking and transactions.”
Duru echoed the submission made by the founder of Centre for Values in Leadership (CVL), Professor Pat Utomi at the fourth edition of Prime Business Africa’s Socio-economic and Entrepreneurship Development Series (SEEDS) webinar on African Businesses’ recovery post-COVID-19 pandemic. Prof Utomi had stated that the pandemic also challenged people, especially African entrepreneurs to explore new viable opportunities for business survival.
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Utomi had also remarked that the pandemic should be a big lesson to African countries who are heavily dependent on importation as it showed how China has dominated the global supply chain and how disruption of supply threw the dependents into crisis.
Duru, therefore, notes that entrepreneurship has not been given the needed boost in Nigeria, which is a major cause of increasing unemployment and rural-urban migration.
He urged governments at all levels to create the enabling environment by providing basic amenities like good road networks for transport and a stable power supply to enable entrepreneurship to thrive and contribute to robust growth of the economy. He also calls on government to give entrepreneurs access to credit to enable them implement sound business ideas and create more jobs in Nigeria and the rest of Africa.
Victor Ezeja is a passionate journalist with six years of experience writing on economy, politics and energy. He holds a Masters degree in Mass Communication.
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