Akin OduwoleOne of my “pass time” learning techniques is by engaging my teenage friends. Reason is they teach me a lot of new things and very quickly too. A lot runs through their minds and they combine their raw innocence with unusual ways of doing things. Honestly, the results are mostly amazing… Me asking one of my teenage friends what his opinion was about Professor Wole Soyinka’s book and without thinking he said “We cannot understand what he is writing, so we will all accept he is a good writer and respect ourselves like that”, he continues to say “We also obviously display his books on our shelves to show we are super intelligent”. All I could say was Hmmm. Especially when he quoted from the book – A play of giants- in the opening of the book, there are three men sitting on thrones in a corridor… then in the second paragraph he made us realize that one is a man, one is a woman and the third is a dwarfish creature… Then in the third paragraph he starts to refer to the woman as both he and she. Uncle I try to understand then I get confused all over. I smiled! In a similar discussion I was informed of a teenage app that seems to create a virtual world, this young people are allowed to build their own world. They decide the type of houses to be built, those who live in the community and even define how the individuals behave. My young friend decided to give one of the characters a criminal trait.
Cutting a long story short, the character ended up in prison for 36 years of virtual life, came out of prison broke and deserted by family and friends, no one wants to employ one with a criminal record and life became so frustrating, I said to my young friend “you can’t give up”. Luckily, a bicycle repair company employed the man for a part time job and so did a plumbing company. Thank God the community had industries. Is it Coincidental that we are called the printing industry? According to investopedia, Characteristics of industrialization include economic growth, more efficient division of labor, and the use of technological innovation to solve problems as opposed to dependency on conditions outside human control. I particularly like the part of more efficient division of labor; this speaks distinctively to all of our printing values chain, in a properly industrialized print sector. Division of labour refers to us professionally separating our work process into a number of simple and separate tasks, with each task being performed by a separate person or a group of people. This is so clear in for example the prepress, press and finishing/post press classification in our offset printing sector. The CtP/CtCP operator can mess up the final print if he misses something as small as sending the job with a wrong resolution. What I like about the teenage spirit is the fearless nature of their exploits, a sector hoping to lead an industrial revolution must be fearless in conducting the necessary research and develop them into practical small units that will form a part of the chain. Another thing I like about the teenage spirit is their imaginative skills, at one of the sessions I had with a group of teenagers I asked that we discuss on how to build a pollution free society, the suggestions were out of this world… Dear professional printers, it is time to classify our Industries under three (3) headings: 1. The primary and in my opinion the most important is EXTRACTION and RAW MATERIAL. You will be shocked that no one in our industry in Nigeria is playing in this sector at the moment. But in the real world, people should be ensuring that pulp is available to serve our paper production arm, some people should be planting the trees to make this happen. Others should be putting the raw material for making pigment to feed the ink manufacturing process. Let me stop as I believe you should have gotten the brief. 2. The secondary is manufacturing. The proceeds of the primary should come together at this point to help in the production of equipment’s and their range of consumables 3. The tertiary is services and this happens to be where we all play today. So the next time we call ourselves the printing industry in Nigeria we definitely need to think again… In closing, this is a call to intentionally attract investors so we can invoke a printing industrial revolution in Nigeria. It’s time to explore globally and build locally! Thoughts from: Akin Oduwole CE @ Technology Global
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