The Boy from Saki

Saki sits in the far northwest corner of Oyo State, close enough to the Benin border to feel like the last town before the country runs out. In the early 2000s the known world there was small: the classrooms of Sharon Rose Schools and College, the market, and the long road south. The largest life anyone could point to belonged to a grand-uncle, Dr. Adeyinka Ola, a Saki man who at different times ran the refineries at Port Harcourt, Warri and Kaduna. The story carried in the family was that he had been among the first handful of indigenous chemical engineers in Nigeria. Whether the count was exact mattered less than what it proved. A boy from this soil could end up running the machines that ran the country.

The factories

Saki taught me the size of my world by showing me its edges. There were no vacations. What exposure arrived came on school excursions, a bus leaving at dawn for Ibadan, for Ilorin, once for Abeokuta. Those trips were the first time I saw industry breathing instead of printed in a textbook: a Seven-Up bottling line in Ibadan, glass marching along the belts, and the Ewekoro cement works near Abeokuta, kilns that had been turning since 1960. Each excursion widened the frame by a few kilometres and made the town feel more like a waiting room. The conviction set in early, before I had words for it. My time in Saki had a deadline.

The notice board

University was Obafemi Awolowo, at Ile-Ife, the old University of Ife. It was the first time the wider world stopped being a day trip and became the room I lived in, and at first it shrank me. My classmates came from Lagos and Ibadan. They had seen more, spoke more easily, carried an exposure I could not fake. Inside a few weeks the confidence I had arrived with had mostly drained away.

Then the first-semester results went up, posted in the open the way they were in those days, a single sheet on a board, every matric number and its scores there for anyone to read. We each had one, a unique matriculation number the university knew us by in place of a name, and the whole class crowded in to find theirs. Mine sat at the very top. Subject after subject, I was in the top three. I had walked up to that board the obscure boy from Saki. I walked away grounded in what was possible. Bandura had a name for what happened to me: the surest belief in yourself comes not from being told you can do something but from having already done it. The notice board was my first proof.

What it taught me stuck. Decide to learn something and most of it turns out to be learnable. The doubt does not have to be a verdict; it can be fuel. None of it requires believing you are special.

Learnable

Kazan tested all of that for real. I went to study chemical technology at what is now Kazan National Research Technological University, a specialist school in Tatarstan, and I arrived a semester late, without a word of Russian. Foreign students get a preparatory year to learn the language and pass the university entrance exam. I had six months. The boy from Saki went back to work. The language does not get learned at a polite pace when the exam is in it and the clock is half what everyone else gets. I learned it, passed, and went on to finish the degree at the top of the class.

MIT, where I went next for advanced studies in chemical engineering, asked something different of me. It was the hardest thing my mind had met up to then, hard enough that I could feel my brain expanding. The method still carried me, commit and strip every concept down to its plain parts, but for the first time grit by itself was not enough. I leaned on other people and asked for help where I was stuck, and came out having done the work well, a little changed by how hard it had been.

A prescribed year had become six months in Kazan, and the impossible at MIT had turned out to be only difficult. I keep pushing on how soon a thing can really be done, not how long it is supposed to take.

Breaking the predictable

With the studying finally behind me, for a while I did exactly what the boy from Saki had set out to do. I became a research engineer building modular refineries, doing the work I had trained for, carrying the title that made my grand-uncle's path feel like my own. It was comfortable, and there was a ceiling on it I could see plainly. So I left it. I went to teach, a senior research fellow at the Higher School of Economics, starting over from scratch, only dabbling in building things.

Then came the real break from the predictable. Yango asked me to take the reins of launching a new app across Africa, a continent I had no track record building in. On paper it made little sense, an academic who had only dabbled, handed a market he had never operated in. I walked in scared, the same way Ile-Ife had been scary, and grounded in the same truth the notice board had taught me. Building it would be learnable, the way Russian had been, the way the top of that class had been.

My first days were spent inside the problems of the market, thinking them through, enmeshed in them. I read every operator handbook I could find. What actually worked was older than any of that. I tore each problem down, reduced every piece to something I could not be scared of, and got to work.

The doubt still arrives. It arrives before every new market and every hard stretch. The move is always the same. I go back to the boy from Saki, the one who once thought the edge of Oyo State was the edge of what was possible, and I measure the distance from there to here. The belief has to come first. Knowing what game you are playing only starts to matter once you have decided you can learn to play one. There has only ever been one person worth betting on. You.