Whenever regulatory agencies and law enforcement bodies in Nigeria identify and nab counterfeiters, whether of foods and beverages or designer brands, phones, electronics or pharmaceuticals, we should not just send them to jail and throw away the keys.
Instead, we should have an agency to legitimise these people. If you can counterfeit the real thing, you can definitely create your own indigenous technology. These guys are not destructive criminals that engage in drug peddling, romance scams and yahoo. They are creative geniuses that reverse engineer a product and replicate it.
The Russians did that to the Americans and the Americans returned the favour. Copying technology is sometimes a necessary crime.
Teach them how to get patents and register a company. Help them get financing. Create an enabling environment, and then they will start creating authentic local alternatives to foreign technologies.
That is how Japan and China started and grew their military-industrial complex to where they are today, such that they now compete with the West.
And to those Nigerians that laugh at Ndi’Igbo, I urge you to take in the larger picture. You cannot even produce ordinary toothpicks, and you are mocking Igbo-made? Look, the technological salvation of Nigeria may come from Aba made!
If we keep sending brilliant minds that can make counterfeits in Aba that are almost as good as what is made in Germany, to Kirikiri, we will forever be a consumer nation. We need to transform into a prosumer economy. One that consumes what they produce. And if we get there by using former counterfeiters, it does not matter. In self-reliance, the end justifies the means.
THIS IS A VERY GOOD IDEA. A FEW YEARS BACK, GOODS NOT MADE IN JAPAN WERE CALLED ‘TAIWAN’. BEFORE THEN, GOODS MADE IN JAPAN WERE REGARDED AS INFERIOR AND CALLED ‘OCCUPIED JAPAN’.
IF PEOPLE ARE ALLOWED TO COME OUT OPENLY TO PRODUCE GOODS, WETHER INFERIOR OR NOT, WE WILL NOT BE TALKING OF DOLLAR SCARCITY TODAY.
