By Ebele Orakpo
Faced with the harsh realities   of the society they live in, the Nigerian youth is getting wiser. Gone are the days when he goes to the university with the hope of getting employment as soon as he graduated.

Today, many, like  Mr. David Alalibo, a computer engineering graduate from the Covenant University, Canaan Land, Ota, and the Chief Executive Officer of Dataalcomms Ltd., made up their minds from the onset not only to be self-employed, but also employe

Mr. David Alalibo

s of labour.

And so while still in school, Alalibo started a transport company. In a chat with Vanguard recently, he stated that in going into any line of business, the first capital one needs is the value he is going to add and not money. He also spoke on the challenges of doing business in Nigeria. Excerpts:

According to Mr. David Alalibo, apart from Dataalcomms Ltd., he also runs a non-governmental organisation known as Dataal Love Foundation as well as a transport company called Dataal Transport Company which he started while he was in school.

“I started the transport company while I was in school. I started with motorcycles popularly called okada and gradually upgraded to motor vehicles. The foundation is just a way for me to give back to the community by helping those that are in need, whoever has a challenge, we help them out through the foundation. The needy are always around us.

It is not running as a formal NGO right now. It is running on an informal level. There are people around us that need help so I and my fiancé help them out.  Those that need to be sponsored in school, those that have rent issues, you know, little, little needs like that, we help them out by meeting those needs,” he said.

The ICT firm, he said,  is into provision of  information and computer technology solutions, networking, software solutions, network audit, consultancy etc.
On how he raised the initial capital, Alalibo said: “Right from time, I’ve had a perspective. The first capital you need in business is not money. The first capital you need in business, to me, is the value you are going to add. If you don’t have a value, what is the essence of raising money, because at the end, that money will finish but if you are someone that can keep on generating value, you will be able to keep on generating money as well.

So funding was not our primary aim, our primary aim was to realise our vision. What do we want to achieve in information and computer technology with this company?

That gave rise to the next step: ‘Ok, we are going into so and so line of ICT, what solutions are we going to be bringing up? How would our solutions be able to help? What is unique about our solutions? What value will our solutions be adding?’ It is only then that you can really generate money so when we were starting out, our major focus was not on capital. Our major focus was on the value we were going to add. As time went on, we got capital. One thing that helped us tremendously was that we started small.”

Continuing, Mr. Alalibo said: “From the nature of our job, even right now, we don’t really need an office. With the use of information technology tools, I can work anywhere so I don’t really need an office and that helped us a lot. Talking of employees, we did not want a situation where we would have to be employing staff and be paying them peanuts so we started with the approach of rewarding our team based on projects, so they get their income based on projects executed and in most cases, they are quite handsome.”

On the challenges they faced, he said: “Obviously, although money was not our first focus but you still need money to get some things done like going around for presentations, we really spend money when we have to go out for presentations. I thank God I already have a transport company so we use most of my personal profit from the transport company and other partners also contribute. We could go for a presentation to which we were invited and at the end, you get there only to discover they are not serious about getting the project done. So those are some of the challenges we face.”

The boss of the Lagos-based ICT firm noted that apart from the network infrastructure aspect, the firm is also into software development, and have solutions for schools, useful solutions that would help in computerising school processes.

“There is e-hospital solution for computerising hospital processes, there is e-library. With the e-library, we are trying to make education a continuous thing, not just learning when you are in the classroom but even while you are away from the classroom you can also keep learning. We also have some other solutions like office automation solutions, unified communications solutions that can engage in video conferencing, voice-over, tele-lecturing and quite a number of other solutions.

Like I mentioned earlier, nobody would want to give you money except you are going to add value to them. So all our solutions are value-driven. The major challenge is being able to educate people on the benefits of these solutions. There are some people that are kind of used to the manual system of doing things and bringing out ICT tools to aid their work, you have to do lots of explanation because they are not really enlightened as to the benefits of ICT tools in relation to what they do so the major thing we’ve had to do thus far in such cases is to enlighten the people, ok this is what ICT can do, this is how it can benefit you, it can save you time and cost, it can also generates income for you. The patronage has been quite encouraging.

Asked whether their solutions are affordable, Alalibo stated: “Concerning affordability of our ICT solutions, they are affordable. For our e-school solution, we achieve this by spreading the cost across the entire populace of the school, thereby, making each student to pay only a token.”

Another challenge being faced by businesses in Nigeria is power. “Power remains a challenge in Nigeria and generators have always been the backup means. with the use of inverters, when there is light, it will charge your inverter and even while you are using your generator, it charges your inverter also so when light goes off, you switch over to the inverters.”