you say, hey, i want to repair my phone. he says, okay, i can do it for you for 5000 naira. now all you have to do is look across the road and find somebody who can do exactly the same thing, and he knows that, right? so, he starts to think to himself, i better give him the best price i can possibly give him, so that i can get his market. anthony: completely unregulated as far as prices. tunti: completely unregulated. anthony: so, it s really the free market at its purest? tunti: exactly. lagos has been able to grow and expand itss borders and that comes from the sweat of people on the street. once government interferes in private activity, more often than not, they make it complex. and they move it towards extinction. [ cars honking ] tunti: a lot of people are outside the tax net, so the state government has to do very genius in trying to get taxes.
you need all these to birth a real miracle. anthony: where are we? computer village? tunti: yes this is computer village, it s your tech hub, they sell everything here. mobile phones, computers, any kind of digital equipment you re looking for, this is where to find it. it s said to be a $2 billion market. anthony: public money is generated in lagos, not so much by oil but by the free market. a wild west free for all of private enterprise. tunti: it grew organically,
not by government intervention. anthony: it just happened. tunti: it just happened. everything is crammed into this small eco-system. you have one small store. somebody selling mobile phones right in it. and in front of him you got another guy who s selling applications for the phones. a repair guy he s right there, and it works. that s the amazing thing about it. anthony: tunti andrews is a journalist, radio host, and an expert on the nigerian economy. the guys who fascinate me are these kids sitting there with phones all opened up. like if i want my iphone repaired in new york i have to go to the apple store and i have to wait on line, i have to say bye to my phone for a while. but here they know how to take apart my iphone, fix it, and put it back together. tunti: this how the computer village eco-system works right, a young boy trying to make a better life for himself finds his way to lagos. and one of his brothers or his uncles are working here and then he starts to learn
in the u.s., for every software developer that s looking for a job, there are five openings, which means there is a massive opportunity to get these awesome people who are really smart and really driven to be able to take on africa s challenges. iyinoluwa: but that s what s special about this place. i mean, most people kind of resign to the reality that they have. we re creating an alternate reality where there is always going to be power for you to do your work. anthony: africa, it should be stressed, is home to seven of the ten fastest growing internet populations in the world, with a huge young and mostly untapped labor pool of eager and ambitious people. iyinoluwa: the impact in a very short period of time, it s incredible. before we started, people would rarely hire african developers, and now they can. seni: many of us have been products of multinational experiences, i grew up in nigeria, spent time in paris, went to the u.s., and eventually i came back home. we re all co