As many of us know, Lagos State’s Governor Ambode paid the Yaba startup cluster a visit yesterday (I know he went to iDEA, CcHub, and Andela).
From Techpoint:
Speaking to the entrepreneurs, Akinwumi Ambode reiterated his supportive stand on innovative startups and businesses. During introductions and discourse, Femi Longe of CcHub raised the issue of electric power being the biggest challenge startups in Lagos face.
And…
On the issue of power that Femi Longe raised, Governor Akinwumi Ambode sympathized with the entrepreneurs seated and shocked them further; he promised to add all the clusters to the Mainland Power. Being that the Mainland Power serves electricity to public utilities, the governor promised that all the tech startups and businesses in Yaba will be henceforth classified as public utility.
From today’s TechCabal daily digest:
What are the second-order effects, though? Property values and the rent they command will do like garri in the presence of water and rise. First, for office spaces, but also for the housing estates around them. That will cause the prices of goods to rise as well (somebody will try to sell me a can of Red Bull for 700 naira and I will buy it
). We will also need to sit down and have a conversation about what exactly a technology business is, in this context. Do you qualify only if you actively build technology, if your internal processes are powered by software, or if you have a website and you know someone? What happens when a “tech startup” moves out of their office space and a barber shop moves in?
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While Ambode’s electricity + grant promise sounds nice, I’m not very enthused about the government giving special “support” to some startups that are picked by some opaque process (we do not know that it will be opaque, but I’m processing only the information I know to be true).
Who determines what a tech business is? If I run a barbershop and I allow some of my customers pay every month and book the service via an Android app, is it considered a technology startup? There are more than 60 tech startups in Yaba. Electric power is a finite resource, so it needs to be allocated in a way that makes sense. Who determines the startups that become public utilities? Based on what criteria? How do we plan to manage the bottleneck that will inevitably be created and check nepotism?
If 3 Birrel Avenue gets classified as a public utility this year, and Hotels.ng moves out in January 2018, what happens to that classification? Does it follow them to their new space? Do they have to reapply for the classification and have the old office disconnected? Or are we going to walk down the slippery slope of classifying everything in Yaba as a public utility? Ah.
I also think it’s weird to attempt to classify the startup ecosystem as one homogenous entity. What matters most to BudgIT or GoMyWay will not necessarily be the same things that matter to Paga, and it’s unrealistic to pretend that that’s the case. I’m personally much more interested in efforts to increase internet penetration and drive down the price per gigabyte of data than anything else. Internet businesses need more potential customers to sell to, not just light bulbs and sockets that work.
The government should be providing the basic gear for the game, and enforcing the rules. Not actively helping some of the teams, no matter how well-intentioned that looks. The last thing we want is enforcing the idea that “support” from the government has direct impact on the success of any company.
Am I looking at it wrong?
got me 
Freelancer too…