Nigeria’s Got Talent

So don’t ask me the details of how this happened.

But somehow I managed to rupture the gas line in our fridge’s freezer compartment. I knew it was bad, because what appeared to be liquid Nitrogen (It’s Freon I know) came out with a loud hissing sound that lasted for like 2 minutes.

I was confused as forks.

One moment I was chipping off huge chunks of ice from my mini fridge’s freezer compartment and the next … boom! The fridge was spitting out freon at me.

It was quite a sight. I thought I was going to get frozen to death, like in Terminator 2 (I know, I have a wild imagination).

But I survived. But sadly, my fridge was no longer cool.

I jumped on the internet to figure out what happened. And It was filled with pages and pages of information talking about how once you hear a “a loud hissing” sound, your Fridge was as good as done. That you had to replace the entire fridge, because the cost to flush and fill your line was too expensive. Like $200 etc.

I was worried, I had just gone from chipping ice to destroying my LG pre-recession model fridge with a 50-cent kitchen knife. I felt all levels of forks in my stomach.

I literally could not sleep at night, I kept worrying about the food, the cost of a post-recession fridge, my stupidity, everything kept me up.

The next morning…

With my eyes still heavy with worry, I picked up the phone and started to call around.

I wanted to know if I could at least find out the cost to fix the fridge, so I could weigh my options.

The first person I called said the fridge repair would cost N6,000 as long as he could find a used evaporator. The second person said it would cost N12,000 because he would need to weld the punctured aluminum outer exterior of the evaporator and then flush and fill the gas line again.

In dollar terms both fridge repair options were between 16 USD and 32 USD.

I eventually went with the second person and got him to do the job for N10,000. END OF STORY

But why is this story important? You see all the sites I checked last night were foreign websites … American, UK, British, etc. All of them had one solution, buy a new fridge.

But in Nigeria because of the talent of our people, economy and pure ingenuity, they were able to fix quickly and easily what would have cost $200 for only $25.

Nigeria has talent! Like China talent.

But I think we (including me via OkadaBooks) sometimes fail to see these talents (the street non-techie entrepreneurs) because we are too busy looking at the digital sexy side of things and frankly because that market is stressful to conquer.

But if we could use “digital” to tap into this large and potent labor force … just like UBER did for thousands of drivers in Lagos, then we could do what China did for the world. Because Nigeria’s Got massive Talent.