Interfacing ICT with Entrepreneurship Culture in a Developing Country in Contest with Cyber-Crimes: Gains and Pains

Abstract

This paper is a cross-sectional analysis, critique and exposé of the impacts and the implications of the interfacing of ICT with entrepreneurship ventures in contest with cyber-crimes in a developing economy such as Nigeria. An entrepreneur is simply an individual who is willing to risk investing time and money in a business activity that has the potential to make a profit or incur loss. More specifically, the enterprising individual is someone who organizes production, bringing together the factors of production viz; land, labor, and capital to make goods and services. He makes business decisions, figuring out what goods to produce and how to produce them even in the face of the emerging cyber-crimes, knowing that there is no guarantee that business decisions will not be sabotaged. Again he innovates, introducing new products & technologies by the applications of information and communication technology (ICT) and related methods as new ways of organizing business. Entrepreneurs come from all types of background. The types of business they create come in all shapes and sizes. They range from, craft shops, wielding, foundries, rubber processing and vulcanizing, food eg “okpapreneur”, ogiri-preneur, akpupreneur, palm-wine-preneur, compu-preneur etc. They are active in all classification of business activity, and are the foundation of the small business sector of our country’s economy. Entrepreneurs are the proprietors of the apprenticeship system that provides primary vehicle for training the labor for small business. The apprenticeship system is one in which an individual serves a proprietor or master for a given period of time in order to learn a trade or craft. It generates a large multiplier effect in employment creation. Generally, there is also a reflection of gross under development of entrepreneurial culture in our academic curricula. Sorrowfully enough, the bane of our educational system curricula, inter alia, is that it is designed towards DEPENDABILITY instead of CREATIVITY to our students (FRCN Oral, 2015). Thus, the present curricula in use in our tertiary institutions should be reorganized and improved upon to serve as an engine of innovation, imagination and vision. The new curricula envisaged should expose students to courses which create opportunities for skill acquisition and entrepreneurship promotion, and broaden access to information and communication technology which encompass all computer-based systems such as tele-conferencing, video-conferencing and the Internet with its world wide web (www).The present picture of our educational system shows defects in national priorities due to lack of proper planning. Data from the National Universities commission show that, the Polytechnic and Colleges of Education enrolled relatively less number of students than the Universities. As a result, graduate output of Universities out-numbers that of other tertiary institutions designed to produce the middle level manpower. This clearly demonstrates that more managerial and executive personnel are produced than what is produced at the middle level, which otherwise should be more. Furthermore, Olaiya (1998) evaluated this problem of imbalance and posited that it has been reflecting in the poor performance of the economy. According to Ihekoronye (2000), the synthesis of this view and the lesson to be learnt from it is that a well planned manpower programme for the country ought to produce more at the middle level, bearing in mind that in an economy, where there are more managers and administrators than those producing and maintaining, there are resultant economic crisis, under-production, under-employment of high-level manpower, scarcity of necessary commodities and lack of appropriate technology development.

Keywords: Cyber-crimes, entrepreneurs, compupreneur, firewalls, computer forensics, ICT, “okpapreneur”, palm-wine-preneur.