This reads like a PR article that Zuckerberg paid to have written.
I'm a sucker for a story about potential, especially in the underdog, and the parts jumping out at me are all about the potential of the people in Nigeria.
I somehow ended up following Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, but it's Twitter so the picture I get is very incomplete. To read that he got up at a formal demo day ceremony during Zuckerberg's trip with the VP of Nigeria in attendance and then criticized the country for being resistant to change is enthralling.
It's hard to be cynical about the article's puffery for Zuck, when it illuminates the intestinal fortitude of entrepreneurs making a hell of a run at it in a place that is infinitely less geared to making startups a reality than Silicon Valley.
I met many smart, driven entrepreneurs while there, but as a new friend said while I was there: "It's tough to be Nigerian on the internet". The number of obstacles that a Nigerian web developer has to fight through even for something so trivial to us like getting a webhosting account, is shameful.
Additionaly, it's tough for the Nigerian developer community to get taken seriously by the outside world... I had several stories related to me about tech companies promising then balking at trips into Nigeria, in one specific instance for totally bullshit reasons. Google apparently does a great job with the developer relations in Lagos, but it seemed like that was about it.
I hope that in the future we get to really see what the Nigerian entrepreneurial community can really do; If they can chip away at their road blocks I think someone from there will eventually build something really special for all of us.
I also hope I get to go back and work with their community some more.
Hey, it's me, Mark, just taking a stroll with my two cool Nigerian friends...
It's a mix between tabloid journalism, pr puff piece, great man narrative, and a new brand of American imperialism. It's shameless in its portrayal of these poor hard-working people as having their lives made better by Zuckerberg showing up saying "awesome" and doing a very public tour which boosts his brand.
Other people do this stuff, but they don't get this kind of attention.
You can't take anything Facebook, Google, or a number of the other big social media giants do at face value anymore. Check out their backgrounds, the politicians they are very chummy with, and what they censor. Business is war and the American social media giants need footholds in the 3rd world if they are going to combat the Chinese, etc.