Following the announcement of the TEF 2021 cohort of 4,949 entrepreneurs, the founder, Tony Elumelu joined the IOD Annual Conference as a keynote speaker where he talked about how young business owners can rise and overtake through corporate governance.
The IOD Annual Conference with the theme ‘Creating the Future: Deepening Corporate Governance Practice Through Multi-Sectoral and Multi-Generational Collaborations’ was directed towards inculcating culture and discipline of corporate governance practices in the younger generation.
It was attended by captains of industry and directors of both private and public sector institutions.
According to Elumelu the first thought about the theme of the conference was TEF – “While reading the theme of the event, I immediately thought of the Tony Elumelu Foundation” – and its beneficiaries.
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Tony Elumelu Foundation (TEF) Entrepreneurship Programme – Application 2021
The 2021 TEF cohort received $24.75million and joined the already existing 15,000 young entrepreneurs from 54 African countries with a non-refundable seed capital of $5000 each.
Elumelu talked about the strategic importance of engaging this younger generation so as to help them build institutions that will last and surpass.
Corporate governance as a way to help the young businesses – Tony Elumelu
Governance, he said, “is extremely important when you want to build to last.”
However, he also noted that the lack of corporate governance can destroy institutions and examples abound all over the world.
Tony Elummelu further made references to Apple, Microsoft and JP Morgan as he cited the aforementioned.
“When you think of IBM and Apple, you’ll find that while IBM was there before Apple, Apple is much stronger today, he said.”
“We need our own Steve Jobs, we need our own Apple, the first company to cost one trillion dollars in market capitalisation.”
“We need our own Microsoft.”
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“We need to build institutions that will not start with Tony and die with Tony.”
Tony Elumelu Foundation (TEF) Entrepreneurship Programme
“We need to have our own JP Morgan. To me, that should be our aspiration and the solution to that aspiration coming through is sound corporate governance.”