Imagining the future...

Congratulations go to Access Bank for their fantastic new advert. It is easily the best tv ad I've seen in the 2 1/2 years I've lived here. The ad is a computer-based animation of passengers getting onto a high-speed bullet-train at Lagos. Electronic doors swish open like on the Jubilee line in London. The train whizzes to Abuja where smart people in suits and native alike get on and off, then onwards.

A simple idea, powerfully executed, doing much to energise one of the strongest up and coming banks. But more importantly, this ad shows how little Nigeria's future has been imagined. Everyone is caught up in the Goldfish bowl concerns of the present: to 3rd term or not to 3rd term, PDP or not to PDP etc etc. More than anything else (and I say it for the umpteenth time) what Nigeria needs now more than anything is people who relentlessly imagine and visualise the future and scenario-plan their way there. The brittle confidence that masks so much insecurity must give way to a collective storytelling of how we want the future to be here. Radical transformation begins with a convincing vision..