Named by Forbes as one of Africa’s 30 best entrepreneurs under 30, Chude Jideonwo is The managing partner of Red Media Africa.
He was a speaker at the TEDxEuston where he reiterated the need for Africans to rise up and take their roles as citizens.
In his his talk titled “Occupying the office of the citizen”, Jideonwo explained that for Africa to keep up with the slogan “Africa Rising”, then “we need young people who are gainfully employed and who can demand better governance or solve their own problems”.
He explained that his firm, TFAA one of the platforms under the group Red Media Africa, has plans for African citizenship schools where 200,000 people aged between 16-24 years will be taught how to influence their communities, demand better from their local and state governments and solve their own problems in spite of their leaders.
For him the rationale for a citizen-centric governance is the very purpose of democracy; “the most important office in a democracy is not the office of the president but the office of the citizen” because it is when citizens show that they’ve had enough that government decides that enough is enough. Hence, as citizens we “cannot leave activism to activists”.
“We need strong, patriotic, visionary leaders, but more importantly, we need strong, patriotic, visionary citizens who will tell their leaders what to do, who will get them to do it or who will shove them aside and show them how it’s done”, said Chude Jideonwo when talking about the need for active citizenship.
During the talk, he also answered an age long question of whether he is an entrepreneur or an activist.