Meeting Bill Gates: "
Last week I got an email from someone at Microsoft asking if my dad was the president
of Nigeria. I almost deleted the email without responding until I looked at the person's
email signature and it said 'Executive Assistant to Bill Gates'. So I responded and
it turned out that Bill Gates was going to be in Nigeria over the weekend to meet
with my dad and he wanted to chat before his trip.
We met on Friday and according to my mom he met with my dad over the weekend. After
our talk I asked if it was OK if I blogged our meeting and he was fine with it. What
follows are my impressions from our meeting and the topics we chatted about.
The last time I talked to Bill Gates in person was five years ago at the annual event
for summer interns at Microsoft where we get to meet him at his house. When I was
an intern they had to split the event into two seperate trips due to the number of
interns. After introductions, I mentioned that we'd met before at the intern event
in 2001 and asked if the event continued to this day. It still goes on today and has
now grown to four separate rounds of visits. BillG said he appreciates hearing from
college students about companies and trends they find interesting before their opinions
get influenced by their employer when they get out of school.
BillG asked a couple of questions about me and my family such as how long I'd been
at Microsoft, where I want to school, if my mom was Stella
Obasanjo (she isn't), what my mom did, if I had any siblings back home and so
on. I appreciated talking about myself and was put at ease before being asked about
Nigeria or my dad.
BillG had read my dad's Wikipedia
entry and thus was a little familiar with my dad's background story. This is my
dad's second time around as president. The first time was between 1976 and 1979 when
he became the military president because the sitting military president was killed
in a failed coup. He made history by being the first African head of state to voluntarily
relinquish power by having elections and stepping down once a winner was announced.
He became president this time around after spending three
years as a political prisoner. After the military president that jailed him died
of natural causes, he was released. A number of others who were jailed at the same
time as him were not as lucky and died in prison such as Moshood
Abiola and Shehu
Musa Yar'Adua before the military president that jailed them passed away.I
talked about meeting my dad in Atlanta back in 1998 when he was released and hearing
for the first time that he planned to run for president. I thought it was an insane
idea given that Nigeria had never had a civilian president finish out their term without
there being a miltary takeover of government. I can still remember my dad sitting
there and saying 'If I don't do it who will?'. He won the election and also won a
second term. My dad still gives me a hard time today because I never called to congratulate
him. I did attend both inauguration ceremonies so that should count for something,
I guess.
BillG wondered what my dad would do after he left the presidency. He mentioned that
he'd had some angst about leaving Microsoft in two years and also gave an example
of a good friend of his, Bill Clinton, who also had similar angst when he left the
U.S. presidency. I pointed out that my dad had been a retired head of state for almost
two decades before this time around and had found things to do. Besides becoming a
large scale farmer, he still did the international statesman thing and once was in
the running for the position of UN secretary general which he lost to Boutros
Boutros-Ghali back in the early 1990s.
He'd read that my dad was a born again Christian and wondered if that extended to
the entire family. It doesn't, I'm not terribly religious and my mom is a devout catholic
which it turned out BillG's wife is as well. This segued into a conversation about
religion and Nigeria. The country is about half Christian and half Muslim but over
the past few years, the division has become more stark. Since I've been in the U.S.,
a number of states in the northern part of the country have embraced Sharia
law which has led to some
negative international responses. The religion issue is now divisive enough that questions
about religion and ethnicity were removed from this year's census. It wasn't like
this when I was growing up. Speaking of ethnicity, BillG asked about the national
language and whether there was a major ethnic group in Nigeria. The national language
is English since we were colonised by the British and although there were three large
ethnic groups (Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo) there are hundreds of indigenous tribes with
their own cultures and languages.
The reason BillG was visiting Nigeria was to talk about some of the work that the Bill
& Melinda Gates foundation has been doing in Africa. One of the issues he
wanted to discuss were the efforts they had been taking to eradicate polio in Nigeria
via vaccination. There had recently been some rumors
about negative effects of polio vaccines in the northern part of Nigeria which
had actually lead to at least one state banning
them. The problem with polio, BillG said, is that unlike diseases such as smallpox
it may be hard to detect so an outbreak could occur with the authorities being none
the wiser until it is too late. He said the tipping point is about 15% of the population
being infected while containment is when < 5% are infected. He also mentioned that
their foundation was working on vaccines for malaria and sleeping sickness. I mentioned
having malaria a few times while growing up and thinking how weird it was when I heard
people in the U.S. talking about malaria as if it was ebola. However there was a difference
between how I grew up in the city and the average Nigerian who lives in the villages
and rural areas. The main problem with malaria that BillG wants combated is preventing
it in pregnant women. Not only is the chance of infant mortality increased but also
if the child makes it, the baby is usually born having a low birth weight which contributes
to a lifetime of problems. He feels they are close to breakthroughs in creating vaccines
for these diseases especially since not a lot of research has been done in this area
due to big pharma not investing a lot in research for diseases affecting the poor
in Africa. BillG acknowledged that he was being an optimist when he says this and
it may take a little longer in much the same way that his optimism about the future
of Tablet PCs and voice recognition software has taken longer than he expected to
become mainstream.
My comment about the differences growing up in the city versus the life in the villages
reminded BillG of a similar contrast in another African country, South Africa. The
life in places like Sun
City [where most Americans go when they say they are going to South Africa] is
radically different than the life in various South
African townships. BillG took his children to some townships when they were in
South Africa so they could see how the other half lived, his children were resistant
to the idea but he thought that it would be a good idea to see what life is like in
these places. We also talked about how widespread AIDs is in South Africa (affecting
30% of the population by some estimates) while it seems relatively contained in countries
like Nigeria. I mentioned seeing the billboards for the ABC campaign (Abstain, Be
faithful, use Condoms) while in Nigeria and he agreed that the campaigns seemed to
have been working. Using condoms has seemed to be very effective but unfortunately
there are some religious and social objections to the idea. Their foundation is working
on creams and gels thatcan be applied just like spermicidal
creams and gels which can be used to prevent AIDs and will be more acceptable
to social norms [his exact words were 'eliminate the negotiation during encounters'].
BillG also said that there seemed to be a strong correlation between improving healthcare
and the number of children people had. This means that there is the double benefit
of having healthy children and being able to afford to have them since you don't have
that many. In addition to healthcare, BillG was also going to talk to my dad about
their efforts around improving agricultural practices to improve crop yield and some
of their suggestions for improving education.
We did talk about Microsoft a little. When I mentioned I work for the Windows Live
platform group he mentioned that this would be an interesting area to be in over the
next few years and commented on a number of Windows Live services such as Windows
Live Spaces, Windows Live Messenger and Windows
Live Mail. He also talked about some of the leadership
changes we've had across Windows and Windows Live.I asked if he'd continue
with his biannual Think
Weeks where employees from all over the company get to write him papers about
ideas they have. He said he'd continue until he stepped down in 2008 and after that
it would be up to Ray Ozzie [who will be replacing him as Chief Software Architect]
to decide if he'd continue with the tradition or not. I did mention that I'd
submitted a Thinkweek paper which he'd writen a response to, he hoped that he
wasn't too harsh in his criticism and I replied that his feedback was quite favorable
and has led to some good things happening in Windows
Live.
The meeting ran over by 15 minutes and I felt bad for taking up so much of his time.
As I was leaving the building I overheard the following exchange between the receptionist
of the building and a visitor
Visitor: Where is Bill Gates's office?
Receptionist: I'm not at liberty to divulge that information.
Visitor: I need to see him, I just downloaded Windows Vista and I have a number
of complaints.
I wonder how often that happens. :)
"
(Via Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life.)