Ambassador Harold Doley remarks at the Closing Plenary, GPLC 2013

Global Peace Foundation
November 9, 2013

Ambassador Harold Doley

Global Peace Leadership Conference
November 7-9, 2013
Abuja, Nigeria
Theme: “Moral and Innovative Leadership: Building Sustainable Peace for a Prosperous Future”

Ambassador Harold Doley, Founder of Doley Securities Group, LLC, New York


I’ve attended many international meetings in my career, and there’s never been a meeting like this.

And I want to thank Dr. Moon for inviting me, and thank his staff, the conveners of this event.

“One Family Under God.” I’m a businessman. So you usually don’t have businessmen, speaking about God and Prosperity and Profit. But I’m here to do that.

One family under God. My emphasis in the panel yesterday dealt with housing. There’s a definition, if you ask someone, what’s the difference between a house and a home, and I was always taught it was love.

And I was somewhat chided yesterday by one of the audience members, saying, “You’re bringing American solutions to Nigeria.” What I was doing was trying to bring economic issues and awareness in my conversation. In the US, which is the largest economy in the world, and in Africa, next year, Nigeria will have the largest economy on the continent of Africa.

The driving force—in the largest economy in the world is consumption. And that’s the misunderstood word, in this context. What it deals with, primarily, is housing. The American economy, with other economies, is driven by housing. And we cannot have a happy family under God, a viable happy family under God, unless we have proper housing.
Seventy percet of the US economy is housing, consumption. What we want to do here is see the transformation, the continued transformation, of the Nigerian economy, and the African economy, as a whole, driven by housing. And to do that, we’re looking at, brining money from around the world, to Africa, to other parts of the “less developed world” and that transformation can be done through housing.

The other issue, which deals directly with the younger people, the future, is small businesses. Small business employs people. And being an American, I go back to the American model. The greatest employer, in America, is not the big-fortune 500, the fortune 1,000 companies. It’s the small businesses. That is the driving employing force in the economy.

And, young people should, and you should insist that the powers-that-be allow you, with little regulation as possible, start and grow businesses. That is the future for Nigeria, the rest of Africa, and the world.

Thank you very much.

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