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If you asked anybody in my family, they would have very stridently proclaimed themselves middle class. My mother and father were separated, so he doesn't count.

When I was 24 I went to Nigeria and it was such a culture shock, growing up in Australia and suddenly being the only white man in this unit full of black men.

I live half the year in Nigeria, the other half in the U.S. But home is Nigeria - it always will be. I consider myself a Nigerian who is comfortable in the world. I look at it through Nigerian eyes.

Imagine how different those classrooms could be if hundreds of Nigeria's most talented recent graduates and professionals channeled their energy not only into the country's banks, but into making education in the country a force for transformation.

Nigeria has moved into low-middle-income, but their north is very poor, and the health care systems there have broken down.

My parents lost everything, all their savings, because we had to run from the Nigerian side to the Biafran side. We were Igbos.

My parents were determined to move into the middle class.

Honestly, I grew up in pretty modest circumstances. We were a middle-class family.

I was born and raised in Nigeria. We lived in England when I was 3 and 4, and I would go to summer school every year in Switzerland.

When I was growing up in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, I sold doughnuts, popcorn and Kool Aid every day after school so that my family had some money and I could pay my school fees. It was a tough life.