The air changes the moment you step into AfricanWorks’ compound in Victoria Island, one of the highbrow areas in Lagos, Nigeria. The first thing you see is the greeneries all over the compound, the atmosphere is calm and quiet. It feels like you’ve just escaped the hustle and bustle of Lagos.

As you’d expect, the outdoor experience is a hint of what goes on in the interior.

The main door is see-through so you can tell of the comfort that awaits inside. After a minute in the lobby, Gregoire Schwebig, founder and CEO of AfricaWorks came out to meet me. He’s of average height and moderately built. His energy, however, didn’t feel like that of a man who had just completed a trip from Paris to Lagos that morning. As we exchanged pleasantries, one question lingered; why is this French man building a home-grown business in Africa?

Schwebig was born and grew up in Paris with a close tie to Francophone Africa. His mother was born in Senegal, so he visited Senegal, Ivory Coast, Mali and Togo while growing up. After graduating from ESSEC Business School, one of the best business schools in Europe, he went on to work at Lehman Brothers in London as a financial analyst. After Lehman Brothers liquidated, he joined Societe Generale in Hong Kong.

In 2011, Schwebig joined Fanasi Capital, a venture capital fund focused on high-growth startups in East Africa, as a senior associate, and then moved to Kenya and remained there for 8 years. He was elected as a consular adviser to the French government on the affairs of 7 countries in East and South Africa. In 2016, he became the president of the Kenya chapter of the French Chamber of Commerce, a dedicated body that helps French companies and entrepreneurs set up in Kenya.

Schwebig wore many hats during his time in Kenya; in 2014, he started Haussmann Africa, a corporate real estate company that built and designed custom offices for companies. The company, which he still runs till date, has designed offices for Uber, L’oreal and Total.

After designing offices for a while, he realised there were gaps he wanted to fill, so in 2019, he started AfricaWorks.

Building AfricaWorks
The way people work had already started shifting before the pandemic hit in 2020. The pandemic only expedited the shift and forced businesses to restructure work to fit the new normal which is hybrid.

While there was already full-blown support for the future of work in the West, there was little or no solution in Africa to support the growing business ecosystem—there was no real pan-African flexible workplace solution that could power the future of work across the continent. And here is where AfricaWorks, a pan-African flexible workspace provider chain, plugs itself.

The idea was simple: build a world-class workspace that brings together the best businesses under one roof in one city. Then scale and replicate the process in another. AfricaWorks launched its first space in Abidjan, the capital city of Ivory Coast, and now operates in 9 cities—Abidjan, Accra, Cairo, Cape Town, Dakar, Dar Es Salaam, Jo’burg, Lagos, and Nairobi—across 8 countries and counting.

The company lists top multinationals like Glovo, Universal Music, L’oreal, Total and more as part of companies working out of its spaces.

“We currently have over 150 businesses and over 2,000 individuals working from our spaces. We are also opening more spaces in the coming months,” Schwebig told TechCabal.

More than just a coworking space
For AfricaWorks, as the African tech and business ecosystem grows, it will continue to grow to support them across the continent. Beyond being a pan-African coworking space, it now wants to do more as it slowly transitions into a tech company. It has started building a business-to-business (B2B) product that will provide full-on operation support for its clients.

“Our B2B service marketplace will be called AfricaWorks Services, which will help us connect our clients to partnered services providers like recruiting, marketing, finance, expansion, and everything else they need to grow their businesses,” said Schwebig, who also co-founded French-African Foundation, an organisation that contributes to the emergence of a Franco-African succession.

The play here is to reduce third party friction and be the only direct partner their members need. AfricaWorks Services will partner with talent companies like OfferZen and Andela to bring qualified talent to its member companies; partner with marketing and financial firms to bring quality marketing and financial services to its community; and African tradetech like Norebase to help in expansion and manage trade across Africa.

Schwebig believes that Africa will play a pivotal role in the future of work and they [AfricanWorks] are positioning to be a crucial part of that movement. He believes this is becoming evident in the way the African tech ecosystem is booming and the surge in talent exodus. AfricaWorks wants to play in the talent services but first for its members and then—maybe in the future—expanding the services to the public.

AfricaWorks operates in 9 cities and counting and these countries, though they may have similar problems, have a peculiar business landscape that requires a bespoke solution. Schwebig confirmed that, while Ivory Coast remains AfricaWorks’ biggest market in terms of patronage and revenue, it has invested more in Nigeria due to the size of the market and the prospect of the tech ecosystem, especially.

Among other places, the company is also planning to open new space at the Kotoka international airport in Accra, Ghana.

According to Goldie Iyamu, the marketing head at AfricaWorks, by the time all the pending projects are completed, the company should push into 500 businesses and over 3,000 people working across their spaces.

After 2 years and 6 months, AfricaWorks has experienced astronomical growth and now it’s positioning itself as the partner for businesses with pan-African growth ambitions.

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Driving in Lagos state is not the same as driving anywhere else in the world m. Here’s what you need to know if you want to learn how to drive correctly in Lagos.

Have a spare car in your compound
Driving in Lagos means you should have a spare car in your house. Because if , the real owners of the car decide to help you bash it, will you now be left with nothing? If you want to drive and you don’t have a spare car, better enter a cab.

Drop your sanity at home
Lagos roads are not a place for people with sound minds. They’re for people who have nothing to lose. When you decide to drive on a Lagos road, you need to embody the spirit of someone who can do anyhow at any time. Scary stuff, but it needs to be done.

Always have enough food stuff in your car
With traffic that often lasts longer than the will to live, you should always make sure that you have enough to cook. As a passenger, you can sleep and pretend to not be hungry. However, if you’re driving, you need all the energy. You fit make sharp-sharp amala.

Remember that you’re never wrong
In Lagos, everyone that drives is right. Even if they’re passing one-way or bashing your car, they’re right. You too need to embody the spirit of always being right.

LASTMA is your biggest opp
As you drive, have it at the back of your mind. LASTMA officers are out for blood, so don’t give them any. Complete papers, fire extinguisher, and whatever else they need. If not, the billing that’ll occur will wreck you.

Pedestrians are a suggestion
To drive in Lagos state, you don’t rate pedestrians. The road was not built with them in mind, so why will you drive with them in mind?

Refresh your insults vocabulary
Every morning before you enter the road, refresh the insults in your vocabulary. Driving in Lagos means you have to be constantly innovating with your insultive creativity.

Have your therapist on speed dial
Driving in Lagos will traumatise you, so you should have the person that’ll un-traumatise you. If you didn’t have a therapist before, better go and book one before you hit the road.

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Facebook content moderators in Kenya will receive a 30-50% pay rise. This announcement comes two weeks after an investigation report by TIME revealed that content moderators in Nairobi were subject to poor pay and working conditions by Sama, a company responsible for Facebook’s sub-Saharan Africa content moderation since 2019.

Every content moderator will receive an extra 20,000 Kenyan shillings ($176) per month, Sama told employees in a meeting on Tuesday, sources revealed to TIME.

“The raise means that the lowest-paid Facebook content moderators at Sama will now take home around 50,000 Kenyan shillings ($439) each month after-tax, or around $2.20 per hour for a 9-hour working day. This is up from around $1.50 per hour previously.”

All content moderators were also promised yearly bonuses worth one month of their salary, as an incentive to remain at the company, according to the sources.

Despite the obvious correlation, Habel Kamau, a human resources director at Sama’s Nairobi office, said that the salary increase wasn’t a result of the release of the investigation by TIME. He claimed that the conversations about a salary increase had been ongoing for a while now, adding that the pay raise was made possible due to budget cuts from other places and not as a result of Sama receiving additional money from Facebook.

Although the pay raise is welcomed by many of the content moderators, some still say it’s not enough. Sama employees remain some of Facebook’s lowest-paid workers anywhere in the world. While the lowest starting salary of a Facebook content moderator at Sama is $2.20 per hour, outsourced content moderators for Facebook in the U.S. are paid a typical starting salary of $18 per hour.

South African Daniel Motaung, a former employee of Sama who was fired after trying to lead a union, noted that in 2019 employees had requested for their pay to be doubled. “This increase will make a difference but it won’t change their lives,” Motaung said in the statement. “They still won’t be able to buy a house or feed their families in line with the ‘lifting the poor out of poverty’ narrative that Sama continuously boasts about.”

Sama didn’t comment on allegations that its managers suppressed a unionization effort in 2019, which led to Motaung losing his Job. Meta, Facebook’s parent company also declined to comment on the announcement of the pay raise.

The announcement of the pay raise is seen as a win for the content moderators and validation of the power in employees speaking up.

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There are many Nigerians who hate the 1999 constitution and just want it completely scrapped. This has been their one prayer point for years:

The sentiment is that the constitution is a fraudulent document that was brought to life under unfortunate circumstances and doesn’t fully accommodate the Nigerian experience. For those critics, the 1999 constitution is a malaria drug being used to treat a kidney infection.

Despite agitations for a new “people-driven” constitution, the Nigerian government is not interested in the hard work of compiling a new one from scratch. So, the only middle ground to address the concerns about its inadequacy is to amend it. A constitutional amendment is basically like a home revamp — you want to get an AC to replace the standing fan, get a couple of new throw pillows, and maybe throw a new rug in the centre of the room.

The National Assembly has been in the news a lot over the past week following the constitutional amendment votes of March 1, 2022. Lawmakers in the Senate and House of Representatives voted on 68 bills with issues ranging from restructuring, welfare, to women’s rights. The simple rule of the vote was that each bill must be passed in both chambers. Failure to pass in one chamber was a failure to pass in both.

We’ve already highlighted some of the most impressive bills approved by the lawmakers. Here is a look at their worst decisions.

1. No judicial reform
For context into this particular subject, let us remind you that more than 70% of inmates in Nigerian prisons are awaiting trial. Some of them have been in prison awaiting trial for so long that if they were immediately convicted for their suspected crime, they’d have finished their sentences.

Now let’s play a quick game of Yay or Nay:
Who wants a judicial system that ensures timely dispensation of justice? Now, who wants a constitution that provides timelines within which civil and criminal cases have to be determined at trial to eliminate delay in justice delivery? Also, who wants a system that allows courts to conduct trials remotely, virtually and online with the full aid of modern technology? If you voted Yay for all, then you’re not ready to be a senator.

The House of Representatives voted Yay on all three bills, but the Senate went in the opposite direction and rejected them. Who does judicial reform hurt?

2. No punishment for changing parties
“Cross-carpeting” and “defection” are words that have become popular in political circles in Nigeria because of how much politicians don’t sit down in one place. Many of them switch between the same parties to pursue their personal interests so often that the average politician has been a member of at least two parties. A controversial part of this culture is when elected public office holders abandon a party that helped them win the office and take that advantage to another party.

A bill was introduced to terminate the tenures of such officeholders, but it was rejected by the Senate. This doomed the bill even though the House of Representatives passed it. Failure to punish elected officials who fail to take their mandates seriously upholds a culture that allows politicians to do as they please without consequences. It’s not a surprise that the bill didn’t pass because it’s the same people that would be affected by it that made the decision. It’s like expecting goats to vote against guarding yams.

The Nays have it.

3. Voting for torture?
The 1999 constitution prohibits torture and establishes the right to dignity for every Nigerian, but torture enjoys free rein in Nigeria. Security agencies are known to torture and dehumanise Nigerians and get away with it especially because it’s so loosely defined. For lawmakers that claim to care about the wellbeing of Nigerians, closing the loopholes that fuel this culture should be an easy decision.

An alteration bill was introduced to have the constitution clearly define acts that qualify as torture, inhuman or degrading treatment. Both chambers voted against the bill, handing torture specialists in security agencies a lifeline.

4. FCT Minister slot
As the child of circumstance that it is, the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) is not administered by a governor, but a minister that’s appointed by the president. Seven FCT ministers have been appointed since 1999 but none of them is an FCT indigene. There have been campaigns by FCT indigenes to change this, and there has even been a court judgement in their favour.

However, when lawmakers voted on an alteration bill that would make it unconstitutional to appoint an FCT minister that’s not an indigene, the House voted yes, but the Senate voted no.

5. Blocking women
A lot has been said about the performance of gender-based bills voted on by lawmakers on March 1, 2022. We have written extensively about their rejection, and the general attitude of the National Assembly towards gender-based bills will continue to be a blot on its records.

Passing any of the five gender-based bills would have enhanced the inclusion of women in politics, governance and society, but the National Assembly said: you guessed right

6. No name change for Barkin Ladi LGA
This is a very strange one and we’ll explain why. Of the 68 bills considered, six of them were about changing or correcting the names of some local government areas across the country. Five of them passed, but the one that sought to rename Barkin Ladi local government area of Plateau state to Gwol LGA was rejected by both chambers.

Gwol is the ancestral name of the indigenous people living in the local government area, and they want the name to reflect their identity, not Barkin Ladi which is from the Hausa language. The renaming issue is a subject affected by ethnoreligious sentiment and a similar bill was defeated in 2017.

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Today, Africa’s largest telecom company, MTN bought 144 plots of digital land in the Africarare metaverse Ubuntuland for an undisclosed sum.

MTN with this purchase laid claim to becoming the first African company to enter the metaverse, according to a press release on the company’s website.

Ubuntuland is being developed by Africarare and Mann Made Media and will be open to public land sales later this year. Ubuntuland will showcase some of the best of African art, fashion, entertainment, sport, tech and creativity and will provide a platform for artists from across the continent to showcase their work. Africarare is the first South African metaverse, housing digital land with roots in the African continent. It sold out it’s debut Non-fungible token (NFT) art collection last year for about $50,000.

“We’ve seen an immense amount of growth in the NFT space marketplace and Metaverses across the US, Europe, Asia, there hasn’t been much coming out of Africa. We feel there’s a great opportunity for Africa to take part in this new world.” Mic Mann, co-founder of Africarare said in an interview last year.

This move comes after MTN’s recent brand refresh positioning itself as a technology company, rather than a telecommunications company. “This investment demonstrates MTN’s commitment to supporting African innovation,” the group said in a statement.

Through its presence in the metaverse, MTN intends to increase its customer attractiveness through a series of experiences merged with consumer passion points, like gaming and music,” Bernice Samuels, chief marketing officer at MTN group said.

Alongside MTN, South African advertising agency M&C Saatchi Abel also purchased its own plot of land in the newly created Ubuntuland. Outside Africa, companies like Samsung, Adida and PricewaterhouseCoopers have hopped on the trend too, buying plots of digital land.

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Linda* left Nigeria for Ukraine in 2021 to pursue a medical degree at Sumy State University. Until February 24, 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, Sumy was a peaceful place for her and hundreds of other Nigerian students studying there.

“The standard of living was comfortable. Everything was affordable and great for students,” she says.

Sumy, a city in north-eastern Ukraine, was one of the first to be attacked after Russian president, Vladimir Putin, ordered an invasion that had been feared for weeks. A confrontation between the invading force and Ukrainian defenders on February 24 led to the burning down of a church. Some of the fighting took place near Sumy State University where a Ukrainian military brigade is stationed. Russian forces were at some point reported to have taken control of half the city, but Ukrainians took it back on February 25.

Three days after the invasion started, Nigerians in Ukraine like Linda and her friend, Blessing*, are stuck in the middle of the chaos in Sumy.

They’re currently staying in an apartment they rented in the city, unable to get on the road to escape to neighbouring countries like others have done. We spoke with Linda about her situation on February 25, a few minutes after she left a bomb shelter she was hiding in for safety.

Stranded
“Presently, our city is in danger. We’ve heard some bombing this night. People are running helter-skelter now and they’re very scared. Students are scared. There’s no way to escape or travel. We’ve received lots of messages from people telling us to go to Poland but the roads are not safe to travel. Russian soldiers are around and they’ve started fighting already.

“Students are scattered everywhere. There are four of us in my apartment. There are more students in the hostel and we even heard about gunshots and smoke around there this night. All of them are underground in the bomb shelters now. We messaged them, but won’t know what’s happening until later.”

Blessing added:
“The situation here does not look so good because there’s no way to get out of the city. Most people don’t even have what to eat. Everyone is stuck here.”

“We eat once a day”
The Russian invasion has disrupted socio-economic activities, including banks that are now shut down, and ATMs that no longer function for people that need to withdraw money needed for survival. Linda’s saving grace is that she was saving some money for a new phone. She wasn’t able to buy it last week, and the money is what she now depends on to survive.

She explained:
“We didn’t know this was going to happen. That’s the money I’m using to buy stuff to survive. I’m sure most students don’t have money on them. Shops are running out of food. They’ve closed down. You can’t even withdraw. Banks are closed.

“We can’t be eating anyhow. I eat once a day. I have to manage what I have. Other students, I don’t know if they have food but we’ve been trying our best to help others to share food. There’s nowhere to get money.”

Travelling is dangerous
Following an initial slow reaction to the crisis, the Nigerian government’s messaging is mostly now focused on telling Nigerians in Ukraine to run towards the borders.

Poland has been one of the most preferred destinations for Nigerians in Ukraine that are trying to escape the war. The two countries share a 332-mile long border. Travelling from Sumy to Rava-Ruska, a recommended border crossing into Poland, takes at least 12 hours under normal conditions.

Travelling there right now means passing through areas that are already under Russian attacks. This journey could now take an entire day, and possibly more if people are forced to walk. There have also been reports that Africans are not being prioritised for entry into Poland and even turned back into Ukraine.

“We just made up our minds that we’re not going anywhere because we don’t want the war that didn’t kill us while staying indoors to kill us on the way to a safe place. You just have to be careful. The Russian troops have harmed civilians and burnt houses.

“The Nigerian government should find a means to get us out of here. I saw the news that they told Russia to not touch their citizens. Please, does a bomb know the difference between citizens of whatever country?”

Worried parents
“We’re not trying to exaggerate. This is what we’re facing. We can’t just tell our parents because they’ll be so scared. My daddy messaged me that he heard the news and he had to get admitted. When he told me that, I stopped telling him things that are happening. I don’t want to hear anything bad from my parents. We’re praying to God to just stop everything.”

A desperate appeal
Not much of what the Nigerian government has said directly addresses people in Linda’s situation, especially other Nigerian students, like Blessing, that are with her. She wants that to change:

“We’re begging the Nigerian government to take necessary action. They should not keep quiet about it. They should help us because we’re actually stranded and stuck here in Sumy. How can we get to Poland when the roads are not safe? We can’t even sleep. We’re so scared.

“The Nigerian government should stop saying things they can’t do. They told us to form a group. We formed a Telegram group. We’ve been in many groups, no action. They told us to fill a form three weeks ago. We filled that form, but we don’t know where they put it. I’m so disappointed I’m from that country.”

Stay put
The most definite position of the Nigerian government on those trapped in Ukraine is to stay put for things to calm down.

For Nigerians in Ukraine like Linda and Blessing, they will have to do that under constant threats to their lives.

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After Njoku Emmanuel’s father seized his laptop for “coding too much” and not facing his studies, he dropped out of school to focus on coding. 3 years later, he has become one of the best blockchain engineers of his generation, travelled the world, and now runs his own startup Lazerpay, a crypto payment gateway.

Njoku’s greeting was casual, like his outfit—a black round-neck t-shirt on jeans. His boisterous laugh set a natural mood for what would become a long but interesting conversation. It was a busy day in Lagos, and the murmuring voices around him indicated he was joining the video call from his office. The walls behind him had “Lazerpay” and some motivational quotes written all over them.

“Sorry for the noise, bro,” Njoku said, running his fingers through his locks. “It’s a busy week. We are going out of beta sometime next week, so all hands on deck!”

To avoid internet fluctuation, we switched off our cameras and dived into our conversation.

Lazerpay, a crypto payment gateway startup Njoku co-founded with Abdulfatai Suleiman and Prosper Ubi, was launched in October, and the reception has been massive. During its beta phase, the crypto startup has been endorsed by several tech and blockchain enthusiasts as a necessary innovation needed to accelerate crypto adoption in Africa. But what is even more remarkable about Lazerpay is Njoku, its 19-year-old CEO, who seemed to have emerged from nowhere to become one of the most sought-after young tech darlings in Africa.

Except he wasn’t a sudden emergence.

The Njoku we see today is a product of a seed planted about 7 years ago in Port Harcourt, the biggest city in the South-South region of Nigeria. In 2015, at 13, Njoku and his brothers were casually introduced to computer programming by their aunt, who was a robotic engineer. Since then, Njoku chose to write code and never looked back.

The lofty dream that followed was wanting to build an operating system like Bill Gates had, or a social media platform like Mark Zukerberg did. He wanted to be the African Mark Zukerberg and told everybody that cared to listen so, including his mother who wouldn’t stop jesting him for it. Njoku began to ask questions and pored through every content on computer programming he came across.

Born to an engineer father and a school teacher mother, Njoku was a mathematics whiz. He represented his school in the mathematics olympiad, won several medals, and lost a few. When his mates had a single mathematics textbook that had different topics like geometry, permutation and combination, and more, Njoku had a different textbook for each topic—each textbook as big as the all-encompassing ones.

“My father forbade us from using a calculator to solve our mathematics homework. Every computation had to be done with your head—why else do you have a head?” Njoku said. With this, his problem-solving skill was already top-notch; little wonder he was quick to embrace programming.

Because gaming was one of his favourite activities—having played video games with his siblings—at the time, he began to learn game development and started using C++ to build games. In 2017, he wrote his final secondary school exams and cleared all his papers, with A+ in mathematics and further mathematics.

Surprisingly, his next challenge will be finishing University.

“University was a waste of my time”
Like most Nigerian parents, Njoku’s parents wanted him to become a medical doctor—his older brother was already studying medicine. But Njoku had chosen his own path, one he wouldn’t let go of for the world.

He got admission to study electrical engineering at Enugu State University of Science and Technology (ESUT) in 2018. This, his engineer father could live with.

In the same year, he joined Quiva Games, a gaming company based in Enugu, as an intern. Everything was going okay; his plate was full—a tasking engineering course and a job where he could build his coding skill. But, after a few classes in his first year, he realised engineering wasn’t as tasking as he had anticipated.

“I thought everything would be advanced, but it was people packed into a small hall to learn social sciences and general studies. I was like ‘What the hell is going on here?’ And the maths they were teaching at 100 level was like my JSS 3/SS 1 maths. So, it became a waste of my time.”

He knew he wasn’t going to do this for another 5 years, so he became laser-focused on coding. “Any time I was going to school, I was going to charge my laptop and code. I didn’t tell my parents. When they gave me money to buy textbooks, I used it to buy coding courses on Udemy.”

His father somehow found out he has been missing classes and invited him home. “I didn’t know it was a trick to seize my laptop. I went back to school and had to borrow laptop to finish some projects at hand and keep learning.”

COVID-19 was a blessing in disguise
When COVID-19 hit in 2020 and everywhere was locked down, everybody panicked and scared, Njoku was somewhat happy; he’d be away from school without getting into trouble. So, he upped his game and started coding 12 hours a day. He didn’t want to go back to school, and the only thing he had was to learn as fast as he could and get a remote job.

In March 2020, he got a job as a mobile application developer at Kwivar, a buy-now-pay-later company based in Port Harcourt.

“The salary was ₦70,000. When I got it, nobody could talk to me. I was the biggest boy I knew. My parents couldn’t believe you could get a job during the pandemic when companies were laying people off. Though the salary isn’t enough reason to not study medicine, they finally saw what I had seen since 2015.”

Introduction to the blockchain
Before the pandemic, Njoku had already started learning about blockchain. He’d taken Udemy courses on blockchain and had entered the finals of a hackathon project that would be held in Lagos in 2019—the first time he’d ever be in Lagos.

In April 2020, a month after he started working at Kwivar, he got another offer as a blockchain developer at Project Hydro, a blockchain company based in the British Virgin Islands. He would be paid $700 monthly in Hydro tokens. At this point, he knew he wasn’t going back to school; everything happening to him agreed with that decision.

Fast forward to September 2020, he wanted to leave Kwivar and needed something to replace it. So, he reached out to Ugochukwu Aronu, the co-founder of Xend, the parent company of Quiva Games where he’d interned for 5 months, to check if there was an opening. After sharing what he’d done at Project Hydro—decentralised wallet, snowflake infrastructure for decentralised identity—Aronu invited him to come to Enugu and join his new venture Xend Finance, a decentralised finance (DeFi) platform for credit unions, cooperatives, and individuals, backed by Google and Binance.

At the time, the pandemic was already easing up, and students had started going back to school. So, Njoku told his father he was going back to school. Aronu made him an offer—₦150,000 net salary, a MacBook, and free accommodation.

The days at Xend Finance: Njoku and Emeka Nweke, the lead blockchain engineer who taught him how to deploy complex smart contracts
“I went to Port Harcourt to show my parents the offer and told them I was dropping out of school. It was obvious they couldn’t do anything about it. Going back to school just to graduate and earn about half or as much as I was already earning wasn’t wise,” Njoku said.

It was at this point that his parents knew and accepted Njoku’s crazy idea to drop out. At Xend Finance, he had to step in when the lead blockchain engineer was unavailable, and that accelerated his blockchain knowledge. Despite the close call—since they’d already scheduled to launch by December 2020—he led the build but not without a hiccup.

“It was difficult because I had to take charge of an entire project in the middle of building. I fixed the bug, wrote, and deployed smart contracts. But I made a deployment error that cost the company $10,000.” So Aronu told him the money he lost would be deducted from his salary. At that point his salary had jumped to ₦300,000. He panicked and started applying to international jobs—at least those ones could pay him enough money to service the debt.

He would later find out Aronu was only joking, but by then he had gotten an offer from MakerDAO, one of the biggest DeFi companies in the world. He was the first Nigerian engineer on the team. As usual, he went home to show his parents his new offer and his mother couldn’t believe her dropout son could earn over $3,000 per month. But that was the beginning.

After MakerDAO, the offers wouldn’t stop coming. He got a contract offer from Instadapp, a DeFi protocol company, for $90 per hour. “I was like, these people don’t know me: I’ll work 20 hours per day!”

He resigned from Xend Finance and was ready to make his mark on the global blockchain ecosystem. He relocated to Dubai.

Dubai was his passport to the world
MakerDAO was having an offsite meetup in Portugal and Njoku was supposed to go, but his visa wasn’t approved on time. He was frustrated, so his aunt, the robotic engineer, advised him to try applying to travel to Europe from Ghana or anywhere outside Nigeria. “She also suggested Dubai, and I took it. After staying in Dubai for a month, I told her I’m not coming back home.”

In Dubai, more job opportunities came. He was on top of the world; he could now reject offers and travel the world. For an 18-year-old boy, there was enough money in the bank so he told his father to leave his brother’s medical school’s tuition to him. “My brother is in Bulgaria, so imagine earning in naira and paying tuition in euro. So it’s only right I took that off my father’s plate.”

He got a contract offer of $3,000 per week from Avarta, a blockchain security company based in Singapore. He joined them and built their entire blockchain infrastructure.

Then he met Yele Bademosi, founder and CEO at Nestcoin, who would later become one of Lazerpay’s early investors. Bademosi then became Njoku’s mentor, so when he wanted to start Nestcoin, Njoku was one of the first engineers he reached out to. It was around this time that the idea to build Lazerpay began to form.

Njoku dropped everything to focus on Lazerpay. Avarta reached out with a full-time offer of $7,000 per month and $50,000 worth of Avarta token, but he rejected it. They came back with another offer of $15,000 per month, but Njoku was running with his new vision now. Before, the vision was to become a great engineer, but now it’s to become a great founder.

So Njoku forfeited everything. He left MakerDAO in December 2021 and his Maker token that was worth over $200,000 and would have vested this February. He rejected a salary package worth over $300,000 from Avarta. All because he believed Lazerpay is the future of payment and will be worth much more than everything he’s given up. And also because he was already raising funds and had to put his skin in the game.

He knew what he wanted from a young age and stood by it. His steadfastness has turned everybody around him into a believer; his parents have now begun nudging his youngest sibling to study software engineering.

Njoku isn’t Zukerberg and may never be, but he’s building his own empire in the blockchain world. At 19, this can only be the beginning of his journey.

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Pan-African fintech firm Flutterwave on Friday announced a rebrand of its logo and dashboard as well as the addition of small business lending, fintech-as-a-service (FaaS), and more to its suite of offerings.

The announcement comes 2 days after Flutterwave confirmed it had raised $250 million in a Series D round that tripled the company’s valuation to over $3 billion. Led by founder and CEO Olugbenga Agboola, the company facilitates cross-border payments transactions of small-to-large businesses in Africa via one API.

In a virtual event themed “Flutterwave 3.0”, Africa’s most valuable startup and payments giant rolled out a series of products and services including FaaS services for embedded finance, SME loans for its users, card issuance for a wide array of clients while announcing the addition of Apple Pay and Google Pay to its payment options.

Flutterwave Capital, the new SME loans product, is offered in partnership with the company’s lending partners—CashConnect Microfinance Bank, MoneyWise Microfinance Bank, Wema Bank, Zenith Bank, Stanbic IBTC Bank, and Sterling Bank.

The new product will enable businesses “easily access loans without collateral, cumbersome documentation, and other stringent terms and conditions,” a blog post on Flutterwave’s website reads, adding that eligible applicants can access the funds they need in less than 2 business days.

“With Flutterwave Capital, we’re making it easier for business owners to access the funds they require to grow their businesses. Business owners can expand, increase inventory, hire more labour, pay bills, run marketing campaigns, and ultimately grow revenue with these funds,” the company said.

Currently, only Flutterwave businesses in Nigeria can access loans but the company says it is working to make it available to its businesses in South Africa, Kenya, and other markets where it operates.

As regards the fintech-as-a-service solution, Flutterwave is opening up its infrastructure to allow other companies to use its APIs to embed financial capabilities into their existing applications, products, and services.

Flutterwave’s FaaS service provides a unified tech stack that includes KYC, account opening, debit card issuance, payments, and real-time transfers through a single endpoint, account servicing, and compliance.

The solution helps companies bypass the often gruelling work of building the infrastructure, integrating multiple, disparate financial systems, licensing, and compliance required in building and offering consumers digital financial services.

Flutterwave also helps businesses outside Africa expand their operations on the continent with an international clientele that includes Booking.com, Flywire, and Uber.

The new set of offerings and features is in line with Flutterwave’s ambitious product expansion drive. Last year, the company launched Flutterwave Market for merchants to sell their goods via an online marketplace and, most recently, Send, a remittance service that empowers customers to seamlessly send money to recipients to and from Africa.

In March 2021, the San Francisco-headquartered and Lagos-based startup raised $170 million in a Series C round at a valuation of $1 billion. The latest financing thus brings its total investments secured since launched in 2016 to $475 million (plus a $35 million Series B in 2020 and a $20 million Series A in 2018).

The $3 billion valuation sees Flutterwave surpass the $2 billion mark set by SoftBank-backed fintech OPay and FTX-backed cross-border payments platform Chipper Cash last year.

Currently, Flutterwave has an infrastructure reach across 34 countries on the continent and processes 200 million transactions worth more than $16 billion. More than 900,000 businesses globally use its solution to process payments in 150 currencies and across different payment modes: local and international cards, mobile wallets, bank transfers, and its consumer product Barter, which now allows for multicurrency wallets.

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Love Life is a Zikoko weekly series about love, relationships, situationships, entanglements and everything in between.

Cynthia*, 30, and Ezinne*, 29, have been dating for six months. Today on Love Life, they talk about getting in touch after reading each other’s stories on Zikoko and falling for each other despite being married.

What’s your earliest memory of each other?
Ezinne: I read her story on Zikoko and reached out because it was similar to mine — also published on Zikoko. I thought the woman in the story and I were living the same life. She was queer like me, married, had a kid and also felt unsatisfied with her life. I did some digging — reached out to Zikoko — and got her contact with her permission.

Cynthia: When Ezinne messaged me on Twitter, I liked that she sounded friendly. Texting flowed. She sent me her pictures and I thought she was a fine babe. I sent her my picture too, and we just kept texting.

What did you two talk about?
Ezinne: Random stuff mostly, but the conversations were deep. We talked about how much we love our jobs. I told her about planning for school. We both knew we were married, but we didn’t talk about that…

The week we started chatting, I was in Surulere to meet up with a friend, and remembered she worked in the area. I texted Cynthia my location and asked if I could buy her lunch. She didn’t have to meet me — I could send it to her office.

Did you want lunch, Cynthia?
Cynthia: I did, but only if I got to see her. I left my office after a few minutes to meet her at the restaurant. I walked into the restaurant, and there she was. She had the goofiest face I had ever seen. I thought, “WTF have I gotten myself into?”

Ezinne: LOL. In my defence, I made a goofy face because I saw her before she saw me, and I could see that she was quite uneasy.

Cynthia: I wasn’t uneasy; I was just looking for you. I don’t like waiting for people.

Ezinne: Okay, I was trying to make you comfortable by making you laugh.

That’s nice. Tell us about the date.
Cynthia: It went well. We vibed. We made each other laugh a lot. Lunch became early dinner because of gist.

Ezinne: I could have stayed there for the whole night listening to her talk about her childhood. I love that she got comfortable with me and that made it very sweet.

Cynthia: At the end of the date, she took me home.

And feelings got caught in 3, 2, 1…
Cynthia: LOL. Calm down. We talked about hanging out again. A few days later, she took me to the supermarket after work to get groceries and dropped me at home afterwards. When we got to my house, I told her I had fun, and she said she’d like to see me again. I leaned in for a hug, but this woman gave me a fist bump.

Ezinne: LOL. I was nervous. What I really wanted to do was peck her on the cheek. When I got home that night, I told her that her eyes were big enough for someone to get lost in.

Cynthia: That compliment made me blush. That’s when I knew I had fallen for her.

Ezinne, was that the plan all along?
Ezinne: Not really. I was still getting to know her. For a month we were just chatting each other up. Then I fell sick.

Cynthia: That illness sped things up. I went to see her, we watched Netflix and ate ofe nsala with pounded yam. That was my first time trying ofe nsala, and damn, Igbo people are enjoying.

Ezinne: LOL. She was really nice during that period. She called often to make sure I was okay. When I got better, I resigned from my job. The day after my resignation, she asked what I was doing and I said nothing, she could come to fill me up. She laughed and agreed to come over, so I sent an Uber to pick her up.

Smooth…
Cynthia: When it was time for me to leave that day, she pulled me into a kiss.

Ezinne: You kissed me back…

Cynthia: Ehn. But the koko is you started it. After the kiss, our conversations became more flirty. She invited me over again. This time, she gave me turkey and spaghetti while we watched movies. This woman was using food and Netflix to get into my heart.

Another time, we were watching movies at her house when NEPA took the light. In the dark, while we were waiting for the light to come on, she reached for my face and we started making out. It was hot as Bleep.

Ezinne: I had told her before then that I don’t let people touch me during sex. She told me it wasn’t going to work for her. That day, on the floor, as she touched me, I realised I liked it a lot. The sex was crazy good.

I don’t know if I should ask about your partners at this point.
Ezinne: My husband was at work and my kid was at school.

Cynthia: Same as mine.

Cool. What happened after the sex?
Cynthia: We became even closer. We started calling each other more. That was a bit difficult at first because I didn’t have earphones, and there were always too many people around me. She said she was gonna get me AirPods to help with that. I was like, “Hell no, I’m not letting you get me something that expensive.” This babe kept shut, then one day she asked me to meet her at the mall. Guess what she was holding when I got there?

Ezinne, there are enemies around me please.

Ezinne: LMAO. I just wanted to be able to talk to her the way I wanted.

Cynthia: She wanted to flirt. She’s worse than me when it comes to flirting. We were doing movies and ofe nsala, and she was flirting with other women on the timeline.

Ezinne?
Ezinne: LOL, I asked her to date me and she said no oh.

Cynthia: I said I wanted to see how things go because whenever I put a label on anything, it turns sour.

Ezinne: And I understood that. I blame my hair oh. A few days after we talked about this, I cut my hair. I look extra hot to women every time I cut my hair, so I was basking in the attention. That’s the flirting she’s talking about. I talked to a few women, but it was nothing. I wanted to be with Cynthia. When she told me she was ready to be exclusive, I was really happy.

What got you ready, Cynthia?
Cynthia: I felt it.

Before I met Ezinne, I had just broken up with my ex for being single. I gradually felt pressured she would want more than I could offer. I told myself I wasn’t going to date again after that, but Ezinne was different — she was married like me. She understands the dynamics of being married and being with a woman. When I have family time, she understands, and so do I when she has to attend to her family. We both understand our responsibilities as partners to each other and to other people. It’s easier like this.

Ezinne: Yup. There’s a safety net being married gives us. I think the fact that she is also a married woman helped our relationship grow. We both understand the risks involved.

Okay. How has the relationship been so far?
Ezinne: It’s been great. She’s very supportive of me and my endeavours. Whenever I do something at work, she always hypes me up and I love that. We’re alike in many aspects. For example, we both procrastinate on tasks until the last minute.

Cynthia: Yup, but we’re also different in many ways. For example, if I want to open a bar of soap, I’d take my time to open the pack but this babe will just rip the whole thing apart like a hoodlum.

LOL, this sounds like a live-in couple problem. Do you two live together?
Cynthia: Not really. She visits often and whenever she does, she sleeps over.

Once again, your husbands?

Ezinne: LOL. My husband knows her as one of my best friends, and honestly, what I have with my husband is different from what I have with Cynthia. With Cynthia, my feelings are deeper, more tangible. I feel like I can touch what I feel. I guess this is what makes everything else great with her.

Cynthia: I know right. My feelings for Ezinne don’t interfere with the relationship I have with my husband.

Do you think they are suspicious about your relationship?
Cynthia: I don’t think so. Everybody knows her as my best friend — husband, friends, even my mum. My kid still sleeps with me and my husband. Whenever she’s around, she stays in the guest room. We only have sex when it’s just us in the house. My husband doesn’t come home early because of work so we have enough time.

What of yours, Ezinne?
Ezinne: I don’t think he suspects anything either. He is always at work when she comes over. Whenever she’s around, we’d Bleep all over the house — my living room, my bedroom, my store. LOL.

Store?

Ezinne: Yes oh, it’s crazy how good the sex is. The way I have sex has changed with her. In my previous sexual relationships, I was always the dominant partner in bed — the one who did most of the work during sex, but with Cynthia, that dynamic changed.

Cynthia: LOL, it was a goal I set. I wanted to please you too — make you cum as much as you make me cum. It started with you letting me touch you one day. Next thing, I had you standing with one leg on my shoulder, cumming.

Ezinne: You are so wild.

Cynthia: LOL. After that day, I knew I had you.

Interesting, so do you two fight?
Cynthia: Not really, but the thing is she’s a flirt — worse than I am. But she’s refused to accept that side of her. When I asked to be exclusive, it was because I saw the way she was flirting with other women. But even after we became exclusive, she continued to flirt with other women.

Did something in particular happen?
Ezinne: There’s this babe that likes me. I told her I was in a relationship, but she no gree. One day, I had to sleep at her place because of traffic. That night, she tried to initiate something, but I shut it down.

Cynthia: But you were still cuddling with her. She now even sent me a picture of the girl’s leg on her body.

Ezinne: I wanted you to know that there was nothing going on.

Hmm, so how did you two resolve it?
Cynthia: I had to ask to open the relationship, so if anything happens with any of the women who like her, she won’t feel guilty or have to turn them down because of me. I didn’t want to grow too suspicious of her. I think things are better this way.

Ezinne, what do you have to say about this?
Ezinne: The thing I don’t notice when I’m flirting with women because that’s how I talk generally. That night she’s talking about was not planned. I didn’t think anything would happen. When I turned the girl down and she held me, I thought it was okay because I was soothing her. I sent a picture to Cynthia because I tell her everything happening in my life.

Cynthia: I was offended, wondering why you weren’t removing yourself from the situation by leaving the bed or something. It felt like you were encouraging her to try again, and it’s not even fair on the girl.

So now that the relationship is open, what’s it like?
Cynthia: I think our relationship is better now. I am no longer suspicious of her and the thing is that we are both not looking to be with other people right now anyway.

Ezinne: Yes, the goal is to build trust between each other. We want to get to a point where we would be open to things like threesomes without destroying our relationship. I love Cynthia and I know I bleeped up, so I am willing to do anything to make things work between us.

What’s the best part of the relationship?
Ezinne: She’s my healer. She helped me discover issues about myself I didn’t know I had. For example, the sex thing. I was a bit repressed before her. She taught me to let go.

I love that I can absolutely be myself with her. I love playing with knives and she lets me do that with her. I also don’t have to tone down my driving for her — I can drive as reckless as I want when I’m with her.

Cynthia: It’s the same for me too. I don’t ever feel like I need to hide anything from her. I’m not the easiest person to be around because I like things done a certain way at all times. I don’t like people touching my stuff and sometimes I feel guilty for being like that but Ezinne always lets me know that it’s ok to be myself. She encourages me to express myself the way I want to around her. I love how honest and open our relationship is.

What’s your favourite part of each other?
Ezinne: I love her eyes so much and she’s also very romantic. I love the way she talks and how she laughs. She can make a joke out of anything and I love that about her.

Cynthia: I love that you’re very smart. Every time you have an idea, in my head, I’m like, “How does this babe come up with this stuff?” There’s also a part of her mind that’s like a toddler, so she does cute things like miss her way around the house. It makes me laugh all the time.

Sweet. Do you have future plans for each other?
Ezinne: Honestly, I want to have a baby with her. I would like to see what a baby we make would look like. If they would have her eyes or her smile.

Cynthia: My personal plan is to japa with her. I don’t know how it’s going to happen; whether we’d run away from our husbands or they agree to send us abroad. I just know we have to leave this country to a place where we don’t have to hide to love each other.

Aww, fingers crossed. Rate your relationship on a scale of 1-10.
Ezinne: I’d say a 7 because there’s always room for improvement.

Cynthia: 8 for me, for the same reason. Aside from that, this is honestly the best relationship I’ve ever been in.

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Imagine that life is a movie and your name is Abba Kyari, a deputy commissioner of police.

The day is June 11, 2020, and you are in the green chamber of the House of Representatives, the centre of all attention.

Elected lawmakers are calling you the toast of the Police Force and the best thing since soft agege bread.

This scene would likely happen at the end of a celebrated career that has put many bad guys behind bars.

The credits would roll and our supercop would live happily ever after.

But things are falling apart for DCP Abba Kyari since he made that appearance at the National Assembly.

One year after his red carpet ceremony, he was exposed as a collaborator in an internet fraud case involving convicted international fraudster, Hushpuppi.

To clear his name, he first claimed he was a middleman tailor for Hushpuppi, and then claimed he was conned by him to make an illegal arrest.

Unfortunately for him, it was the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from across seven seas that had all the dirt so the allegation was hard to shake.

Since this is Nigeria, it has been seven months and authorities have failed to make any meaningful progress in investigating and confirming the case against him.

“When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging” is usually a commonsense approach for most people, but Abba Kyari is not most people.

What is a suspension?
When you are on suspension from work, it would usually mean that you are, well, suspended, but we now know that Abba Kyari does not like to be idle.

Nigeria’s most infamous supercop turned a moment of forced rest into an opportunity to try his hand at other things. Who doesn’t like multiple streams of income?

The National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) namedropped Kyari at a media briefing on Monday, February 14, 2022, as a principal suspect in a major drug trafficking case.

He was already replaced as the head of the elite Intelligence Response Unit (IRT) last year, but our supercop is not a man to be stopped by protocols.

From what we have now been told by the NDLEA and the Police, Kyari was instrumental in a drug bust in Enugu state.

While that would be commended under different circumstances, it is the point where Abba Kyari’s story takes another wild twist.

Narcos: Nigeria
Coming soon to a Netflix near you.

Allow us to break it down for you:
On January 21, 2022, Kyari called an NDLEA officer in Abuja to tell him his IRT team had arrested suspects who were smuggling 25 kg of cocaine into Enugu from Ethiopia.

Our anti-hero proposed that his team and his informants be allowed to take 15 kg to resell and replace with dummy powder.

To sweeten the deal, he offered to help his NDLEA contact sell 5 kg of the remaining 10 kg, leaving only 5 kg to be tested and used to prosecute the suspects.

At this point, we just have to assume this guy was out of bleeps to give about getting caught, or it was just another regular deal to him.

Four days after initial contact, he was caught on camera passing $61,400 to the NDLEA officer for his cooperation.

Kyari had since then been airing the NDLEA’s messages after they told him to come and face the consequences of his bad decisions.

We have questions
The very obvious red flag in this whole story, of course, is how Kyari still held such a commanding position that he was able to call the shots on a drug bust.

He wasn’t only suspended from the Force, he had already been immediately replaced as the head of the IRT.

This incident speaks to the institutional rot that fueled 2020’s historic EndSARS protests against police brutality and impunity.

Even worse is that Kyari’s IRT had been accused of many extra-judicial actions before his internet fraud case finally drowned him last year.

The failure of authorities to reach any serious conclusions on his pending case reflects poorly on the government’s claims of reforming the Police.

Police vs NDLEA
Clearly unsettled about being exposed as having rogue agents, the Police Force has also released its own version of events.

The long version is the two drug traffickers arrested in Enugu have apparently confessed they were being helped by NDLEA agents.

Their contacts had been helping them operate unhindered at the Akanu Ibiam International Airport since 2021.

This explains how they were able to successfully clear the drugs before Kyari’s team picked them up outside.

The one good thing that has come out of this whole episode is that Abba Kyari is now in custody, arrested by the police and handed over to the NDLEA alongside four other officers.

If this was a movie, we know for certain this is not the end.

We should be expecting a sequel of our supercop’s adventures in detention and maybe beyond.

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In January, Bolt, one of the biggest ride-hailing startups in the world, closed a $711 million funding round led by Sequoia Capital and Fidelity and saw its valuation go up from $4.8 billion to about $8.4 billion.

The company said the new funds will be used to further improve its full suite of mobility and delivery products, and expand into new cities in Europe and Africa.

To understand Bolt’s overarching plans for Africa, its second-largest market after Europe, TechCabal spoke with its Africa Regional Director, Paddy Partridge.

Even though the company has added 2 new verticals—shared cars and scooters, and quick commerce called Bolt Market—to its product line, ride-hailing and food delivery services are the only products available in Africa. Rather than launch all its verticals in African cities, the company wants to continue ramping up more users for its ride-hailing and food delivery products—at least for this year, as it introduces them to more African cities.

Expansion while meeting demands
According to Partridge, the company is doubling down on its expansion plan in the North Africa region, as it currently only operates in Tunisia. Partridge also mentioned that more West African cities have been earmarked for expansion. However, expansion means more demands, and the company, like other players in the sector, is currently struggling to meet up.

Today, the company boasts of over 40 million customers—that’s about 40% of its total users base—and over 700,000 drivers in about 90 cities across 8 countries on the continent. A rough calculation puts the driver-to-rider ratio at 1:570. This is reported to be the reason for the occasional surge in trip prices, like the one observed in December last year. Prices had to be increased to attract more drivers to sign up and fill up the order.

Going forward, more drivers will be onboarded, so a surge in price wouldn’t be the solution to meeting high demand. But the problem here is the lack of access to vehicles: thousands of drivers are willing to get on Bolt but don’t own or have access to a vehicle to work with.

“This is a major challenge, and to solve it, we’re now doing several partnerships on the vehicle financing side,” Partridge told TechCabal.

The company, which has a standing partnership with Nigeria’s Sterling bank, has added Nigeria’s MAX.ng, a logistics and vehicular asset financing startup, to the list of partners to provide financing for 10,000 affordable vehicles to their drivers. The company is also in partnership with FlexClub, a vehicle financing marketplace, to serve its drivers in South Africa.

“Hopefully, it’ll mean less surging, which I know is a challenge in the Nigerian market. And it’ll mean that we can keep up with the growing demand,” Partridge said.

Transitioning to electronic mobility
Electric mobility is the new trend, and every environment-conscious company is embracing the development. In Europe, Bolt says its fleets are filled with electric vehicles (EVs) and, as a result, all trips are carbon-neutral. Bolt’s Green Plan is created to reduce its global ecological footprint. It says its e-scooters are all charged with 100% green energy and made from 100% recyclable materials. The company has begun to replicate that in Africa and is also planning to optimise for green this year.

“Last year, we introduced the green category in Nairobi. We also rolled out EVs for ride-hailing and food delivery in several markets. This year, we really want to start accelerating that,” said Partridge. “This is important for two reasons: it is better for the environment and more profitable to drivers, particularly as fuel prices go up so rapidly.”

As sweet as this development sounds, Partridge, unsurprisingly, said there is currently no plan to implement EVs in Nigeria. It’s actually a no-brainer because Nigeria hasn’t done a lot in the EV sector; there is no infrastructure to support EVs and, compared to other markets, they are not a wise economic option. This means MAX.ng, Bolt’s financing partner, won’t be extending EVs in its home country like it has done in other markets it operates in—such as Egypt. “The main focus areas at this stage are really Kenya and South Africa.”

Extensive driver education and verification
Six years ago in 2016—about 3 years after it was founded in Estonia—Bolt made its first foray into Africa when it launched in South Africa. It quickly expanded into Kenya, Ghana, and Nigeria, and within 4 years, displaced Uber, its biggest competitor, to become the biggest ride-hailing platform in Africa.

But with huge growth comes equal responsibilities and challenges. Bolt’s success in Africa came with a price. The startup has gone through an odd collection of good, bad, and ugly reviews from its African customers. Riders have reported being harassed by Bolt’s drivers. For instance, during Nigeria’s #ENDSARs protests, some Nigerians took to social media to complain and rant about how Bolt’s drivers were delivering young people to the police. And this is one of many unpleasant experiences with the service.

To solve the problem, Partridge said the company is investing in building a more efficient verification system that will weed out bad players and shoot up the security rating of the platform. Though the process varies from market to market, depending on regulatory requirements, Bolt currently onboards drivers by checking identification and running criminal background checks.

The issue of onboarding only qualified well-behaved drivers on the platform may be a hard nut to crack because, when Bolt newly entered the African market, it was reported that the platform relaxed its entry requirement to snag market share from Uber—a strategy that worked at the time but continues to haunt and hurt the brand today.

“So, we have a new sort of quality management system that basically tracks different metrics and gives drivers more actionable feedback on how to improve their behavior on the platform,” Partridge said. He also mentioned that Bolt is improving on their driver education programme, both online and offline.

A safe space for women
It’s said that women feel safer with other women than with men. This means that Bolt must onboard more female drivers. According to the African director, Bolt is looking to bring more women drivers onto the platform.

“At the moment, across Africa, women make up a very small share of our driver base. But we see quite a big opportunity to get more of them into ride-hailing. And in South Africa and Kenya, we’ve now launched women-only categories.”

The women-only category is a feature that allows women to choose their rider to be a woman. “This is basically a way to give women a bit more trust on the platform, where they can choose if they want to pair with a woman rider.” Similarly, women drivers, if they want to be paired with a woman rider, can choose that.

One could have sworn that the women’s category would be rolled out in Nigeria immediately, given the many complaints from Nigerian women about harassment from male Bolt drivers. But that hasn’t happened because, according to Patridge, South Africa and Kenya have the highest share of female drivers—which is an essential metric in rolling out the feature.

“It was most feasible to get the category off the ground in South Africa. We wanted to test what kind of traction the category could get, and South Africa is the most suitable pilot test. For us to provide women riders with a category that makes sense, we need to have a certain volume of female drivers in the first place.”

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6. The urge to beat other people’s children
This urge definitely comes from an unscrewed nut in people’s brains. No human being with a fully functioning brain is going to see a child that’s not their’s and beat them up. We know things are hard, but it should not affect you to the point of beating other people’s children. Hian.

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5. The urge to give applause when aeroplanes land
I mean, I get why it feels like a relief, but it’s strange nonetheless. Was the plane supposed to stay in the air, why you dey clap?

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4. The super Nigerian urge to lie about leaving the country
Yes, we know what you guys are going to say, but is anyone going to beat you if you say you’re travelling? Or are your village people going to stop the plane from moving? Nigerians don’t tell anyone they’re leaving the country; one day you just wake up and see Sola Sobowale’s picture in their tweet. Welcome to a new dispensation ko

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3. The urge to womb watch
Maybe you should go and give birth for the woman whose womb you’re watching since you’re so worried about her fertility. Womb watching? Kill it with fire!

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2. The urge to start shouting very early in the morning
It’s not like we’re trying to tell Nigerian mothers anything o, but is it possible for them to start the day a little later than 6 am? The Nigerian urge to start shouting very early in the morning is so common, it’s been normalised. We hope the GenZs fix that.

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Nigerians are a very versatile group of people, and part of our versatility reflects in the sudden urge to do things we’ve considered normal. Many of these urges aren’t natural and need to die by thunder or fire.

1. The urge to be the upstairs neighbour who pounds yam in their kitchen
Who wakes up and feels it’s alright to pick up a mortar and pestle to start pounding yam or whatever they feel like eating when they know they have neighbours who live downstairs? Get a food processor or take that mortar to the ground floor if you must eat. Smh.

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Love Life is a Zikoko weekly series about love, relationships, situationships, entanglements and everything in between.

Naomi, 27, and Chiby, 28, have been dating for two years. Today on Love Life, they talk about meeting in secondary school, remaining friends and finding love in each other at South.

What’s your earliest memory of each other?

Chiby: We attended the same secondary school in 2009. I joined the school in SS 3, and she was in SS 1.

Naomi: He used to come to my class to chill with the guys. We said hi to each other whenever we saw each other, but didn’t have any conversation until one day after school. We were alone in the class talking when he tried to kiss me.

Chiby: She always tells this story, but I don’t remember the kiss.

Naomi: You sha tried to kiss me and I pushed you away. It didn’t happen again and we continued to say hi to each other until he went to university in 2010.

Did you stay in touch?

Chiby: Yeah. We followed each other on Twitter.

Naomi: He used to come for me on the timeline. He’d call me a midget or laugh at something I am saying.

I loved the attention and began looking forward to it. If a week went by without him entering my mentions, I’d be worried.

Chiby: LOL. I liked teasing her. It was my way of staying in touch. We exchanged DMs a couple of times, but that didn’t stick until 2018 when we lost a mutual friend in an accident. She texted me about the accident and we exchanged numbers while planning for the burial. From there, we started talking more.

Hmm. Just talk?

Chiby: Yea. In January 2019, I invited her to Sabor for an event my friend was having.

Naomi: I was supposed to have a date that day but the guy and I were undecided about where to go. After Chiby invited me, I decided to have the date at Sabor because I wanted to see Chiby. We had been texting since we lost our friend, and it felt nice, but we hadn’t seen each other since then.

After exchanging pleasantries with Chiby at Sabor, he left to be with his friends so I could have my date, but I couldn’t stop looking out for him in the room. The guy I was with even noticed that I wasn’t paying attention to him, and whatever we had died that day.

Chiby: After that day, I invited her to South Social, a weekly Friday night party I started with my friend. She came for the first one. It was nice to see her again. She looked and smelled nice. By this time, I knew I was attracted to her but I wasn’t sure if I liked her. We hung out throughout the party. At some point that night, we sat on the swing outside and shared a cigarette. We talked about who we were both seeing at the time. I was single and so was she. I think that’s when I started thinking of her romantically, but I didn’t act on it.

In March, we ran into each other at a Socialiga event. We — me, her and her friends — hung out throughout the event. Nothing serious as well.

A few weeks after that event, I saw a missed call from her. When I called her back, she said, “Do you know who this is?” and I was like, “Duh. I have your number saved.” From that day, we started talking and texting every day.

I invited her to South Social again. She came looking as hot and amazing as always. I tried dancing with her but she didn’t seem into it. I wasn’t sure if it was because she didn’t like me or because she was shy so I asked her if she liked me.

What did she say?

Naomi: I said I didn’t know. I always wanted to talk to him, but wasn’t sure if that meant I wanted a relationship. I told him this, and he said he had no problem with it so we continued dancing.

By 2 a.m., after dancing all night, we were chilling at a cosy corner in the restaurant when he kissed me. He’s a good kisser and his lips are very soft so I didn’t want it to stop. We made out for about an hour. The whole night felt magical.

After that night, I couldn’t stop thinking about him. I wanted to talk to him all the time. Over the phone, we’d tell each other how our days went. We’d talk late into the night until one of us fell asleep. I knew I was falling in love with him.

He asked me out on a picnic date a week after the kiss, and it felt like the universe was answering me. I had always wanted to go on a picnic date. I thought he was the perfect man. I even told someone at my office that I’d found my husband.

Chiby: The truth is I had seen her Instagram post about wanting to go on a picnic date months before that. I told my best friend that I liked Naomi and wanted to do something special for her so she helped me plan the date. I cooked, got wine and found us a nice spot. We went on the date a week after the kiss at South.

Naomi: He showed up with a rose that day. I was so excited and shy that I couldn’t even eat anything. We talked and drank wine under a shade. It felt like something out of a movie.

Chiby: That day made me sure that I wanted to be with her. You know when you meet someone, and you’re like, “This is right. This is who you’re meant to be with.” That has never happened to me before. She came over to my house the next day. I live with my aunt and I had never told her about any of the girls I dated but I told her about Naomi. She liked her when they met and that made me happy. Naomi and I ate then played FIFA together in my room. It was a nice day for me. We saw each other almost every day that week. On Saturday, I asked if she wanted to hang out with me and my friends at the beach.

Did she go?

Naomi: Yup, even though it was raining. I wore a raincoat to protect myself.

Chiby: LOL. It was cute. On our way to the beach, my friends were smoking on the boat because it was cold. I pulled out a cigarette to join them but this babe was like, “No, you can’t smoke.” Would you believe that that’s how I stopped smoking?

Just like that?

Naomi: Yup. We celebrate his abstinence on the same day as our anniversary because that’s also when he asked me out.

Interesting. Tell me how that happened.

Chiby: At the beach, after drinking and playing with everyone else, we were both tipsy. I wanted to spend some alone time with her so I took her to the back of the beach house. We were making out and I stopped to look at her. Her face, her smile, everything looked so beautiful in that moment. I was in awe of how much pleasure I felt just looking at her. That’s when it occurred to me that I could ask her to be my girlfriend. I asked, “What are we doing?” and she was like, “I don’t know.” Then I said, “Will you be my girlfriend?” See, when she said yes, I jumped.

Naomi: He was so happy he ran to tell his cousin, who was also at the beach. I loved watching him scream, “She said yes! I have a girlfriend.” It was so cute.

Too cute. How has the relationship been so far?

Chiby: It’s been really beautiful. This relationship has redefined what love is to me. She’s my best friend and it doesn’t mean we don’t have our low points. We do but we understand each other and are able to talk through whatever we go through. I’ve always been a lover boy who writes his partners poems and plans romantic gestures, but with her, I’m more intentional. Every day, I learn how to love her better. We always ask each other how we can improve the relationship and honestly, it’s been an amazing experience for me.

Naomi: Before Chiby, I always felt like relationships were not my thing. I thought I was going to die single but when I started talking to Chiby, I knew he was exactly the kind of man I wanted to be with. He’s my other half. He feels like an extension of me. I never used to be a romantic person but he brought that side out of me. I’m 100% myself when I am with him. Yes, we have our downtime but even then, I think everything is still perfect.

Talk about a romantic movie. I’m curious, do you two fight?

Chiby: Yeah. She has a problem with my drinking, and we fight about it often. Naomi helped me realise that I have a drinking problem. I can drink three long Islands in 30 minutes. This was fine when I was single and could misbehave without worrying about embarrassing anyone. Now, when I drink, I have to think of how my behaviour reflects on Naomi.

Naomi: My problem with him is that he doesn’t know his limit. I don’t mind him drinking but he has to know when to stop.

Chiby: I’m working on it and trying to do better.

Great, so what’s the best part of the relationship?

Chiby: Honestly? It’s everything. We spend a lot of time together and do not get tired of each other. I always want her in my space even though I know she’s going to drive me crazy. She has an artistic eye and likes to arrange things to her taste. Whenever she’s in my house, she’s always trying to arrange something. It drives me crazy but I know she means well and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Naomi: LOL. It’s the same for me. Quality time is my love language and we get to spend a lot of time together.

Aww, sweet. What’s your favourite part of each other?

Chiby: I love that she’s an observant and calculated person. She’s always thinking ahead. We could go out and I’d do or say something wrong, but she won’t address it there to avoid unnecessary escalation. I respect her calmness during conflict.

Naomi: My favourite part of him is him. There’s never a dull moment with him. I never get bored of him. He loves me in the ways I want to be loved. He wasn’t one of those people I had to teach how to love me. He came ready.

Na wa for romance. Do you have future plans for each other?

Chiby: To be honest, I want to marry her. I want to spend the rest of my life with her. Even though I haven’t proposed yet but the plan for me has always been marriage and kids.

Naomi: I want cats. I feel like bringing children into this world takes away from the relationship. I want to be able to travel around the world and not have to worry about where our children will be. I enjoy being with him and I don’t want anyone to come between us.

I feel you. Rate your relationship on a scale of one to ten.

Chiby: Easily 11. I enjoy spending time with her so much. She can be walking around, playing music, making noise, but it doesn’t feel like anyone else is in my space. It feels like we’re one person, and I never want to lose her.

Naomi: I never want to lose you too. For me, it’s 10 because he’s everything to me and more.

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After more than five years in operation, Meta has announced it’s shutting down Express Wi-Fi, a program designed to provide low-cost internet in developing countries through partnerships with local communities, mobile operators and businesses.

The shut down of Express Wi-Fi comes barely a year after Meta partnered with Eutelsat Konnect, a satellite operator, to expand the low-cost internet service in parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Zambia, Cameroon, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Madagascar, South Africa and Uganda.

Notably, in countries like Kenya, Express Wi-Fi has been unavailable since mid-December 2020. The service is currently active in over 30 countries across Africa, Asia and South America. Similar to this announcement, about a year ago, Google shut down project Loon, one of it’s low-cost internet projects active in Kenya. A move that made people question the fate of internet projects in Africa by big corporations.

Launched in 2016, Express Wi-Fi program was designed as an improvement to Meta’s earlier failed Free Basics program. It was designed to be inexpensive, starting at around 15 cents for 100MB or $5 for 20GB.

Meta said that while it’s winding down Express Wi-Fi, it’s focusing on other projects around internet access.

“While we are concluding our work on this program to focus on developing other projects, we remain committed to working with partners across the telecom ecosystem to deliver better connectivity,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement. It promised to work with Express Wi-Fi partners to “minimize the impact to their businesses while keeping networks running.”

The company first revealed its plans to build a 37,000-kilometer subsea cable, named 2Africa, in May 2020, and it announced an expansion in 2021, which is expected to be completed in 2023 or 2024.

Meta’s different initiatives are part of its efforts to bridge the internet gap across emerging markets like Africa, where connectivity is lowest across the globe. Currently, about 28% of sub-Saharan Africa’s population is connected to mobile internet according to the 2021 GSMA mobile economy report. The end of Express Wi-Fi program signals a change in Meta’s approach to delivering low-cost internet across Africa.

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Every week, Zikoko seeks to understand how people move the Naira in and out of their lives. Some stories will be struggle-ish, others will be bougie. All the time, it’ll be revealing.

Today’s subject on #NairaLife grew up seeing her parents struggle and borrow to keep up in the wealthy society they lived in. At 22, she decided to start her own business. Now at 27, she makes millions selling hair and doing comms side jobs. You want to know her biggest fear? Losing it all.

Let’s start with your first memory of money.
I remember overhearing my parents complain about not having a lot of it. We weren’t broke, but we lived above our means in a few ways. The school we went to was the most expensive in the area, but they sent us there just because they wanted us to get a good education. They did it even at the risk of embarrassment for themselves because when they couldn’t afford the fees, we got sent out of school. They had to resort to borrowing.

What did they do for a living?
My dad had his own practice as a medical lab scientist, and my mum worked in the medical field for an oil company. She brought more money into the family, and she was in charge of making sure we had money saved. If it was up to my dad, we wouldn’t have the life we did. He was a spender. He’d get money and think of all the ways to spend it immediately.

So you were living among people that were much richer than you.
Yes, and as a child, stuff like that messed with my head. I constantly daydreamed about being rich like my school friends and getting picked up by drivers after school. Even now, I can’t bring myself to owe anybody money. The fact that my parents owed and struggled to pay makes me scared the same thing might happen to me.

How long did they have to borrow for?
By the time my siblings and I were going into secondary school, they couldn’t keep up with the finances anymore, so they decided to send us to public school. Public school wasn’t terrible. I made friends and had fun. I had a best friend whose dad sold electronics, and somehow I partnered with her to sell phone chargers and make small money to buy boli and okrika clothes.

After secondary school, I tried to get into a federal university to study medicine and failed on my first try. The next year, I got in, but somehow, they cancelled my results. I was home crying and miserable when my dad came to me and said, “Do you really want to study medicine?” My answer was yes, and two days later, I was off to study medicine in a private school in Edo.

At private schools in Nigeria, once you have money, you can get in, and that’s what my dad did for me.

Interesting.
I met more people from wealthier homes in that school. People who travelled abroad for holidays and lived more luxurious lifestyles than I’d ever seen before.

In my first year, my mum called me one day and told me to write JAMB again and POST UTME to a federal university, just to have as a backup. I had made friends and was enjoying my life, so I didn’t understand why she was telling me to do that, but because I had no choice, I did and got admitted to study plant biology and biotechnology in UNIBEN.

In my second year, I woke up one day and found out that the school didn’t have the accreditation to teach medicine, so there was a notice board with our names assigning us to other departments. They moved me to physiology.

Whoa.
There was no point staying in the expensive school anymore because the reason I was there was to study medicine, so we decided that at the end of the semester, I would go to UNIBEN. In the final semester before I left, I baked a cake for my roommates, and they loved it so much they swore I had to start selling it, so that’s what I did. Ingredients worth ₦1,200 were enough to make a few cakes that I sold in slices of 10 each. Each slice was ₦100, so I was making good profit. I partnered with a friend who knew how to decorate cakes and we split the profit 50/50 when I left the school.

What was UNIBEN like?
I lived a soft life. My parents didn’t have to spend so much money to send me to school anymore, so they could afford to increase my monthly allowance from ₦25,000 to ₦30,000 and eventually ₦35,000. The only attempt I made at saving was doing ajo with my boyfriend and his friends. We contributed ₦5,000 each month and whoever’s turn it was took ₦25,000. We were only able to do it for one round because it lacked structure.

I got a place and spent all my money on whatever I wanted — hair especially. Whenever I got a new wig or hair done, I would get endless comments about how I had great taste. People asked me where I got my hair from, and I told them the particular shop in Ring Road Market.

Now the thing is, the shop was popular for not having great hair, so people always wondered how I was able to get good stuff from them. The more I got compliments, the more it dawned on me that I could be making money from my ability to find good stuff. Around this period too, I overheard my parents talking about how immediately I graduated, they would stop sending me money. So I decided to start selling hair.

How did you go about it?
In 2016, my third year in university, I found about MMM through a friend and put ₦25,000 in it. After a few months, I had gotten ₦125,000 as interest.

I got an extra ₦40,000 from my boyfriend who was doing IT, got on a bus to Lagos, stayed in a hotel and went to Eko Market the next day. The cost for transportation, feeding and accommodation in Lagos took the ₦190,000 I had to ₦160,000, and that’s how much I started my business with.

In one day, I went to multiple shops until I found a vendor and bought hair from them. When I took my stock back to Edo, the first place I thought of going to was the university I’d left because I knew the people there could afford wigs worth ₦10,000 to ₦20,000. In two weeks, I sold off my stock and made an extra ₦50,000. I was speechless. I didn’t expect business to move that fast.

What happened next?
I went fully into business mode. I put my profits into MMM and used the returns to get more stock. Things kept going smoothly until MMM crashed with ₦250,000 of my money in December 2016.

Whoa.
It was devastating. I wasn’t saving, so that was all the money I had. By January 2017, I decided to take a break from doing business that way and instead started dropshipping. I received orders, got paid, sent the money to the vendors, the vendors sent the goods to the customer, and I kept my profit. I was in my final year and doing projects so I didn’t have time to make those frequent trips. By July 2017, I had made some profits, and had a bit more free time on my hands, so I started my business as usual again, but this time, I focused on selling online.

How did that affect your business?
It was amazing. All I had to do was post on Instagram, and I was sure to make sales. This continued into 2018 when I moved to Lagos for NYSC. I was making sales of at least ₦50,000 monthly in addition to the ₦20,000 I was making at my NYSC job and the ₦19,500 alawee.

By November 2018, I calculated my finances for the year and had a shocking revelation. I had made ₦1.2 million in profit from the business that year and only had ₦30,000 in total savings.

You’re killing me.
That’s when I decided to start saving. I saved the ₦20,000 I got from my PPA every month, used the ₦19,500 alawee to run my daily life and saved my business profits too. By the end of 2019, I had gotten a new job that paid ₦80,000 monthly, made ₦1.7 million in business profits and had about ₦900k in savings.

How did the pandemic year affect your business?
It started slow, then became the year that I made the most money in my life. Business went normally for the first few months until lockdown happened. In my head, there wasn’t going to be any business until lockdown was over, so I took three remote jobs. One paid ₦250,000 monthly as a corporate communications lead at a home automation company, the other paid ₦100,000 as a content and social media manager at a fintech company, and the last paid ₦150,000 as content and social media manager for a fashion brand. From time to time, I also got random graphic design gigs that paid the odd ₦10,000 or ₦20,000.

How did you get these skills?
I did social media work, graphic design and corporate communication every day in the running of my business, so I got really good at them.

How did you survive having three jobs?
I was on my phone every freaking time. Even when I was asleep, I was waking up at intervals to check my phone.


Sometime in the middle of the lockdown, I got a call. Someone wanted a wig for her birthday shoot. I was confused. People were still using beauty items in a lockdown? Quickly, I reached out to my vendor, got materials, made her wig and sent it to her. That’s how business started again. The orders were pouring in, and I didn’t have to do too much running around like going to the market to pick up stock. My dispatch rider did all of it for me.

2020 made me realise one thing: There will always be a market for beauty products. I can never run out of customers as long as I provide high-quality goods. To standardise the quality of my goods, I started ordering hair from Vietnam.

How did you balance business with three jobs?
As the year went on, I dropped the jobs one by one because I was getting overwhelmed. By October, I was doing only my hair business, but it was okay because business was booming. You know what made 2020 the perfect year?

Tell me.
The bone straight craze of December 2020. It was insane. Before then, I didn’t stock bone straight hair because people didn’t really like it. All of a sudden, people started ordering for bone straight wigs like that was the only hair available. I was making orders for hair that overwhelmed my vendors so badly, they started taking shortcuts to fulfil them faster. This led to people returning goods and some losses, so I found another vendor in Vietnam and ordered from them. Those ones did a better job.

The bone straight thing lasted only a few months, but it was the best run I’ve ever had in my business. By the end of 2020, I had about ₦2.7 million in savings.

Business continued as usual, and by the end of 2021, I was able to invest ₦4.8 million in buying stock in bulk. Although it hasn’t moved as fast as I expected it to I expect 2022 to be another great year.

What’s your average monthly income now?
I recently got a community manager job that pays ₦350,000 monthly. In addition to that, business brings ₦500,000 and other content jobs bring between ₦100,000 and ₦200,000

Let’s look at your average monthly expenditure.

Whatever’s left after saving and paying bills is for enjoyment.

How do festive periods affect your business?
They’re the absolute best times for business — Christmas and Valentine’s especially. I have to work double hard in this period because orders come in like no man’s business.

How has your money journey affected your view of money?
My view of money hasn’t changed a lot since I was child. I’m still very scared of poverty, but now I can let money go because I know I’ll always make it back.

What would you rate your financial happiness on a scale of 1-10?
7. I’m very content with my finances right now. There’s stuff I still want, like an apartment of my own, but I know those things will come with time.

What’s one thing you want but can’t afford?
I want to go to Europe for a month, just to live in and explore another country.

Source

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For Nigerians who want to start or already run their businesses, there’s a constant concern about access to supporting infrastructure, funding, and talent. These concerns are the primary causes of high failure among startups on the continent.

The startup failure rate in Nigeria reportedly stood at 61% in 2021, meaning only 39% survive. This is similar across Africa where startup failure rates range from 75% in Ethiopia and 74% in Ghana to 58.3% in Senegal and 58.7% in Kenya.

In a bid to increase the success rate and accelerate the transition to a digital economy, the Saudi Arabian government is partnering with Nigerian authorities to provide Nigerian entrepreneurs with expedited entry and support via Digital Cooperation Organization (DCO) Startup Passport.

The Startup Passport initiative, which will ultimately be between the 8-member DCO countries, rolled out initially in Saudi Arabia and Nigeria. This announcement implies that Nigerian startups building products that primarily serve the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region are invited to build their companies from Saudi Arabia with support from the government.

This initiative was launched at LEAP, a global event for future technologies being held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, from February 1 to 3 and attended by leading technology corporations, global start-up pioneers, and venture capitalists.

Faris AlSaqabi, Saudi Deputy Minister for Future Jobs and Capabilities, explained that the bond between Saudi Arabia and Nigeria is fueled by the country’s movement to a digital economy.

“Nigeria is one of the key players in the digital economy. We’ve noticed you cannot do it alone, so we have to partner with other countries.”

At LEAP, “The Garage”, a world-class innovation hub to support emerging and disruptive technology-based startups was also announced. The name is inspired by the origin stories of many of the world’s top tech companies that famously started from inside garages.

Alongside other business leaders who were present at the event, Nigerian Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Isa Ali Pantami; Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian Communications Commission, Umar Danbatta, and other delegates were attendees.

“One lesson we can pick from Saudi Arabia’s success is that we should take away the word impossible. We should be optimistic about any plans we have for transforming Nigeria,” Pantami told TechCabal. “Whoever comes to Saudi for the first time after some years and sees the changes will appreciate what’s going on in the digital economy. Their institutions are no longer obsolete. They’re not just advanced but proactive.”

He further said that his presence at the conference is to connect with potential investors, government officials, tech giants, and even startups. “We’ve been having a series of meetings with investors on how they can come to Nigeria and invest. Some of the global tech giants are willing to come to Nigeria and establish their manufacturing plants.”

Pantami pointed out that Nigeria’s large economy, youthful population, and its exit from the recent recession are some reasons why investors are excited about the country, despite there also being a few areas to improve on.

“The first meeting I had, they were surprised that Nigeria has 6 successful unicorns and still many are coming. The fastest-growing economy is the digital sector, which played a pivotal role in exiting the country out of recession.”

Alongside the Nigerian delegation, Domineum, Tanadi, Rice Afrika and 7 other Nigerian startups were also present at the event.

All roads lead to Vision 2030
So far, investments worth about $10 billion in technology and startups were announced at LEAP.

The investments and initiatives include the launch of Aramco Venture’s Prosperity7 fund with $1 billion, and a billion dollar investment from NEOM Tech & Digital Company with a focus on future technologies. The Saudi Telecom Company announced MENA HUB, a $1 billion investment in regional connectivity and infrastructure.

Ignite, a $1.1 billion investment targeted at the creative industry, was also launched. This new program is expected to transform Saudi Arabia into a leading digital entertainment and media production hub.

To provide better internet service, WiFi 6E was launched, supported by the largest amount of spectrum available for WiFi of any country worldwide. This is accompanied by other connectivity-boosting initiatives, including the first regional trial of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite technology to extend reliable coverage to remote areas of the Kingdom.

These announcements are all connected to Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, a drive to reduce dependence on oil and diversify its economy.

Since the drive to achieve the Vision 2030 began in 2016, there’s been considerable changes in Saudi Arabia, notably the liberalisation of its entertainment sector, provision of tourism visas and relaxing its rules for tourists as well as lifting the ban for women to drive in 2018—the last country in the world to do so.

“We’re thinking about the emerging technologies and the future of jobs for our people because soon millions of current jobs will be replaced by technology,” AlSaqabi said. “This means we’ll lose millions of dollars if we don’t adopt emerging technologies. There is no excuse to wait for the future to come, we have to go to it.”

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The Nigerian experience is physical, emotional and sometimes international. No one knows it better than our features on #TheAbroadLife, a series where we detail and explore Nigerian experiences while living abroad.

Today’s subject on Abroad Life struggled with loneliness when he moved to the UK to increase his chances of earning more last year. He talks about living away from his friends and family, and how he’s scared of getting back into the dating scene in the UK because it’s been toxic to him.

When did you first decide to move abroad?
July 2020. I’d always been satisfied with living in Nigeria until I weighed my potential earning options and realised that my chances of living a better life and earning more would drastically get better by moving abroad. Once I realised this, I didn’t waste any time. I quickly found a master’s programme in the UK and applied.

Why the UK?
The most popular options before me were the US and the UK, and I didn’t want to go to the US because of all the violence and racism I’d seen online. The UK was a more attractive option because of the new law where Nigerians who go there for master’s get extra two years visas to work.

That makes sense.
Processing a visa was straightforward. From the time I decided to the time I was in the UK, it took six months.

Expectations vs Reality: UK Edition.
I quickly realised that moving abroad doesn’t solve all your problems or make you happy. People see pictures of people who have moved abroad glowing in the sun and looking relaxed and automatically think they have no problems. It’s not true. People who move abroad deal with bills they’ve not experienced before, and sometimes it can get overwhelming. If you hear that someone earns £1,000 in a month, and you’re screaming because you’ve converted it to naira, you’re far from reality, because, after taxes and bills, they can be taking home as little as £200. Moving abroad and seeing it play out first-hand helped me understand this.

Interesting.
Another thing is loneliness. I landed in the middle of a lockdown in January 2021 and went to live with a family member and his wife. For six months, I hardly left the house, and I was losing my mind. I didn’t have friends here to talk to or activities to do. I was just sitting in front of my laptop and attending classes. The loneliness slowly brought sadness. I couldn’t even interact with my friends in Nigeria so much anymore because it seemed like everyone was busy and had gone their ways.

Did it get better?
When the lockdown was called off in June, I was finally able to go to school, and that’s when I started making friends and going out. It was only then I felt better.

What’s school like?
My programme is one year, so it ends soon, but it’s much more difficult than people make studying abroad to be. Many times before I came here, I heard that “If you can do school in Nigeria, you can do school anywhere.” Omo, it’s not true o. If you come here and lose focus of your education, you would so fail. You have to attend classes, read, do your assignments and talk to the professors about things you don’t understand.

What are your plans for after the programme?
I’m looking at getting back into the dating scene.

Ouu… What’s the dating pool there like?
It’s bad. If you go on Twitter, you’ll see a lot of people complaining about how the dating pool in the UK is terrible, and they’re not wrong. In the few months that I’ve tried to explore it, I’ve seen things that have blown my mind. I’ll try to be a bit more specific — It’s hard to find a UK babe that genuinely cares. I’m not talking about only UK citizens o. The Nigerians that move here and stay for a long time become that way too. With babes in Nigeria, at least you can see some form of humanity in the way they interact. Even if they reject you, it’s with humanity. Here, anything you see, take it like that.

Do you have any personal experiences?
I reconnected with an old friend that used to live in Nigeria, and after some time, we decided to link up. She’s been in the UK for much longer than me. Because I live far from London where she lives, I decided to take the 90-minute train there, stay with a friend in East London, and then on the night we were to go out, travel to West London to pick her up. I got to her house and stayed at the door for three hours in the blistering cold, ringing the bell and calling her phone.

When she finally came outside, she gave some flimsy excuse about why she didn’t pick. No apologies. I didn’t want to fight, so I asked her what our plans for the night were and she said, “I don’t want to go out again. I just don’t feel like.” Just like that. I was stunned. I tried to explain to her that I’d just come from another city to see her, and she just said, “So go back.” And that was it. I never heard from her again.

Ouch.
I know a lot of people that have experienced similar things here in the UK. Women here? Heartless.

How do you intend to go back in the dating pool like that?
The plan is to date someone fresh from Nigeria o. Someone that hasn’t stayed here for long and imbibed the culture.

You’re killing me. Apart from dating, do you have any other plans?
I hope to find a good job, and after my two-year visa expires, I hope to apply for five-year permanent visa and renew it from time to time.

Source

Love Life is a Zikoko weekly series about love, relationships, situationships, entanglements and everything in between.

Olanrewaju*, 27, and Temi*, 27, have been dating for a year. Today on Love Life, they talk about meeting on Twitter, starting a relationship after reading a Zikoko article and their plans for the future.

What’s your earliest memory of each other?

Temi: In January 2021, I saw his tweet on my timeline. He quoted a tweet of a fat guy and said, “If you’re built like this, DM”. The tweet was about two weeks old when I saw it, but I sent that DM. I said, “I think I have what you’re looking for.”

Olanrewaju: I got a lot of DMs because of that tweet. I was scrolling through when I saw his message. His account was faceless and had 20 followers. I don’t like interacting with accounts like that, but I liked his message. I replied and that was how we started talking.

Temi: I don’t remember exactly what we talked about, but we bonded very well within the first few hours. He was funny and expressive. I didn’t want our conversation to stop.

Olanrewaju: I was a bit worried though because he was anonymous. I wanted him to be comfortable with me, so I didn’t ask for his pictures until two weeks later. He gave me his Instagram handle, and I checked it out. He was tall and fat. He looked soft, just like I wanted. I decided to keep texting him.

How long did you two text before meeting physically?

Olanrewaju: I was away with my family in Ibadan when we started texting. Two days after I returned, I asked where he lived. He said Surulere. I lived a hundred naira away. So the next day, I went over to his house.

Ouuuuuu.

Temi: Haha. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but when I saw him, I was impressed. He looked so hot. He wore a shirt that I immediately wanted to tear off him.

Olanrewaju: Trust me, I made extra effort to look good. I picked that shirt because I knew how it looked on me.

Temi: We spent the day talking. I made him pasta and sauce, which he spilled on my sheets. After we ate, we took a nap. He went home later that evening.

Olanrewaju: When I was about leaving, I saw from his face that he wanted to kiss me, so I hugged him. I was trying to tease him, give him a feel of me without doing anything.

Temi: To be honest, I wasn’t particular about anything happening that day, but if it had happened, I would’ve welcomed it.

Okay. So what happened after that day?

Temi: He visited again and spilled sauce on my sheets again. LOL. Nothing happened that day as well. The next time we saw each other, I went over to his house.

Olanrewaju: The visits became regular as we got closer. He’d cook for me or I’d eat from whatever he was eating. We talked a lot during these visits.

One day, I slept off at his house and couldn’t go home. In the middle of the night, I could sense the tension between us, but I didn’t want to act on it. He tried to touch me, but I said no.

Can I ask why?

Temi: I felt bad, but I liked him so I continued talking to him. The visits and the texting continued. I saw him almost everyday. Either he came to mine or I went to his place after work. I was quite vocal about how I liked him, but he would remind me that nothing was ever going to happen between us.

One day in March 2021, I stopped at his house on my way back from work, and he asked me to go on a date with him. I won’t lie, I was terrified.

Why?

Temi: It came from nowhere.

Olanrewaju, explain.

Olanrewaju: LOL. That day, he told me he saw some kids on his way to work and took them to school. He said while he was driving, he pictured himself taking his own kids to school someday. I thought, ”Temi is so cute and selfless.” I thought about asking him out the entire day.

When he stopped by my house, I shared a Zikoko article about a couple in an open relationship with him and asked for his thoughts about it. He said open relationships were cool, but he didn’t want an open marriage. That’s when I told him I liked him and wanted to take him out on a date.

Sweet. Tell me about the date!

Olanrewaju: The day we were supposed to go on the date, he had an accident.

Temi: Because I was on a call with you while driving.

I was running late for our date because my boss asked me to complete a task before leaving. When I was done and on my way out of the office, I called Ola. As we were talking, a car ran into my car. I wasn’t hurt but the car was badly damaged. Don’t call your lover and drive, folks.

Olanrewaju: That night, he slept at my place. When he was asleep, I went through his note pad. There, I saw a note he wrote a few weeks before. It was addressed, “Dear husband”. I don’t remember all the words, but he was trying to say he was tired of waiting for me to come around. LOL. In that moment, I was glad I made my move when I did.

LOL. How has the relationship been so far?

Temi: It’s been my best. I love how thoughtful he is and how he takes care of me. We haven’t even had the chance to explore other people because we are too busy exploring each other. I know all relationships have their ups and downs, but the downside of this isn’t bad at all.

Olanrewaju: The early stage of the relationship — when we just met and were getting to know each other — was fun, but it’s a different ballgame when you start dating people. I noticed some things when we became official. For example, I don’t have a high libido but he does. I can go a month without sex, but he needs us to have sex often. We had a fight about it once. After we cooled down, he told me that one of his love languages is physical touch, so now I make more effort to have sex with him.

Aside from that, the relationship has been great.

I’m curious about your biggest fight. What was it like?

Temi: In August, we were supposed to go to a friend’s birthday party but we both decided that we weren’t feeling up to it. Olanrewaju said I should reach out to the person and let them know that we won’t be available. I said I would but I didn’t do it immediately.

He reminded me twice but I felt like the birthday was still a couple of weeks ahead and I could still reach out to the person much later. The third time he brought it up, he said, “Somebody will tell you to do something, and you’ll act deaf.” I was so mad.

Olanrewaju: I regretted it the moment I said it. That’s why I don’t talk when I’m angry. I can be rude and won’t care about the consequences. He knows that. We had an argument that night.

Temi: And then he didn’t speak to me for a week.

Olanrewaju: I was texting you.

Temi: Oh please. You were not your usual self. I could not reach you for a while. I had to report to your aunty. She knows about us, and I knew she could talk some sense into his head. She helped me reach out to him. When we settled, she spoke to both of us individually about where we went wrong. It was interesting for me to learn about his behaviour from someone who watched him grow up. I think that conversation helped us understand each other better.

Cool aunties are the best. What’s the best part of the relationship?

Olanrewaju: For me, it’s getting to meet his father and his elder sister. I met his dad during Ramadan 2021. One of his cousins was getting married and he asked me to join him. He introduced me to his dad as a friend. His dad was very warm to me. We danced together at the wedding. He even sprayed me money LOL. Since then, he calls or texts to check up on me. Whenever he’s in town, he would ask to meet up so we can run one or two errands together. He’s such a sweet man.

Aww, Temi, have you met his family?

Temi: Yeah, and I was nervous as Bleep that day. His family knows he’s queer, but I was still worried about what would go wrong. I met his siblings first. His sister made jokes while his brother made me noodles. We spent the day gisting, and it ended up being fun. They even washed my car sef. LOL.

That’s so sweet. Do you have any future plans for each other?

Olanrewaju: We plan on getting married and having kids.

Temi: I want to travel around the world with him, and we will get there someday. Currently, we are looking forward to getting a bigger apartment and starting our life together as a live-in couple. The kids, the pets and travel will follow soon.

That’s nice. Rate your relationship on a scale of 1 to 10?

Temi: 25 out of 10. I have dated men before but no relationship has been this good. I don’t have to displease myself to make this work; we just work.

Olanrewaju: For me, 11. Temi is my answered prayer. He gives me peace of mind, and I don’t take that for granted.

Source

In August 2014, Nigeria’s former president Goodluck Jonathan launched a new national identity project. The new e-ID card was supposed to be the super app of civil registers and traditional ID cards, combining digitally verifiable identification with the ability to make electronic payments, and even withdraw cash at ATMs.

Long story short, it flopped. As had a previous attempt made 10 years prior.

A 2019 court order finally put a temporary halt to new card issuance after a paltry 1.2 million cards had been issued. NIMC then switched attention from e-cards to simply issuing paper-printed National Identification Numbers (NINs). So far, NIMC has successfully registered over 71 million Nigerian residents and citizens, representing roughly 35% of the population.

Now Nigeria’s identity management office is rolling out the next phase of its ambitious digital ID programme, a virtual e-ID that anonymises the personally identifiable information used for KYC verification.

On the one hand, it’s a long-overdue milestone, and on the other hand, it is a confidence signal that the government is serious about digitally ID-ing Nigerians.

Why are digital IDs important?

Generally speaking, legal identification is important. People have the right to be recognised legally by their government for social protection, financial inclusion, and migration. Identification is how people prove that recognition. Theoretically, what digital IDs do is simply replace paper records with digitally stored and accessible ID databases.

Of course, today’s digital IDs do much more than simply recognise and authenticate identity claims. Some governments want them to serve as intermediaries between the population and access to basic services.

India’s Aadhaar number is a good example of a widely successful digital identity project. Aadhaar now covers 99% of Indian adults, a huge feat in itself, given the country’s huge population. According to K. Sudhir and Shyam Sunder, both faculty members at Yale, “Because of Aadhaar, many have gained access to public services they had long been entitled to. Banks and mobile phone companies have enrolled poor people who previously had been seen as too risky and cost-prohibitive to be viable customers.”

Subsidies and food aid, which used to be diverted through “ghost” recipients, now go to the people who need them, and rural-urban migrants are able to access an entire suite of services that would otherwise be challenging to access. In Malawi, fingerprinting for credit disbursement helped reduce loan default rates and supported repayment behaviour.

However, untokenised unique identifying numbers (UINs), like Nigeria’s NIN, can leave people vulnerable to privacy abuses since the individual has one identifying number which follows them across every database they interact with. For example, NIMC recommends that Nigerians not share their NIN, but the same NIN is one of the channels for verifying customer identity.

A digital token is that crucial additional layer that prevents personally identifiable information (PII) from being recorded while allowing a company to securely verify the user’s identity. My earlier example, India’s Aadhaar, is tokenised in a similar way as NIMC intends. What is more? India’s Reserve Bank has even asked all service providers to tokenise card and card-on-file storage, but that’s a story for another day. The point is, tokenisation is an important component of privacy protection.

Improving data privacy

In 2019, following the footsteps of Europe, Nigeria’s National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) issued the Nigerian Data Protection Regulation (NDPR). The NDPR was largely based on the European example, but some analysts argue that it is inadequate and lacks sufficient legal status, as it is not a law. That flaw, combined with the fact that a proposed data protection bill was abandoned by the federal government late last year, has allowed a legal grey zone for how data is handled in Nigeria.

For example, private companies might handle, store, or even sell personal data in ways that are not only unethical but legally grey. A NIN token prevents that from even happening instead of simply relying on the honor code illusion.

By tokenising the authentication process, NIMC is helping to prevent users’ personally identifiable information from being accessed and stored unethically by private companies.

Now NIMC has asked service providers to only verify NIN tokens, not the actual NINs. This KYC policy update means that startups, telcos, and the organisations that use NIN will need to update their onboarding processes and app interfaces to be able to verify NIN tokens. According to Kasim Sodangi, NITDA’s National Coordinator for the Office for Nigerian Content Development in ICT, using NIN tokens to verify user identities will be cheaper for private companies’ KYC.

What happens now?

Users can create NIN tokens from NIMC’s mobile application or generate the tokens via USSD (*346*3*Your NIN*AgentCode#). Agent codes are like unique merchant numbers that identify the service provider requesting the verification. This means that tokens generated for merchant X can only be used for that merchant and remain valid for only 72 hours.

What does this mean for service providers?

In general terms, nothing much changes. Service providers can still use the Bank Verification Number (BVN) or any other KYC verification channel to authenticate users’ identities. The only big change applies to startups that require NIN for KYC. Such companies will have to apply as enterprises to get unique merchant keys with which they can verify virtual NINs or tokens. Or use KYC verification services like Smile Identity to access NIMC’s API. NIMC also says using the service will be cheaper than using BVNs for KYC.

NIMC launched the NIN tokens in January, and while telcos and Nigeria’s National Pension Commission (PENCOM) have begun dry runs of the new process, Usman Abiola, Principal Product Manager at Smile Identity says they were yet to try the product and expected to get access later in February. NIMC has issued over 70 million NINs despite debilitating trust issues and a generally poor service infrastructure. A lot of that success comes from the mandated linking of NINs to individual SIM cards. Tokenisation will protect people’s personal data, for sure, but that is only one part of the enormous work needed to fix data protection and enforcement in Nigeria.

Source

Read more National Tech policy stories here

American tech conglomerate Meta (formerly Facebook) on Monday joined the list of tech companies like Microsoft and Nvidia who have built an AI supercomputer, with the recent announcement of its new Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research SuperCluster (RSC). Meta claims RSC is already among the fastest supercomputers and, when completed in mid-2022, will be the world’s fastest.

Supercomputers are high-performance computers that perform computationally intensive (high-speed) tasks such as weather forecasting, climate research, and oil and gas exploration. AI supercomputers are an improved version of supercomputers that can carry out more calculations per second than regular supercomputers, using the same hardware.

“RSC will help Meta’s AI researchers build better AI models that can learn from trillions of examples; work across hundreds of different languages; seamlessly analyse text, images and video together; develop new augmented reality tools; and more,” the company explained in a blog post.

With more than 2.6 billion monthly active users, Meta’s Facebook is the most popular social media in the world. In Africa, Meta’s suite of social messaging tools—Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp—serve as the internet for hundreds of millions of people. Businesses and consumers depend heavily on these messaging platforms because its use is ubiquitous and access to these apps and sites are free or discounted on many African telecom networks.

RSC is expected to aid Meta in identifying harmful content on Facebook and Instagram; processing larger and longer videos with higher sampling rates; and in developing new augmented reality tools. It’s a valuable tool that’ll aid Meta in accomplishing its plans to move billions of users into the Metaverse in the near future.


Before this announcement, Meta has been using the first generation of the supercomputer designed in 2017, which could design 22,000 NVIDIA V100 Tensor Core GPUs in a single cluster that performs 35,000 training jobs a day.

Realising the need to accelerate progress, work on the RSC began in early 2020, with Meta engineers designing and building a new AI supercomputer system from ground up.

“RSC today comprises a total of 760 NVIDIA DGX A100 systems as its compute nodes, for a total of 6,080 GPUs—with each A100 GPU being more powerful than the V100 used in the previous system,” the company said.

Compared to the first generation of Meta’s supercomputer, early benchmarks on RSC show that it “runs computer vision workflows up to 20 times faster, runs the NVIDIA Collective Communication Library (NCCL) more than nine times faster, and trains large-scale NLP models three times faster. That means a model with tens of billions of parameters can finish training in three weeks, compared with nine weeks before,” Meta said.

Aware of privacy concerns, the company added that RSC has been designed from the ground up with privacy and security in mind. Meta’s researchers can safely train models using encrypted user-generated data that is not decrypted until right before training.

Source

Read more tech stories like this here

Every week, Zikoko seeks to understand how people move the Naira in and out of their lives. Some stories will be struggle-ish, others will be bougie. All the time, it’ll be revealing.

Today’s #NairaLife subject got tired of the slow income increase at the law firm where she’d worked for four years and decided to leave in 2020 at ₦386k/month. Two years later, she’s at ₦2m and hoping to increase her earnings even further.

Let’s start with your earliest memory of money.

I was 9, and my dad used to give my siblings and me ₦20 every day to school in addition to the lunch we took in our food flasks. In 2000, ₦20 was enough to get a drink and some snacks, so we always brought our lunch back home untouched, and my grandma who lived with us didn’t like that, so she complained to our parents, and they reduced our pocket money to ₦10. It hurt like hell because I now had to manage half of what I used to, and I didn’t have any money saved.

Did you start saving after that?

I didn’t start saving until secondary school. This time, my allowance had gone up to ₦200 a week. My dad would give me money on Monday and ask for a report on how I’d spent it by the end of the week. If I didn’t have any money saved, I got scolded. I lived on allowances until I decided to try out business for the first time.

When was this?

2010. I was 19 and in university, and I saw that Valentine’s was a big thing, so whenever my sister and I went to the UK, I would buy cheap perfumes and other tiny gifts university students could afford and sell them during Valentine’s period. My goal was to double whatever my capital was so it didn’t feel like I was wasting my efforts. if I spent £500, I’d make £1000 back. I did this until I left university in 2013.

Before I started NYSC in 2013, I went to the UK again and bought white shirts, white shorts and white shoes for people who didn’t want to go to the market. This time, I broke even — I didn’t make any profits or losses. That was the last time I ever did business.

Why?

I realised that business wasn’t for me. I wasn’t doing it to make money, I was doing it just because I saw an opportunity and a market. It didn’t really excite me. Immediately after NYSC, I went to the UK for my master’s.

How did that go?

It was very stress-free. My fees and accommodation were paid for and I lived on campus, very close to my classes. The savings culture I’d developed in secondary school was already a big part of my life. My dad gave me £800 every month, and I got a job that paid £600. Sometimes, my uncle in the UK gave me money when I went to visit him, and other times, my mum just randomly sent me money. I bought foodstuff and cooked, and only really spent money when I occasionally went to visit my boyfriend in Manchester.

When did you return to Nigeria?

Immediately after my master’s in 2015. I had about £8,000 saved, but I started looking for jobs immediately. When I found one, it was at a top law firm in Lagos. Because it was my first job, I expected to be offered between ₦100k and ₦120k, so you can imagine my shock when I got the offer letter and saw ₦210k.

Sweet.

The money wasn’t going to change my life significantly, I was just shocked I was getting that much. I wasn’t spending so much money. My dad had gotten me a car that I drove to work and I stayed with my sister, so I was only spending money on fuel and saving the rest.

My salary didn’t increase until 2017 when the company reviewed salaries and increased my pay to ₦251k. It was also in 2017 I got married to my Manchester boyfriend, got pregnant, and by January 2018, I had pregnancy complications that kept me out of work for 10 months. In May 2018, I travelled to the US and had my baby there in June, and by August, I was back in Nigeria, and I resumed work in October.

I’m curious, was your salary paid for the months you were away?

I was paid for the first two months, and then I requested that they stop because I knew I wasn’t returning to work soon. When I had my baby and officially got on maternity leave, they started paying again.

Do you remember how much it cost to have your baby in the US?

If we’re talking about flight costs, accommodation, hospital bills and buying things for the baby, we spent roughly $35,000. A lot of it came from my savings and my husband’s money, but we also got $10,000 from my parents.

That’s a lot of money.

Yes, it was, but we didn’t have to spend much money going forward because we already bought clothes, diapers and all of that. My total savings when we got back to Nigeria was ₦1 million and about £5,000.

What was happening on the work end of things?

I was due for a promotion, but the time away from work delayed it. In 2019 however, I got my promotion, and my pay went up to ₦386k. A few weeks after I got the promotion, I stumbled on my first ever Zikoko Naira Life story, and that’s when my view on money changed completely. Before, I used to think you had to work hard for a long time before you could make the type of money you wanted. The more I read Naira Life, the more I realised that I needed to have more ambitious goals for my finances. I saw stories of people who had crazy salary jumps and thought, “Why can’t this be me?”

Instead of feeling happy about the raise, I felt even more dissatisfied because I thought, after working for the firm for four years, I deserved more than ₦386k. I decided I was going to leave, and after that decision, I started seeing things I didn’t see before. For example, it was only then I realised that out of the 13 people that were hired at the same time as me, I was the only one still working at the firm. I also looked at the top people at the firm whose positions I aimed to get to one day — senior associates and partners — and realised they weren’t happy. They were just people that were stuck at the job doing the same thing for years. I didn’t want to end up unfulfilled with my job like that.

Did you leave immediately?

Nope. Because I fell pregnant. A month after I got the promotion, I found out I was pregnant again. I didn’t want to start a new job while pregnant or soon after I had a baby, so I stayed at the firm, learning and putting myself on more projects and deals so I could increase my value. The US denied my visa application to have my second baby there, so I had my second child in the UK in January 2020. I stayed there until April because of the pandemic lock down, but when I got back, I started actively searching for jobs.

I found one that was going to pay ₦500k monthly, but I felt like I deserved more, and they didn’t offer more. When I considered that the law firm I was leaving paid bonuses at the end of every year that could be as high as ₦1.2 million, it meant my average monthly salary was ₦486k, and ₦500k wasn’t a big jump.

What happened next?

I finally answered a friend that had been trying to poach me for months. He wanted me as head legal counsel at his tech start-up. For some reason, I just didn’t consider interviewing for the role. He first texted me when I was in the UK to have my baby, but I told him I wasn’t interested. From time to time, he’d text me stuff like, “So when are you coming to work for us?”

So why did you finally answer?

One day, I was praying about getting a new job and God told me to consider the person that had been disturbing me for months. I spoke with my husband, and he agreed that I should give it a shot, so I did.

I asked for ₦1.2m monthly based on what I heard the market was paying for that position, but we ended up negotiating ₦650k and I took the job.

That’s almost half of what you asked for.

You know how these tech people can sell you dreams about huge salary increases when funding comes. As the head of my department, I’d also get the opportunity to make my own decisions and mistakes. Immediately I joined, my first major task was to be the legal personnel in charge of closing out the funding deal we were chasing. It was exciting because I got to be in meetings negotiating huge sums of money with people I could only dream of meeting.

Did you eventually close the deal?

We closed it in December 2021, and it was finally time to do a salary re-negotiation.

Should I drum roll?

Haha. We started at ₦1.5 million, but I wasn’t accepting that, so after some back and forth, we ended at ₦2 million monthly.

Is there something you want but can’t afford right now?

A new car. The car I currently drive is the one my dad got for me in 2015 and I would like to get a new one, but my total life savings is currently at $3,000.

How did that happen?

My family needed a new house because we’re getting bigger, so my husband and I sold our former house and got a new one last year.

Tell me about the finances of this deal.

Shortly before we got married in 2017, we bought a house for ₦30 million. My husband paid most of the money. I only contributed a little. We decided to sell the house last year to get a bigger one, so we sold it for ₦50 million and because my husband is a real estate broker, we found a good one for ₦77 million. Buying the house and furnishing it took a huge toll on our finances, but it was for an important cause, and money always comes back.

How will your new pay change the way you approach money?

I’ve decided that apart from my tithe, I’m going to keep living on ₦650k monthly. I’m also going to continue my habit of giving money to people and to God a lot. People have told me that the church abuses the money people give to them, but I don’t care. I’m giving the money to God, and it’s been working for me so far. The rest of the money is going into investments and savings.

What would you rate your financial happiness on a scale of 1-10?

9, because there’s always room for more. My friend recently told me that with my skills and experience, I should be earning about $100k yearly. That’s my next financial goal.

Source

Read more Nairalife stories here

Bitcoin technology is powered by software developers or contributors that work on a pro bono basis. So, the Bitcoin infrastructure would be threatened if these highly skilled developers refuse to work or are not skilled enough to maintain the code that sustains the entire Bitcoin ecosystem.

In recent times, there have been efforts to prevent this from happening by supporting Bitcoin software developers to make Bitcoin more private, resilient, and decentralised. In May, popular crypto derivatives exchange, BitMEX, partnered with global non-profit, Human Rights Foundation (HRF), to provide a $150,000 grant for Calvin Kim, a Korea-based Bitcoin scaling researcher, and a $50,000 grant for Abubakar Nur Khalil, a Nigeria-based Bitcoin wallet developer.

In February this year, Twitter co-founder and former CEO, Jack Dorsey, had also taken a similar path when he announced that he was launching a new endowment called “₿trust”, in partnership with rapper Jay-Z, to fund Bitcoin development in India and Africa.

He promised to donate 500 bitcoins ($23 million) to the endowment fund and give its board complete autonomy to use the funds as they deemed fit. But he has one ask: “Make Bitcoin the Internet’s currency.”

Last week, he unveiled the members of the board—four of them—to the world: Nigeria’s Abubakar Nur Khalil, Obi Nwosu, and Ojoma Ochai; and South Africa’s Carla Kirk-Cohen.

Board members with a game plan
Abubakar Nur Khalil, 22, does not have a traditional bank account. He became a contributor to Bitcoin Core—there are less than 40 of them in the world—when he was just 19. But the journey began in late 2017 when he heard about Bitcoin’s price and started reading about it. The following year, he got into programming and built a blockchain-based app, before becoming a contributor to Bitcoin Core in 2019.

In 2020, he co-founded Recursive Capital, a venture capital that provides crypto-focused startups with seed and early-stage investments, with the aim of contributing to the development of the Web 3.0 ecosystem. Recursive Capital is on a mission to facilitate online sovereignty—tools, protocols, and ventures that democratise data ownership and promote privacy, encryption, and financial sovereignty—all driven by Bitcoin. Despite being founded before the Web 3.0 buzz, Recursive Capital had decided that it wanted to enhance financial freedom by decentralising the financial monetary system.

Khalil, who was recently named Recursive Capital’s CEO—after serving as its Chief Technology Officer (CTO)—explained that Recursive Capital realised that Africa’s financial infrastructure is underdeveloped and cannot handle the amount of load being put on it.

He explained that this is why it is hard to send and receive money across two African countries, and even more difficult across continents. But he believes that Bitcoin will level the playing field since the requirements for participating are low. All you need is a phone and internet access, and a bitcoin address or lightning address—think email address but for Bitcoin.

“Bitcoin is democratising financial freedom on a global scale. It is also providing a unified monetary network where individuals from any part of the globe can transact instantly and have settlement across the global ecosystem cheaply,” he told TechCabal in a call.

Talking about the barrier to entry for Bitcoin, Khalil believes a misconception lies in the way people approach it. He explained that Bitcoin should be seen as an investment over a long time. This way, investors don’t bother about how high its current price is. He also believes that an easy-to-use interface on mobile and web-based wallets should be created, so that non-technical individuals can use Bitcoin. This would help in lowering the barriers to entry.

Earlier this year, after realising there is a dearth of Bitcoin developers in Nigeria and Africa, Khalil also founded Qala, to begin a revolutionary campaign of expanding the pool of Bitcoin and lightning developers on the continent.

Ojoma Ochai, one of the newly appointed board members to ₿trust, explained that her selection was based on a combination of her experience in Africa’s creative and digital economy and demonstrated interest in writing and talking about emerging technologies on the continent. Ochai has vast experience in non-profit management and governance across Africa and has run creative and digital economy projects across policy and practice in these sectors, on the continent and beyond. She also has board experience, being the board chair of the British Council Nigeria Programmes entity for two years. She was also involved in initiatives like the African Tech and Creative Group, which aims to capture value for African creatives and the tech sector.

Ochai also started a company with CcHub, The Creative Economy Practice, to capture more value for the African creative economy through projects that stimulate innovation and technology and enhance value chains and business models.

What will Bitcoin do for Africa?
Khalil believes in educating and enlightening individuals about Bitcoin’s long-term benefits: economic freedom for the entire continent. Khalil believes Africa needs Bitcoin more because the currency of most of its countries are volatile, making it pointless for people to save long term in their native currencies.

He said that the reason many people see Bitcoin as volatile is that they approach it as a short-term asset: ”Bitcoin is only volatile in a short timescale— a week, three months. But if you look at the asset across, for example, an entire year, it is quite stable, compared to some national currencies.”

On fraud claims around Bitcoin, Khalil argues that Bitcoin is one of the most open monetary systems because the majority of fraudulent transactions still pass through the traditional financial system, where it is relatively easy to track parties involved.

Ochai believes that bitcoin will eventually become a viable medium for Africans to do business without restrictions. She added that it would also help the creative industries easily monetise content.

“This is an opportunity for Africans to be more involved in building solutions that work for us so that we move away from the paradigm of things being done to us and for us to a paradigm where we contribute our skills, worldview, and capabilities towards solving our own problems and being part of a global seismic shift,” Ochai said.

Source

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It’s another year of capitalism and just like you, we’re over it already. We’re back to the early morning struggles of waking up and rushing out by 8:30 a.m. with the hopes of getting to work by 8:00 a.m. The absolute ghetto.

If you’re heading back this week, we bet you can relate to at least one person on this list.

The confused one
You have absolutely no idea about how we went from “Merry Christmas” to “Please find attached” all over again.

The angry one
You’re not even in the mood for eye contact, much less someone telling you, “Welcome back! ” HR won’t be able to separate the fight that’ll start between you and whoever tells you that shit.

The hungry one
The only thing you missed about work is the fluffy amala and soft kpomo Iya Sukirat sells on the street behind your office. Capitalism is awful so we can’t even judge you for using food to numb the pain.

The unprepared
You haven’t re-downloaded Slack and are still wondering if the Monday meeting you have memory of was a dream or not. Like, does your boss really expect that document by Friday? What is work?

Eye service ogas/madams
You’ve already prepared a PowerPoint presentation to explain how your holiday went, and cc’d everyone for the catch up meeting on Friday. All your colleagues hate you and will pour laxatives in your coffee/tea whenever they get the chance.

Already tired
It’s barely noon and all you want to do is sleep. Like can we skip ahead to another holiday season? You pull out the year’s calendar to check for the next public holiday and find out that there isn’t one until APRIL. The despair you feel makes you even more tired.

The lovers
You’re back and ready to continue your secret but steady knacks in the office toilet.

The scapegoat
It’s been two days since you resumed and your line manager has already dragged you across Slack for the entire company to see.. Pele dear.

The newcomers
You are just filled with energy and happy to be employed. Give it another week. Nobody will tell you to relax.

The ones that never go back
Who capitalism epp?

Source(because it's funnier with the images)

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