For over a month, I was a part-time sports analyst sharing my thoughts on my pick of the matches across my Whatsapp status. Just before the start of the World Cup, I took a poll with some friends, asking them to predict the winner. I got 12 responses.

Team Votes Percentage

France 4 33.3%

Portugal 3 25.0%

England 1 8.3%

Argentina 1 8.3%

Netherlands 1 8.3%

Brazil 1 8.3%

Other 1 8.3%

Spain 0 0.0%

Germany 0 0.0%

No one picked Spain, which, in retrospect, was odd. They are the reigning European champions. Given their slow start against Cape Verde, I could see why they were underrated, especially when compared with the blistering attack of overwhelming favourites, France. But they grew into the competition, dismantling elite opposition along the way to claiming their second star.

For me, it was bittersweet. On one hand, I had backed England to go all the way for reasons rooted in sentiment, their defensive performance in qualifying, their captain—Harry Kane—having one of the most prolific goal-scoring seasons ever, and a belief that they had an elite coach to take them the distance. That belief was severely tested against Argentina in the semifinal and was found to be misplaced.

On the other hand, I took solace in the knowledge that Spain had three World Cup winners from Arsenal—the first time the club has had this since Ozil and Mertesacker in 2014.

By most accounts, it was successful. If we focus on the football alone, it was a glorious sporting spectacle that the hosts, particularly the Americans and Mexicans, delivered creditably. The tournament recorded a 99.7% attendance rate and set a new record for the most goals scored at 308. Because there were 40 more games than in the last edition, a fairer comparison would be adjusting for goals scored per game. Yet even at that, it was excellent. It racked up 2.96 GPG, making it the fifth highest of all time.

[Created with ChatGPT]

Commercially, FIFA made money. Maybe too much money, if you believe the New York Times’ detailed breakdown of its $9bn windfall. Whether that came at a cost to its reputation, given all of the happenings behind the scenes, will be a matter for posterity to judge.

There were many talking points from the tournament, including, but not limited to, accusations that FIFA favoured Argentina, dubious VAR decisions (or nondecisions), neo-pentecostalism as the leading cause of the decline of the Brazilian national team, Africa’s mettle or lack thereof in big moments, Trump exerting his influence to rescind the Balogun red card, and many more.

However, for this article, I’ll focus on one thing I only briefly discussed on WhatsApp, which I want to flesh out here: hydration breaks.

Hydration breaks are a welcome development

This was one of the major talking points at the start of the World Cup. Full disclosure: I initially baulked at it because of its glaring commercialisation, despite FIFA’s insistence that it was in the players’ interest. But let us consider the broader arguments here.

The antagonists of hydration breaks say it is a growing trend of the Americanisation of football. By introducing it, football, like basketball, is divided into quarters, which “breaks the flow and tempo” of the game. One proponent of this view is the legendary manager of Uruguay, Marcelo Bielsa, who said the breaks “add nothing and take away a lot from the game.”

But is this really the case?

An article in the Times last month analysed data from all 72 group games at this year’s mundial measuring match momentum. If you’d followed the matches on TV, you may have noticed an infographic that looked something like this:

The above was from the final match between Spain and Argentina, which the former dominated. It shows how matches swing based on statistics such as who is keeping the ball, how far they encroach into the opponent’s half, goal threats, and so on. The Times found that in the group stage, momentum tended to fall 17 per cent on average after hydration breaks.

However, this is only one part of the story. Naturally, one would expect the game to take some time to crescendo after an extended break in play. There were several games in the tournament where goals came at a flurry after the breaks. One such game was Switzerland vs Bosnia, which, for two-thirds of it, was scoreless, yet ended 4:1 in Switzerland’s favour. A BBC analysis of the first 96 goals scored at the World Cup found that 29.2% of goals scored were in the 76th minute and later. The next best window? The period between the 31st minute and half-time, both coinciding with the period after the stoppages.

In fact, the teams that tended to use the breaks to the most devastating effect were the finalists.

Argentina notably made late tactical attacking switches in their second-half breaks that inspired comebacks against the beleaguered England and Egypt. Spain used the hydration breaks to maintain their technical superiority and raise their level through apt substitutions that put games away at the death, such as against Portugal and Belgium. That the World Cup averaged nearly three goals per game for the first time since 1970, and for a sport whose most common scoreline is 1-0, indicates, at least to my mind, that the breaks didn’t affect the quality of the matches. If anything, they may have improved it, the annoying ads aside.

That said, I prefer to keep an open mind. I understand the purists’ argument against dramatically altering the sport. But I would argue that not all change is bad. We’re in an era where athletes are playing more games, off the back of physically gruelling seasons, especially in the Premier League, and at greater intensity than in previous eras. Anything that gives their bodies respite, no matter how fleeting, should at the very least be considered. The other option is to reduce the number of games or have players pull out. But realistically speaking, no player will, under normal circumstances, turn down the chance to play in a World Cup.

Some compromise can be made, like considering the weather conditions, such as in the second-half game between France and Iraq, where the break was jettisoned, or in winter.

Sometimes, a change in football is enforced by necessity. The switch from three to five substitutes during COVID also had its detractors at the time, but has now become widely accepted. Some other times, after enough experimentation, a proposal can be abandoned. Like the golden goal rule, which had good intentions but created the perverse incentive of inhibiting free-flowing football, as players preferred to see games out to penalties rather than take risks. Ultimately, time will decide. But as has hopefully been made sufficiently clear, I lean towards retaining hydration breaks.

Those were the opening remarks of Hardy Pemhiwa, CEO of Cassava Technologies, at a TEDx talk he delivered late last year in Vienna titled “AI’s Next Frontier Isn’t Where You Might Expect.” As presentations go, it was a well-paced performance delivered in the calm mien of an expert salesman painting a Pollyannaish vision of Africa, one in which the continent was writing an entirely different playbook for AI adoption. Or so it seemed.

Hardy reeled out the familiar statistics, beginning with Africa’s demographics. He correctly noted that the continent has a youthful median population that is tech-savvy and primed to engage deeply with technology, although the underlying reasons are not especially palatable. There is, after all, a reason countries like Kenya and Nigeria rank among those that spend the most time on social media globally.

There is supporting evidence for his view. Google’s recently released Our Life with AI 2025 report notes that Nigeria leads the world in reported AI usage. Ninety-three per cent of Nigerians say they use AI to learn or understand complex topics, 19 percentage points higher than the global average.

Other claims, however, were less precise. Hardy’s assertion that by 2050, 60% of the world’s youth will be African overstates the case. While Africa’s youth bulge is significant, projections suggest the continent will represent about 25% of the world’s total population by that date, with closer to 40% of the world’s children. Still, he described Africa’s youth as “digital natives,” building on a narrative of rapid technological adoption. Where “75% of Africans had never heard a phone ring 30 years ago,” he said, “the continent now boasts over one billion mobile connections and 1.1 billion mobile money accounts.”

Hardy’s central thesis was that Africa’s core challenge is not poverty or disease per se, but youth unemployment. To illustrate this, he told the futuristic story of Yemurai, a 24-year-old high school graduate from Zimbabwe who, through AI academies launched by Cassava Technologies, has become what he calls an “AI-amplified community entrepreneur. “In the mornings, she uses AI tools to teach mathematics to 200 students across five schools. By noon, she assists nurses in diagnosing malaria and tuberculosis at local clinics. In the evenings, she analyses soil samples and diseased crops for neighbours, increasing yields by as much as 40%.”

This model, Hardy explained, addresses chronic shortages of teachers, doctors, and agronomists in rural Africa while simultaneously increasing individual income up to three times that of peers.

As he ended, he was greeted with rapt applause. However, I was neither impressed nor convinced.

The innovation myth

To be clear, there is much to commend in Cassava Technologies’ actual work. The company, owned by Strive Masiyiwa, has announced strategic partnerships with Google and Nvidia, valued at hundreds of millions of dollars, to supply GPUs for AI data centres across the continent. Its leadership previously ran Econet Wireless, which, in its early days, helped drive the widespread adoption of telecommunications across Africa. Cassava has also rolled out over 110,000 kilometres of fibre-optic cable, a critical backbone for real-time AI inference that requires high data-transfer speeds and low latency, which only fibre can reliably provide.

My difficulty lies less with the company’s execution than with the framing and its implications. The suggestion that the rest of the world ought to “catch up to what Africa is doing with AI” borders on the risible. Innovation on the continent, as Hardy himself explicitly acknowledges, is largely driven by constraint. While this appears to play to the maxim that necessity is the mother of invention, the litmus test for whether something is truly innovative is in how replicable it is elsewhere. Anecdotal evidence suggests that we typically copy and adopt from outside rather than build exportable models that others can emulate. Consider fintech: while Africa has produced innovative payment solutions for local markets, the continent’s most successful tech companies (PayStack, Andela, Flutterwave) still largely replicate models proven in Western markets, adapted for local contexts. This is not to say that copying is inherently bad, but rather our “inventiveness” is often a survival strategy, not one designed for scale.

Consider also his mobile money analogy. The success of platforms like M-Pesa in East Africa hinges on structural and cultural deficits. Structurally, large segments of the population remain excluded from formal banking, despite sustained efforts to “bank the unbanked,” particularly in rural areas where ATM access is limited. Even among those with bank accounts, mobile money is often preferred for its speed and convenience. Culturally, there remains deep distrust of banking institutions, fuelled by opaque charges, taxes, and a long-standing preference for keeping one’s cash close. To its credit, the mobile money model solves real problems for Africans. While it has influenced similar systems in parts of Asia and Latin America facing comparable infrastructure gaps, its success remains largely confined to situations where formal banking infrastructure is weak. It is a solution to scarcity, not a model for optimised financial systems. You cannot export it to environments where banking infrastructure already works efficiently.

This adaptation to infrastructural scarcity is frequently celebrated as “leapfrogging.” But it also points to a broader dysfunction. One that has not only been normalised, but institutionalised. Bypass the underlying problem, take a shortcut to the outcome, and congratulate yourself for ingenuity. Much of this is government failure, and it is not an indictment of private actors who, whether driven by passion or profit, attempt to work around these constraints. The broader concern is that we risk reframing what is plainly the fruits of incapacity (from the outside looking in) as a virtue, or worse, as a model others should emulate. To state the obvious from the Yemurai scenario, having someone work three jobs a day to earn a linear increase of three times the average wage is exploitation, and one should only applaud it if the parties involved in this arrangement seek burnout and a shortened lifespan as a reward.

While Hardy celebrates over one billion mobile connections, only about 37% of Sub-Saharan Africans are actually online. In countries such as Burundi, internet penetration hovers around 12.5%. Mobile money and POS terminals are praised as a success in place of building robust, inclusive banking systems that provide small business owners access to credit facilities. Solar panels proliferate as a cheaper workaround for failing power grids. Boreholes spring up indiscriminately as substitutes for moribund water boards unable to supply potable water to urban populations.

Feyi Fawehinmi captures this reality starkly:

“If, as a developing country, you failed to develop the critical skill of last-mile connectivity that allows your country to become legible, you can kick the can down the road, but the problem never goes away.

If you didn’t do it with the post office, emails didn’t ‘leapfrog’ the problem. You still needed to do it with landlines. If you didn’t do it with that, mobile phones didn’t ‘leapfrog’ the problem. You still needed to do it with broadband.

You still need to do it with power and grid connectivity. Rooftop solar panels won’t ‘leapfrog’ the problem. It will show up elsewhere. Every solar panel installed on a rooftop, because it’s cheap from China, is simply accepting that you’re just not going to make it.”

When will Africa catch up to the AI revolution?

Let us answer the original question, this time without reframing to suit a narrative. In my work as a data journalist, I have identified five building blocks Africa needs in place to be relevant on the global stage. In summary, they are: Electricity, data centres, the internet, digital and AI skills, and language.

Recently, some progress has been made. Just this month, Google unveiled WAXAL, an open dataset for 21 African languages, built in collaboration with African academics. The hope is that, over time, more languages will be included in its corpus, increasing accessibility for non-English-speaking populations who are largely excluded from the benefits of using AI.

AI data centres are also springing up, in line with one of my predictions for the year. As reported by TechCabal, a 100MW data centre along the Lagos-Calabar coastal road, facing the Atlantic Ocean, could go live in Nigeria this year.

However, excited as I am about these developments, I must state some painful caveats. First, whatever gains AI makes on the continent are concentrated around the big four: South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria and Egypt. While several African countries have some form of documentation for implementing AI strategies, bringing them to life requires hefty capital investment that is simply out of reach for most governments with more pressing priorities.

Second, Africa needs an industrial revolution, propelled by manufacturing. In a read I highly recommend, Jostein Hauge cogently argues, with historical data, that the popular notion that developing countries can bypass manufacturing and leapfrog straight to services is an exercise in wishful thinking. One of the benefits a revamped manufacturing base confers is that it forces binding constraints and coherence along several interconnected links, including energy, road networks, supply chains, quality control, policy, and so on. Each one works in lockstep over a long time horizon, leading to positive spillover effects across other sectors that ultimately encourage the faster diffusion of technology.

Kenya has the perfect confluence of conditions needed to be a manufacturing giant. It boasts abundant geothermal energy, a strategic location as a gateway to the East and Central African trade corridor, a robust regulatory framework, world-standard warehousing facilities in its Special Economic Zones (SEZs) that offer reduced corporate taxes for manufacturers, and relatively better road infrastructure for the movement of raw materials. Yet, it is learning firsthand just how difficult it is to make that transition. As part of a “friend-shoring” strategy under the Biden-led administration, the US spread chip production to Kenya, where STL, a semiconductor manufacturing plant, became a beneficiary. The company received a $1.3m grant from the US, which, welcome as it was, was a pittance compared to the $350 million it needed to raise to produce 30,000 wafers. A change in administration brought the inflow of the American greenback to a halt. Vietnam, a US ally in similar circumstances, invested $500m to spur its first manufacturing plant; Kenya, meanwhile, remains stuck in limbo.

So, will Africa catch up? Not yet. South Korea and Vietnam prove the transformation is possible, as I have argued, but both started with something Africa keeps avoiding: confronting infrastructure deficits head-on rather than attempting to leapfrog them. That is the honest assessment required. Governments must abandon the fantasy that solar panels and mobile money can substitute for functional power grids and banking systems. How soon Africa heeds this reality will determine whether the continent becomes a genuine frontier economy or remains stuck romanticising workarounds.

That’s the number of days between my last blog post and this one. I woke up this morning and decided to send this brief review, not because I had grand plans to resume writing, but because some years demand to be accounted for.

Finding my voice in AI

What a year it’s been. Around this time last year, one of my prayers—having recently rediscovered my faith—was to do impactful work around artificial intelligence. It seemed absurd even to me: I have no technical background, but I wanted to speak and write about AI in a way that brought Nigeria and Africa into the conversation rather than as an afterthought.

So I watched scholarly videos, read academic articles, toured a data centre, joined an AI salon, experimented with tools, and shared my half-formed ideas in the relative safety of WhatsApp group chats and status updates. In my first work article of the year, I noted what many AI experts were saying: 2025 would be the year of AI agents. I didn’t know then how much of my year would be spent proving I belonged in these conversations.

Two fellowships followed. In the first, I wrote a paper on building AI literacy in Nigeria. One friend called it “a fantastic documentation of the future.” Others reached out about research collaborations. I was humbled and, I’ll admit, a little surprised by the encouragement.

In the second fellowship, I was part of a team that built a working prototype AI tool for investigative journalists. In between, I gave presentations and was invited on TV to speak about AI from the perspective of Africa’s exclusion. It’s ironic that despite being in the media, I baulk at cameras. But I said my piece. Days later, a professor of technology from the Netherlands who’d been on the panel reached out via LinkedIn to say they were in complete alignment with my points. It helped quiet some of the imposter syndrome, at least for a while.

It wasn’t all roses and cherries. There were some personal disappointments I can’t yet share publicly. One particularly deflated me that I almost lost the zest for work, even though I like to think that I tried very hard not to show it publicly.

The hope that kills you

Then there’s Nigeria.

There’s a popular refrain among sports fans that it’s the hope that kills you. Nigerian football did just that. First, we were on the precipice of not qualifying for back-to-back World Cups after a disastrous start to the qualifying campaign. Then, from the brink of despair, the national team mustered everything within them to win by the exact scoreline needed to earn a lifeline. After scoring four against Benin and Gabon, it was just the small matter of beating DR Congo to qualify for the intercontinental playoffs.

We all know how that went—or is going. We lost on penalties and now have to rely on FIFA to sneak in through the back after initiating proceedings against Congo for allegedly violating the rules for player registration. Many people believe that something good will come of it. I’m here to urge you, in the words of Dante, “Abandon hope.”

The women’s team, at least, gave us something to celebrate—clinching WAFCON in style for the tenth time. Spectacular babes, indeed.

An invitation for invasion

If you had it on your bingo card that Nigeria would take centre stage in international geopolitics this year, let me see your hands. Trump and Netanyahu taking hard stances on the persecution of Nigerian Christians. Nicki Minaj playing Christ’s advocate at the UN. News that the US government, with permission from Nigeria, made an incursion into Nigerian airspace to offload Tomahawk missiles.

Whew.

What’s clear, without making bold conjectures, is that Nigeria’s security architecture has changed—for the worse. We used to be the country that intervened when crises brewed elsewhere. Nigerian-led ECOMOG in Liberia, anti-Apartheid efforts in South Africa, and, as recently as 2025, the country of first call after a failed coup in neighbouring Benin. That we’re now described as “that now disgraced country” should be cause for sobering pause and reflection.

Unfortunately, Nigeria is where shame goes to die.

I prefer to be optimistic, but it’s challenging to make a favourable prognosis based on our current trajectory. I trust our pastors will fare better than I have with their 2026 prophecies.

Nigerian of the year

At lunch with a friend recently, I asked who he thought was the Nigerian of the year: my own hypothetical award for the person whose work had the most impact on Nigerians, for good or bad.

We started with the usual culprits: music and entertainment. No standout achievements this year. Burna Boy was in the middle of a near-cancellation fiasco. Wizkid and Davido had relatively modest years. The “cats,” as Davido would call them, had no megahits like Calm Down or Love Nwantiti. Music was out.

Content creation? VDM and Peller came up, but we weren’t convinced about their lasting impact. Sports, as mentioned, were largely quiet.

Only after I’d left him did it hit me: I’d missed the obvious answer. It was, of course, the tax czar, Taiwo Oyedele, with Aliko Dangote coming a close second. (Check out Feyi’s Substack to learn more.)

Oyedele is revered by a few but disliked by most, dividing opinion from North to South. His private sector work earned him high praise; some see him as the most efficient technocrat in the Tinubu administration. Others have labelled him a double-tongued patsy, the useful idiot to be blamed when the tax bills eventually condemn Nigerians to penury.

Recent controversies around disparities between bills passed and those gazetted have heightened distrust in an already low-trust environment, exacerbated by misinformation about the reforms. I stand on public record to say (at the risk of getting egg on my face) that on the whole, I think the reforms will be beneficial. However, I understand the fears, especially in a country where earlier reforms, such as subsidy removal, have yet to deliver their much-vaunted benefits.

The Rubicon has been crossed. Now we wait to see how the new regime unfolds in 2026.

Looking ahead

In my drafts are unpublished works shelved for two concerns: whether I’d developed sufficient expertise to write authoritatively about AI, and whether Nigerians are interested in reading about it. The first remains a work in progress. But over the course of this year, feedback from some of you has given me encouragement to overcome my initial fears. I write about AI professionally, and my preference is always to centre Africa rather than exclude it, as is often the case. Whether I can write about it here in a way that’s fun and inviting is my next challenge.

In 2026, I hope for personal and collective victories. The grit to take on more ambitious projects and succeed, a Nigerian football team that doesn’t just raise our hopes but goes all the way to win AFCON, afrobeats getting its act together, and perhaps a government decision that doesn’t require mental gymnastics to defend. One in which the benefits are tangible enough for everyone to see. The little things, really.

All that said, many thanks to you all for your continued support. I’ll try not to let another 540 days pass before the next one.

See you in the new year!

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Chiamaka Dike voiced over this article. To learn more about her work, visit here.

It’s July 4, 9:16 pm as I type this, and the idea for this post only struck me on my way to buy amala at the famous Amoke restaurant. One could argue that if necessity is the mother of invention, hunger is the mother of inspiration.

This is my first post this year, so although seven months late, happy new year—or happy H2 if you prefer.

Typically, I write at least one post around my birthday, but I owe my loyal subscribers an explanation for my hiatus.

The challenges I’ve faced are twofold. First, the demands of living in Nigeria and juggling work and side gigs made it difficult to churn out articles regularly. That’s the official excuse, which is true but isn’t complete, bringing me to the second point. The real wahala was that I never quite settled on a theme. Long-time supporters may recall when I planned to shift from politics to crypto and finance, which seemed promising based on feedback. However, a series of events, culminating in new job roles, meant I had to start learning new things at work. The more I learned, the more I realized how much I didn’t know—a Socratic paradox. When I knew less, I wrote more frequently. As I acquired more knowledge, my writing shifted from opinion-laden to data-driven, ultimately requiring more research and work. Unsure if I had the bandwidth for all that, I put it on hold.

These days, I primarily write about the digital economy (read: “tech stuff”) and infrastructure. So diverse are these fields that I sometimes wonder how I keep up, but God has been my strength. Thankfully, this post isn’t about any of that. As I promised three years ago when I started this newsletter, my writing will, at its heart, center on hope. This might draw understandable criticism for being Pollyannaish, especially given the country’s currently sorry state. Still, permit me to maintain some optimism.

By the time you read this, I’ll be 33. If this were Twitter, it might take the form of “33 things I learned at 33.” But I don’t have 33 insights. I do, however, have a few lessons from this year and from wiser folks that I hope will serve you well. But first, a toast: Happy birthday to me! 🥳

Let’s dive in.

Everything takes longer than you think

Yes, including this article.

You've probably heard of Murphy's Law: if something can go wrong, it will. One of its corollaries is that everything takes longer than you think. Let me illustrate with a recent experience.

My boss assigned me a specialist course. I wasn’t thrilled, but I’d committed to it. The course overview said it would take 9 hours. “Easy,” I thought. “I’ll finish it over the weekend.”

I couldn’t have been more wrong. Those 9 hours stretched into two months. Before you call me lazy, consider the hidden costs: the time to absorb information, practice new skills, make (and learn from) mistakes, all while managing daily life. I earned the certification, but I’m still learning. This experience opened my eyes to how often this plays out in life.

I had a friend in secondary school who planned to be a dollar millionaire by 25. We’re both still waiting for that dream to materialize. I’m not mocking him—I hope he achieves it—but his plan didn’t account for the decimation of economic wealth over the past decade. I’ve seen similar situations with people setting timelines for marriage or dream jobs. Plans are good, but life often throws a spanner in the works.

So here’s my first lesson: plan, but temper your expectations. This isn’t meant to discourage you, but to help you stay resilient when faced with unexpected delays or detours on your journey—because everything takes longer than you think.

Commit yourself to learning and keep an open mind

This flows nicely from the first point. By committing to learning, I’m not talking about earning multiple degrees—although those are commendable. I’m speaking more about honing your curiosity, gaining new knowledge and applying it daily.

The beauty of embracing a learning mindset is that, over time, your perspective broadens, naturally leading to a more open mind. I have a personal heuristic for distinguishing between acquaintances and friends: Have they changed their minds on viewpoints they’ve held for five or ten years? Here, I am not referring to changing one’s values, e.g. religious faith, compassion, patriotism, etc., as being principled is a virtue.

However, when someone always wants to “die on a hill” and refuses to reconsider their stance on trending issues, it’s a red flag for me. I mentally file them under “acquaintance.” A dogmatic mind eventually stagnates, like a pond without fresh water, and time inevitably exposes its limitations.

To again use myself as an example, I was once very obstinate about never seeing Korean TV shows or reality TV. I thought they were for suckers. Silly, silly me. If I had persisted in my stubbornness, I’d have missed out on so much. This principle extends beyond entertainment choices. To use another instance and with no reason to offend, think about how some churches back in the day considered the TV the “devil’s box.” Imagine if they’d remained resolute in that dogma. The revenue stream from televangelism would have been a massive opportunity missed. In any case, they would have become dinosaurs in this day and age where you can find sermons on TikTok.

Staying open to new ideas and experiences isn’t just about personal growth—it’s about remaining relevant in a rapidly changing world. It’s about challenging your own beliefs and being willing to adapt when presented with new information.

Give yourself more credit, give people more grace

I’ve noticed that younger people often feel downbeat and depressed for not achieving as much as they'd like. While this partly relates to my first point about giving things time, there’s more to it.

Let’s put things in perspective. We’re living through historic times—and not in a good way. We’re experiencing all-time highs in inflation and debt. The middle class is shrinking. Even the real unemployment rate is likely disguised because Nigeria’s statistical agency engaged in what I can only describe as “intellectual wayo” with the numbers. Many are underemployed, with millions living below the poverty line. Seen this way, all your hard work might seem wasted, which is deeply disheartening. This is where I must urge you: don’t discount yourself. If anything, give yourself more credit—you deserve it.

I want to share a quote that I use as my WhatsApp profile picture, written by Scott Fitzgerald, the celebrated American essayist:

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

Now, here’s the crucial context. This was written in 1936. Why is this important? 1936 was in the thick of the worst economic downturn in the history of the industrialized world, lasting from 1929 to 1939, more commonly known as “The Great Depression.” At its height, the unemployment rate was 24.9%. The idea of relying on male breadwinners became less appealing as many lost their jobs, compelling more women to enter the labour market for far less pay. Within that decade, marriage rates declined by 22%. And worse, the year The Great Depression eased off, World War II began.

So imagine seeing this quote at the time from someone telling you to function still when all around you seemed helpless. It would be easy to tell them off as speaking from a place of privilege and not well grounded in reality. While I would never absolve the government of the blame for putting us in this predicament, my sole intent is to uplift you. You should give yourself more credit for still being here, still fighting. Even Nigeria’s richest man is complaining about the economy.

Conversely, these times call for extending more grace to others. I’ve caught myself getting irritated over minor things, once even feeling targeted at work. But I realized I was misreading intentions due to stress. I resolved to take a moment to breathe, de-escalate, and give more leeway to people also battling tough times and deadlines. It’s amazing how much clarity you gain when you zoom out and stop making everything about you.

I’m not going to promise that things will turn around soon. I want to say that, but I don’t have the data to back it up. But I maintain that life is a cycle of peaks and troughs. And the people who win, in my experience, tend to be those who push on regardless of how dire things are. So, my final lesson here is to give yourself a pat on the back and stay determined always.

I have more to say, but brevity dictates that I wrap up here. If you’re a subscriber to my Substack and run into me in Lagos, feel free to claim a bottle of beer—or your beverage of choice. It’s the least I owe you for your patience and support.

Have a prosperous H2. See you soon!

As a general rule, thanks to the work of eminent behavioral expert and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, we now know that humans are intuitively poor at statistics. By “intuitively,” this means that statistics does not come naturally to us the way, say, language or reading facial expressions do.

There are a couple of examples to illustrate this, but one of my favorites comes from the veridical paradox known as the birthday problem. In a room of 23 people selected at random, there is about a 50% chance that two of them share the same birthday. If we increase the sample to 70, the probability nears a virtual certainty of 99.9%.

People who come across this problem the first time think it is a mathematical mistake. “Surely that can’t be true? Don’t you need way more people?” As it turns out, you don’t.

The error in reasoning often comes down to how we naturally only situate ourselves when presented with the problem. We only think of our birthdays when checking against others. We’re not considering that in a room of 23 people, there are 22 other people for whom matching pairs could exist, meaning 253 combinations (23 x 22/2). One only needs to find a match for the “paradox” to be resolved. Here’s a broken-down explanation for those interested in the maths and an even simpler Ted-Ed video that beautifully sheds light on the problem.

I hope you learned something new. I wanted you to ease up a bit because I want to write about a few things that have been pain points for many Nigerians, which also center around numbers and how we often situate ourselves without zooming out. What follows are a few real-world examples. You may want to grab a coffee and sit for this one.

Is japa really a wave?

In my experience, this is a touchy issue. So, I’ll try as best as I can to limit the political commentary and focus on the numbers.

When I think of a wave, the image that comes to mind is a large crowd of people either on an exodus or doing something in sync. To the latter point, sports fans (like myself) may be familiar with the Mexican wave.

It is a matter of public knowledge that the Nigerian economy is a shambles and has been so for a while. So, it makes sense that people would want to look elsewhere for better opportunities. The Nigerian brain drain is real; there’s even a Wikipedia page dedicated to it.

But I also think it requires some qualification if the japa fits a “wave” based on the imagery I’ve provided and if the brain drain is unique to us. I myself have been culpable of describing it as such. However, having studied some data relating to migration, I’ll leave you to draw your conclusions.

As you may observe from the chart provided by Statista above, the data covers a period of 20 years, from 2000 to 2020, which clearly doesn’t account for more recent migratory trends. But it does provide exciting insights. India now has the world’s largest diaspora, having gone from 7.9 million in 2000 to 17.9 million in 2020. That may feel like a significant increase until you realize that India’s population in 2020 was 1.39 billion. Its diaspora constitutes a negligible 0.013% of its native population. Perspective matters.

Bangladesh, in South East Asia, is also worth mentioning. Like Nigeria, it suffers from brain drain. It has 7.4 million of its people living in the diaspora and a native population of 167.4 million in 2020, which comes to 4.4%. Official data from the country as of 2022 put diaspora figures at 13 million, which I’d say is significant enough to raise eyebrows.

And Nigeria? According to the African Development Bank (AfDB), Nigeria ranks fourth among African countries with the most diasporans outside the continent. “From 320,000 people in 2000 to about one million in 2020, about 58% of Nigeria’s diasporans live outside Africa, while 42% live in Africa,” says Kevin Urama, a chief economist at the bank.

However, in 2017, then Senior Special Assistant to the President on Foreign Affairs and The Diaspora, Mrs. Abike Dabiri-Erewa, claimed there were 15 million Nigerians in the diaspora. My first thought was that it was fictitious. A fact-check by Africa Check ruled this claim as unproven, with a UN estimate in 2020 putting it around 1.7 million. The National Identity Management Commission (NIMC), earlier this year, said there were 366,164 Nigerians in the diaspora with a National Identification Number (NIN).

I’m wary of Nigeria’s population figures, as I’ve written about a couple of times, but in keeping with the trend so far, I’ll state that 2020 estimates put Nigeria’s population at 208.3 million. This means the Nigerian diaspora constitutes anything from 0.48-0.81% of our population (using AfDB/UN estimates), which would be even lower if we redefine the diaspora as Nigerians who live outside Africa.

Given this background, the rhetorical question which I leave to you to reflect on is if the japa trend in Nigeria is a massive wave, or if it is par for the course.

This chart from FDI Intelligence reveals the Human Flight and Brain Drain Index score that covers 177 countries and is ranked from 0-10, low to high. The global average is 5.17. Notice the sea of red across Africa.

Nigeria ranks 44th with an index of 6.7. It's not great, but it's still better than countries like Senegal(35) and Morocco(28). Sub-Saharan Africa ranks poorly in human development indices, which shows in economic migration patterns. The Nigerian Immigration Service (NIS) said it issued 9.31 million passports between 2015 and 2022. However, it is also apparent, based on what has been explained so far, that not many people got to japa with these passports.

A recent survey by Piggyvest on spending showed that japa remains the primary goal for over 50% of Gen Zs in Nigeria, constituting the third most common reason why people save. But, and this is my educated guess, the devaluation of the naira will make those plans even harder, leaving more people feeling trapped or seeking alternatives. As a friend of mine told me recently, “I’ve decided to go to another African country if Europe and co don’t work out.” I hope she doesn’t see the chart above.

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Is Nigeria a gambler’s paradise?

There are some headlines you come across that stop you in your tracks and leave your mouth wide agape. Just like the one below, which trended online:

I’ve written before on this blog about how to hone your bullshit detector. While the headline is reported as a quote, it’s still BS. Let’s dig a little into the story.

Data from the National Lottery Trust Fund (NLTF) has revealed that over 65 million Nigerians actively engage in betting, spending an average of $15 daily. This is just as it disclosed that every day, 14 million bets take (place) and payments are made online in the country.

Executive secretary of NLTF, Bello Maigari, made this known yesterday at the second edition of the biennial national gaming conference held in Lagos.

He said Nigerians spend billions of dollars on betting each year despite economic hardship.

“Currently, there are over 65 million Nigerians actively engaging in this activity, spending $15 on average every day. It is on record each day 14 million bets are taken, and payments are made online in our country.

“It is expected to experience an annual growth rate of nearly 10% to reach more than $366 million by 2027,” he said.

What a contradiction! How can you, on the one hand, say the gaming industry rakes in $975m daily but are, in the same breath, projecting annual revenues from the same industry to grow to $366m by 2027?

To spare you a long read, the nonsensical claim that Nigerians spent $975m daily on betting was arrived at by multiplying the purported 65 million gamblers by the more dubious $15 spent daily on betting. This is a mind-bending claim because nearly two-thirds of Nigerians live on less than $2 daily. I’m not the only one who doubts it.

Gambling is an expensive habit. There’s a positive correlation between countries that gamble the most and wealth.

While I do not doubt that it is a popular activity in Nigeria, it would be splendid if the NLTF shared some of its data in the public domain for analysis. It’s not clear to me, for example, how people can afford 15$ in disposable income daily for betting. It’s also not clear how it defines “active.” For example, the US, with a population of 339 million, has 10 million people who gamble online “on a regular basis.”

Some people will say there’s a gambling epidemic in Nigeria, and I hear them. But I also hope they’re not basing their assumptions on this report. If you’ve lived in Nigeria long enough, you’d know that finding accurate data on anything can often be a fool’s errand, and we may have to rely on guesstimates. A shame, of course, but as one famous tweet goes, “If they explain Nigeria to you and you understand it, they didn't explain it well enough.”

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This is my first post since February, and Substack has taken on a different feel ever since then. My first impression is that it’s slicker and visually more appealing. It just might motivate me to resume writing here more frequently.

I was possibly woken up due to a mosquito buzzing in my ear. There’s no light here, and the heat is stifling. I pick up my phone. It’s 00:43, and I get a notification reminding me that today is my birthday. Today, I turn 42 (-10).

A natural question that follows, of course, is how I feel about that. Yesterday was my dad’s birthday, and he turned 68. While celebrating him, the mathematical realisation didn’t elude me that we would hit a combined age of 100 by the next day. That kind of knowledge fills one with some dread and/or soberness. The overarching feeling for me, however, is a sense of gratitude.

Today is two years since I launched this newsletter, and I still have many untold stories to tell. The one I’ll lead with is from exactly a year ago. By this time last year, I was struck by severe typhoid. One year after, I’m in good health. Whenever I count my blessings, I count good health twice.

Now, let’s talk about something that’s been on my mind recently.

Good news, bad news

My work as a journalist revolves heavily around understanding politics and the economy. Much of the news I cover can feel depressing in the wake of harsh economic circumstances. Sometime in June, I listened to a Ted Talk by Angus Harvey, a self-described “Good-news reporter” that talked about why journalists are so bad at reporting good news. He asked the important question of why good news is so rare before mentioning good news from around the world. I only learned through him that Togo had, in March, become the first country to eliminate four tropical diseases successfully.

According to Harvey, “When we only tell the stories of doom, we fail to see the stories of possibility”. I’d recently been discussing this with my colleagues about the need to do some “good stories”. So hearing a fellow journalist talk about it, you could say, supported my conviction—or confirmed my bias if you choose to see it differently. I briefly touched on some good fun facts people should know about Nigeria in an SEO story I did at work the previous day. The next day, I researched and highlighted good news from around the world on my WhatsApp status.

About a week later, I’d come on Twitter to see a post by the CNN International Correspondent, Larry Madowo, where he talked about his role as a journalist. Madowo hosts the show “African Voices Changemakers”, which brings into focus some of the interesting things Africans do in areas such as travel, fashion, art, music, etc, to a global audience. Given his position, it would be fair to say that Madowo’s voice carries some heft.

Madowo was included in a list of inspirational Africans compiled by Kenya Airways. He’d later tweet, “My job is to cover Africa accurately, not positively.”

He expounded on the point to say that he makes sure every story he does portrays Africans as being beyond disease, drought and war and having accomplishments, art, beauty, innovation, and so on.

To my mind, I think this disclosure was instructive. There have been growing debates about the role of the African journalist, particularly in how they tell Africa’s stories. In 2015, Nancy Kacungira, an award-winning Ugandan journalist, spoke to the BBC about her dilemma in telling stories. “I cannot tell the African story”, she said. She argued then that Africa was too diverse a continent with over a billion people and thousands of languages. Western reportage about conflict, she noted, seemed to focus on Africa as a continent perpetually at war, creating a negative stereotype. Conflicts in other regions, on the other hand, tended to be more country-specific, which clearly shows a bias.

An op-ed from January 2023 notes: “A study, ‘Africa in the Media’, that was conducted by Africa No Filter and The African Narrative in 2019, looked at how Africa was covered in the US media. The report analyzed over 700,000 hours of news and entertainment media in the US, and the findings form the basis of this reflective piece. It found out that Africa was broadly depicted negatively and as a country and not a continent with 54 countries. It also found that after politics (32%), crime had the most mentions (16%), and over one-third (35%) of African mentions in scripted entertainment were about crime. In scripted entertainment, 44% of TV shows only mention ‘Africa’, with no reference to a particular country.”

Given this background, new questions arise. And I’m not sure how the answers go. Do we adopt Harvey’s approach and focus on the good stories only? Or do we broadly appeal to accuracy instead, as Madowo suggests?

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You dictate the news. Garbage in, garbage out

I agree that, to a large extent, the media is compelling in shaping narrative. And yes, we know how to get you talking about one issue for a long time. But here’s a fact: We only amplify the stories you want to read. If it feels like the news cycle is negative, that’s because it’s responding to the “aggregate demand” of the masses. I will prove this to you with two examples.

The first is from April, when the Nigerian government approved a malaria vaccine from Oxford University, making Nigeria the second country in the world, after Ghana, to grant that approval. The vaccine has a 75% efficacy and prevents malaria in children between 5 months and 36 months.

Malaria is a killer disease. In 2021, 96% of the world's malaria deaths occurred in Africa. According to the WHO, in that same year, four African countries accounted for just over half of all malaria deaths worldwide: Nigeria (31.3%), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (12.6%), Tanzania (4.1%) and Niger (3.9%).

So news of a powerful malaria vaccine should be celebrated wildly, yes? And you’d expect it to dominate news headlines just as the world was ecstatic about a COVID-19 vaccine. But most Nigerians were, understandably, focused on the aftermath of the elections. Every other thing took a backseat. There’s only so much the media can do. If the people say election-related news is all that matters, that’s what media houses will offer.

The second example is more recent and concerns an allegation of a Nigerian student who the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, JAMB, says forged her result to produce the highest score of 362 in the UTME. Although the newspapers broke the story, social media gave it fire, and soon enough, it became all everyone could talk about. Just two days ago, I turned on my TV to see that it was the leading topic of discussion on a popular channel by a popular TV host. It wasn’t lost on me that a teenager had become the week’s cynosure and was the subject of political and ethnic squabbles on Twitter.

While the girl’s case was gathering all the attention, the person verified by JAMB to be the highest scorer got relegated to the background. There was the option of allowing the authorities to proceed with their investigation while focusing attention and adulation on the other lady verified to be the highest scorer. But our eyes were fixated on a scandal.

The lesson is obvious: Bad news sells. And that happens because there’s a willing market for it. This maxim is what birthed another famous media aphorism, namely, “If it bleeds, it leads.” Anything related to disaster and gore leads the news for a long time.

Conclusion

For the journalist, this creates a feedback loop that subconsciously seeps into how we pitch and tell our stories. You find yourself looking for the “interesting” angle. “Interesting” here is a euphemism for the “shock and awe” stuff, the type that “unearths something sinister” because it’s unlikely to win a journalism prize or a grant for telling a “feel-good” story.

In my coverage of the elections, I suffered mentally, having to digest and disseminate news of electoral violence. At one point, I had to excuse myself from work because it affected my mood. I’d learn later that there’s a term for this—“doomscrolling”.

It describes endlessly scrolling through and consuming accurate and essential but negative news. The National Library of Medicine says it can affect one’s mental health and is linked to “increased distress, anxiety and depression, even when the news in question is relatively mundane.”

It’s a Catch-22 situation for which there are no easy answers. On my part, I’ve tried to incorporate a couple of “good stories” into my work, even at the risk that it may not do as many numbers. I don’t mind. As I see it, there’s enough bad news to go around. What would it hurt to do something different and offer a ray of sunshine amid all the gloom?

So my admonition to you today is to take time off your phone screens if the news is too strong for your liking. Good things are still happening all around. You’re probably too beclouded by all the sad stuff that you’re not seeing them.

It might take some effort, but it’s there. So while it’s unavoidably true that times are hard, someone in Nigeria broke a world record in marathon cooking. Another Nigerian woman went to study in China and emerged as the university’s best-graduating student and delivered a valedictory speech in fluent Chinese. A footballer from the slums of Lagos became a prince in faraway Naples after leading his team to their first football title in 33 years.

As I like to remind you, this newsletter was founded on a simple premise—to offer hope. By God, I will do my best to do that even when I have to report on the bad stuff. And if there’s anything you should take away as I mark the second anniversary of this newsletter, it’s a rephrasing of Angus Harvey’s earlier quote: “When we only read the stories of doom, we fail to see the stories of possibility.”

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I was genuinely surprised to see how many people took February 14 to heart. Forgive the pun. I had imagined that the naira scarcity would distract people from celebrating love, but I was wrong. If anything, the opposite happened, as various status updates across my WhatsApp showed. True, there weren't any over-the-top proposals or outrageous gifts on display. And yet, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that many of you were in blossoming relationships despite this Buharious economy. Kaare o.

I'm going to act like Arsenal didn't get a trashing last night and segue on to what could be a controversial point of view. Writing convention dictates that you save the nut graph of an article for a couple of paragraphs further down. I'll buck that trend and lay it out here: Godwin Emefiele isn't all to blame for the naira fiasco.

There you go. This is where you either (a) exit this page hissing and wondering why you even bothered opening this email or (b) give me a chance to explain myself. The boy might be on to something. Who knows, eh?

Ok, ok you have three minutes to get me interested

Let's state the verifiable facts of the matter. In this piece, I laid out the timeline of the new naira banknotes. I argued summarily that the CBN needs to come out openly to tell us how much it released in circulation, which has always been the standard.

When the CBN announced on October 26 that there'd be new notes in circulation, it was eager to tell us that it wanted to take control of the economy and quoted statistics saying that around ₦‎2.73 trillion of it was outside the confines of the banking system. What did Meffy not say? He told us the banknotes needed a new look because the ones in circulation were ugly. He told us he wanted to fight inflation, choke kidnappers, deal with counterfeiters and boost the adoption of the e-Naira (which I criticised at the time it was introduced, more on that later).

On December 7, I spoke to a macro and investment analyst who shared some insightful thoughts on the naira redesign policy. Among other things, he argued that the redesign as a measure to address monetary policy made little sense. His words:

"Cash won't affect monetary policy. Banknotes in circulation relative to total money, that is, money available to be spent, including the deposits in your bank account, is just 6%. So when you say 6% of the money you have in your economy is what is slowing down the effectiveness of your economic policy, it doesn't make any sense."

Hate to say I told you so, but he was right. On November 24, I wrote that the CBN raised the interest rate to 16.5%, which was very worrying. This was almost a month after the CBN announced it was mopping up the old notes. Two months later, on January 24, the CBN raised the interest rate to 17.5%. To explain this in simpler terms, the cost of borrowing has increased. If you take a loan of ₦10 billion from the bank (which they won't give you anyway), you'd have to pay back the ₦10 billion with an additional ₦1.75 billion at the end of one year.

Let's look at another macroeconomic indicator, inflation. I'm going to report this in the exact words of Trading Economics.

Essentially, if you hypothetically borrowed that ₦10 billion, you'd be doing so at an unbearable loss because inflation exceeds the interest rate. I mentioned earlier that I'd come to the e-Naira. Well, Meffy has told us that its launch was a success. I'll be generous and say the jury's out on that one. Here's what I wrote on that last month.

Overall, the naira redesign policy has yet to have its intended effect. I'm careful not to say it's failed because it takes time for policy implementation to take effect. Yet, based on early impressions, it's concerning.

However, the blame is only partially on Meffy. Now's the time to introduce the big bad wolf, President Muhammadu Buhari.

Hmm. Have another four minutes

If you look at Meffy's policies purely from an economic lens, you'll scratch your head to see how it makes sense. Between October and now the CBN has gone into overdrive trying to do many things all at once which begs the question of why? Why are you launching new notes this close to the elections? Even if we were to ignore that, why's there a rush to get these old notes out so quickly? Why's the CBN introducing debit cards?

It's easy to forget, but this is the second time Meffy's launched new notes. He came to office under former President Goodluck Jonathan in March 2014. This came about following GEJ's dismissal of his predecessor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi. Meffy must have observed how things went then and learned something. The most important lesson is that the CBN governor and his policies are subject to the whims of the President.

In December 2014, Meffy launched new ₦100 notes commemorating Nigeria's centennial anniversary. Then, unlike now, it was a phased introduction which is the global standard. There was no rush to get the new ₦100 notes. The CBN only had to stop printing the old notes and gradually mop them out of circulation. So it begs the question, why didn't Meffy use a tried and tested template? The apparent answer is Buhari.

In an article from last week, Farooq Kperogi — a man I have a love-hate relationship with — highlighted what he suspects is the real reason for the currency redesign.

Some may argue that it's all hearsay with a little factual basis. Except that Bola Tinubu in Abeokuta spoke publicly about being frustrated by the naira and fuel scarcity, intimating that it was a ploy to set voters against him. Although his comms people have said he wasn't calling out the presidency, we heard what we heard, lol.

The rumour mill, particularly from opposition supporters, is that Buhari is doing Nigerians a favour by using the redesign policy to stem vote-buying. I believe this is futile and even counterproductive. The growing frustrations of many voters unable to access the new banknotes might force them to sell their votes come election day if the naira scarcity persists.

Another salient point that Nigerians need to remember is Buhari isn't doing you any favours. For the moment, his interest might appear aligned with yours but don't for a second mistake it for strengthening the electoral process or whatever the running narrative is. Buhari has been consistent with the mantra that he belongs to everybody and nobody. He’s all about himself.

Ok, what’s your conclusion?

Several, take your pick. One, that this isn't the first time Buhari's championed the redesign of the naira — he did it in 1984 and fired the guy who got in his way. Two, Emefiele is inept as a CBN governor and has foolishly enmeshed himself in politics. Which fool advised him to run for President LMAO. He's, however, ideally suited for the role as a stooge or a yes man if you prefer.

The result of this point is that contrary to what Oshiomole would have us believe that the President has no agency and got the idea for the redesign from Meffy, Buhari was the policy originator. His address to Nigerians this morning confirmed it.

The follow-up to this is that the President's address has bleak implications. One which was brought to my notice by a friend is Buhari has said the old ₦500 and ₦1000 notes are no longer legal tender. This runs contrary to the Supreme Court set to rule on the matter conclusively on February 22. One of two things will happen, none of which bode well. Either the Supreme Court rules against the President and another drama unfolds, or the Supreme Court sides with the President, in which case they'd be doing so under executive pressure. Interestingly, Buhari mentioned in his speech that he was aware the matter was in court, but as the big bad wolf, his word's final.

Another conclusion I gleaned from his address is that the President is daring anyone, be it the Supreme Court, Nasir El-Rufai (who recently turned on Buhari), and any other disgruntled elements within his party, to take him on. Buhari, a term-limited president in the twilight of his presidency, has nothing to lose, and he's letting anyone know that he's the nigga in charge.

My last conclusion is that Buhari has shown unflinching loyalty to Meffy, which is admirable — but only from afar. Meffy has been at the centre of various storms, from state governors to the Senate, the House of Representatives, the DSS and angry Nigerians. In all of these, Buhari hasn't made Meffy the fall guy (hi again El-Rufai). This is the same Buhari who doesn't send Nigerians despite their hardship, whose bromance with long term ally BAT, has gone sour, and who relegated his own wife to the other room when she questioned his leadership.

For good or ill, the story of these two are interwoven permanently. While Meffy is the patsy made to take the blame for the naira redesign, the pantomime villain pulling the strings behind the scenes is none other than President Muhammadu Buhari.

It’s the last Friday of the year and almost six months since my last newsletter. I don’t have enough words of apology to my subscribers who may have felt disappointed by my extended absence. It’s been a wild year for me — as I’m sure it’s been for many of us — still, have it in your heart to accept my apology.

On the last day of 2021, I wrote a newsletter summarizing my year. In it, I shared my highlights and lowlights and even my 2020 predictions for how 2021 would turn out. I’m going to do something similar here, so let me begin with what my forecast was for 2022.

If you’ve followed events from the past year, you’d know that my forecast was a mixed bag. And to answer THAT question, no, I’m not a millionaire :(

Morocco did themselves very proud at the World Cup in Qatar becoming the first African team ever to make a WC semifinal, so give me my flowers for nailing that. Argentina were crowned champions and lots of Messi fanboys are still in ecstasy over a title they deem long overdue.

Arsenal almost broke my frail heart when they lost steam towards the end of the season when finishing in the top four seemed easier. Driven by the disappointment of falling short and coupled with smart investing in the market and elite coaching by Mikel Arteta, the boys are on fire this season. They sit pretty at the top of the table now, five points clear. Fingers crossed we go the distance and win the premiership. Come On You Gunners!

It was a catastrophic year for crypto. Winter did come and it wasn’t pretty. Instead of heading north for $100k from its peak price of $69k, it lost around 80 per cent of its value, crashing to its current price of $16,487. I’ve not opened my crypto wallet in almost five months because I’m scared of what I’d find there.

The collapse of FTX sent crypto into a death spiral which had far-reaching impact. The tech industry whose stock correlates highly with bitcoin was among the worst-hit, with layoffs happening at a frightening pace. Nigerian tech and VC startups weren’t left out of the chaos as many of them had to scale back and revise their lofty growth projections.

I did contribute my bit to helping people reach their goals though. That’s an achievement for which I am most proud. The jury is still out on whether Nigeria has gotten a W. We’ll know for sure in a couple of months when elections are concluded.

Let’s get really personal now. When I started this newsletter last year, I made a couple of promises. One was that it would be honest, another was that it would offer hope. I haven’t reneged on those promises. I’m sharing this bit because I have a prompting in my heart that someone might need this.

At the start of this post, I said that 2022 was a wild year for me. For the most part I was out of active employment. In fact, I was without a 9-5 job for a year. My inbox was filled with so many rejections, I got depressed. Really depressed. There were days I couldn’t get off my bed. I was locked up in my room, tired of life. It looked like everyone had their stuff figured out while my life was wasting away. That’s not a good place to be in.

I’m not someone who knows how to ask for help. It’s not so much a question of pride, it just isn’t something I do too well. One reason may be because of my tendency to overthink. I often think that by asking, I may become an inconvenience. So I’d rather expend myself completely than coming cap in hand. If I’m asking for help, know that I’ve exhausted all options.

And so I asked for help, from would you guess? God.

I had heard back from this media company based outside Nigeria looking for someone to cover crypto-related news. I started reading up, watching YouTube videos and doing research. Because I’d gotten a series of Ls, I wanted to cover all my bases this time — both academically and spiritually. I prayed. And let me tell you something, it was hard for me. Hard because I simply didn’t know how to go about it again. But I eventually summoned up everything within me to get on my knees.

What followed was a month of interviews. Zoom calls across multiple time zones. The feedback I got during the interviews was good and I was feeling positive that an offer was on the horizon because I had done my best and had prayed. So imagine my devastation when the rejection email came after the grueling process. I wanted to die.

Tough luck. However, I remain grateful for the people I had around me which the more I think about, were God’s gift to me at the time. I was also learning some lessons.

One is that no one can go at it alone. Everyone needs someone in their corner and in my case they were my family and friends who rallied on my behalf. I had to ask for help and a couple of friends provided side gigs which I sustained myself with during this tough period.

I also learned that life doesn’t follow a template. While I remain a believer in hard work and consistency, there are times when in spite of your best efforts, nothing seems to work. In those moments I understood firsthand what patience truly meant. Patience, combined with hope that the tide will turn. And although I was running out of patience, I had not run out of hope even though it was, admittedly, in the reserves.

As Gil-galad said to Elrond in The Rings of Power, “Hope is never mere, even when it is meager. When all other senses sleep, the eye of hope is first to awaken, last to shut.”

No matter how bad it gets, never ever abandon hope.

I kept putting myself out there and eventually, the tide did turn. In October, I got a job offer to be a Citizen reporter covering matters relating to the economy, politics, social justice and basically everything about how to know when the government is f***ing with you and how you can unf***k yourself. Those are not my words, it’s literally in our header lol.

This should also explain why I don’t cover much political stuff here as I ordinarily would. Because I’m now being paid to do so as my day job. You can see what I’ve been up to here.

To circle back to the crux of my story, I’m telling it to let you know that if you’re feeling like your year hasn’t gone to plan, I can very well relate because I too have been there.

I’ve heard people say they’re jealous of me and I think it helps to put it out there that there’s nothing to be jealous of. I’m a struggling guy who just has the audacity to not give up. It’s why I became an optimist, because success can often depend on being “unreasonable” in the face of adversity.

I’ll wrap up with this inspiring quote by George Bernard Shaw who captured it best when he said: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

Stay unreasonable friends, and see you again in the new year!

Not all clocks are round: Kostas GR / Flickr

My birthday fell on the 7th of July. I had it somewhere in mind to do a commemorative post to mark one year of starting my newsletter. As the day drew closer excuses kept springing up, pushing me to procrastinate till I completely put it off.

The day itself was not one I particularly enjoyed. On the morning of the 6th, which happened to be my dad’s birthday, I began to express symptoms of what I assumed to be malaria. It would turn out to be much worse. I was curled up in bed shivering as though I was undergoing an exorcism. Then came the migraines which didn’t ease up despite self-medication. The night I was rushed to the hospital was hellish. You should have seen me, a grown man, acting like a petulant child. I was restlessly delirious and it took quite the intervention to get me in a calmer state.

As anyone who has experienced typhoid will tell you, it is an especially nasty illness. It is resistant to common antimalarials and is only properly treated by aggressive combination therapy. At one point I had one simple prayer: heal me dear God, or just kill me. Well, I was healed and I’m happy to be back once again, writing a long awaited draft.

Over the course of the last year I’ve taken the liberty to write on topics dear to my heart and even some that are on the peripheries of my expertise. As I’ve stated before, there was never really a long term goal to it. I just decided to do it and make it a weekly thing. However, as time wore on, I found out that keeping to a weekly schedule was tough. So I varied it fortnightly, monthly, or even longer as my work demands grew.

When I first really started writing for an audience, I had recently become a huge (still am) fan of the British rock band, Coldplay. I was so in love with them that I found a way of referencing them in my writings, subtly or overtly. My first public newsletter titled Mylo Xyloto, which was based on an allegory of the hammer and the screw, was the name of Coldplay’s fifth studio album. Subsequent titles, including this article you’re reading, follow a similar pattern and are named after Coldplay albums or songs such as LeftRightLeftRightLeft, Twisted Logic, Adventure of a Lifetime, Up in Flames, The Escapist—and many more.

The other reason for adopting this style of naming my articles was to act as a teaser and in the process, provide some surprise value. Sometimes it worked, but it also brought a significant disadvantage in the context of SEO as the title head often didn’t reflect the body of the article. I tried to use the sub-headings to rectify this.

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In the one year since I started I’ve learned a great deal, some of which I’ll share with any of you who want to take up writing or start a newsletter. I’ve gone outside my comfort zone and written things I wasn’t sure I had the range for, which I believe improved me as a writer and gave me the courage to take on more ambitious work.

The most important “trick” to the trade is that there’s no substitute for consistency. If you think of reasons why you shouldn’t do it, the universe will conspire to make your thoughts become a self-fulfilling prophecy. So start small, write that “rubbish” draft, and keep on going. It’s only day one, you will get better.

Emulate people you like to read. It might sound counterintuitive but every great writer had someone they admired. Over time with ardent study and practice, they refined themselves and carved out a unique style for themselves. So why not you?

Be prepared to make mistakes, oh yes I did—and still do. I like to keep an eye for detail but even then, one word out of place can give a sentence a whole new context and convey an unintended meaning. The important thing is to recognize and work on them. Grammatical errors can be eliminated using writing aids like Grammarly and Hemingway although I never use them. Still, they are nice to have in your corner. It never pays to linger over minimal errors and if they are grave ones, accept the responsibility and issue a correction.

There is the vital need for research and rigor in analysis, while also avoiding the logical trap of overgeneralization when trying to drive home a point. Another thing I’ve learned is that there’s such a thing as too much. Like every good prosecutor in a cross examination will tell you, know when to rest when you already have the upper hand.

If the lawyer pushes too hard, a small crack may emerge that undermines their case. Similarly, in writing—especially if you resort to using case studies or analogies—stick with the relevant few and use them to make the pertinent point. If you overextend your analogy or try to put too much seasoning in the broth, you risk stultifying and ultimately, alienating your reader.

I learned the value of feedback which is very helpful for young writers. But, a word of caution: feedback is a double-edged sword that can be positive or negative. Positive feedback may come from friends who genuinely support you and want you to do well and it is inspiring especially on days when posts don’t do great numbers.

However, you must try, hard as it may, to not dwell too much on it because it can lure one into a false sense of arrival. Negative feedback is also useful and does not always come from “enemies.” Because I understand the effort that goes into putting out a piece of creative content, I naturally default to praise openly and criticize privately. And even when I criticize, I often preface it with some good humor or compliment to “soften the blow.”

I haven’t yet hacked the technique to getting viral posts. In truth, there is no one surefire method as it often requires a mix of consistent high quality output, understanding the audience you’re writing for, timing and a bit of luck.

Going viral on quality content is every writer’s dream for what good is one’s writing if there’s no one to read it? It so happened once that I went viral fortuitously. My post on NFTs was published at about the same time as news of a major NFT crash was awash on social media, so I shamelessly plugged a link to it on a Twitter thread that was generating a lot of reactions and voila! I got more traffic that day than in the previous month combined. I also got new followers too. So there’s one tip right there.

A better place to learn the art of marketing your content to a wider audience might be found in a resource recommended to me by a friend aptly titled The Content Marketing Handbook. There are gems there, I assure you.

With the clock having come a full year, I’ve shared bits of my writing lessons and experience which I have now relayed to you as advice. I’m humbled by the over 20 articles and several of you who find what I write interesting enough, for which I have earned your unwavering readership. Many thanks to you all. Perhaps in my next article I can get back to discussing matters of the day while I look forward to any suggestions on what you think those should be in the comments below.

A happy one-year anniversary to me, let’s do this again!

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On a personal note I found the news unusually surprising. Given my crypto advocacy, this may come as a bit of a contradiction so I should explain myself. In November of last year, the Global Legal Research Directorate of the Library of Congress released a report on the regulation of cryptocurrency around the world. The Central African Republic was one of 23 African countries to impose a ban on crypto. For a sovereign state to go from being crypto skeptic to promoting crypto as currency within a few months naturally raises eyebrows.

Before I share my bit on this let me give you, the reader, some background information on the country. The first time I gave serious thought to it was when I was pondering the correct demonym for people from the CAR. Are they called Central African Republicans (which is quite a mouthful), or Central Africans (which might be indistinguishable from the term one might call people from Central Africa, a sub-region of Africa comprising over ten countries)? To satisfy your curiosity, it’s the latter.

Notre-Dame of Bangui — Central African Republic :  mbrand85/Shutterstock

The CAR isn’t usually in the news for the right reasons. Although a resource-rich country, it is staggeringly poor. A 2016 report by Reuters noted that the CAR is the worst country in the world for young people to live in. It is the scene of an ongoing civil war and ranks 188 out of 189 on the Human Development Index with a score of 0.397. You get the picture.

Now to the big question: is the CAR’s adoption of bitcoin a win? My answer is: it depends on who you ask.

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For fans of crypto, it is, — or more accurately, it appears to be — for reasons already explained. However, and this is probably my more cynical side (the Hyde to my Jekyll if you may), I have some reservations.

Traditional financial institutions none more prominent than the IMF have spouted the usual criticisms, warning that the CAR’s decision comes with “large risks associated with the use of bitcoin on financial stability, financial integrity, and consumer protection”.

On any other day I would dismiss it as scaremongering. Except I don’t think it is in this case. Although its inflation rate is steady around 2.47 per cent, the CAR ranks low on other economic indices which casts doubt on how bitcoin would gain wide acceptance and use.

Chainalysis, the US blockchain firm that analyses crypto activity globally, has no data on crypto usage in the CAR due in part to the civil unrest in the country. Hence it’s really anyone’s guess as to exactly how many people currently conduct transactions in crypto although it would be safe to assume that the figure is infinitesimal.

The CAR is one of 6 African countries whose currency, the XAF, is pegged to the euro and backed by the treasury of France. Its announcement on bitcoin blindsided the Bank of Central African States (BEAC) — the regional body in charge of the XAF — who expressed in shock that they were only made aware of the announcement the same time as the public!

Bitcoin relies on the Internet for use and yet per 2019 statistics from WorldData , only one in three people own mobile phones with a meagre 4 per cent of Central Africans having access to the Internet. The figure is even lower for those in need of fast internet where the number drops to zero per cent.

Skeptics argue that for a country with a huge financial burden which is also dependent on foreign interventions, the risk of becoming ostracized by major international lending institutions coupled with the lack of a buoyant economic infrastructure means that bitcoin may create more problems than it sets out to solve. Questions are rightly being asked of the government’s priorities with fears that it may have put the cart before the horse.

There’s a bigger worry however that maximalists may not be looking at or if they are, are choosing to stay silent on which is that these two countries are for good or ill, the poster nations for bitcoin. Being the only ones so far to have experimented on it, the rest of the world is watching keenly to see how it unfolds. So far, the results don’t appear too promising.

By comparison with the CAR, around 50 per cent of El Salvador residents have access to the Internet. However, a recent Bloomberg study notes alarmingly that bitcoin is struggling to take root in El Salvador following its authorization last September. That month, bitcoin was disbursed to citizens via a government approved wallet, Chivo, which came with a $30 incentive to all users.

The study notes that “virtually no one has installed Chivo on their phone in 2022”. The reason? “The most important reason not to download the app, conditional on knowing about it, is that users prefer to use cash, which was followed by trust issues — respondents did not trust the system or bitcoin itself”.

Even El Salvador’s much hyped Bitcoin Bond is raising red flags among crypto enthusiasts with some advising that people pass on it due to its unsustainability, limited legal protection and an unsuitable issuer, among other issues.

Meanwhile, a BBC report suggests that the CAR’s move may well be a power play designed to undermine the CFA, just as France and Russia struggle to gain a strong foothold in a country with an abundance of precious natural resources. Given the historical scramble for Africa, that explanation doesn’t appear implausible.

Despite my concerns, a part of me hopes this project succeeds as it may well be the story that erodes anti-crypto sentiment across governments in Africa. Already, Nigel Green, the CEO of the deVere Group — one of the world’s largest independent financial advisories — has predicted that Tanzania is on track to become the next African country to adopt bitcoin as legal tender. I’ll be following that prediction eagerly.

In a sense, it is fitting that the CAR’s President, Faustin-Archange Touadéra, is a double doctorate holder in mathematics. All eyes are on him now and his putatively calculated approach to bitcoin.

Will it work? We’ll see.

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The list, devoted to discussions on mathematics, cryptography, philosophy among other ‘nerdy’ topics, had as a primary goal the advocacy of Internet privacy and individual liberties in the face of giant corporations and government oversight.

Over time, it grew to incorporate more members of the larger tech community. Prominent leaders in today’s tech world and cryptography experts were at one point or the other a part of this esteemed group.

To name just a few, Marc Andreessen — the co-founder of Mosaic which was the first widely used web browser as well as the now defunct Netscape, Julian Assange — the famous journalist and founder of Wikileaks, Nick Szabo — the inventor of smart contracts which are the building blocks of code on the Ethereum network, and Hal Finney — one of the early developers of Bitcoin, now deceased. Make a note of these names, you’ll be hearing more about some of them as you proceed.

On January 17, 1993, just three days before Bill Clinton was sworn in as the 42nd President of the United States, Finney sent an email to the Cypherpunk mailing list. At the time, the mail was sent in jest. This joke would turn out to be very prescient as it accurately foretold what we now come to know as NFTs.

What are NFTs?

It would take another two decades for Finney’s prediction to manifest and it did that in some style. Although 2014 was the first time NFTs were heard of in public discourse, 2021 was when NFTs really took off. That year alone according to data from DappRadar, NFTs generated over $23 billion in trading volume—up from $94.9 million the year before.

Now that I fully have your attention let’s define what an NFT is. NFT, short for non-fungible token is in simple terms a digital asset that is representative of real-world items like art, music, videos, a merch in an online game, physical collectibles, or even a tweet!

Let’s break down what the words themselves mean. The word ‘non-fungible’ is the opposite of fungible which means mutually interchangeable. The naira for example, is fungible because you can swap it for another naira. Same with bitcoin.

A token is anything that serves as a visible or tangible representation of something which in this case as explained earlier, is a real-world item. In Finney’s email, he referred to these digital tokens as “cryptographic trading cards”.

Because a cryptographic card is embedded with unique code, such a card would be non-fungible. If you trade it for a different card, you would be getting something different from what you originally had.

Now if your curiosity is piqued at this point you’re probably wondering: what if I just take a photo of an NFT, what’s to stop me from claiming ownership and selling it?

More of that in a bit.

Smart contracts

Remember Nick Szabo from our story? The guy who invented smart contracts? Well, it’s thanks to him that NFTs possess the uniqueness they have. The code behind every NFT is known as a smart contract. So what’s that?

A smart contract is a self-executing program that includes terms of agreement between a buyer and seller which runs when the predetermined conditions are met. To the earlier question of whether taking a photo of an NFT duplicates it and confers ownership rights, the answer is no. If I take a photo of a Picasso, does that automatically mean I own one?

The reason is that while you may have a ‘copy’ of the NFT’s image, the underlying uniqueness isn’t in the jpeg per se, but in the smart contract that powers it which provides its unique ID and metadata.

This critical feature is also what makes them valuable as it guarantees that your NFT is original. To provide just one example of the role smart contracts play in authenticating digital assets, the YouTube star Logan Paul in January was conned of $3.5 million when he purchased an unopened set of first edition Pokémon cards that turned out to be G.I. Joe cards. With NFTs, such scams are improbable.

When you buy an NFT using Ether, its record is publicly available on a ledger, depending on the platform where it is traded. Most transactions can be viewed on Etherscan, a block explorer and analytics platform for Ethereum, which provides all details concerning a trade. Here’s what that looks like:

For a comprehensive guide on how to make your own NFTs, check out this resource from Binance.

The appeal behind NFTs

The idea behind NFTs is not exactly novel. After all, when Finney was describing his cryptographic cards he was likely referencing baseball cards which have long been a favourite collectors’ item. But what explains the rave behind NFTs?

Several theories exist. According to this stellar piece by NextAdvisor, a combination of factors including the Ethereum and Bitcoin bull run of 2021 coupled with the unpredictable adoption curve of new technologies contributed to its mainstream acceptance.

Another plausible factor includes the lockdown created by the pandemic which gave rise to more people looking to explore avenues to make money. As word of mouth got out through celebrities like Paris Hilton, William Shatner — who sold 90,000 virtual trading cards as NFTs last year for $1 each, and musician Grimes — who sold $6 million worth of her digital art, more people decided to hop on the NFT money train.

The exclusivity that comes with NFTs is also an important point. The Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) for instance, is a collection of 10000 unique Bored Ape NFTs — unique digital collectibles found on the Ethereum blockchain and the largest NFT avatar by market capitalization. At its peak, the floor price of owning one such NFT was $350,000 — with one selling as high as $2.8 million in January.

The cachet that comes with owning a BAYC NFT provides an appeal of its own, with collectors happy to flaunt their art on social media. Owning one of those can grant you a pass to the most exclusive events where one gets to meet celebrities and build social capital via networking.

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The ugly side of NFTs

“The peril is you have these $3 million monkeys and it becomes a different kind of gambling”. — Vitalik Buterin

Last month, Ethereum’s founder Vitalik Buterin made the cover of TIME. In an interview which has had ripple effects on the Web 3.0 community, Buterin expressed fears over the public perception of crypto including of course the quote above which some regard as a perceived slight at BAYC.

Beyond the hype, skeptics offer an uneasy argument against NFTs which is that they fall under a class of assets that are highly speculative. The FOMO* combined with the urgency to auction an NFT before the window of opportunity expires, leads to a bubble where the price and volume of trade in NFTs experience an inflationary trajectory. (*FOMO—Fear of missing out)

This argument underpins the Greater Fool Theory which describes the idea that during a market bubble, one can make money by buying overvalued assets and selling them for a profit later, because there is “a greater fool” willing to pay a higher price.

There are indications that the hype is beginning to cool off with the Financial Times reporting that the average selling price of an NFT dropped more than 48 per cent since November to around $2,500 in February. Daily trading volumes on OpenSea also plummeted 80 per cent to roughly $50 million in March, just a month after they reached a record peak of $248 million in February.

Beside these, there are other issues which concern a variety of scams that are prevalent both in the digital collectibles market of NFTs and the larger crypto space as well. The most salient ones are rug pulls, a term that describes what happens when a startup or influencer promotes a crypto token, NFT or DAO project, solicits public investment, then vanishes with the cash or stops updating the project; Wash trading, a form of round-tripping where one tries to inflate the value of an asset by buying and selling it back to their self; and pump and dumps where one uses misleading information to raise the price of an asset before selling at a profit.

It’s germane to note that while these concerns exist, they are not peculiar to NFTs and are in fact unhealthy practices borrowed from the world of traditional finance.

It’s not all doom and gloom however, as you’re about to discover.

The beautiful side of NFTs

NFTs have in very recent times been used to great effect. You remember Julian Assange from earlier? For those unaware, Assange is an Australian journalist who has been imprisoned in London since 2019 over espionage charges. Because the charges levelled against him are grave with looming threats of extradition to the US along with bleak prospects of facing up to 175 years in prison, he has sought for all available resources to finance his defense.

In February the anonymous NFT artist Pak, in consortium with the AssangeDAO* which had over 10,000 supporters, successfully bid 16,593 ETH (approx. $52 million at the time) for Clock, a single-edition NFT that counts the number of days since Assange was arrested in April 2019. (*To learn more about DAOs, short for decentralized autonomous organization, check out this detailed explainer by Tejumade Adeyinka.)

On a much bigger scale, the Ukrainian government in March announced that it is selling a timeline of the Russian invasion as NFTs with proceeds going to its army as well as civilians. So far, the government has raised over $60 million dollars.

This month, the famous coffin meme which has brought laughter to many people was sold as an NFT for 327 ETH ($ 1,045,409).

Much closer to home in a story that warmed a lot of hearts, an 80-year-old drummer Ayangbenle, fondly referred to as Baba Onilu, received a pleasant surprise when an NFT painting of him was sold on the NFT marketplace OpenSea, by youth corp member Adisa Olashile for 0.6 ETH ($2,098.32). Half of the proceeds from the sale amounting to ₦500,000 was disbursed to the man. The palpable joy on his face tells its own story.

Conclusion

While not everyone is sold on NFTs, it is worthwhile to acknowledge that it is finding utility beyond its classification as a speculative asset. Just this month, the UK’s Chancellor Rishi Sunak, ordered the Royal Mint to create the UK government’s first ever NFT which it notes is to “ensure the UK financial services sector remains at the cutting edge of technology, attracting investment and jobs and widening consumer choice.”

Similarly, applications of NFTs can be found in popular play-to-earn games like Axie Infinity where Axie characters are bred and bought as NFTs, creating a booming ecosystem for avid gamers.

The use for NFTs has also evolved towards the entertainment industry. Last year, American rock band Kings of Leon generated $2million from NFT sales of their album. More music artists are following suit.

As Peter Yang explains it, more Web3 onramps are coming that will revolutionize our understanding of NFTs. The real challenge now is finding newer ways of democratizing access to NFTs and widening inclusivity particularly for those from emerging economies like Nigeria. With the passage of time along with technology’s exponential gap, more use may yet be found for NFTs that are currently undiscovered.

I’m betting on it!

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Yes, I’m aware we’re halfway into February but as this is my first post this year, I thought I’d start by extending felicitations long overdue.

In previous newsletters, I intimated that I would be delving more into matters relating to technology and the creator economy. While it appears to be a departure from my writing scope which typically centres social commentary and politics, I believe that there is an information gap that needs bridging in the tech space with a lot of novel things popping up at breath-taking speed.

Without much ado, let’s take an exploratory dive into what has been one of the most exciting buzz terms to come from tech in the past year.

I present to you, Web 3.0.

The evolution of Web 3.0

A common mistake many people make, me included, is to conflate the Web as being the same as the Internet. In truth, they are different. If the Internet describes a collection of computers all linked together globally, the Web refers to the collection of all the HTML pages, digital music, GIFS, photos, videos etc. that can be found on the Internet. The Web is quite simply a part of the whole.

Web 3.0 describes the third generation of the Internet where websites and applications will process information in a decentralised manner that is built on the blockchain technology.

The third generation refers to an iteration of the Internet evolved from the current paradigm, Web 2.0.

The World Wide Web was created in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee. Web 1.0 which lasted from 1989 till 2005 was read-only and not very interactive. It ran on the web protocols HTML, HTTP and URI which are still in use today.

Because Web 1.0 was quite passive, its limitations became very apparent with the dotcom boom and the dynamic information technology age that the world was undergoing. Web pages were static as they ran mostly on HTML, updating and managing web pages could only be done by web masters and the pages themselves didn’t work so well with web consoles.

Web 2.0 which came circa 2005 improved on the limitations of its predecessor. It has been described as the read-write web. It is more participative by encouraging more social interactions, more user-friendly and provides a software architecture which businesses are able to leverage on.

It is no coincidence that the rise of social media coincides with the advent of Web 2.0. Facebook, Twitter, Netflix and a host of other content sharing platforms came into force with the adoption of Web 2.0.

However, this has also presented its challenges particularly as critics of Web 2.0 say that tech corporations have harvested user data in such a way that they are at the mercies of these companies who can seemingly violate user privacy at will. The need for a decoupling and the decentralisation of those powers among other concerns have given impetus to Web 3.0.

Web 3.0 has been described as the read/write/own stage of the Internet with users being able to take control of web protocols through increased participation and democratisation that aims to wrestle power away from Big Tech. It comes with a lot of prospects such as structured data, automation, integration, and compatibility across various applications.

Advancements in AI and machine learning mean that both users and machines will be able to interact with data. In fact, the cornerstones of this new generation of the internet are AI and what Berners-Lee calls the Semantic Web which is another name for Web 3.0.

The graphic below may help highlight the basic differences between the three generations of the Internet.

Image source: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/

Decentralisation

One of the prominent features that Web 3.0 proponents talk about is decentralisation. Here’s how Jason Griffey of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University describes the decentralised web:

“The term ‘Decentralized Web’ is being used to refer to a series of technologies that replace or augment current communication protocols, networks, and services and distribute them in a way that is robust against single-actor control or censorship.”

By now I assume anyone reading this has an idea what cryptocurrency is, a digital payment system that permits peer-to-peer financial transactions devoid of any central regulatory authority and is in essence, decentralised. Crypto operates using the blockchain—a digitally distributed ledger that is immutable and stores records of all transactions which is visible to all.

Decentralisation as a concept is gaining acceptance in tech with its applications seen in gaming, decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs) and most saliently with the adoption of Defi, short for decentralised finance.

Decentralised finance aims to disrupt central banks by offering bank-like services such as high interest-earning accounts, lending & borrowing, and currency exchange—all on the Ethereum blockchain through self-governing systems.

Here is an excellent resource to learn more about Defi.

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What Web 3.0 is not

So far, I’ve touched on the evolution of the Internet and the concept of decentralisation in explaining what Web 3.0 is. However, it might also be instructive to shed light on what it is not.

Web 3.0 is not the same thing as the metaverse. Sorry to burst the bubble on that one if you thought so as some apparently do. While the two concepts may have a nexus in that they both provide a glimpse into what the future of the Internet is, the metaverse combines both features of virtual reality and a digital second life.

The metaverse is fluid (read as vague) in definition but most people agree that it is an immersive 3D world where people can engage in activities that take place in the real world such as building communities, playing games, entertainment and even conducting transactions.

Leading the charge on this front is Meta, the Zuckerberg owned company rebranded from Facebook. It has spent billions of dollars in research and development geared towards accelerating the company to the metaverse.

Similarly in January, Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard an interactive gaming franchise, in a deal worth almost $69 billion. The company said its acquisition was a ‘metaverse play’.

While critics maintain that the metaverse is a vague concept and despite Meta's plummeting stocks going by its latest financials, reports that the metaverse will fizzle out may be premature. It is quite a risky punt betting against what some see as the future.

Another important thing to note is that while Web 3.0 will become the new paradigm, it isn't in anyway disconnected from Web 2.0. In the same way Web 2.0 is layered on aspects of Web 1.0, Web 3.0 will also be built on foundations already laid down by Web 2.0.

This means that user hardware and devices will still largely remain the same while interfaces in use now will still support Web 3.0.

Is Web 3.0 really all that?

While there's a lot of hype around it, not everyone is sold on Web 3.0. You need not look further than the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, for proof.

In a widely circulated blogpost from earlier this year, CEO of Signal, Moxie Marlinspike, highlighted fundamental concerns regarding Web 3.0. A few issues stand out.

One, despite the premise that Web 3.0 will allow users own protocols and run their own servers, people in fact do not want to do so.

Two, decentralisation as promised is at odds with reality. Marlinspike referenced non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and decentralised apps (Dapps) to make this point.

“For example, whether it’s running on mobile or the web, a dApp like Autonomous Art or First Derivative needs to interact with the blockchain somehow—in order to modify or render state…

“That’s not really possible to do from the client, though, since the blockchain can’t live on your mobile device (or in your desktop browser realistically).

“So the only alternative is to interact with the blockchain via a node that’s running remotely on a server somewhere.

“A server! But, as we know, people don’t want to run their own servers. As it happens, companies have emerged that sell API access to an ethereum node they run as a service, along with providing analytics, enhanced APIs they’ve built on top of the default ethereum APIs, and access to historical transactions. Which sounds… familiar.

“At this point, there are basically two companies. Almost all dApps use either Infura or Alchemy in order to interact with the blockchain.”

The point, or irony here, is that almost all Dapps run on APIs owned by either one of two companies which appears to defeat the goal of decentralisation.

However, despite these objections, it remains early days and there’s no reason to not expect that the tech ecosystem will adapt to address these issues. As with crypto which got bad rep in the beginning from experts, skeptics and financial institutions alike, it has now gained wide acceptance in a short space of time.

This wraps up my explainer on Web 3.0. There’s a lot of stuff to be excited about and I hope in subsequent newsletters to explore the interesting things happening in the world of tech. Meanwhile, if you liked this post feel free to share and subscribe.

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It’s the last day of 2021 and what a ride we’ve had. I know I’ve not drafted a newsletter in a while (more on that later) and I almost didn't want to.

However, it just felt wrong to not sign off on this year without at least a word or two to you my readers who have been steadfast in your support through your readership and your words of motivation. For this I say a heartfelt “thank you”.

Recently, I was hanging out with friends and I asked them to review their year and assign a score between one and 10. I got a couple of interesting responses. When it got to my turn someone spoke up for me and said that my year was definitely a seven.

Seven?

I almost certainly didn't think so—at least on first thought. If anything, I was going to give my year an even lower score. But I reflected on it and later found myself in agreement with him. Seven, as it turns out, is a fair assessment.

Anyone who knows me well enough knows that I overthink and worry—a lot! As far as 2021 is concerned, what I thought of it and what eventually became of it were somewhat at a disparity.

I resolved this year to become a rational optimist and if you follow my posts and indeed the general theme of my newsletters, they often hinge on hope in the midst of gloom. I thought that if I sent out enough good vibes out there, the universe perhaps would reciprocate the gesture. Reality however, is much more nuanced.

Sometimes, we are so encumbered by where we think we ought to be that we lose sight of how far we’ve come. Discounting the small wins and failing to, as the good old hymn admonishes, count one's blessings and name them one by one.

I left my job a few months back and between then and now I’ve been searching for opportunities. It hasn't quite happened yet though this is definitely not for a lack of effort. Naturally, the feeling of dissatisfaction about the unfavourable turn of events left me a bit downcast. Still, I wasn’t going to allow myself wallow in self-pity.

One of the things I promised to do with my free time was to reconnect with old friends and rekindle moribund relationships.

So my biggest personal win for me this year would be that I went out more and met people. I even found time to travel to my hometown for the holidays which was a welcome scenery that was physically and mentally reinvigorating for me. I listened to people more and learned greatly. I may have lost one or two friends, but I also gained more and repaired a couple of friendships that were in the cracks.

I’m thankful for friends and family who have stuck with me during my highs and lows. You know yourselves. The promotion of my newsletter within your circles along with the occasional calls, texts, visits and financial support are things I will never ever take for granted. My respect for you all remains unflinching. We will rock steady come 2022.

Another win I can point to would be in my worldview which I have already referenced, going from a cynical sceptic to a rational optimist—something which for me is all the more impressive given that we’re in one of the most uncertain times ever in history struggling with a pandemic that we’re coming to learn, is here for the long haul.

This newsletter counts as a major win for me too. It wasn't really something I mapped out a concrete plan for. I more or less just borrowed a leaf from Nike and just did it. The feedback I regularly get from you guys warms my heart and I fall back to them on days when the going gets very rough. So yes, I’m thrilled to count you as part of my wins for 2021.

Sometime in November I went on a hiatus from writing. The main reason for this was that I was undergoing some lessons which consumed most of my time. I’m afraid this would only intensify in the coming year which would mean that my newsletter may become more sporadic. But I’ll never give up writing completely. Whenever I can find the time to, I'll share my thoughts on the pertinent matters of the day affecting the country.

I’m also a little excited about the football team I support, Arsenal. We’ve been having a good run and finished the year on a strong note. While there’s still much work ahead, I’m really confident that we would finish in the top four after such a long time.

I know some of you reading this are sneering but we will come back to this in May by which time either you or me will be laughing. My money’s on me.

I’m leaving you with a photo of me typing. No, that’s not where I wrote this newsletter and no, I wasn't alone. If you look closely though, you can see me smiling and I hope that 2022 gives everyone reading this many reasons to smile.

Here’s me wishing you a happy new year with an assurance that no matter how disjointed things may be right now, everything is going to be alright.

Ciao!

P.S: If I owe you money please let me know before the year runs out so I can repay you. Similarly if you owe me money, or you think you owe me money, please pay up so the books can be balanced :-)

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On Monday, the Lagos State Judicial Panel on #EndSARS submitted its findings in a report that shed light on the events of Bloody Tuesday, October 20, 2020, and its aftermath.

The details of the report which were eventually leaked on social media are awash with evidence which some have described as a damning indictment on the military, law enforcement and ultimately the state. A friend of mine who finished digesting it said he shed a tear afterwards. You can find a link to the full report here.

The reactions garnered on Twitter following its release was a potpourri of emotions ranging from relief to anger. Relief for young Nigerians who at last had hard proof against deniers—not that they doubted anyway—that indeed the state perpetrated atrocities against its citizenry.

Then there was anger. Anger at the government, its sympathisers and the several others who attempted to gaslight Nigerians by referring to the shootings as a hoax. In no uncertain terms the report has confirmed the shootings at Lekki as nothing short of a massacre.

A few months after the protests, I was at a luncheon organised by my boss. It was a get together outside of the formal work setting where we were more relaxed and discussed issues outside of work.

We touched on different subjects including movies, cancel culture, the latest Twitter gossip among others.

For the most part I was consuming a huge slice of pizza along with sangria while also setting my eyes on some unknown South American cuisine. I only managed to chip in my thoughts when I was almost done clearing my plate.

With my stomach filled, and after having had a bit of time to gather my thoughts, I proceeded to ask a question at the table.

“What are your thoughts on the aftermath of the #EndSARS protests. Successful or not”?

The responses gathered were mixed. You see, the team had worked very hard to deliver the December issue of our journal: #EndSARS and the Makings of a Historical Movement. We had solicited essays from far and wide from authors and participants who experienced the events firsthand.

I had taken part in the protests myself and may very well have joined in the Lekki protest were it not for work commitments.

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When Bloody Tuesday happened it took many of us myself included, a bit of time to process it. I watched, along with hundreds of thousands of others, the Instagram live video by DJ Switch and saw blood and gore unfold in real time.

The answers I got to my question are similar to the answers I still get today, more than one year on. For some, it was all for nought. The ultimate price had been paid for freedom and no one had been held to account.

It is instructive to note that the Lagos panel was not the only one set up. Others were set up in other states, two of which I recall were in Anambra and Ekiti. Conclusive findings from those panels are yet to be made public which may stall proceedings in the fight for justice for the victims of police brutality.

The Nigerian army's position still remains one of denial that it fired live bullets at protesters. Nigeria's Chief of Defence Staff has recently gone on record to say that only a whitepaper from the report would confirm the ‘alleged incidents’.

The Nigerian army doubling down should come as no surprise, though the shift in tone suggests that they have run out of options to extricate themselves from their initial egregious lie.

A reminder here that a ‘forensic expert’ had declared before the panel that he was ‘99.9999 per cent sure that the bullets fired by the military were blank bullets.’ Efforts to discredit the protesters online and offline were in full swing from the get go. Right in our faces they spat, dishonouring us and the memories of the lives lost.

While the report remains silent on who gave the ultimate kill order—with the Lagos State government saying it would release a whitepaper on it in two weeks—it surely provides vindication and indeed it is a matter of credit to the panel that they were able to come to a definitive conclusion despite what must have been immense pressure from all quarters.

Vindication has now been achieved, next is closure for the families of the fallen—many who still remain unnamed—and then justice.

So returning to my question: has it all been for nought? I honestly don’t think so. Already the US through its mission in Nigeria has called on the Lagos State government and the federal government to address the issues the report raises. Same with the UK through its minister for Africa. Pressure is being applied and people will pay.

I understand there is every reason to be sceptical that it is all performative. Call it naïve​té if you like yet I think that posterity will reflect well on us that our generation fought tyranny with the limited resources at its disposal and was able to elicit global response.

The real positive for me though is that this speaks to the larger power of what we can achieve as a collective when we refuse to cower. The government's use of brute force and its behemoth propaganda machine was geared towards engendering fear among us and bringing us into servitude but that plan has failed woefully.

They’ve thrown everything right at us: the Twitter ban, crypto ban, arrests, seizures, appeal to force, trumped up charges—everything. And none of it has stuck. In a comical sense we’ve become the Teflon Don.

Believe me when I say they’re out of ideas. They’re using the same dated tactics of repression against a generation that has continued to outfox them and this has unsettled them deeply.

There’s really one way we can truly get to them. You know it, I know it. Despite the oft-repeated mantra that our votes don't count, historical evidence suggests otherwise. Recent election results are a pointer to this. With the race for 2023 afoot it’s time to kick out the plague and stymie the corruption that has set in deep.

Any government that has demonstrated repeated disregard for the sanctity of human life has no business being in power as they have failed the litmus test upon which all elected governments derive legitimacy. I’ll probably get called out for being political in tone but the time for niceties has long elapsed.

It might not be apparent yet and may even appear counterintuitive but October 20, 2020 will go down in Nigeria’s history as a turning point as I vaticinate, for the better. We will tell stories of it, sing about it and write about it.

One half has already been written in blood. The other half will be etched, with ink.

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Meanwhile in Scotland, hundreds of thousands of people have been protesting over COP26, the climate summit which has seen leaders around the world gather to discuss plans to mitigate the worrying effects of climate change by keeping warming at under 1.5°C.

The cause of the protests? Well, as Greta Thunberg, the child climate activist describes it, COP26 ‘has been a failure’. This is coming while the summit is in its final week and with world leaders making promises and commitments to combat the malignant crisis. As in Madrid two years before, there is a sense that it may all be talk with no corresponding action.

To start with, leaders of two major energy consuming nations in the world, Russia and China, are conspicuously absent—which has led America’s president, Joe Biden, to lambast the two countries as failing to lead.

For China’s Xi Jinping, his absence was not much of a surprise as he hasn’t set foot outside China in almost two years. Ostensibly the reason is the COVID-19 pandemic however, there are suggestions it may be in a bid to consolidate his grip on China which is of more importance to him than any conference.

His Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, may likely see the whole summit as a giant charade. For all the talk of lowering gas emissions it remains difficult to see the feasibility in these plans as of yet especially as Russia already announced the completion of the controversial Nord Stream 2 pipeline which would effectively boost gas flows towards Germany and bypass Ukraine—leading to a potential conflict as the pipeline once approved by German regulators would hamper Ukraine’s revenues from gas severely.

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There are also ethical concerns bordering on social injustice. A major argument advanced by developing countries such as in Africa which emits the least—just about three per cent of global emissions—is that they suffer the adverse effects of the negative carbon footprint left by the West while still being asked to cut down on industrialisation, the same process through which developed nations achieved their current economic status.

President Buhari, for all his flaws, makes an important point when he argues in this opinion piece that climate crisis will not be fixed by creating an energy crisis in Africa. (Whether the piece was truly written by him is another matter altogether)

Although Buhari has committed Nigeria to having net zero emissions by 2060, skeptics may argue that such lofty goals are at odds with lived realities. For one, Nigeria still relies heavily on crude oil earnings with plans in place by the Buhari-led administration to get its oil refineries privatised and working at optimum capacity.

Still on the subject matter of words at dissonance with actions, let's revisit China. Like Buhari, Jinping also promised to keep China carbon-neutral by 2060. However, it has been building coal plants at an unprecedented speed making a mockery of plans to scale back on coal production globally. A report by the Global Energy Monitor noted the following:

China commissioned 38.4 GW of new coal plants in 2020, over three times the 11.9 GW commissioned in the rest of the world.

Chinaʼs coal fleet grew by net 29.8 GW in 2020, while in the rest of the world net capacity decreased by 17.2 GW.

China now has 247 GW of coal power under development (88.1 GW under construction and 158.7 GW proposed for construction) – a 21% increase over end-2019 (205 GW), and nearly six times Germanyʼs entire coal-fired capacity (42.5 GW).

Do as I say, not as I do.

Rising crude prices suggest that any talk of a shift towards renewable energy soon may be optimistic at best as demand remains high. The US particularly is facing demand pressures as OPEC has refused to accede to Biden's request to increase production to stem the surging price of gasoline.

There’s also the question of continuity with regards to America's foreign policy. We saw for example how Trump discarded Obama's Iran nuclear deal. Still under Trump, the US officially pulled out of the Paris Agreement, undoing years of work. With these precedents set, what's to say that a future Republican president doesn’t renege on any current climate commitments?

To highlight the divergence between the goals of the climate summit and actual projections, a recent report by the Climate Action Tracker has provided a rather grim outlook noting that the world is nowhere near its goals of limiting global temperature rise having calculated that earth is heading for 2.4C of warming—more than the 1.5C target.

While technological advances have seen the cost of installing renewable energy devices fall dramatically over the last few years, they still fall painfully short in servicing much of Sub-Saharan Africa where energy needs will only continue to grow.

This illuminating Ted-Ed video below provides a wonderful explainer as to why the oft-repeated idea of covering the Sahara with solar panels to power the continent or even earth at large does not work.

Ultimately, while I concur that work must be done in earnest to stave off a climate catastrophe, there’s way too much insincerity and a perplexing inability to face the hard truths by leading powers which lends volume to the argument by the protesters that COP26 is nothing more than a jamboree.

As Thunberg appositely puts it, it’s all blah, blah, blah.

P.S 

Hi! 

If you’ve made it this far, I'd like to hear your general thoughts on my newsletter(this,or any of my previous posts) and areas you think I should be covering more—or less! All comments are welcome. 

I also want to pivot towards more writing on finance and tech-related topics. I'd like to know if that interests you. You can leave your feedback here or via email: steveagwaibor@gmail.com.

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On both brands were a pretty unusual and dare I say stark warning. Alongside the well-known caveat from the federal ministry of health that smokers are liable to die young were pictures of two lungs placed side by side, a healthy one and a smoker’s lung.

Also conspicuously stated on the packets were that they contained 70 substances known to cause cancer. In all my life I had never seen such negative advertising sponsored by the owners themselves. Everything about those packs was literally screaming at you, almost forcing you not to indulge in them.

Warnings for rotation on cigarette packages. Credit: U.S. Food and Drug Administration

I stood transfixed for a while at the counter trying to make sense of it. To be clear I am passing no judgment on lifestyle choices. My wonderment merely derived from the reason for the depressing advertisement which drove me to read up on it.

Usually, warnings on cigarette packs were small up until 2019 when a law was passed mandating tobacco companies to make it as conspicuous as possible. A statement from the FDA to that effect read: The new required warnings must appear prominently on cigarette packages and in cigarette advertisements, occupying the top 50 percent of the front and rear panels of cigarette packages and at least 20 percent of the area at the top of advertisements.

That said, do these warnings work? Are more people deterred from taking a puff? The answer is not so straightforward.

A 2019 research paper by the Oxford University Press set out to answer the question on whether graphic health warning labels on cigarette packages deter purchases at point-of-sale.

The study was conducted in the RAND StoreLab (RSL), a life-sized replica of a convenience store that was developed to evaluate how changing POS tobacco advertising influences tobacco use outcomes during simulated shopping experiences.

Adult smokers (n = 294; 65% female; 59% African-American; 35% White) were assigned randomly to shop in the RSL under one of two experimental conditions: graphic health warning labels present on cigarette packages versus absent on cigarette packages.

Cigarette packages in both conditions were displayed on a tobacco power wall, which was located behind the RSL cashier counter. Results revealed that the presence of graphic health warning labels did not influence participants’ purchase of cigarettes as a main effect.

Graphic health warning labels reduced the chances of cigarette purchases for smokers lower in nicotine dependence but had no effect on smokers higher in dependence.

In other words, negative advertising had no effect on people who were serial smokers. However, that was just one study. A 2021 study on the effectiveness of warning graphic labels on cigarette packs in Bangkok arrived at a somewhat similar conclusion.

The results showed that warning graphic images exhibiting patients suffering from cancers (e.g., lung cancer or laryngeal cancer) and images of damaged body parts were perceived as the scariest warning images.

In contrast, images that did not illustrate serious disease suffered by smokers were perceived as the least scary images. The scariest images generated a significant higher level of fear of smoking-related harms than the least scary images.

In addition, non-smoking participants were more sensitive to scary warning images than smoking participants. It was also found that the level of fear of smoking-related harms was significantly based on individual cognitive judgment, and it was not affected by the influence of social groups such as friends and family members.

Here, the findings of the study also suggest that regular smokers were less likely to change their behaviour as a consequence of negative advertising which presents some salient points.

First, it is clear that the scary warnings on cigarette packs are likely directed at passive or non-smokers as opposed to regular smokers which seems counter-intuitive. If you’re trying to raise awareness on the ill effects of tobacco shouldn’t the target audience be the smokers themselves?

Second, one of the studies noted that the reaction to the images was significantly based on the individual as against the prompting of external agents like family or friends. This tells us something about behaviour which we already know: people tend to make changes only when they come to the realization by themselves, not through coercion which is more or less what these graphic warnings are.

It reminds me of the ‘Do not urinate’ or ‘Post no bill’ signs we see in public spaces. Ever notice that places that have these signs tend to be the dirtiest or the most defaced as the situation applies? What does that tell you?

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Behavioural scientists have come up with a concept known as nudge theory which attempts to alter behaviour by shaping the environment—known as the choice architecture—with the effect that one option is chosen over another.

First introduced by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in the book: ‘Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness’ written in 2008, the theory seeks to reinforce positive behaviour by nudging people towards a desirable course of action without any coercion. An example may suffice here.

Suppose there is a public male restroom where signs are in place asking men to pee properly without splattering all over the place. However that has not had much success. So instead, one tries a nudge.

The toilet bowl is redesigned such that there is an illustration of a fly at its centre. You’ll observe that the average guy who goes to use the toilet subconsciously aims at the centre trying to use their urine to ‘catch’ the fly. Without being forced they are altering their behaviour and shooting straight—which is the desired outcome.

Similarly, to encourage people to stop smoking in the Philippines, an experiment was conducted which saw a select group of smokers provided with a bank account where they saved money they would ordinarily have used to buy cigarettes. If they stayed away from smoking for six months—which was checked by conducting urine tests—they would get the money. Otherwise, the funds would go to charity.

The success of initiatives like these provides evidence that positive reinforcement works much better than scare tactics. It’s not that people are not aware of the dangers of smoking, sometimes what they really need is a nudge.

As far as negative advertising goes, I don’t think it does the trick. But that’s just me. What do you think?

P.S 

Hi! 

If you’ve made it this far, I'd like to hear your general thoughts on my newsletter(this,or any of my previous posts) and areas you think I should be covering more—or less! All comments are welcome. 

I also want to pivot towards more writing on finance and tech-related topics. I'd like to know if that interests you. You can leave your feedback here or via email: steveagwaibor@gmail.com.

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Although I made an announcement on my Twitter page, I’m still going to extend my apologies to those of you who were expecting a post and didn’t get any. I’ll try to make up for it with this one.

One of the unreal stories I read this week was from South Africa. An ex-policewoman who was found guilty of killing five relatives and her boyfriend. More interesting was the motive behind the murders which was to claim the life insurance policies of all her victims.

I had only ever heard of this form of insurance fraud when watching TV shows. I’d never thought someone in the real world would be capable of such horror. Not once but six times! Truth really can be stranger than fiction.

In fact, the only reason she was caught was because the person she hired to carry out a hit on her sister and her five children took the matter to the police who then set up a sting operation that eventually put her nefarious plans on hold.

Take a moment to imagine the depths of that woman’s turpitude for a hitman to grow a conscience and say “Nah, not doing this. Gotta snitch on you ma’am!”

Another story which caught my eye was from China. Li Jiaqi, a popular Chinese live streamer, sold about $3 billion worth of goods online in 12 hours. And what was he selling mostly? Cosmetics.

Jiaqi is known there as the ‘lipstick brother’. He’d try out various brands on his stream and make his recommendations, either to go with or discard.

By his admission his average number of viewers hovered around 20 million. At the end of Wednesday’s half-day marathon he had amassed 250 million viewers with billions in sales to match.

Just take pause to think of how huge this is. For context, Twitter makes $3.72bn in revenue annually. One streamer from China just about matched that in 12 hours. And he was not alone. A couple of others also made similarly outrageous sales within a short period proving that live e-commerce may very well be here to stay.

The really big news which is most relevant in the Nigerian context is the CBN’s official launch of the e-Naira. In my previous post, I worried about whether it would gain acceptance by Nigerians. It would appear that is just one of several concerns.

For one, accurate information about what the e-Naira is—and isn’t—is hard to come by. Even the experts are somewhat unsure of what it is. Clearly the CBN has not done a great job in properly disseminating information.

An economics professor and a former economic adviser to the American government, Steve Hanke, had this to say about the e-Naira:

“Nigeria's central bank has launched a digital currency, eNaira, just months after barring financial institutions from transacting in crypto. Wrong move. The naira’s junk. Today, I measure inflation at 29.75%/yr. No.1 priority should be inflation control.”

The point to keep in mind here is that as the currency keeps losing value its appeal as a digital swap would be almost nonexistent. As one Twitter commenter notes, the e-naira is not backed by physical cash which makes the CBN the real winner as it may be able to mint at will thus raising fears of further inflation.

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The fact that we already have multiple POS agents on just about every Nigerian street makes one wonder what the purpose of the e-Naira is. What novel idea does it come with? What problems does it solve for the average Nigerian? Money in the e-Naira wallet does not accrue interest, nor is it fungible enough to be used for international transactions.

Concerns about the app not undergoing beta testing have been at the fore as well which comes with the risks of it suffering glitches or being susceptible to hacks. It eerily feels like the case of a regulator competing in a space it should be regulating. If there are any lessons to be gleaned from similar actions with the NNPC in the oil industry it is that this rarely ever ends well.

It doesn’t help either that a prominent account of the e-Naira handle on Twitter belongs to a known pro-government (BMC) supporter which very well tells you all you need to know.

One expects that the handle will be disowned soon as after all Twitter is still banned in Nigeria. It would be farcical and yet unsurprising to have the CBN communicate via a proscribed platform.

If you need any more proof that the e-Naira is up to a rocky start, here’s a screenshot from their website. No more words necessary.

Meanwhile, a popular finance expert has argued that the move would help boost financial inclusion especially among the large section of the population without a bank account.

Yet, I would counter that I just don’t see it. This feature already exists on mobile money applications like Paga and Opay. Why for instance, should the market woman be bothered about downloading the e-Naira when she already has multiple channels to receive her cash?

Or to better put it, what incentive does the CBN have in mind to get the e-Naira widely adopted aside from press releases?

Perhaps the CBN governor, Godwin Emefiele, might want to take a cue from the government of El Salvador who offered all adult citizens that downloaded and registered the government’s cryptocurrency app $30 worth of bitcoin.

This is Nigeria though and I won’t hold my breath on that one—and neither should you.

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However on the matter of showdowns, I will veer off politics temporarily to bring up the Tyson Fury vs Deontay Wilder fight. I was quite pumped in anticipation of the end to the trilogy which lived up to billing.

The night before the big fight, I was in debate with a friend who felt Wilder was undervalued by bookmakers and was going to pull an upset. I provided some analysis as to why I believed the odds, at 1.3 for Fury, were right on the money.

Overall as the concluded trilogy would show, Fury is the superior fighter. He’s what one would call a slugger who simply never quits.

We saw this in at least two of the fights with Wilder getting in early punches with his legendary right hand and even knocking Fury down. And yet more than once, Fury bounced back. The two men gave their all in the ring and credit must go to Wilder who nearly took Fury the whole distance.

Fury though is exceptional, a sui generis boxing supremo with his own grass to grace story which somehow fuels him and keeps him going. As he himself would say, “Don’t ever doubt me, when the chips are down I always deliver!”

Meanwhile, just before the big one, the undercard between Nigeria's Efe Ajagba and Cuba's Frank Sanchez took place. It turned out to be a humbling reality check for Ajagba who until then was 15/15 in his professional career.

The fight report showed that Ajagba lost all 10 rounds based on the scorecards from the judges, though not for lack of effort. Like Wilder, it was simply a case of being outclassed by the better pugilist.

This period has been mixed for Nigerian sports. Late last month, Anthony Joshua was sprung an upset following his loss to Oleksandr Usyk.

On Thursday, Blessing Okagbare was charged with three anti-doping offences following her dismissal from the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. That same day, the Nigerian football team lost a World Cup qualifier at home to lowly-ranked Central African Republic—although we went on to win the reverse fixture.

Returning to politics, for this week’s entry I’ve decided to discuss a recurring issue that tends to pop up one way or another on my timeline. This time around, a friend of mine sort of reignited the discourse.

This friend wrote on Twitter: “The potential influence of the Nigerian diaspora is immense. Careful organisation and allocation of capital by a demographic repatriating ~$20bn/annum can influence elections, politicking, policymaking, make and break governments. If only they can have that coordination.”

The sum of what is being discussed above if it’s not clear is the idea of mobilising Nigerians in the diaspora to fund a preferred candidate. The argument has taken slight iterations in the past such as having tech bros in Nigeria come together and create a fund with the specific aim of supporting a candidate of their choice.

Before I delve into the argument, I’d like to say that I enjoy seeing Nigerians thinking innovatively about the future of the country. What it tells me is that despite our collective dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs, we still want the country to thrive. And this gives me hope.

On to the matter.

A popular Twitter commenter on the thread raised a counterpoint: “Unless the country is restructured into a form that gets people excited about returning to it and participating in government at levels they can have real influence, I don’t see why they would mobilize capital for this.”

The counter here is that there is no incentive for people to expend resources towards this venture. This is a valid concern.

Nigeria has a substantial populace in the diaspora which the government has, over time, become increasingly reliant on.

With the slump in the naira and forex scarcity, diaspora remittances have become a lifeblood of this administration which explains the CBN’s initial vehemence against cryptocurrencies.

In August, AfricaReport noted thus:

“Diaspora remittance inflow into Nigeria declined by a consequential 27% to $17.2bn, down from $23.5bn last year.

The steep decline was $4bn more than the projection by the World Bank.”

The reason?

Largely, the adoption of bitcoin driven by an increasing distrust in the Nigerian financial system.

The CBN has adopted measures to stymie the decline in remittances as well as get the diaspora actively sending more money to fill the coffers.

It has extended the Naira4dollar scheme indefinitely, a scheme for those unaware, that rewards recipients with N5 for every dollar received via official channels.

It has also announced the adoption of the e-Naira, a state-backed digital currency to be pegged to the naira and accepted as legal tender. Whether this will gain wide acceptance will be seen in the coming months.

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The Nigerian diaspora. Credits: The Guardian

On the issue of incentives for the Nigerian diaspora, my thoughts are clear. The problems with funding a candidate are aplenty. I’ll dwell on two for brevity.

Firstly, elections are not just about money. There’s a great deal of effort that goes into grassroots politicking, mobilising manpower for the hard work of spreading awareness, registering voters, and monitoring votes. That kind of reach is built painstakingly over time. Loyalty and commitment are qualities that money can’t buy.

Secondly, the problem with having your source of funding coming from a group of people asides—breaking electoral guidelines regarding funding—is that the one who pays the piper dictates the tune.

Political parties may be old-fashioned but their appeal comes from the fact that they cover an amalgam of interest groups. If your funding comes primarily from tech bros or the diaspora, there’s always going to be concern raised about whose interests would be served.

Is it those of the average Nigerian or those overseas who do not get to experience the aftermath of their electoral choices firsthand?

Rather than them crowdfunding for a candidate, how about getting them actively involved themselves via diaspora voting?

The diaspora plays a big role in influencing economic and foreign policy. Their switchover from traditional remittance to crypto is one example.

One could also look at how they helped stoke international pressure on the Nigerian government during the #BringBackOurGirls saga. I say it’s time to enfranchise them.

It would be an epic coup should the electoral act and indeed the constitution be amended to make allowance for it.

This excellent piece by Muzz Muhammed on diaspora voting should help shed light on why Nigeria has yet to implement it despite some African countries already leading the way in that regard.

In 2017, the Senior Special Assistant to the President on Foreign Affairs and the Diaspora, Mrs Abike Dabiri-Erewa, said that there were 15 million Nigerians in the diaspora. 15 million is a sizable number and enough to swing electoral outcomes.

Last year, the INEC chairman, Professor Yakubu Mahmood, urged the national assembly to expedite action towards making diaspora voting a reality.

As it stands, any delays towards its implementation is only due to ‘political considerations’. For the government to ratify such, it may need ‘assurances’ that voters in the diaspora would support them with their votes.

Hence, when the Minister for State for Foreign Affairs, Zubairu Dada, said that Nigeria was not ready for diaspora voting and should not hope for such in the coming election I was disappointed at what I believe is a missed opportunity.

Ultimately, the onus lies with the Nigerian legislature. We must make that part of ongoing discussions going forward and indeed a campaign pledge for those who would run in 2023.

The best time to enfranchise the diaspora was yesterday. The second best time is now.

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House was who one would call the cynic’s cynic. He was not only an exceptionally brilliant diagnostician but also a towering misanthrope.

One of his famous lines was that people don’t change. He’d say it with such élan, it could almost pass for gospel.

On October 1, the president delivered to the nation what would be his penultimate Independence Day speech. When I was done reading the transcript I came off unsurprised, just as I assumed our fictional Dr. House would be.

Buhari, despite the mantra under which his party once ran under, cannot change. He has neither the care nor the capacity for that.

The tepid independence speech was delivered in his typical perfunctory manner, embedded with varied measures of mendacity, vagueness and ineptitude. It was largely an exercise in praise-singing and victim-blaming—traits we’ve come to expect from a government that has clearly given up.

For the benefit of those who understandably didn’t read what was an uninspiring speech, I took some time to peruse it and will give a review. The speech itself is 101 paragraphs long, so I decided to touch on what I felt were germane while leaving out the rhetoric.

Without much ado, here we go.

Paragraph four:

Fellow Nigerians, the past eighteen months have been some of the most difficult periods in the history of Nigeria. Since the civil war, I doubt whether we have seen a period of more heightened challenges than what we have witnessed in this period.

Well, well, well. You don’t say Bubu!

Paragraph seven, on the country’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic:

The doomsday scenario predicted for our country never came. Even as the Delta variant continues to spread, we have built the capacity we need to respond now and into the future.

The first part is true. Indeed I’ve said before that we need not go into a frenzy over the virus. The lockdown mode which the country went into earlier was a panic-driven decision based on models copied from advanced nations. As to the second part, it’s not quite accurate.

By capacity, what does the president mean? That we now have more health centres and ventilators ready to handle any upsurge in infection rates? More doctors and health workers? Or that we now have a sizable population vaccinated? The stats say otherwise. Less than one per cent of Nigerians are fully vaccinated.

Paragraph 16 reeks of confusion:

Similarly, on our approach to food security, I am proud to announce Nigeria has commenced its journey to pharmaceutical independence.

Errm…excuse me sir. What does food security have to do with pharmaceutical independence?

Paragraph 19, on tackling insecurity:

In the last four months, the gallant men and women of the Military and Security Agencies have made tremendous progress in addressing these new security challenges. We are taking the fight to our enemies from all angles and we are winning.

“Tremendous progress”, “we are winning”. Nothing to see here except one prefers to soak in outright lies. Journeying across federal roads should promptly lay bare the uncomfortable truth. There is no need dwelling on this.

Paragraph 28:

The seeds of violence are planted in people’s heads through words. Reckless utterances of a few have led to losses of many innocent lives and destruction of properties.

I cackled when I read the above. Here’s Buhari in 2012:

“God willing, by 2015, something will happen. They either conduct a free and fair election or they go a very disgraceful way. If what happened in 2011 (alleged rigging) should again happen in 2015, by the grace of God, the dog and the baboon would all be soaked in blood.’’

Or shall we reference his 2021 tweet that got deleted by Twitter?

“Many of those misbehaving today are too young to be aware of the destruction and loss of lives that occurred during the Nigerian civil war. Those of us in the fields for 30 months, who went through the war will treat them in the language they understand.”

No further words needed.

Paragraph 31:

Nigeria is for all of us. Its unity is not negotiable. And its ultimate success can only be achieved if we all come together with a common goal of having peace and prosperity for our nation.

Personally, I prefer Nigeria united. However, the idea that our unity is not negotiable needs to perish.

Around the world people have asked and are asking questions about their unions as seen by various referenda and secessionist movements. The fall of the Soviet Union and Brexit are two famous examples which happened without the need for war.

The irony is made apparent when you consider that in 2016, Buhari himself threw his weight behind Western Sahara’s right to secession from Morocco. The cognitive dissonance is galling.

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Paragraphs 51-52:

Unfortunately, as our food production capacity has increased, food prices have been going up due to artificial shortages created by middlemen who have been buying and hoarding these essential commodities for profiteering.

To address this, I am hereby directing the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development to rehabilitate the National Food Reserve Agency and also work with security agencies, the Nigerian Commodity Exchange, and the National Assembly to find a lasting solution to these disruptive and unpatriotic hoarding activities.

I may have to do a separate post addressing the issues in Nigerian agriculture subsequently. Nonetheless, the sentiments expressed by the president here are risible and show a lack of grasp of the problems plaguing the sector.

It appears he draws comfort from running with wearied tropes about middlemen and hoarding. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The following is from a PwC report from last year on the state of Nigeria’s agriculture:

With a population of roughly 200 million people, Nigeria’s agricultural productivity is insufficient to meet the food demanded of its growing population thus increasing the demand and supply gap in Nigeria.

Absence of value addition and supply-chain linkages Nigeria focuses mostly on food production, thus neglecting the processing and manufacturing segment of the value chain. The chain reaction that arises from shortages of resources, lack of financing for small-scale farmers and inefficient transport systems, exacerbates the development of food production along the value and supply chain.

In any case, the people at the Foundation of Investigative Journalism have fact-checked the president's claim on middlemen and hoarding creating food inflation. No marks for guessing their verdict.

The president also spoke on the Twitter ban which of course addressed everything but the underlying reason behind the ban which is simply a bruised ego.

The conditional lifting of the ban is, as some have noted, a face-saving move. Those that can have bypassed it anyway using VPNs. It’s just a shame the amount of revenue lost and the opportunities missed by the ban which as each passing day reveals, was a bemusing lack of foresight.

Here is the president's adviser on CNN trying in vain to defend the proscription. A rambling mess.

Paragraph 98:

I fully understand the anxiety of many Nigerians on the inability of this country to go beyond a never-ending potential for becoming a great nation to an actually great one.

When I read the above, I realised that Buhari’s speechwriters had done him a great disservice. At first glance, it appears like a regular closer, but take your time to look deeper.

That line is an admission of incapability from the president and also a reality jolt to us that Nigeria, according to the president, is NOT a great nation; merely one with pretensions to greatness.

Look how far we’ve fallen. Only in 2009 under former president Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, Nigeria rebranded itself with the slogan: ‘Nigeria: Good People, Great Nation.’ Buhari has come to promptly set us straight.

With his admission, the effete king has finally come to terms with his legacy of failure.

Summarily, the speech was rich in untruths and mute on the increasing brain drain, the continued strike by doctors, the failing educational and manufacturing sectors, the alarmingly depreciating naira among others.

Where it tried to proffer solutions, it only succeeded in being nebulous as to a way forward.

As Dr. House and ultimately Buhari show us, people do not change. The last six years have been a stark reminder of this painful aphorism. Many campaign and Independence Day speeches after, we’re back to square one.

Credit must thus go to Buhari who has maintained his unerring consistency and a steadfast commitment to remaining an anachronism from the military era to this present day.

Nigeria is laid bare before the world just as its emperor is on the verge of delivering his swan song with no clothes on. Perhaps the one consolation Nigerians can have is this: he’s got only one independence speech left to give.

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The last couple of months I’ve worked there will go down as the most productive of my entire life. Journalism is very demanding, all day every day at all hours. When you’re not on the field looking for stories you’re at the desk calling, transcribing, writing.

Even when you’re home your brain is on overdrive, thinking about ideas for exclusives. The job requires every bit of mental acuity as well as physical stamina and to this end I can look back at my time here and say that I gave my all. That is, for me, the ultimate form of satisfaction.

Informing my colleagues about my decision came with mixed feelings. I had established friendships with some of the most resilient and hardworking people working in an environment that demands unflinching dedication. So it came with a tinge of sadness having to say goodbye.

As I have explained to a couple of friends, I need some time off for rest, reflection and a plan for the next phase of my career. Writing is a lifelong calling for me so rest assured I’ll never quit that.

However, at this juncture in my life, I want to be very intentional about what I do and I have no shame in taking some time off when the demands of work begin to take its toll. Suffice it to say that you should give any journalist friends you have their flowers. It really is not easy.

With that out of the way, here’s a reminder that Nigeria turns 61 on Friday. The mood of the country however, is anything but celebratory.

Only a few days ago, the NYSC in its updated handbook warned members of the corps posted to volatile states in the country about the attendant risks of travelling along federal roads while telling them in certain terms to brace themselves for the possibility of being kidnapped, as well as an advisory on what to do in the event that it happens.

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Among other things advised was the need to have ransom on ground, being friendly with one’s captors (Stockholm revisited) and the grim warning—DO NOT BE A HERO.

As is typical of Nigerians, we’ve made light of the matter, generating a host of memes on Twitter which in all candour sent me in rapturous laughter and yet, one cannot help but look back and ponder how the country has sunk to its nadir.

There was a time when news of terrorist attacks in the Middle East would rock the airwaves and we would say ‘that cannot happen in Nigeria’. At the time, Nigeria was the happiest country in the world. We're a happy people, no way would we plunge those depths. Yet, here we are.

In a recent interview with the Financial Times, the Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, poignantly captured my thoughts when he remarked, “Even during the civil war, I do not believe that we devalued humanity as much as we do today. It’s like something has broken in society, in something I used to take for granted.”

A protester walks around the city of Port Harcourt with the Nigerian flag. Credits: Emmanuel Ikwuegbu/UNSPLASH

In November last year in Zabarmari, a village in the northeast of Nigeria, at least 43 farmers were gruesomely beheaded by Boko Haram. We moved on like it was just another day, barely any protests. Meanwhile about a month earlier in France, a French teacher was beheaded sending the nation in indignation along with cries for justice.

Contrasting the two responses, it may appear as though Nigerians have become apathetic. In truth, it’s not so much that Nigerians don't want to protest. We have done so with our voices and our feet and the heavy price for that has been the loss of lives.

I would be remiss to not hoist up bloody October 20, 2020 as a sad reminder of how Nigeria failed us. A day in which something finally gave way in our hearts, perhaps irreversibly. The Nigerian state opened fire on its young, marking an inflexion point for many—the point where any spark of hope in Nigeria became completely extinguished.

So when Zabarmari happened, we had no more care to give. We had become victims of compassion fatigue, numbed to trauma and reduced to counting days till a new government comes to power.

Something is indeed broken whichever way you look at it. Be it the economy, education, healthcare, politics or society as a whole—there’s a spectre of despair just brooding over everything and everyone, evidenced putatively by an unprecedented upsurge in the number of Nigerians leaving the country or planning to do so.

Take a look around. Those we once looked up to as champions of the common folk, prominent critics of the government, are either incarcerated, compromised, loving Nigeria from afar or dead. All these and more redound to our present realities.

This pops up an irony in my mind, how the late Sound Sultan who sang that classic with the hook ajo o dabi ile, died and was buried in a foreign land.

So at 61, one of the few things I think is really worth celebrating is that we’re still alive. Life expectancy in Nigeria is about 55 years. Congratulations are therefore in order if you’ve made it past the mark, and for all those still breathing there is something to look forward to. As they say, where there’s life, there’s hope.

Forging ahead in these trying times is tough. Nonetheless, I like to remind people that in this pressure cooker that is Nigeria, people are still doing amazing things. When I take a cursory look at the tech, literary and entertainment spaces for example, I am offered some comfort that hope lies in the horizon.

Young Nigerians are still doing their bit despite being in a country hell-bent on thwarting their aspirations one way or another. It is from them and many others that I draw inspiration and promise that we will surely overcome.

If like me, you are cautiously optimistic about our country’s prospects—regardless of current circumstances—know that I am your comrade in arms and will within my abilities contribute my quota towards providing uplifting through my writing.

Here’s to us and to the future. Happy 61st birthday Nigeria, may we rise again.

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