Adedeji Olowe

Olowe of Ise

I used to wonder what our older folks were up to like 200 years ago – most often I come up with nothing apart from Oduduwa – Lamurudu stories which obviously are folklore. Not that Oduduwa didn’t exist, I just don’t believe he fell out of the sky. Granted, there were some stories of Benin and their wondrous artifacts which the British stole.

Surely my Pales weren’t living in caves – and it wasn’t all about Ijapa and Yannibo.

But there was some dude, Olowe of Ise. He’s probably one of, if not, the greatest African sculptors who ever lived. He carved some magical doors and lintels; one is still at the British Museum till date. He was from Ise-Ekiti but worked far and wide. I’m not sure if I got my name from his but then, who would mind? You can read more about some of Olowe of Ise Biography on Wikipedia and see some of his doors here.

The only amazing, or do I say sad thing, about him is that the average lad on the street of Lagos, or Ise for that matter, doesn’t even know him. We all know about Lawrence of Arabia, King Arthur, bla bla, yet we don’t know such a great gem of history.

Van Damme Epic Split on Volvo is Inspiring!

I’m generally a positive person. Or so I think. Some of my friends don’t think so but who cares about them anyway?

How has this got to do with this post?

Ok, some random friend shared Volvo’s advert with me. The Jean Claude Van Damme (JCVD) advert is currently trending nicely on the internet but the most important thing for me is the deep message – you can be what you want to be irrespective of time. JCVD has gone through a fair share time of ups and down but at over 50, he’s got an incredible body. If I did that split, I would be paralyzed for life.
By now you would have known that I have the mentality of geezer but a never say die one.

Jean Claude Van Damme doing the famous Epic Split for Volvo
Go one JCVD, inspire us not to give up!

CactusVPN to the Rescue

Every wannabe geek always requires some repertoire of tools – even if all you do is sell cards every day. Top on my list is TeamViewer for working remotely and helping those pesky friends of mine (you know yourselves) but increasingly I find myself having to do quite a lot with services not readily available in Nigeria. Case in point, I can’t pay for my Rebtel services within Nigeria, our IP addresses have the same status as our green passport.

Here comes VPN. VPN has been an enterprise gourmet since a thousand years ago but with availability of free VPN services that allow you to hide your IP, you can securely (without badass guys such as the annoying network admin sniffing at your traffic) reach services restricted by geo-IP. One of such awesome services is CactusVPN – I bumped into them while researching on top notch VPN services. The good thing is that you could start out with a free VPN account, test to see it suits you and then go all the way for it.

Installation of the client is a snap – you are up and running in a minute. But if you try to do torrents, you are warned one and if you happen to be a goat, your service is tossed out like a rancid salad. Although the Dutch guys are very permissive so you can do all the torrents you want via the NL Servers. Why don’t you give them a try?

50,412,559 Nigerians on the Internet

The reality is, I’m not much better than the armchair consultants I ranted about. Some months ago I wrote that Nigeria doesn’t have more than 17M internet users. I did my calculation based on MTN’s year end result and extrapolated that for the whole industry.

Please read paragraph 5 of page 50 of the MTN Group Annual Report for 2012.

Not a bad try but then NCC poked their fat fingers into my eyes and called me a freaking liar.
Based on the current data, as of July 2013, 50,412,559 dudes are ~~watching porn~~ using the internet in Nigeria from mostly their mobile devices.

Well I’m starting to see that around. Not that I can see 50M Nigerians dancing Azonto on the internet. After all, how many users actually come around to read my rants? I’m not that popular. You never know, I could be suffering from a chronic case of megalomania.

I can’t overcome the temptation to rant.
Some years ago, Blackberry was the king of Nigeria’s fondlesmob market. But they were expensive and very bad. Sammy and Lugi boys came around but they were expensive too. Then Ching Chong! The market is now getting driven by extremely cheap, I mean outrageously cheap, Android phones knocked out from X,000 Chinese factories for the world to use. And they work! Some days ago, I heard how the 5 inch Tecno Phantom A+ apparently sold out in Lagos; at N35K a pop, that was a badass bargain :-). Now we even have N14K full Android phones and of course they are all on the internet. The executives of MTN and others must be going through a paroxysm of excitement.

By the way only about 114,760,406 lines are active now. That’s more than all the population in the other African countries combined 10 times. OK, that was a joke!

Do we understand data?

Nobody can correlate anything around here – I mean Nigeria. For example we still can’t wrap our heads around the idea that 170 million Wazobians crammed into Nigeria is a joke.

Someone pointed to the number of GSM lines but wait, can’t he see that everyone has at least 2 lines? Now that the networks are a bit better and guys are dumping the other SIMs – invariably for the first time ever, the number of active lines in Nigeria declined. Maybe people are dying off but I doubt it, in fact almost all my friends are popping twins while slowmos like me are doing it one at a time.

What’s the rant?

We simply don’t understand data. We don’t know what it means to have complete and accurate data about anyone. Check any bank’s database, what you see there is poultry carpet. Phone numbers are wrong; addresses point to a dung yard. In fact many names are not spelled correctly and sometimes some customers are born in the future. But the most important things – customer balance and transactions are always OK. Interesting!

The Telcos amassed a Mount Everest size data during the last government enforced registration but what are they doing with it? Probably the silly admin is using it to find the age of his girlfriend’s sister and deciding if hitting on her could be term pedophilic.

Meanwhile NIMC is running around to look for the same data about everyone. FRSC is doing same. The Police are also on the racket. Yet that data is there, right under our noses. Why can’t they start from there? Why can’t banks and others who want to verify identity (like the dude stepping up to my younger sis) connect via some open standard web API to check things out. Why can’t your mobile phone number be your ID number? Basic rule, telcos can never recycle numbers again. If you have gazillion number of SIMs then they are also your identity. Most people I know have many names; even married girls dump their fathers’ names and yet never lose their identity, per se.

Back to my insurance company – they sent me text message wishing me a happy birthday 5 months after I did it all because some nincompoop mistyped my birthday. If they think data is serious, someone should have cross-checked that. After all, they never advanced me a free year insurance by mistake. Can you spot their priorities?

Ok. Rant over. Time to hit the sack. Good night boys.