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?
Category: Nigeria
Adedeji Olowe shies from politics but has tons of opinions about Nigeria. He’s passionate and stakes his future here.
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.
You can read more about the latest NCC internet data here.
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.
What do Banks do with their Website?
Most companies in Nigeria are now embracing the internet – at least to put up what looks like websites. Banks have been here before others but I’m not sure if they all know what to do with it.
In my spare time, I ranked all the banks and using the Alexa ranking. Alexa is an Amazon company that aggregates web traffic to rank popularity of website. So for example, Google.com is the number destination worldwide but number 2 in the USA where Facebook.com reigns (people have time to farf!). Don’t even bother to check my website ranking, nobody apart from me and you visits here.
| Bank | Website | Nigeria | Global |
| Access Bank | www.accessbankplc.com | 338 | 56,440 |
| Citibank | www.citigroup.com/citi/about/countrypresence/nigeria.html | 13,270 | |
| Diamond Bank | www.diamondbank.com | 150 | 30,081 |
| Ecobank Nigeria | www.ecobank.com/countryinfo.aspx?cid=74072 | 44,193 | |
| Enterprise Bank | web.entbankng.com | 1,623,102 | |
| Fidelity Bank | www.fidelitybankplc.com | 912 | 101,328 |
| First Bank | www.firstbanknigeria.com | 316 | 38,430 |
| First City Monument Bank | www.firstcitygroup.com | 3,160 | 354,439 |
| First City Monument Bank | www.fcmb.com | 4,938 | 348,675 |
| Guaranty Trust Bank | www.gtbank.com | 18 | 3,631 |
| Heritage Bank | www.hbng.com | 7,128 | 1,058,728 |
| Keystone Bank | www.keystonebankng.com | 1,590 | 245,477 |
| Mainstreet Bank | www.mainstreetbanklimited.com | 5,473 | 695,549 |
| Skye Bank | www.skyebankng.com | 1,050 | 111,101 |
| Stanbic IBTC Bank | www.stanbicibtcbank.com | 279 | 50,567 |
| Standard Chartered Bank | www.standardchartered.com.ng | 2,273 | 258,505 |
| Sterling Bank | www.sterlingbankng.com | 466 | 95,814 |
| Union Bank of Nigeria | www.unionbankng.com | 1,595 | 190,767 |
| United Bank for Africa | www.ubagroup.com | 320 | 71,157 |
| Unity Bank | www.unitybankng.com | 3,927 | 757,389 |
| Wema Bank | www.wemabank.com | 4,458 | 548,194 |
| Zenith Bank | www.zenithbank.com | 136 | 21,304 |
The Beginning of New Things
Something magical happened last week – the average man on the street didn’t even notice or cared but then it would probably have more influence on the fortune of this country than anything else that ever happened to us.
Well, GEJ didn’t resign – that’s too obvious. BH didn’t declare cease fire – that probably won’t happen anytime soon.
The dudes who wanted to buy our electricity infrastructure finally plunked down the balance of the money to buy hope and faith. Of the 15 consortia itching to have some electric shocks bring us back to life, only the folks gunning for the Enugu Distro couldn’t pay up. That’s sad because all they need do was ask me, I could have extended some cash advance, after all, this is for Nigeria. Ok, that’s a joke. If I had that much cash, I wouldn’t have to endure many things day after day.
Now that they have paid up, GEJ will hand over PHCN to private sector and we believe that this would be the beginning of good things in Nigeria. I’m so giddy with excitement. Imagine even 12 hours of uninterrupted power each day and then gradually they upgrade to 24/7. Think of how much we would save from not buying diesel and petrol to fuel generators? Think of how much it even cost to get those damned generators in the first instance?
Cost of business would drastically reduce for everyone. Businesses would flourish. More cash means more things to buy. The middle class would resurge. Maybe if life is easier for everyone we would be less easy to bribe to elect stupid officials, which is maybe.
But what happens to the folks that bring in generators to sell? Demand would nosedive – same happened to the importers of motorbikes when Fashola pulled the plug off Okadas. Demand for petrol and diesel would also bottom-out.
There would always be losers and gainers. In this instance, probably more gainers. If GEJ could pull this through, his name would be written in gold. I’m dead serious. I’m not praise singing him but electricity is the biggest problem we have in Nigeria, after mediocrity.