From Import dependency to local capacity: Nigeria’s tech manufacturing journey - ITREALMS Online

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The recent escalation in the Middle East conflict has delivered a sharp, analytical reminder of Nigeria’s structural vulnerability. As global oil prices surged past $100 per barrel, a troubling paradox emerged: Nigeria, a major crude producer with a world-class refinery now operational, remains buffeted by energy shocks originating thousands of miles away.

This crisis has brought instant sunlight to an uncomfortable truth; decades of import dependency have left the nation’s economy precariously exposed to external shocks.

Simon Ekpa's journey to six-year jail - ITREALMS

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Simon Ekpa's journey to jail began with his arrest in November 2024 by Finnish authorities for alleged involvement in incitement to violence, separatist propaganda, and financing terrorism in Nigeria, reports ITREALMS.

The Finnish National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) frozen his assets and those of his accomplices, as well as the assets of companies associated with him.

AMVCA@10: Tecno's unstoppable journey - ITREALMS

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As the curtains rose on the grand spectacle of the 10th Africa Magic Viewers' Choice Awards (AMVCA), TECNO again took centre stage, illuminating the night with a blend of technological innovation and unwavering support for the Nigerian movie industry.

Amidst the glitz and glamour of the red carpet, where superstars dazzled in their finest attire, TECNO's presence was felt beyond mere aesthetics. Attendees were greeted with a showcase of technological splendour at the TECNO booth, where moments of laughter and camaraderie were immortalized through the lens of innovation.

Inner Drive: Epic journey, told via individual narratives - ITREALMS

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How does a startup, founded far from the advantages and resources of the world’s tech hubs, go on to reach unicorn status? And more deeply, just how far can the drive for meaning and purpose ultimately take you? The inDrive documentary sets out to answer these questions.

In an exclusive premier today in Lagos, Nigeria, the inDrive documentary offered audiences a rare glimpse into the heart and soul of the company, with never-before-seen footage and candid stories from the individuals at inDrive’s roots, including founder and CEO Arsen Tomsky. 

25 years after Abacha's death sentence: A Journey of resilience, gratitude says Bello Fadile - ITREALMS

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As I sit down to pen these words, my mind drifts back to a momentous day etched in the annals of my personal history – March 4, 1999. It was on this day, 25 years ago, that I emerged from the shadows of incarceration into the warm embrace of freedom. 

The memory of that day remains vivid in my mind, a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the unwavering power of faith.

Navigating Digital Frontier: MediaConsortium confab2023 to explores consumer journey - ITREALMS

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Introduction
The consumer is the nucleus of all production and marketing activities. It is therefore important for brands to observe the consumer closely and pay particular attention to the consumer's journey if sustainable growth is the object.

In this digital age, experts argue that the consumer journey is more dynamic and interconnected than ever before. Brands that adapt to these changes and prioritize customer-centric approaches are more likely to succeed in this evolving landscape.

Dangers of hyper-sexuality in a relationship - ITREALMS

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Ugonna and Chris (not real names) had been dating for a year, six months into the relationship Chris discovered Ugonna had a serious sex addiction problem, he spoke to her about getting help, but she insisted there was no issue, but deep within herself she knew that she had a major sexual behavior challenge. She secretly did research online and found out she was suffering from hyper sexuality also known as sexual addiction.

One day Ugonna had an official meeting with a few colleagues and felt a sudden urge to play with her private part. She reached out to her clitoris and gently started rubbing it, few minutes later she got an orgasm. Unknown to her a colleague had seen Ugonna reaching under her skirt fondling her private part, a feeling of disgust and shock passed through her colleague. She immediately told other people later that day, one of them being a cousin to Chris who quickly called his attention to Ugonna’s disturbing behavior on that day.

Sam Amadi: Journey to remove legacy deceit, murderous incompetence in Imo - ITREALMS

ForTheRecords@ITREALMS:

A text of a Statement Made by DR. SAM AMADI, APGA Gubernatorial Aspirant for Imo State 2019 on Tuesday, September 4, 2018 while Collecting his Nomination Form.

Today, we officially begin the process to end the legacy of deceit, corruption and audacious immorality in Imo.

Today, we raise the APGA flag signaling the beginning of the onslaught against a legacy of ‘Iberiberism’ in Imo State and the beginning of building strong foundations for prosperity, justice and accountability in Imo State.

Today, we raise the voice of millions of Imo citizens who have courageously declared an end to impunity, to unbridled stealing of public wealth and the criminality of mendacious 419 operatives who have hijacked political power since the end of the illustrious Sam Mbakwe era.

Today, as I pick this nomination form Imo citizens declare their determination to fight every inch of the way to liberate their land from poverty for many and stupendous wealth for just a few.

We know it will be a tough battle. Those who invaded political leadership in Imo and built this infrastructure of poverty and misery have consolidated their political power in the state through continuous impoverishment of the citizens.

But we can hear the voice of the people proclaiming an end to poverty; we can hear the people refusing to be deceived again and again; we can hear them looking for a new leadership.

We are in APGA because Imo people have chosen APGA as the vehicle of redemption. APGA is ready to end the Okorocha legacy and the legacy of similar deceitful and incompetent leaders who have raped and wasted the potentials of the state.

APGA’s manifesto focuses on sustainable community-based prosperity and social justice. APGA emphasizes responsibility and accountability to the people. APGA articulates the egalitarianism and productivity that define the Igbo worldview. APGA represents those character traits and competencies that made Eastern Nigeria the fastest growing economy in the World under M.I. Okpara in the 1960s and Imo State under Sam Mbakwe the fastest industrializing state in the 1980s.

In the 21^st century, governance has been complex. Imo needs a competent hand to start the rebuilding. Considering the damage Governor Okorocha has inflicted on Imo State, in 2019 Imo can’t afford another one from the tribe of political entrepreneurs whose interest in public office is to maximize personal wealth and indulge in endless sensuality. Imo needs a man or woman of integrity, compassion and competence. Imo needs a Governor who can envision transformation and deliver it on time. Imo needs an upgrade of Sam Mbakwe, a governor whose lack of interest in personal wealth enables him or her to focus all energies towards building economic and social infrastructure of rural prosperity. That person is me. I am ready to provide such a leadership.

My colleagues and I at the New Imo Movement have developed a Community Action Plan for Prosperity based on the social democratic values in the APGA manifesto and the time-tested principle of economic and social development, more recently from the Asian continent.

This plan has three agenda. Rural industrialization, health and education and open government.

We start with a commitment to return 100 per cent of all local government allocations to the local government council to be used singular to build rural economy. We have to end poverty in Imo by making communities prosperous.

Our grand rural industrialization plan will lead to 108 cottage industries in Imo State in one year and create about 108,000 new jobs for unskilled and medium skilled youths. 27 local government councils in Imo State will have 305 quality health centers and we will have public schools that are comparable to the best private schools.

We will end the apartheid that subjects the children of the poor to failed schools that lead to more poverty and misery. The New Imo is an equal opportunity society.

From May 29, we start this difficult march to establish the vision of the founders of APGA and present a model to the world of an African economic and social miracle better than the Asian miracle. We can do it at the Heartland of Southeast. The Sun will once again rise from the East.

We are ready and willing. This task is urgent and pressing. That is why we are in a hurry to pick the nomination form and begin the journey to end Rocha’s Nightmare. Join us.

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Journey to hoisting APGA’s flag @Senate

Commentary@ITREALMS:

From Octavia to Obama, the audacity of hope lives on. Also known as Augustus Caesar, Octavia dreamt of an indelible entry in history and moved on to achieve immortalisation of his name by inserting August into the then ten months calendar of the year. He was imitated by Julius Caesar whose introduction of July into the moon list brought it to the present twelve. Barack Obama, enduring and daring, rode on the tide of time to rewrite conventions of the American presidency. The elasticity of the human spirit remains an eternal wonder of creation. A despot may seal off voices but he cannot steal the visions singing in our hearts. Nelson Mandela, the African hero of the twentieth century, taught us that strong convictions are the secret of surviving deprivation. And we begin to get a sense of how the APGA and one of its star brands, Victor Umeh finally achieved a breakthrough in the knotty senatorial turf.

In the most clinical fashion of a long distance champion, Victor Chukwunonyelum Umeh breasted the Senate tape on Saturday, January 13, 2008, bringing to an end a cocktail of contrived confusion that stood in the way of implementing the Court of Appeal judgment of December 7, 2015. As The Nation editorial of Thursday, January 11 put it, the rerun is ‘despite the shenanigans of some political actors’, climaxing in the effrontery to purport a high court judgment superior to that of the Court of Appeal. Thus, the successful conduct of the election has immense significance for Nigeria’s democracy, and especially for the party APGA and the senator – elect, the development is a soothing balm on a political journey often marked by subversion and reversals.  

Eminent historian, Ali Mazrui, had once described the Jews as the most brutalised but not the most humiliated race. A critical study of the APGA story will reveal that it is the most brutalised but not the most humiliated political party of the fourth republic. Its very registration as a political party was a tug of war. Acutely aware of the political tendencies represented by the association and their implications in the electoral contest, the ruling establishment employed every trick in the book to frustrate the realisation of this aspiration. It had taken a Supreme Court judgment in 2002 to force the withheld official recognition. Piqued by the development, the hawks in the ruling ranks mounted a prolonged persecution of the APGA; sometimes directly and sometimes through proxies.

Posterity will credit the collective of APGA faithful for steadfastness in the face of many aggressions. But if individuals are to be recognised for standing up to the assaults, the honour goes first to Victor Umeh and then Peter Obi. In the ten year period from 2004 to 2014, no single individual impacted on the fortunes of the All Progressives Grand Alliance as Chief Victor Umeh. Skeptics might tend to view Umeh’s influence on the APGA narrative as a given in the context of his vantage leadership position. But this would be simplistic. Umeh’s role in the APGA saga derives largely from a personality factor and acute sense of mission.

The story of Anambra’s journey of transformation is in part, the story of APGA’s travails and triumphs.  APGA launched the movement that ushered in Anambra’s process of recovery from neglect and misrule in 2006.  Though sensitization and mobilization was underway by 2002, events took a critical turn in 2004, when the party was subverted from within, from the highest rung of its leadership. This came in the sudden declaration that APGA as a party was no longer interested in the prosecution of its 2003 Anambra governorship petition then going on at the tribunal.  It was a volte face that left terrible trauma on the party faithful. The severity of the internal conspiracy compelled a more deliberate search for a new leadership that could be ‘predicted’ and trusted. And it was in this very delicate circumstance that Chief Victor Umeh, hitherto national treasurer of the party, came to the fore as acting national chairman in 2004.

Ignoring the issues of his indictment, the suspended national chairman, Chekwas Okorie, pronounced that he could not be removed because his name was written in the party’s constitution. The disengagement generated a total of eleven suits, nearly all instituted by the sanctioned politician. A fuming Okorie proceeded to systematically lose and or abandon the cases and his desperation grew with each painful loss. Yet, the Maurice Iwu – led INEC demonstrating disdain for decorum, conferred recognition on a king without a kingdom and would have gone on with the perversion had Victor Umeh not initiated contempt charges against the offenders. With reality dawning, Okorie returned the APGA certificate in his possession but sought revenge with his bid to register a new party United Peoples Grand Alliance (UPGA).  The spoiler game was clear enough. The phonetic and syntactic similarities between APGA and UPGA were sure to have devastating consequences for APGA in a society still contending with low literacy levels. An alert APGA leadership swung into action, detailing grounds which ought to render Okorie’s application defective. The INEC under Attahiru Jega, a man widely respected for his pedigree, considered and sustained the objections for their merit. Okorie had to settle for the unobtrusive name of United Progressive Party in the end.

There were more rivers and deserts to cross. About a year to the end of his tenure in 2014, then Governor Peter Obi was seized by his own pet idea of playing adventures with APGA. Members of APGA were at a loss as Obi tried to install a new national chairman in place of the man reckoned as an achiever and whose tenure had not ended. Umeh stood his ground and snatched victory from the lion’s jaw.

Consequently, he was able to influence the nomination of Willie Obiano as the APGA governorship candidate in the 2013/2014 election; signing off in style at the state level, driving the re – election of Governor Obiano for second term.  

We see then why the outcome of the January 13, 2018 senatorial poll is so significant for APGA. If Umeh the veteran of APGA battles cannot make it to the Senate, what hope lies for others? With the prospect of free and fair elections brightening under Buhari’s presidency, the quest to launch APGA to the centre – stage of Nigeria’s government and politics has become feasible with the congruent leadership of Umeh and Governor Willie Obiano.  Both as Governor and Chairman, Board of Trustees of APGA, Obiano has added huge value to the party that Umeh nurtured to reckoning in very difficult conditions. 

With APGA’s flag flying at the Senate, notice is served to those ever in a hurry to define our political colouration as a two party system not to beat the gun. In 2019 the PDP will for the first time contest national elections without being in control in Abuja. That level playing ground guarantees that the PDP can no longer appropriate APGA’s victories as happened in the governorship cases of Ugochukwu Agballa, Enugu State, in 2003; Martin Agbaso, Imo State, 2007; and Alex Otti, Abia State 2015.  APGA has not just elected its first senator from Anambra State; it has elected a senator who will not defect to another party!

*Contributed by Ifeanyi Afuba

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A Journey into the Clouds – 50 Years of Technology

Opinion@ITRealms:

It's April 7, 1964, and while the Beatles are telling the world that 'Money Can't Buy Me Love', IBM is attempting to convince the business community that it can at least buy you a decent mainframe.

The IBM System/360 – touted as the Big Blue's most innovative iteration to date – had just been announced, and since then the technology industry has changed in extraordinary ways, shaping the way we live, work, and play. The impact on Africa has been profound, with the continent and its people now connected with each other and the rest of the world in ways that couldn't possibly have been imagined only a decade or so ago. But how did the connectivity we now all take for granted first come about?

For 17 years after the System/360 launch, the world of technology was living its 1st Platform. In this world, mainframes reigned supreme, and just a few million enterprise users on the planet had access to them via terminals. Throughout this era and way into the subsequent one, all computer-related activity was restricted to the interaction between a person and a computer. However, such interaction was never of a personal nature.

This would only change after the end of the 1st Platform, although the event that made this transformation possible actually happened during that era; in 1973, to be precise – the year Bob Metcalfe broke new tech ground by inventing Ethernet at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center.

Fast forward to 1981 and the tech world was taking its first tentative steps onto the 2nd Platform. This was the age of the server-client model and the PC – the device that, together with the Ethernet and the local and wide area networks it made possible, brought about the personalization of IT. And when PCs started becoming more interconnected around 1983, we quickly moved into a world where one of the most incredible creations ever imagined – email – started being used to share company information online from different places on Earth.

From this point, we move 10 years into the future. CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) is set to redefine the whole world as we know it by creating a global hypertext system and making it available to the public as the World Wide Web. This exacted one of the most amazing leaps in technology: we went beyond sharing company documents with specific people to sharing personal data with complete strangers. Blogging was born, and was soon to be followed by a personal data generation and sharing revolution.

The 25 years of the 2nd Platform era were characterized by an exponential increase in the number of users and applications – users went from millions to hundreds of millions and applications went from thousands to tens of thousands. Still, the computing industry was focused on the enterprise, and personal usage of computers was secondary. Its progress would come as a result of advances in enterprise systems and applications.

And so we arrive at 2007, the year when the iPhone and Google Apps were launched and Amazon and Salesforce.com began offering their cloud services. At this time both Hadoop and Twitter were only around a year old, while Facebook had just become available to the general public for the first time several months earlier. These were the seeds of what we now recognize as the main trends in technology adoption today: mobility, cloud computing, Big Data analytics, and social media. Or in other words, the 3rd Platform.

The year 2007 also signaled an exciting new era of connectivity across Africa. In October that year, Rwanda hosted the 'Connect Africa' summit, with the aim of expanding the continent's broadband backbone infrastructure and access networks. Pledges totaling $55 billion were announced during the conference, with national and regional interconnectivity initiatives taking center stage in a bid to ensure that Africa capitalized on the broadband and ICT opportunities already being taken for granted elsewhere in the world.

The upshot has been the proliferation of Internet exchange points and rural connectivity projects during the intervening years, while numerous major undersea cables have also entered operation. Spearheaded by the Kenyan government, the TEAMS cable began service in 2009, connecting the country to the rest of the world via the UAE, and in the following year the EASSy cable system brought widespread connectivity to the wider East Africa region, with landing points in nine countries along the coast and connections to at least ten landlocked nations. Three years later, West Africa got in the act with the WACS cable connecting South Africa to the UK via 12 landing points along the western coast.

Such developments have increased the availability of bandwidth enormously and brought about a significant decline in the cost of connectivity, factors that will prove crucial as African governments, businesses, and citizens increasingly look to embrace the endless possibilities presented by the 3rd Platform. Difficulties remain, of course, with the need to improve last-mile connectivity hampered by the limited penetration of fixed telephony across large parts of the continent, but Broadband Wireless Access solutions that can tap into Africa's vast mobile network offer a more connected future for even the most rural of communities.

With IDC expecting spending on public cloud services in emerging African countries to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of up to 84% over the coming five years, it is clear that the 3rd Platform has well and truly arrived in Africa. The journey to this stage has seen the tech world move from computers the size of family cars to invisible cloud storage, and with applications increasingly escaping the corporate world to become a means of entertainment, self expression, and communication, the next 50 years are sure to be even more eventful!


*Contributed by Mark Walker, Regional Director: Sub-Saharan Africa, IDC (pix insert)
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