Konga, Nigeria’s leading composite e-commerce giant, has pledged huge savings and more importantly, same day delivery for shoppers in the second edition of the much-anticipated Mid-Year Shopping Festival.

Widely regarded as the biggest discount sale in the first half of the year, Konga Mid-Year Shopping Festival kicks off formally on Tuesday, May 30 and will run through Friday, June 30, 2023 online at www.konga.com and offline in every Konga store nationwide.

An annual promotion, the month-long fiesta coincides with the celebration of Konga’s 11th anniversary, with the management of the e-commerce giant also seizing the opportunity to roll out KongaNow, its same day delivery initiative through which shoppers can get their verified items delivered within one to six hours.

All products tagged KongaNow on the Konga website are available for immediate delivery, provided orders are placed before 2pm daily.

Alternatively, shoppers can access www.konga.com/konga/now to select from a wide array of genuine high and medium-value items across categories.

Meanwhile, a variety of exciting offers have been lined up for shoppers throughout the month-long duration of the Konga Mid-Year Shopping Festival.

In addition to mouthwatering price crashes of up to 70% across multiple product categories including Computing, Electronics, Mobile Phones, Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG), Home & Kitchen Appliances, Wine & Spirits, Fashion, etc., Konga has equally lined up a suite of budget offerings tailored for every pocket, including Under 5k Shop, 10k Shop, 20k Shop and Under 30k shop, among others. Shoppers are also in for a treat, with treasure hunts, live auctions and flash sales on specific days of the campaign.

In partnership with leading financial institution, Access Bank, Konga is also offering extra 10% discount off all purchases made by Xclusive Plus subscribers who shop with their Visa Signature Card.

Also on offer are app-only deals for Konga App users, early bird discounts, special deals for walk-in customers to Konga stores, free delivery for Konga Prime subscribers, special bulk deals for heavy shoppers, business owners, corporate/religious organizations, cooperatives and educational institutions, among others.

In line with its mandate of helping shoppers save money, prospective travelers will also enjoy special deals on visa and passport processing, summer flight packages to major destinations as well as flexible instalment payments via Konga Travels & Tours.

These offers are available simply by emailing [email protected] or WhatsApp: 08112114488.

KongaPay users are also set to benefit from attractive discounts and bonuses on daily transactions, airtime and data recharge, among others during the Mid-Year Shopping Festival.

Konga Mid-Year Shopping Festival runs from Tuesday May 30 till Friday June 30, 2023.

Federal Executive Council, (FEC) on Wednesday, approved a memo from the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) allowing banks to print debit cards that double as National identity cards.

With this Nigerians can now request their commercial banks to provide them with a debit card which doubles as their National Identity Card at no extra cost than the normal fees charged for debit cards.

Prof. Isa Pantami, minister of Communication and Digital Economy, said that “It is going to be a form of multipurpose card where it will serve as your national identity card on one hand and also your bank card on the other hand, either MasterCard, Visa or any other kind of card,”

Pantami said although the NIMC Act 2007 only mandates Nigerians to have a National Identity Number and not necessarily a printout card, demands for cards have swelled nonetheless.

He explained that “As in the NIMC Act 2007, section 27, what is mandatory for our citizens and legal residents is the acquiring of the National Identity Number, not the card. However, the card is optional.

“But many citizens, particularly those living in rural communities, always go to NIMC offices complaining that they need the card at hand, even though it’s optional.

“To make it easier, NIMC last year, introduced a smart ID card you can download from the NIMC app. It is just a smart card. You don’t need to have it physically, but that is becoming difficult for our people living in rural communities.”

To ease the difficulty, Pantami said “NIMC has partnered with the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) so citizens who are interested in having a card at hand can easily go to the relevant banks.”

“The bank is permitted to print the card along with either MasterCard or Visa card. It is going to be a form of multipurpose card that will serve as your national identity card on one hand and also your bank card on the other. And based on the agreement, it is without any additional costs on our citizens.

“So when you apply for a card at your bank, you can indicate that ‘I want this card to be multiple purpose whereby it will serve as my bank card and also my national identity card’. Both of them are going to be printed on the same card and it is going to serve the same purposes without any additional costs. So that memo has also been approved by the Federal Executive Council,” the minister said.

The minister revealed that the NIMC and the CBN signed a non-disclosure agreement to protect the privacy and confidentiality of card applicants.

“NIMC and the central bank signed a non-disclosure agreement where your privacy and your confidentiality must be respected in the course of providing the card for you.

“When you apply for the card, the bank will apply online to the NIMC through their database. When they verify and confirm that your record in the database is in alignment with your record in NIMC database, it will be permitted and the card is going to be printed for you immediately,” the outgoing minister told journalists.

In a similar vein, Pantami revealed that FEC okayed a memo proposing the deployment of an automated system to integrate NINs with individual SIM cards.

The system, according to him, is to consolidate the implementation of the NIN-SIM linkage.

He said “As we all know that previous administrations made efforts to verify NIN and SIM starting from 2011 without success. In February 2020, President Muhammadu Buhari approved the implementation of the policy and the revised version of the policy was also launched and unveiled by Mr. President on May 6, 2021.

“As it stands today, the NIN and SIM policy registration is being implemented. In order to consolidate the implementation.

“The Nigerian Communications Commission came up with a proposal that will enhance the implementation of the policy and bring many more benefits to it.”

Pantami boasted that the automated system would sanitise the database and ease the process of SIM replacement for Nigerians or legal residents.

The latest study by cybersecurity company Surfshark ranks Nigeria as the 32nd most breached country from January to March 2023 (Q1’2023). Globally, a total of 41.6M accounts were breached in Q1’2023, with Russia ranking first and amounting to a sixth of all breaches from January through March.

The United States takes second place, while Taiwan appears in third place after extreme quarter-over-quarter growth, followed by France and Spain. A 49% decrease in breached users worldwide is seen compared to Q4’2022.

Surfshark’s analysis of data breaches in Q1’2023 shows Nigeria is in 32nd place with 82k leaked accounts (previously 41st with around 50k in Q4’2022). The breach rate is 46% higher in 2023’Q1 than it was in 2022’Q4.

Global data from Surfshark’s data breach statistics update (Q1’2023) records 41.6M leaked accounts, with Russia being 1st in the world (6.6M), followed by the U.S. (5M), Taiwan (3.9M), France (3.2M), and Spain (3.2M). Taiwan saw the highest quarter-over-quarter increase (21x), placing its total of 4M leaked accounts 3rd in Q1’2023. The country had only placed 26th in Q4’2022’ with 191K breached users. Globally, data breaches declined, dropping to one user account leaked every second in Q1’2023.

“According to Surfshark’s study, data breaches declined globally in the first quarter of 2023 if we compare it to the previous one,” says Agneska Sablovskaja, Lead Researcher at Surfshark. “However, the fact that over 40 million accounts were breached in just a few months is still a cause for concern.

“Those whose data was compromised are at an increased risk of being targeted by cybercriminals as their personal information can be utilized for phishing attacks, fraud, identity theft, and other serious cybercrimes.”

Europe was the most affected region by breaches in Q1’2023, followed by Asia and North America

In Q1’2023, Europe was also the only region with a significant quarter-over-quarter increase in its statistics on data breaches. The number nearly doubled, growing from 9.9M in Q4’2022 to 17.5M in Q1’2023. To put this into perspective, 2 out of 5 accounts breached in Q1’2023 were of European origin, with 38% of these being Russian. Within the region, the biggest quarter-over-quarter spikes in data breaches were recorded in Czechia (almost 9x), Armenia (around 6x), and Switzerland (6x).

Asia was the second-most vulnerable region, accounting for around a fourth of the quarter’s breaches (10.6M). The three countries that saw the highest quarter-over-quarter increase overall were all Asian — Taiwan and Saudi Arabia both had around 20 times more leaked accounts in Q1’2023 than in Q4’2022, while South Korea saw its number increase 12 times.

An additional 13% of the accounts were North American (5.3M). All other regions comprised less than 5% of the quarter’s total. Out of all regions, Africa saw the greatest quarter-over-quarter decrease — a whopping 33 times, bringing its total of 18.6M leaked accounts in Q4’2022 down to 557.6K in Q1’2023.

Some of the biggest breaches by email count were Sberbank (Russia), with 2.9M accounts leaked, Weee! (United States) with 1.1M, and Zurich Insurance (Switzerland) with 756.7K.

The ten most breached countries of Q1’2023, in descending order, are Russia, the U.S., Taiwan, France, Spain, India, Czechia, South Korea, and Italy. The highest growth in user victims was spotted in Taiwan (21x), Saudi Arabia (19x), South Korea (12x), Czechia (9x), and Armenia (7x).

Methodology

The data was collected by our independent partners from 29,000 publicly available databases and aggregated by email address. To determine the location of the email address, our partners’ mechanism looked into several associated parameters, such as domain names, IP addresses, locales, coordinates, currency or phone numbers. This data was then anonymized and passed on to Surfshark’s researchers to perform a statistical analysis of their findings.

The Data Breach World Map is updated every month with the most recent data from our independent partners. At the time of this particular study, the data analyzed was from April 1st, 2023. The numbers from October to December 2022 were compared with data aggregated from January to March 2023. Countries with a population of less than 1M people are not included in the analysis.