E-Business
ICT Sector this Year from Leo-Stan’s Observatory
2013 is just two years from 2015, the year set aside for the attainment of the Millennium Development Goals, and seven years from 20 2020, Nigeria’s self set date to join the top 20 economies of the world.
Between 18 and 24 months from now the world would start listing the degrees by which nations attained the MDGs.
Nigeria is not likely to be upset if her name does not come up for mention in 2015 because we have set a superior goal for 20 2020. Coincidentally but unfortunately the sense of urgency has just been deleted from the pursuit of 20 2020 by the declaration from the USA that Nigeria would be a world leading economy in 2030.
The shifting of dates for national development is about to become a national past time. However, that research, from the USA, is suspect because it is coming from the very shores that have predicted the disintegration of Nigeria by 2015.
Meanwhile, it is generally accepted that ICT will drive the transformation of Africa, with Nigeria in the forefront, from an agricultural to knowledge society.
Rather than wait for 2030 we can invest in ICT not as a panic measure as we did in 2006 and 2011 salvaging the voters’ registration exercise by importing, assembling, and deploying over 120,000 laptops and data capture machines in a few weeks.
In the process we overwhelmed the volunteer work force that INEC had engaged for the exercise. Come to think of it we tend to have a special liking for panic measures as was recently played out in the now controversial attempt to buy 10 million GSM phones valued at N60billion for rural farmers in Nigeria.
Whether our development as a nation is pegged to any timeline or not, the sober thing for us to do today would be to adopt a long term ICT strategy to ensure that we are ready to leap when opportunity calls.
There are key objectives that ICT professionals must pursue in 2013 as our contribution towards creating a character for the ICT industry while refocusing this nation.
As an IT entrepreneur, let me begin with the objective of education, which I believe is the most daunting challenge facing the development of the ICT sector in Nigeria.
We have not focused enough on education as a people who see ICT as a golden opportunity – computer appreciation for the general public and for first time users, reviewing the content of the ICT curriculum in schools, massive campaign to teach computer literacy to teachers (at all levels) and civil servants, retraining existing professionals to capture recent trends and innovate for the fatherland and setting up incubation centers.
It would be right to assert that the computer finally arrived in Nigeria in 2001 with the emphatic launch of Zinox Computers.
The wonder-exclamations that the launch achieved from the highest levels of Government to the citizens in the street convinced me at the time that we were right to initiate the Computerize Nigeria Initiative, a company that was dedicated to the creating of awareness for the adoption of the computer as a major tool for work and play. T
he scope of work to be done in education further dawned on me when I met distinguished Professors who familiarized themselves with the computer keyboard for the first time ever at a Zinox hands-on workshop.
All ICT companies take training so seriously that it should be an integral part of their marketing strategy. Last week I had to cut short a business trip abroad to take part in training for 20 teachers from the North East.
The emphasis is on training the trainer but often we have to train the work force of our Clients’ on how to operate and maintain new equipment. The more people that become knowledgeable about the computer, the more prospects we are likely to have for computer ownership and the fewer ignorance related calls we get for support.
The CNP spent huge sums placing advertisements in the newspapers targeted at governments on the need to computerize their citizenry and operations. However, there is a limit to what one company can do in a country of 160 million people.
In 2013 I would like to see an orchestrated approach that would speed up the building of local capacities working through the schools, professional bodies and the mass media possibly within the framework of the Public Private Partnership.
Closely related to the quality of formal education is the issue of Young Innovators. My regular sponsorship of the National Association of Computer Science Students, NACOSS, provides insight to the immense potentials of these young persons.
Quite recently I had to provide support for a group that is working to make the CBN’s cashless policy the mode in all campuses.
In 2013, I want to see more corporate persons sponsor youth competitions, workshops and fairs. Each State Government should at least sponsor one NACOSS event in 2013.
As in previous years the answers to what constitutes local content and how to enforce its imperatives would determine the rate of PC penetration in 2013. Foreign competition, academics and politicians have belabored the concept of local content and deliberately blurred the strands of national interest in the concept.
I am a Nigerian entrepreneur and the new global economy can only be relevant to me to the extent that it helps to grow the financial, technical, and manpower needs of Nigeria. Local content is a concept used to define the extent to which a product or service is locally produced.
It also refers to the ratio of locally produced products and services that are deployed in the day to day running of an organization.
For example, the Zinox brand of computers was developed by Nigerians, designed by us, fabricated with partners in China and assembled here in Nigeria.
The imprint on the product is Made in Nigeria and proponents of local content are saying that the best way to support local industry is through patronage.
They also agree that the only way to tackle the scandalous preference for foreign products is to sanction all those who flout the Presidential directive that MDA’s must buy Made in Nigeria PCs. All those who talk of efficiency, competitiveness, and the new global economy in abstract terms miss the point.
The same academics would point to China, India and Brazil as examples of emerging economies that have got it right but they fail to mention that these countries all had protectionist policies that worked.
China and India together are home to over 2.5 billion people and the need to create employment, wealth and a stable society gave rise to policies that restricted what products can come into their country.
I can tell you that Coca Cola, in spite of its popularity and clout, was not being sold in India when I was a student in the early eighties. Every country with its national interest and security well defined strives to be an exporter and not an importer of goods and services.
The industry is pleased with the pedigree of the Minister of Communications and Technology, Mrs. Omobola Johnson, as a professional who was appointed on the basis of her being an active participant in the ICT sector.
She certainly knows where the shoe pinches. We trust that in 2013 she would concretize her initiatives to improve local content development in the ICT sector.
In particular, we want to see her join issues in the public domain, in the absence of sanctions, with MDA’s who flout the Presidential directive to buy Made in Nigeria PCs; set up a machinery to police the multinationals to ensure that they outsource their business processes to Nigerian ICT companies, national interest would best be served if installation contracts, maintenance, upgrades and procurement are handled by Nigerian companies against the tendency to outsource to Asian companies; the students’ PC ownership scheme requires fine-tuning because no students’ loans scheme has worked in this country, only a stimulus of this nature can guarantee that the IT sector records growth in 2013; force banks and oil and gas companies to compulsorily run Nigerian software as alternative packages in their businesses; ban the importation of all consumer PCs into the country; liaise with her counterparts in the West African sub region with a view to form an alliance that allows a free flow of goods, services, know-how and capital.
I see a very busy but tough 2013 for Madam Minister, an uncharitable course for the delectable lady from Accenture.
There was another lady, within the current democratic experience, who was appointed into the pharmaceutical sector at a time when Nigerians were dying in droves because of fake drugs.
A gun was aimed at her head but rather than run she chose to dig into the trenches and by the time she left office, Nigerian pharmaceuticals were being proudly exported to countries in the West and East Africa sub region.
The issue of quality must be addressed in 2013 by Nigerian ICT practitioners. When I launched Zinox in 2001, Microsoft in endorsing the product said that Zinox had ‘surpassed international quality standards’.
I can tell you that most Nigerian OEMs produce very high quality and world-class IT products because competition is keen and the home environment is skeptical.
Their devices are often fabricated in the same Asian workshops that fabricate for the ignorantly preferred foreign brands. The problem is that the sector is hampered by the lack of human, technical, and financial capital to respond satisfactorily to the realities of supply and demand. Moreover, the trendy pace (sometimes faddish) of international competitors is always pressurizing the logistics and inventory capacities of the local OEMs.
Threatened by regular losses each time the market migrates from one hyped variant to another, the local OEMs are forced to order in small numbers at a time.
The result is the high cost of operations and inevitably higher costs for local brands in a market where there are hardly differentiating attributes between brands.
The local OEMs must pull their resources together, submerge the ego of maverick brands, share know-how, and produce under one or two truly digital plants if they are to survive the challenges facing them and lead this nation to her manifest destiny.
Nigerian OEMs must learn from their brothers in hip hop music – these are the days of the collaboration and it is common to see musicians who are in a feud today, collaborating tomorrow.
Let me conclude this piece by expressing my satisfaction with the 2012 NITMA Awards because it threw up for our review some of the problems facing the Awards and Recognitions mechanisms within the industry.
I congratulate Juliet Ehimuan Chiazor of Google Nigeria for winning the IT Personality of the Year. Her professionalism must have made a difference for the highly critical membership of the Nigeria Computer Society, NCS, to choose her.
The leadership of the NCS also receives my appreciation for permitting Dr. Eugene Juwah, Juliet Ehimuan Chiazor and the CBN Governor Sanusi Lamido Sanusi to be among the personalities shortlisted for the Award.
However, it is important to note that one of the functions of an Award is to use the yearly tracking of performances to tell the story of an Industry.
For example, how did all the nominees for the IT Personality of the Year 2011 crash out of contention in 12 months?
Did they give up on the work that recommended them in 2011? I agree that an Award does not follow a succession plan but the chances are that those who were in contention with Juliet Chiazor in 2012 would also be in contention in 2013 unless some rare work opportunity throws up a new personality.
This observation is not meant to cast aspersions on NITMA 2012 but to strengthen its mechanisms as it evolves to be the most authoritative ICT Awards in Africa.
In 2013, I would love to see the ICT Publishers Alliance develop a memorandum of understanding that would bring all media initiated Awards in the ICT sector under one powerful, credible, and viable platform.
This is one instance when the phrase ‘the more the merrier’ means bad business. 2013 calls for closing of ranks among all stake holders in the ICT sector if we are to achieve the globally competitive ICT industry of our dreams.
Leo Stan Ekeh, is Chairman, Zinox Group.
Contrary to popular belief, using cutting-edge artificial intelligence tools slowed down experienced software developers when they were working in codebases familiar to them, rather than supercharging their work, a new study found.
AI research nonprofit METR conducted the in-depth study, on a group of seasoned developers earlier this year while they used Cursor, a popular AI coding assistant, to help them complete tasks in open-source projects they were familiar with.
Before the study, the open-source developers believed using AI would speed them up, estimating it would decrease task completion time by 24%. Even after completing the tasks with AI, the developers believed that they had decreased task times by 20%. But the study found that using AI did the opposite: it increased task completion time by 19%.
The study’s lead authors, Joel Becker and Nate Rush, said they were shocked by the results: prior to the study, Rush had written down that he expected “a 2x speed up, somewhat obviously.”
The findings challenge the belief that AI always makes expensive human engineers much more productive, a factor that has attracted substantial investment into companies selling AI products to aid software development.
AI is also expected to replace entry-level coding positions. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, recently told Axios that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white collar jobs in the next one to five years.
Prior literature on productivity improvements has found significant gains: one study found using AI sped up coders by 56%, another study found developers were able to complete 26% more tasks in a given time.
But the new METR study shows that those gains don’t apply to all software development scenarios. In particular, this study showed that experienced developers intimately familiar with the quirks and requirements of large, established open source codebases experienced a slowdown.
Other studies often rely on software development benchmarks for AI, which sometimes misrepresent real-world tasks, the study’s authors said.
The slowdown stemmed from developers needing to spend time going over and correcting what the AI models suggested.
“When we watched the videos, we found that the AIs made some suggestions about their work, and the suggestions were often directionally correct, but not exactly what’s needed,” Becker said.
The authors cautioned that they do not expect the slowdown to apply in other scenarios, such as for junior engineers or engineers working in codebases they aren’t familiar with.
Still, the majority of the study’s participants, as well as the study’s authors, continue to use Cursor today.
The authors believe it is because AI makes the development experience easier, and in turn, more pleasant, akin to editing an essay instead of staring at a blank page.
“Developers have goals other than completing the task as soon as possible,” Becker said. “So they’re going with this less effortful route.”
Kaspersky GReAT (Global Research and Analysis Team) experts have discovered open-source packages that download the Quasar backdoor and a stealer designed to exfiltrate cryptocurrency. The malicious packages are intended for the Cursor AI development environment, which is based on Visual Studio Code — a tool used for AI-assisted coding.
The malicious open-source packages are extensions hosted in the Open VSX repository that claim to provide support for the Solidity programming language. However, in practice, they download and execute malicious code on users’ devices.
During an incident response, a blockchain developer from Russia reached out to Kaspersky after installing one of these fake extensions on his computer, which allowed attackers to steal approximately $500,000 worth of crypto assets.
The threat actor behind these packages managed to deceive the developer by making the malicious package rank higher than the legitimate one. The attacker achieved this by artificially inflating the malicious package’s downloads count to 54,000.
After installation, the victim gained no actual functionality from the extension. Instead, malicious ScreenConnect software was installed on the computer, granting threat actors remote access to the infected device.
Using this access, they deployed the open-source Quasar backdoor along with a stealer that collects data from browsers, email clients, and crypto wallets. With these tools, the threat actors were able to obtain the developer’s wallet seed phrases and subsequently steal cryptocurrency from the accounts.
After the malicious extension downloaded by the developer was discovered and removed from the repository, the threat actor republished it and artificially inflated its installation count to a higher number – 2 million, compared to 61,000 for the legitimate package. The extension was removed from the platform following a request from Kaspersky.
“Spotting compromised open-source packages with the naked eye is becoming increasingly difficult. Threat actors are using increasingly creative tactics to deceive potential victims, even developers who have a strong understanding of cybersecurity risks — particularly those working in the blockchain development field.
As we expect adversaries to continue targeting developers, it is recommended that even experienced IT professionals deploy dedicated security solutions to safeguard sensitive data and prevent financial losses,” commented Georgy Kucherin, Security Researcher with Kaspersky’s Global Research and Analysis Team.
The threat actor behind the attack published not only malicious Solidity extensions but also another NPM package, solsafe, which also downloads ScreenConnect. A few months earlier, three additional malicious Visual Studio Code extensions were released — solaibot, among-eth, and blankebesxstnion — all of them have already been removed from the repository.
Kashifu Inuwa CCIE, the Director General of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), has reaffirmed the Federal Government’s unwavering commitment to achieving 95% digital literacy across Nigeria by the year 2030, with an ambitious milestone of 70% by 2027.
This disclosure was made in total alignment with the present administration’s priority areas of reforming the economy for sustained inclusive growth and accelerating diversification through industrialisation, digitisation, creative arts, manufacturing, and innovation.
Making this known during a collaborative meeting hosted by the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC), Inuwa highlighted the government’s strategic prioritisation of human capital development as central to its national transformation agenda.
“We started this journey in 2023 when President Bola Ahmed Tinubu came on board and he made it clear that economic diversification and inclusivity are part of the administration’s agenda,” he noted.
“And the president outlined this in 8 priority areas to achieve the vision, with priority number 7 specifically focused on accelerating industrialisation, digitisation, creative arts, manufacturing, and innovation,” he added.
Recognising the importance of digital fluency in achieving this agenda, he stated that NITDA is committed to investing in the digital empowerment of citizens through the development of the National Digital Literacy Framework (NDLF), a strategic blueprint aligned with international best practices.
He added that to tailor the framework to Nigeria’s specific needs, 6 core competency areas were incorporated to include device and software operations, information and data literacy, communication and collaboration, content creation, safety, and problem solving.
He explained that the framework would address all levels of digital fluency, from basic, intermediate to advanced levels, to make digital skills accessible to every Nigerian, from primary school pupils to working professionals.
According to Inuwa, despite data limitations, NITDA estimates that Nigeria’s digital literacy rate currently stands at 50%, up from 44% in 2021, based on extrapolations from the World Bank’s Better Life Report.
The NITDA DG disclosed that the agency has been working closely with the Nigerian Educational Research and Development Council (NERDC) in developing a curriculum for digital literacy, which can be infused into formal education. Stating that the visit is a continuation of NITDA’s ongoing engagements with key education stakeholders, including the Federal Ministry of Education, the National Universities Commission (NUC), and the Nigerian Educational Research and Development Council (NERDC), all aimed at advancing digital literacy across all levels of learning.
Inuwa also revealed ongoing collaborations with global platforms such as Coursera to train teachers using AI-powered lesson generation tools and provide scalable online training.
It is worth recalling that late last year, NITDA partnered with the Nasarawa State University in collaboration with CISCO in launching the Digital Learning for NSUK (DL4NSUK) initiative to enhance digital literacy in tertiary institutions, and equipping graduates with the skills needed to be digitally proficient and globally competitive.
While stressing that the entire process, from curriculum development to classroom delivery, would require a whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach, Inuwa said, “This is not a journey we can walk alone; we must bring everyone on board, education stakeholders, technology providers, state governments, and international partners.”
In response to the DG’s remarks, UBEC Executive Secretary, Hajiya Aisha Garba, confirmed that the Commission has officially received the digital literacy curriculum developed by NITDA and NERDC and has commenced internal review processes.
She acknowledged the curriculum as robust and forward-looking but stressed the need for simplification to suit early learners and teachers, citing challenges such as curriculum overload, limited teacher capacity, and inadequate infrastructure as key barriers to effective implementation.
She pledged that UBEC, in partnership with the State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB), will lead efforts to equip schools with computers and solar-powered infrastructure to support real learning.
“We’re committed to working with NITDA and NERDC to refine the curriculum, train teachers, and ensure effective delivery. Let us align the technical vision with grassroots realities to make a lasting impact,” she concluded.
To formalise the implementation of the meeting’s resolutions, a joint inter-agency committee was established to develop strategic plans that will ensure the effective rollout of the digital literacy initiative, to equip young Nigerians with the essential digital skills required to thrive in an increasingly dynamic and technology-driven global landscape.
EFCC Says Corrupt Politicians are Using Crypto Wallets to Launder Money
UBA Expands to More African Cities, Stamps Footprint in Saudi Arabia
NCC Speaks of Plans to Secure Telecom Infrastructure Nationwide
Africa’s Lawmakers Commit to Strengthening AI, Digital Health and Smart Manufacturing Frameworks
Ecobank Plans to Raise $250m Capital Through Private Placement
News3 days agoJAMB Accuses Student of Securing Admission through Identity Fraud
News3 days agoCheck Point Report Finds Africa as Top Target for Cyber-attacks
E-Financial3 days agoEFCC Recovers Funds Lost to CBEX Fraud
Telecom2 days agoNCC Speaks of Plans to Secure Telecom Infrastructure Nationwide
General News2 days agoAirtel Nigeria Drives BFSI and Utility Sector Innovation with Industry-wide Workshop
E-Financial3 days agoFinancial Fraud in Nigeria Surges by 45 Percent, 70 Percent of Losses Linked to Digital Platforms – CBN
Telecom2 days agoAfrica’s Lawmakers Commit to Strengthening AI, Digital Health and Smart Manufacturing Frameworks
E-Financial2 days agoUBA Expands to More African Cities, Stamps Footprint in Saudi Arabia