General News
SAP Leading Technological Revolution among Young Students in W/Africa – Ajayi
Olajide Ajayi is the director FIRST LEGO LEAGUE (FLL) Nigeria. He is also a Software Engineer/Technical Quality Manager with SAP in Ireland.
SAP is the number one Enterprise Software Application provider in the world. Ajayi is currently coordinating the FIRST® LEGO® League Nigeria with the support of SAP and NITDA.
In this interview with Peter Ugwu, he spoke on their plans to develop next generation of scientists, technologies, engineers and mathematicians in Nigeria via FLL.
First LEGO League
This program is an alliance between LEGO®, the educational giant and FIRST, an organization in the USA. FIRST® was founded by Dean Kamen, an American and inventor, who made Segway, a motorized cycle. He has lots of patent in the US and just thought to himself, ‘I can create things why don’t I teach people how to create things’.
So he founded the organization called FIRST and then partnered with LEGO to form the FIRST LEGO League. FIRST® LEGO® League is an Educational partnership between FIRST® and the LEGO® Group. It is a program for a team (comprising of 2-10) of children from ages 9 to 16 with a different challenge/theme issued annually. It has three (3) components comprising of Project, Robot Game and Core Values.
In the project, teams research a real-life issue related to the theme of the year, create or proffer a new and innovative solution, then present this information (using different presentation models and props) during a timed presentation to the judges.
This is followed up by a timed question and answer period. The robot game deals with robot design, build and programming to complete a set of missions on a thematic table-top playing surface. Core Values – the FLL Core Values are the cornerstones of the FLL program.
They are among the fundamental elements that distinguish FLL from other programs of its kind. By embracing the Core Values, participants learn that friendly competition and mutual gain are not separate goals, and that helping one another is the foundation of teamwork.
The values are: We are a team; we do the work to find solutions with guidance from our coaches and mentors; we know our coaches and mentors don’t have all the answers; we learn together; we honour the spirit of friendly competition; what we discover is more important than what we win; we share our experiences with others; we display Gracious Professionalism® and Coopertition® in everything we do and we have FUN!
The program offers immense benefits to participating schools and students. It provides schools with a great opportunity to introduce technology into the curriculum to help sharpen students’ digital numeracy skills and also for teachers to get some good training in modern teaching and mentoring techniques.
Some benefits for students are highlighted by using the yearly Challenges, FLL: Entices kids to think like scientits and engineers; provides a fun, creative, hands-on learning experience; teaches kids to experiment and overcome obstacles; builds self-esteem and confidence; inspires kids to participate in science and technology; kids develop life skills such as communication, project, resources and time management and it also offers students unlimited opportunities to test their wits against those of their peers around the world and prepares them to compete favourably in the future within the global knowledge economy.
Partnership with SAP and NITDA
SAP supported us with equipment for Lagos and NITDA(National Information Technology Development Agency) responsible for Abuja.
As I said the program currently being supported by SAP and NITDA is open to more sponsors as number of teams grows year on year and more regions are added to existing ones.
SAP is channelling the future of kids age 9-16 by sponsoring the FIRST® LEGO® League in West Africa. The software giant have taken a leap of faith to support this program and the rewards are starting to show. Recently, at the University of Lagos Nigeria a group of young students called SAP Smart Teens from Onilekere Junior Secondary School Ikeja, a suburb of Lagos Nigeria came out victorious at the inaugural FLL program.
The event had over 300 students, mentors and members of the public in attendance. It was covered by most media houses including AIT, Daily Times, Daily Trust, Nigerian Communication Week etc. The program was hosted by the University of Lagos.
The FLL program is an annual event where kids demographic 9-16 are tasked with the responsibility of finding solution to real-life problems. It also embodies the Core Values of the FLL of Gracious Professionalism and Coopetition.
The most exciting for kids at the University of Lagos event was the Robot Game where the competitors have to carry out several missions on thematic tables using autonomous robots.
Target Demographic Under FIRST LEGO LEAGUE Initiative
The target age is 9 years to 16 years because it is an age bracket we feel will have the mental capability to learn the programming and the rigorous task that we want to put them through.
Possible Extension to Tertiary Institutions
FIRST® as an organization have other programs, one is the Junior FLL, which is targeted at the primary kids, then FLL which is targeted to nine to 16 years, then FTC which is First Tech Challenge targeted at the university. So we will be bringing that as well.
Place of Government in Pushing FLL
We have nothing from the Federal Government yet. We are a Non-Governmental /Not for Profit Organisation (NGO) and we have been running on a shoe string budget and been working with people on a shoe string budget.
You know that volunteering culture is not very popular in Nigeria, so everybody we have to work with we have to pay and most of these payments have been coming from personal pockets. We are so short on resources it is unreal, but we just decided that we will carry this through.
We will need other organizations within the public and private sector to support this initiative. e.g. Intel, Google, Telcos like MTN, Airtel, Globacom, Etisalat and other organizations that have the interest of kids at heart.
First LEGO League Competition in Nigeria
This is the inaugural FIRST LEGO LEAGUE competition in Nigeria and it is an annual event. So we give the kids the challenge about August and they work till September through November, December. They work for eight weeks and then we will organize a championship for them.
This year we started late because the resources didn’t come in until much later in the year. So we started in November however schools vacation in December delayed things a bit further. That is why we are doing this at this time.
Next year we will be doing the next one in November/December, so we can get the winners of the Regional championships in Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt and Enugu (Which we plan on including this year) to compete at a National championship.
We want to expand along the geopolitical zones. So we started in Abuja which is the North Central and Lagos which is the South West.
We hope to do the South-South and South-East this year so that we can have the National Championship in January. We have the Regional in December and National championship in January.
Selection of Schools
In Lagos we are working with public schools. We approached the Education District and we asked for 10 schools for the pilot phase, but they gave us 20 schools so we merged the 20 schools to 12 teams. Each team comprises of 2-10 students.
Assessment of ICT industry In Nigeria?
ICT in Nigeria is growing. It takes a visionary leader to turn things around and the Minister in charge is doing a lot I think some collaboration between the Ministries of Education and Communication Tech would help strengthen TechEd(Technology Education). Some of the schools we work with lack resources and the teachers lack basic ICT skills.
So one of the things we hope to achieve with this program is to teach the teachers so that we can build an ecosystem of trained ICT teachers who are able to impart STEM Skills to their students.
Fate of Participating Students and Schools after the Competition
Each school will work in their own school and the ones we joined together have been working cooperatively.
The program does not end after the season as the schools will continue working on honing their programming skills in readiness for the next season.
Government and Funding of Nigeria’s Knowledge Economy
The Federal Government is interested in capacity building for youth within the knowledge economy; thankfully we have a Minister of Communication Technology who is a technocrat and knows that technology should be placed at the core of our development.
We only need people to come up with initiatives such as this and I am certain that she would embrace them. We can’t expect the government to do everything so we need the third sector, public private to come in to fill these gaps.
Hope of Localizing FLL Tools for Local Content Development
What we do is that LEGO gives us a challenge every year and the challenge for this year is going to be “how do you manage your waste”.
Waste is generated everywhere across the world, so the kids in England will work on how to manage their waste looking at their environment.
The kids in Nigeria will look at the Nigerian environment and see how to manage their waste. It is localized and it funnels down to the local environment.
The kids in England will teach us how they want to learn. And the kids in Nigeria will teach us how they want to learn. It is an application and you apply it to your environment. It is a gestation that will determine the idea you are to throw forward.
Is Robotic Technology Not a New Concept In Nigeria?
It is a new concept in Nigeria and CODERINA is one of the pioneers to bring it to Nigeria. I must say the CODERINA team who are the regional operational partner of FLL have performed really well in such a short time. They only saw this program through my eyes and they hit the ground running and have been able to put together two regional championships in the first year.
Robotics is good for kids because it teaches them how to build, how to create things and changes the mindset that we don’t really have to make much because other people will make them anyway. This is a game changer and it will teach the kids that they can actually create something. Because we gave the students these robots in parts and they built the robots with the software we gave them. You have seen the results of their hard-work today.
First LEGO Legague in the Next Two To Five Years
In the next two to five years we want FIRST LEGO League to be running across the Federation and we can grow horizontally within the states and we can eventually have central points where kids can come and partake and learn about technology and its application for FREE. We want to take this program to the rural areas, and everywhere we can take it to because this is the future of education.
How Do You Recruit Teams For The Program
The FLL program is open to teams of 2-10kids (having two adult mentors) from public and private schools, after-school groups, churches or mosques group of kids.
The next recruitment session for teams starts in April through May and spaces are limited. Registration of teams is done by registering an interest on the organisers website www.fllnigeria.org or by requesting a demo through the outreach contact at [email protected].
Every June 19th, the world pauses to recognize something that, for millions of families, never pauses at all. World Sickle Cell Day is observed across the globe to bring sickle cell disease out of the shadows; to name it, to understand it, and to stand with the people who live with it every single day.
This year, the world marks the day under the theme “Closing the Survival Gap: Equity in Sickle Cell Disease.” It’s a phrase that asks a hard, necessary question: why should where you’re born, or what your family can afford, decide whether you live well, or live at all?
For us at Indwelt, that question isn’t abstract. It has names and faces we know.
Why this day means something to us;
Here in Nigeria, sickle cell isn’t a distant statistic. Our country carries the heaviest burden of the disease anywhere in the world; roughly 150,000 babies are born with it here each year, and millions of Nigerians live with it into adulthood. Behind those numbers are real people: managing pain that often goes unseen, navigating crises that arrive without warning, and carrying on with a quiet courage that most of us will never fully understand.
Some of those people are our colleagues.
Since our inception, we’ve had and still have team members who live with sickle cell. They show up, they create, they pour themselves into the work we’re proud to put our name on; and they do it while carrying something most of us never have to think about.
Our team member with sickle cell, put it to us simply:
“People see the work I deliver, but they don’t see the days I show up after a night I didn’t think I’d get through. Sickle cell is part of my story, but it isn’t the whole of me; and being a part of an organization that understands that, supports me and let’s me do work I’m proud of continues to make a difference for me. I don’t want sympathy. I want a world that takes this seriously enough to change the odds for the next person.”
Supporting them, through medical interventions and through simply being a workplace that sees them fully, has never felt like a policy or a perk. It’s felt like family looking after family.
That’s where our commitment began. Not in a boardroom, but in the everyday reality of caring for our own.
If you’ve ever asked; this is the reason we’ve chosen to anchor our Corporate Social responsibility around sickle cell, supporting initiatives that improve care, and backing the research working toward a future where this disease no longer steals so many years from so many lives.
We believe the survival gap can close. We’ve seen what changes when someone living with sickle cell is met with the right care, the right understanding, and the right support; they don’t just survive, they thrive. They build, they lead, they make beautiful things. We know this because we work alongside them.
So, our promise is simple: to put our resources, our voice, and our craft behind the people and the science fighting for better outcomes. To keep learning. To keep listening to those who live this reality. And to use whatever reach we have to make sure that, in this country with the world’s heaviest burden, no one feels they’re carrying it alone.
For someone living with sickle cell, care that comes to you and care you can actually afford aren’t luxuries; they’re often the difference between a crisis managed and a crisis survived. We’re proud to walk alongside teams doing that quiet, necessary work.
To anyone living with sickle cell, today and every day; we see your strength; including the kind that doesn’t look like strength, the kind that’s just getting through a hard day and showing up for the next one. You are not your diagnosis. You are not a burden. You are someone we’re honoured to stand beside.
And to everyone reading: you don’t need a CSR budget to make a difference today. Learn what sickle cell really is. Know your genotype. Have the conversation. Give blood if you can. Be gentle with the people around you who may be carrying more than they let on.
Awareness is where compassion begins; and compassion, multiplied, is how survival gaps close.
This World Sickle Cell Day, we’re thinking of our own. And we’re committed to doing our part, not just today, but in all the days that follow.
To our clients, we owe a particular thank you. Every brief you trust us with, every project we build together, every time you choose Indwelt; you are doing more than growing your business. You are helping fund the care, the awareness, and the research behind this cause. The work we do for you is quietly working for someone living with sickle cell, too. That partnership means more to us than you may realise, and we’re deeply grateful for it.
Awareness is where compassion begins; and compassion, multiplied, is how survival gaps close. This World Sickle Cell Day, we’re thinking of our own. And we’re committed to doing our part, not just today, but in all the days that follow.
Nigeria Police Force National Cybercrime Centre (NPF-NCCC) has uncovered a major telecommunications fraud syndicate accused of compromising a telecom company’s billing infrastructure and fraudulently generating data valued at more than N7.7 billion.
The breakthrough led to the arrest of several suspects and the recovery of assets believed to be proceeds of the crime, including nearly N90 million in cash, two residential houses, a mini-plaza, and a Toyota RAV4 vehicle.
In a statement issued on Thursday, June 18, 2026, DSP Unwana Imah, Police Public Liaison Officer of the NPF-NCCC, disclosed that investigations revealed the involvement of both insider collaborators and external accomplices in the large-scale cyber fraud operation.
According to the statement, the investigation was launched following a petition by a leading telecommunications service provider, which reported the unauthorized use of staff login credentials and a breach of its network billing system.
Preliminary findings showed that between October 1 and November 28, 2024, the suspects unlawfully accessed the company’s billing infrastructure and generated fraudulent airtime.
The airtime was subsequently converted into data bundles and distributed through a network of vendors operating across the country.
The criminal operation reportedly caused losses running into billions of naira before it was detected by the telecom provider, which promptly alerted security agencies.
“The Nigeria Police Force through the Nigeria Police Force National Cybercrime Centre (NPF-NCCC) has recorded significant progress in the investigation of a case involving Computer Related Fraud, Unauthorized Access to Computer Systems, and Theft of Telecom Services,” the statement said.
During the course of the investigation, operatives arrested several suspects and recovered more than 400 laptops, 1,000 mobile phones, Point of Sale (POS) machines, cash exhibits, and other evidential materials.
The telecommunications company was also able to reverse approximately 2,931.79 terabytes of fraudulently obtained data, valued at about N3.8 billion.
Further investigations uncovered the participation of insiders working alongside external collaborators to execute the scheme.
In a second phase of operations carried out in May 2026, NPF-NCCC operatives acted on intelligence and conducted coordinated raids across Kano, Katsina, and Zamfara states, leading to the arrest of key suspects identified as Musa Muhammed Kwandi, Nura Sadauki, and Aminu Muhammed.
Other suspects arrested include IT specialist Musa Hassan Mohammed, Samson Alisigwe, and Yusuf Shehu, all of whom are believed to have benefited from the proceeds of the fraud.
Through extensive financial investigations and asset tracing efforts, police recovered almost N90 million and seized properties linked to the alleged criminal enterprise.
The NPF-NCCC said investigations are ongoing to identify additional accomplices, trace more proceeds of the crime, and ensure that all individuals found culpable are prosecuted.
Olatunji Rilwan Disu, Inspector-General of Police (IGP) reaffirmed the Nigeria Police Force’s commitment to safeguarding the nation’s critical digital infrastructure and intensifying efforts to combat cybercrime across the country.
The African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) has urged Nigeria and the rest of Africa to strengthen intra-African trade and resilience to protect against geopolitical shocks.
In a recently released Trade and Development Finance Brief, titled: ‘Africa’s Trade and Investment Landscape’, which examines the structural challenges shaping Africa’s trade performance and investment outlook in an increasingly uncertain global environment, it pointed out that Africa’s trade landscape remained heavily dominated by the export of raw materials, including agricultural products, oil, gas and minerals.
The report, however, regretted that imports continued to be heavily skewed towards manufactured goods and machinery.
The report noted that the existing export-import configuration leaves many African economies overly exposed to unfavourable terms of trade shock on account of external headwinds, including commodity price volatility, geopolitical tensions and associated global supply chain disruptions.
According to the report, the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) remained central to efforts aimed at diversifying the continent’s trade base, strengthening regional value chains and increasing intra-African trade.
It further expressed that alongside the African Union’s Agenda 2063, the AfCFTA provides a practical framework for integrating fragmented markets, expanding industrial production and boosting productivity, with intra-African exports projected to increase by more than 20 per cent within a decade as implementation advances.
Also, the report further highlighted the importance of scaling investment in trade-enabling infrastructure, including energy, transport, communications networks, ports and logistics systems, to reduce the cost of doing business and improve cross-border trade flows.
It expressed that targeted infrastructure investment could support industrialisation, strengthen regional specialisation and improve Africa’s competitiveness as an investment destination.
It also pointed to a wider set of priorities for strengthening the continent’s trade and investment ecosystem, including regulatory coherence, institutional strengthening, economic diversification, improved access to finance for small and medium-sized enterprises and greater use of digital financial technologies.
Besides, the report stated that domestic and foreign investment were increasing across many African economies, notwithstanding the observed dominance of foreign investment.
It further mentioned that the direction of investment flows was uneven across sub-regions, with Eastern and Southern Africa receiving a larger share of foreign direct investment compared to Western and Central Africa.
Afreximbank said the findings reinforced the need for coordinated action to expand trade finance, improve trade-enabling infrastructure, deepen regional integration and accelerate value addition across the continent.
Managing Director, Research for AfreximBank, Dr Yemi Kale, said regional development finance institutions, including AfreximBank, were playing an increasing role in supporting intra-African trade through trade finance and related initiatives.
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