A Different Africa Please

We all get tired of hearing the same old stories about Africa. You know, what you get from CNN, BBC, VOA e.t.c It's always war, hunger, corruption, diseases, not good, bad, worse, worst ....
This post is not about any of that or the fact that one can often trace the root of the problems to the so-called developed world. This post is about how the Internet allow us to see the other side of Africa and get stories from Africans. Not Africans being paid by the western media to carry out western propaganda in local African languages but everyday Africans that want to tell their stories and express their thoughts using the Internet. Instead of reading about hunger, corruption and diseases it's a great relief coming across words like hope, innovation, technology and entrepreneurship. This is the required spirit to define the new Africa. The following are some the African blog sites I find particularly interesting.

Africa unchained
Timbuktu chronicles
Whiteafrican

African Business Directory

www.africanbusinesscontacts.com is an on-line directory for African businesses. So if you own or run a business in Africa, please register it there. I discovered some Nigerian firms there that I didn't know existed before. Go register now, maybe your next big customer will find you through this site.

smetoolkit Nigeria

nigeria.smetoolkit.org is a website dedicated to small and medium sized enterprises in Nigeria, I checked it out to see if there is anything useful for a person like me. Me and my colleagues run a software company that I believe falls into the S.M.E category. Unfortunately the site has no software in it's category of businesses. What a shame.

Am I African?

While growing up in Maiduguri, Nigeria. Most of my view of the outside world was shaped by what I see on TV. It should be noted that back in the 80s the internet doesn't exist and we do not have quick access to books and magazines from other parts of the world like we do now. So one's world view is largely determined by what he sees on TV. Back then we used to watch a lot of hollywood movies on the state television. The most interesting thing is the type of Africa I see in the movies. The Africa they show us is a land of savages and heathens that can kill one another over a piece of candy. Judging by the type of environment I grew up in I was quite sure that I wasn't African and my country was not in Africa. At least that was what I thought as a kid, because I've never came across the type of Africans I see on TV either in my town or any other town I've visited. When my older siblings told me that we are Africans I didn't believe it and thought it was a joke. I only realized and accepted that after being taught so in school. The question that then came to my mind is that if we are the Africans then who are those savages I saw in the movies ? It was later in life that I realize that those were the imaginary Africans that the movie makers wish were a reality.
The fact remains that as a result of such movies a lot of Africans were made to believe that though we are now civilized, our fore-fathers were once savages and were only civilized after coming in contact with Europeans. In reality the reverse can be argued to be the truth. I come from a part of Nigeria that was once a great Empire with a known history of more than two thousand years and a written history of more than one thousand five hundred years; the Kanem-Borno empire. We had great architects, scholars and poets when Europe was in the dark ages. We fought our wars not with sticks and bones but with Muskets, Catapults, Swords, Spheres and Horses. We produced great mathematicians, physicists and doctors we had well laid out systems of diplomacy that successfully averted wars. Savages don't do that. We built great cities and had built up cavalries of hundreds of thousands of horses. To the west was the great Malian empire and later the Sokoto caliphate. To the south were also great kingdoms like the Benin kingdom. And contrary to what some historians will want us to believe we were dark skinned people with strong curly hair then as we are still now.
So when does the problem with Africa started?, the problem started with the stealing of Africans from Africa up till today with the stealing of African resources from Africa. The wars, hunger and diseases will continue in some of Africa as long as the west still manufactures guns and needs our gold, diamond, oil e.t.c.

Leaving the politics aside, one notices that African historians have celebrated our great emperors and warriors but have given little attention to our scholars; so I'm mentioning here one of the many African scholars that I believe need to be celebrated. Back in the 1700s he provided several formulas for constructing odd-order Magic squares which is invaluable in the world of statistics today. He hails from Katsina of present day Nigeria. His name is Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Fullani al-Kishnawi. More about him here

Getting Out Of The Browser

If you hang around the programming threads of Nairaland.com you will notice that majority of the programmers are web developers. The reason for the preference for web/PHP development by Nigerian developers varies a lot. But one argument that keep recurring (especially on Nairaland) is that PHP is pretty easy to learn and get up and running with.

I've done a little bit of web development with PHP, but most of my programming experience is in developing standalone programs (compiling source code to binary the old fashioned way).
Based on my experience with both web and standalone app development I am of the view that, contrary to popular assumptions, developing standalone programs is much easier.

I find it really difficult (though not impossible) to maintain an elegant code when mixing PHP and HTML. Though there are ways around this like templates but that doesn't compare with coding in C++ or C# in terms of maintaining an elegant and clean source code.

Another major frustration one gets is in maintaining state. Because the web is a stateless environment, one needs to use tricks like hidden fields or cookies to pass data across different pages. The same can be achieved in conventional programming using public variable or passing values through method parameters.

Debugging PHP applications is like running backward up a hill. Apart from the absence of a debugger (as far as I know) one cannot use the old trick of printing to console. Because there simply is no console but a web page. I know that the Zend Studio comes with a debugger but one has to cough out more than $1000 to buy it.

I remember talking to a web developer friend telling him about the Firebird open source database management. I told him that the Firebird engine can raise events which you can handle in your client application through a call back function. Suddenly my friend became lost and asked me to explain again. After explaining for the second time without him understanding me, I remebered that my friend is strictly a web developer and doesn't know what events or callback functions are.

He doesn't really know how much he has been missing by living all his developer life in a web browser. When I compare him with most of my team mates who can develop both for the web and non-web platforms I see them like super heroes that can get in and out of the browser at will.

What most web-only developers do not know is that it doesn't take much to get out of the browser. With their existing PHP skills picking up a language like Python, C# or Java will be much easier than they imagined. It should not be forgotten that the web was primarily design to be a presentation medium and that any other functionality is an after tought. This therefore makes it very difficult to squeeze some solutions through a web browser.

I think the right thing to do is develop web apps for problems that are based solved by web apps and standalone apps for problems that are best solved by standalone apps. But how do you know when to use what ? You need to experience both worlds. So if you are a web-only developer try getting out of the browser for once. I bet you'll never regret it.

FOSS Nigeria 2009

To must of us free software users in Nigeria, there is a general assumption that Nigeria is a Microsoft territory. Many average computer users here have never heard of alternative operating systems and office suites apart from windows and MS Office. A few times I came across people that ask me "what type of windows is this ?" when they see my beautiful Gnome desktop running on Linux.



So you see what I mean by Nigeria being a Microsoft territory. Thanks largely to the wide availability of pirated Microsoft software. My assumption was that there a few of us free software users spread across the rest of Nigeria and a larger number clustered in Lagos. But that was to change soon.
In mid January my team received an invitation to attend a conference tagged FOSS Nigeria 2009. So what is FOSS Nigeria 2009?, one might ask.
According to the organizers it's the first Nigerian Free and Open Source Software conference. It took place from 6th to 9th February 2009 at the Center for Democratic Research (Mambayya House) in Kano. It was organized by Hutsoft Nigeria limited collaborating with the Center For Information Technology (CIT) of the Bayero University Kano (B.U.K).
Hutsoft Nigeria Limited is a start-up software company founded by some friends. One of the co-founders, Mustapha Abubakar is a K.D.E enthusiast and has been contributing translations to the K.D.E project. Quite naturally K.D.E guys kind of dominated the conference. When I say K.D.E guys I mean including some of the guys you see on the K.D.E blog. Two of them made it to the conference. Adrian De Groot who was introduced as the vice president of K.D.E e.v (whatever that means) and Jonathan Riddel who was from Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu Linux). Gnome's Stormy Peters was invited but didn't make it, although she sent her speech to the organizers which was printed and distributed to the participants.
The opening session was attended some important figures within Kano state. These include Dr Bashir Galadanci (commissioner for Science and Technology of Kano state) and Prof Attahir Jega (the vice-chancellor of Bayero University Kano)
Unlike most Nigerian IT conferences which were normally dominated by suit wearing executives this one largely has jeans (and sometimes kaftan) wearing geeks and a few important personalities in the Nigerian IT ecosystem.














Hutsoft's Ibrahim Dasuma

Jonathan Riddel

Adrian De Groot of K.D.E e.v

Talks were given by the following people
Dr Bashir Galadanci : Kano state commissioner for Science and Technology
Ibrahim Abubakar Dasuma: CEO of Hutsoft Nigeria Limited
Adrian De Groot : Vice-President K.D.E e.v
Mustapha Abubakar : Hutsoft Nigeria Limited
Jonathan Riddel : Canonical
Auwal Alhassan Tata : Center for Information Technology (CIT) Bayero University Kano (B.U.K)
There were also representation from Information Technology Association of Nigeria (ITAN) and the African University For Science and Technology.
The conference was attended by many B.U.K students a lot of whom were astonished by the possibilities free and open source software has to offer. A lot of them told me that they wouldn't have stuck with propriety software if they previously knew well about open source software. Before the end of the conference many participants installed various distributions of Linux on their laptops. Some of them were even brave enough to wipe out there Windows installation and replace it with Linux.


The last day of the conference was capped with a social event at Gidan Makama a museum located close to the Kano Emir's palace.

Koroso Dancers

There was some traditional Koroso dancing and lot of barbecue meat. One thing is clear about all these; FOSS Nigeria 2010 should not be missed.

NEIS 2008

This may be a little overdue to blog about, but it's always better late than never. The Northern Nigeria Economic And Investment Summit took place in Abuja from 6th to 9th October 2008. It was organized by the Conference Of Northern Nigeria Chambers Of Commerce Industries Mines And Agriculture (CONCCIMA). It's a response to the economic backwardness of the Northern Nigerian region as a whole.

My team participated in the event as part of the ICT group. The ICT group is formed by all the ICT companies that participated in the event. We were all lumped together by the organizers of the event. Companies in the ICT group are Viatech, 3D formula, Cerebro Systems, SDDS, Walfam and Frontier Systems.

The conference turned out to be more interesting than I initially expected. I attended most of the plenary sessions. There were really interesting talks by a lot of people (some of which I previously only used to see on TV). People like Aliko Dangote, Dr Mansur Ahmad of the Nigeria Economic Summit Group (NESG), professor J.D. Amin of Nigerian Universities Commission took part in the plenary sessions.

Sadiq Modibbo of Frontier systems gave a talk on behalf of the ICT group.

Dr Barth Nnaji of Geometric Energy also sent a representative. Geometric Energy is the company that built the Aba independent power plant in Abia state. According to Mr Nnaji they are currently trying to replicate that project in three Northern cities of Kano, Kaduna and Katsina under a project name K3.

The event ended up looking more like an All Nigerian Economic And Investment Summit and less about Northern Nigeria alone. As somebody stated at the event, you can't discuss a section of Nigeria in isolation from the remaining sections.

Based on the large number of southern Nigerian business men and women at the summit it became obvious that unlike our politicians, our entrepreneurs are relatively free of regional and ethnic bigotry.

After all it's the same money that is spent all across the country.