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.

MTN 3G and Linux

If you have subscribed to MTN Nigeria's 3G internet service and want to use it with your linux box then this might help you to get things working. Note that the following procedure is not restricted to MTN 3G alone. It can be used to connect to other networks' 3G or gprs service.

I am using ubuntu linux 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) with the Huawei E170 usb modem supplied by MTN Nigeria.

If you are also using ubuntu 8.10 then things are a bit more easier. The following steps are what you need to do.

1- Right click on the network icon on the top panel and select "Edit Connections" this will bring up the network connections window

2- Select "Mobile Broadband" tab

3- Click on "Add". A wizard (druid in linux) will come up

4- Select Nigeria from the country list and you will get a list of mobile operators in Nigeria.

5- Select MTN , click "Next" and "Apply"

The next time you left-click on the network icon on the panel you will get a list of connections. Select the one you just created "MTN" and you will be connected.

Now you are ready to start surfing.

If you are not using Ubuntu 8.10 or you still can't browse after connecting then the following steps might help.

I am assuming you have a program called wvdial shipped with your distro. If it's not there then you will have to install it.
To check wether you have wvdial, open a terminal window and type wvdial . If you get any other message apart from "wvdial: command not found" then you have wvdial on your system.

Now you need to edit the wvdial configuration file located at /etc/wvdial.conf.
type sudo gedit /etc/wvdial.conf
this will open the configuration file in gnome's text editor with write previlege. If you are not using ubuntu/gnome open it with the appropriate method on your distro. But you need to open it with root privilege so that you can have read/write access to the file.

this is the configuration on my system

[Dialer Defaults]
Phone = *99#
New PPPD = yes
Stupid Mode = on
Dial command = ATDT


[Dialer MTN]
Username = web
Password = web
Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0
Baud = 460800
Init2 = ATZ
Init3 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
ISDN = 0
Modem Type = Analog Mode

put the following configuration and save the file. If you want to know more about the configurations then check the wvdial manpages or google for more info on wvdial.

Now in the terminal window type "sudo wvdial MTN"

A series of messages will pass over the console screen.
If you got a message "CONNECT" followed by some IP addresses then you are on.

Open your browser (firefox in my case), uncheck the "Work Offline" option under the file menu and browse away.

Interswitch and web merchants

If you lived in Nigeria in the last 4 years you must be familiar with interswitch Nigeria or at least the ATM cards they issue through most Nigerian banks. Now interswitch and the banks have done a great work in providing those ATM services. And they made life a lot easier for us. interswitch also has an online payment gateway which they call interswitch webpay. This enable web merchants to accept payment from any interswitch card holder.

Think of the possibilities here. The last time I googled for the statistics there are approximately 17 million interswitch card holders and 10 million internet users in Nigeria. But there are only 200 web merchants that accept interswitch payment. Why are Nigerian web merchants not jumping on this opportunity? because interswitch won’t let them.

First of all the entry fee of integrating interswitch webpay interface to your website is just too outrageous. One has to pay N150,000 (one hundred and fifty thousand naira) per site. I thought that was just an initial price and will eventually come down, but three years has passed and it’s still 150 grand.

The second and the most annoying reason is the technology interswitch is using. When last did you hear of Java applets ? As far as I know java applets is an obsolete technology now. Well that’s what interswitch is using. Your customer’s browser must have sun java plug-in for them to pay you through interswitch. That means downloading at least 26 megabytes (if they don’t already have java run time+plug-in) simply to make payment on your site. With the type of Internet speed most widely available in Nigeria, I think going to a banking hall and paying into an account will be much faster. Even if you have the plug-in, the webpay applet is extremely slow to load which makes the processes considerably painful.

Recently there have been advertisements in national dailies by interswitch about their new improved chip based cards called “verve”. I do not know what pain this new cards solve but I’ve never heard any cardholder complain that his/her card is magnetic striped and he/she really needs a chip based one. instead of bringing new cards that do essentially what the old ones do interswitch would have changed it’s webpay interface to something that is supported by browsers out of the box. html+https anybody ?