Nigerian President Bola Tinubu has reached a deal with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to lift the visa ban it placed on Nigerians, according to a statement issued by the presidency.

The statement titled: “President Tinubu secures landmark deal with United Arab Emirates across sectors; visa ban on Nigerian travelers is lifted immediately” and was signed by Chief Ajuri Ngelale, Special Adviser to the President on Media & Publicity, said that Tinubu and the President of the UAE, Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, on Monday in Abu Dhabi, finalized the historic agreement.

It disclosed that the agreement “has resulted in the immediate cessation of the visa ban placed on Nigerian travelers.”

It could be recalled that the UAE stopped issuing visas to Nigerians late last year, following a series of issues involving Nigerians living in the oil-rich country, with some resulting in diplomatic interventions.

The UAE’s total visa ban follows earlier rules restricting visa issuance to Nigerians under the age of 40. A statement issued by the Nigerian Ministry of Foreign Affairs last September said some Nigerians “were denied entry and advised to return to their country and apply for the appropriate visas” because they ignored the rules.

Other issues, including the failure of Emirates Airlines to repatriate its trapped fund – which resulted in the company’s decision to suspend its operation in Nigeria, contributed to the dented relationship between Nigeria and the UAE.

On Sunday, Ngelale announced that Tinubu will meet with the leadership of the UAE during a technical stopover in Abu Dhabi, UAE, after the President’s departure from New Delhi, India.

The presidential spokesperson said the meeting will serve as a follow-up discussion to address specific, salient issues within the bilateral relationship after conversations held during a recent visit by the UAE Ambassador to the President at the State House in Abuja.

“The President is to address lingering bilateral issues while maximizing the opportunity of the stopover to equally advance his investment promotion objectives with high-level authorities in the public and private sectors of the United Arab Emirates,” he said.

Ngelale added that besides lifting the visa ban, the historic agreement has enabled both Etihad Airlines and Emirates Airlines to immediately resume flight schedules into and out of Nigeria, without any further delay.

“As negotiated between the two Heads of State, this immediate restoration of flight activity, through these two airlines and between the two countries, does not involve any immediate payment by the Nigerian government,” he said.

In addition, presidents Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and Tinubu established an agreed framework, which will involve several billions of U.S. dollars worth of new investments into the Nigerian economy across multiple sectors, including defense, agriculture, and others, by the investment arms of the Government of the United Arab Emirates, according to the statement.

“Additionally, President Tinubu is pleased to have successfully negotiated a joint, new foreign exchange liquidity programme between the two Governments, which will be announced in detail in the coming weeks,” he said.

How do you launch an AI startup if data is a very important component of that business? There are many ways, and  I will provide the main two here: 

(1) Spend tons of money at launch to collect data which will be used to improve your AI models. A good case study is Temu, an ecommerce company, which uses AI to soup recommendations on what to buy and wear. Temu spent close to $5 million during the last Super Bowl, America’s largest yearly event, to quickly collect data to improve its models. With millions on-boarded as a result of that massive media blitz, Temu has enormous data to quickly improve its technology. 

(2) Partner with a company which has tons of data. That is for OpenAI, the owners of ChatGPT. By partnering with Microsoft, ChatGPT became a category-king product which would not have been possible without the decades-old data which Microsoft provided. Indeed, besides the code, the best raw material here is the data! And I posit that there are better AI models somewhere in the universities. But those schools do not have the datasets which Microsoft has across its product lines like Xbox, Bing, etc.

If I have explained how to launch AI startups, what of a fintech company which focuses on payment (i.e. a paytech) in Africa? I can posit that starting a startup in most African markets with a clear mission to offer pure-payment is largely stale. To a large extent, in markets like Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, etc, payment is not necessarily a major friction anymore. And if that is the case, launching a paytech company may be very hard. Indeed, the incumbents have built moats and getting to the castle may be challenging. 

So, to launch a paytech, you need to add many other goodies as part of the product. Indeed, your payment must come with other services because just collecting payment will not take you far. And as you offer those services, explore partnerships because the most important layer now is distribution. Your tech means really nothing; what matters now is scale via partnerships since pure play organic growth is harder. Simply, you have to connect into promising ecosystems, thereby offering a lot more than payments to your customers.

Such could include inventory management solutions, accounting, project management tools, etc which many of your customers can use to run their operations. In other words, you need to offer more value than the ability for users to just move money via your channel. Those channels are everywhere and adding another one may not bring growth.

That is what everyone is doing: Flutterwave is in partnership with an Indian bank even as Interswitch expands Google Pay in Nigeria.

Interswitch, a leading African integrated payments and digital commerce platform company headquartered in Lagos, has integrated Google Pay on its Payment Gateway (IPG) platform.

This integration will enable individuals and businesses in Nigeria to make a wide range of financial transactions, including in-person contactless purchases, for goods and services, peer-to-peer money transfers, and more, using their mobile devices.

In this Tekedia AI in Business Masterclass courseware [we used AI to record some of the modules], we explain what happens with AI, Data and Value in AI Projects. In my last post here , I listed some ways to launch AI startups; this short video notes the sequence to turn that data into value. Remember: the most important phase is the AI readiness assessment, and there, you examine the business case and technical feasibilities for that project.

Comment on Feed

Comment 1: What a valuable piece of content. ?
Prof, I completely agree with you.

It is very true that the most important phase is the AI readiness assessment, which involves checking for both the technical and business factors for successful AI projects.

It’s very important that development teams understand how serious this phase is.

It’s not just about technology. The most important factor is identifying valuable business problems where AI can provide significant business value and competitive advantage. Focusing on the business needs comes first. The business case justifies the investment.

Also, on the technical side,

From my opinion, focusing on data health comes first – Bad data equals bad models and so data collection, labeling, cleansing, security, monitoring has to be rigorous. I consider this part of the pain in building your own model or fine-tuning an existing one.

The importance of doing a readiness assessment cannot be overemphasized.