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Nigeria 2023 general election; the worst of them all

By
Stanley Alieke
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0

I have been looking for the right word that will fully capture and express how I feel since yesterday morning when Mr Ahmed Bola Tinubu was announced as the president-elect of the federal republic of Nigeria by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).

I’m yet to find the right word that fully captured how disappointed I am. The right word for my current mood and state of mind is yet to find its way into the English Lingo. 

If I say feel terrible, I feel devastated and I’m transfixed they are all understatements of how I truly feel. I’m so sure as I am of my name that millions of Nigerians feel the same way too.

The presidential election held on the 25th of February which spilt over to the 26th of February 2023 is the worst election that ever took place in Nigeria. No other election, not even the infamous 12th June 1993 election come close to this shambolic display of failure and embarrassment that was put up by INEC on the 25/26 of February 2023. The current INEC chairman has written his name in the sand of time for conducting the worst but the most expensive failure of an election in Nigeria. Future generations will learn about him in history and social studies classes.

They were paid 3.5 billion Naira, they used four years to prepare, and they had only one job; conduct a free, fair and credible election, but they failed woefully to successfully execute that.

The indications of riggings were so visible to the blind and audible to the deaf. Some party agents have even confessed that they doctored the results, and some confessed that they were forced at gun points to doctor the results. For instance, the results that were churned out of Rivers state were unbelievable to everybody. We expected there to be rigging but not on this astronomical scale.

My grievances are clearly not about the winner or the defeated; in every contest, there must be a winner and the defeated but let the process be free, fair and credible and everyone will go home happy. What is making my belle spin is the so-called democratic process that produced the winner. International observers could not believe their eyes, and international media were dumbfounded over what took place; although they expected it, they expected electoral malpractice judging from Nigeria/Africa’s track record but they never believed that it will be on this full scale.

The APC party expected the election to be rigged in their Favour in Rivers state but they didn’t believe their eyes the level of the rigging that took place. It surpassed their imagination; I can imagine Tinubu screaming; “Ah, Wike, this too much”. This is the gravity of what took place.

Now the ball is in the court of the court and the election tribunal to remedy this despicable wrong and save the nation from this national disaster and embarrassment. The court should nullify the last weekend’s election in totality and ask INEC to conduct a fresh election, that is the only way forward but if the court wants to be lenient or take into consideration the cost and expenses that will be involved in conducting a fresh general election then the court can nullify the election of those polling units, stations or even state where there are clear cases of electoral malpractice; on that instance, the whole of Rivers state election should be nullified.

I know many people have lost hope in the judicial system, but my hope is unwavering in them; maybe I’m just being sentimental because I’m part of the judiciary as a legal practitioner. This is no time for the judiciary to apply technicalities of the law; this is a straightforward case; the election was rigged, and there were evidences alluding to the fact that the election was rigged, therefore the court should either nullify it or adopt the proper results of the election.

The whole world is watching and we Nigerians are watching with one single prayer point; “God abeg”.

Choosing The Best Business Model for Your Company – Tekedia Mini-MBA

By
Ndubuisi Ekekwe
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Join me tomorrow at Africa’s finest business school for entrepreneurial capitalism as we discuss the Great Business Models of the 21st Century. The boards of companies do one important job: hire a CEO. And the CEO does also one important thing: commit a company to a business model. In the market system, your business model determines significantly how successful you would be, because the business model is about how a firm could capture value in the market. So, a business model is supreme, and you need to understand the best across market territories and business sectors.

The CEO was fired for poor performance. Another CEO took over, using the team and product and found success. Check well, s/he committed all the factors of production in the company to a new business model.

Good People, pay attention to the business you run. I have a 53-page course material on this topic for Tekedia Institute learners. From the great Oriendu Market in Ovim, Abia State, to the banking halls of Lagos, to the trading desks of Goldman Sachs in New York, the greatest companies run the most relevant business models. Data supports that: more than 80% of finest digital/online companies have one business model in common.

Meet me in class: Zoom link in the Board and let’s discuss business models.

Ethereum ERC-4337 Token Standard Deployed

By
Paul Ugbede Godwin
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On March 1, EIP-4337 deployed on the Ethereum mainnet heralding a new token standard – ERC-4337. The token standard implementation was initially proposed in September 2021.

At that time, it was described as:

An account abstraction proposal which completely avoids consensus-layer protocol changes, instead relying on higher-layer infrastructure.

Account abstraction essentially allows Ethereum wallets to operate as programmable smart contracts. This would enable users to recover lost private keys, among other benefits. New users may no longer need a deep understanding about the technical process of setting up a wallet, transactions or managing seed phrases. ERC-4337 is a step in the right direction for mainstream adoption. Grandma will finally be able to send crypto to her grandkids.

These new smart accounts could also help onboard the next wave of users to Ethereum and Defi. As opposed to third-party External Accounts that hold one set of cryptographic keys, Contract Account wallets are programmed by smart contracts. ERC-4337 merges the two account types into a new one.

Furthermore, users can program different mechanisms to enable their private keys to be retrieved. Instead of writing down seed phrases, users could secure wallets with 2FA (two-factor authentication) or biometrics.

This could allow for storing cryptographic keys on smartphones.

In October, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin commented:

The big really valuable and necessary thing that ERC-4337 provides for account abstraction is a *decentralized fee market* for user operations going into smart contract wallets.

On March 3, Professor John Keeting briefly explained the advantages of Ethereum account abstraction. ERC-4337-enabled wallets could also carry out automated payments and set time-based spending limits, for example.

Account Abstraction” (ERC-4337) is here and it will change and improve wallet handling a lot: wallets without seed phrases, account recovery, transaction limits, and many other great features are now possible.

In December, credit giant Visa Proposal an automatic programmable payments system using Ethereum account abstraction.

ERC-4337 allows other wallets to sponsor your gas fees, enabling truly gas-free transactions. Imagine if a collection used its royalties to fund all gas fees for its holders or maybe we will start to see Ethereum gas fees sugar daddies.

Previously, when sending a user operation to be signed by an ERC-4337 verifying paymaster, you had to fill out the paymasterAndData input with random bytes so it matches approximately the length of the output you expect to receive, Kristof Gazso noted.

This was because while the paymasterAndData field was not getting hashed and signed, the OFFSET of the paymasterAndData was (read up on abi encoding to understand how it works).

Below is how the packing was done before: so if you used as an input an empty array of bytes for the paymasterAndData, as is the default, the offset would be lower than expected than after you input the real paymasterAndData, invalidating the signature.

The solution is to cut the offset of the paymasterAndData and the offset of the signature out of the packing, so it doesn’t get hashed. however, they are in the middle of the encoding, before the initCode and callData, two values which we need! so we use inline assembly to extract the parts before and after, and glue them back together before returning them.

Not only is this more dev friendly (you no longer have to insert random bytes for seemingly no reason in the paymasterAndData field of your users’ ops before signing them) but it actually also costs 149 less gas.

On March 2, Ethereum developers delayed the Shanghai staking hard fork until the middle of April. They confirmed that the final testing phase on the Goerli testnet will go live on March 14. The latest upgrade is a big step forward for the network. However, BTC losses are pulling ETH prices down today.

The asset tanked 4.8% during the Friday morning Asian trading session. As a result, ETH has plunged to a two-week low of $1,570 at the time of writing. Ethereum prices are currently 68% down from their November 2021 all-time high of $4,878. However, the asset remains within its range-bound channel as six weeks of consolidation continues.

Zoom Fires President Only Eight Months After Appointment

By
Ojukwu Emmanuel
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0

Video conferencing company Zoom has abruptly terminated the employment of its president Greg Tomb only eight months after he was employed at the company.

According to a SEC filing, the former Google executive will receive severance benefits in line with his employment arrangements, which are payable upon a termination without cause. The move is effective today, Friday, March 3.

A Bloomberg report reveals that Tomb was on a $400,000 annual salary and had been granted $45 million in stock that would vest over four years. Tomb had taken a high-profile role at Zoom during his short tenure, appearing on earnings calls and overseeing the company’s sales operation.

Before his sack, in an interview with Bloomberg during the January World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Tomb spoke optimistically about Zoom’s growth potential, while acknowledging that the company faced more competition, shortly after, the company announced the layoff of employees.

It is however unclear who would replace Tomb as president of Zoom, although, a spokesperson from Zoom disclosed that the company won’t find a replacement. 

Zoom has “abruptly” fired its president, reported Bloomberg, with effect from Friday. According to a regulatory filing, former Google exec Greg Tomb, who only joined Zoom Video Communications in June, will receive severance benefits following his “termination without cause.” Tomb was on a $400,000 annual salary and had been granted $45 million in stock that would vest over four years, per Bloomberg. Earlier this week, the video-conferencing firm announced better-than-expected earnings, as well as a 27% year-over-year jump in large enterprise customers.

Zoom laid off about 1,300 employees as part of a 15% workforce reduction in February, while CEO Eric Yuan reduced his own salary by 98% for the fiscal year and is forgoing his 2023 bonus. (LinkedIn)

Tomb sudden sack was taken as a negative by some analysts at Wall Street. Analyst at Citigroup Inc. Tyler Radke wrote in a note to clients that it’s “hard to read this in a positive light,” as the sudden timing and limited language detailing the departure “gives investors plenty of leash to speculate on the reasons behind the departure.”

Shares of the video-conferencing software company fell as much as 2% in premarket, putting them on track to extend their decline this week to more than 6%. Tomb’s termination comes after Zoom announced last month that it was laying off about 1,300 employees, 15% of its workforce.

According to the company’s CEO Eric Yuan, via a blog post, he disclosed that the decision to trim the company’s workforce was necessitated, owing to the fact that the company hired too many staff during the peak of the covid-19 pandemic to support the quick rise of users on the platform.

Yuan acknowledged taking the blame for the company’s unfriendly condition and also disclosed that each organization across Zoom were impacted by layoffs, as a single departure was not taken lightly. By showing accountability not just in words but actions, further went on to slash his salary for the coming fiscal year by 98% also, forgoing his FY23 corporate bonus.

Also, members of his executive leadership team will reduce their base salaries by 20% for the coming fiscal year while also forfeiting the FY23 corporate bonuses.

Zoom’s revenue increased 4% year over year in the quarter, which ended on Jan. 31. It signified a dramatic slowdown from the quadrupling of revenue that Zoom enjoyed in 2020 and 2021 when consumers and businesses flocked to the video service during the Covid pandemic.

The company had its first net loss since 2018 in the quarter, losing $104 million compared with a net income of about $491 million in the year-ago period. The loss stems from stock-based compensation costs.

Twitter Rolls Out Blue Subscription to 20 New European Countries

By
Ojukwu Emmanuel
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0

Microblogging platform Twitter has rolled out its Blue subscription to more than 20 new countries in Europe.

The new countries which Twitter users can now subscribe to the blue subscription, include Greece, Sweden, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Slovakia, Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Finland, Cyprus, Denmark, Bulgaria, Austria, Latvia, Belgium, Czech Republic, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, and the Netherlands.

Twitter Blue’s recent expansion will see the feature available in more than 35 countries across the world. The subscription will give subscribers access to a handful of perks on the Twitter platform for a fee of $8 per month.

Some of these perks include, a reduction in the number of ads, a blue verification checkmark, the ability to post videos up to 60 minutes long, longer Tweets of up to 4,000 characters, early access to Twitter Blue Labs features ( Twitter is working on but hasn’t officially released yet), and several others. However, the reduced ads component isn’t live yet and Twitter hasn’t offered a firm timeline for when that will change.

The feature is optional and users certainly don’t need it to enjoy Twitter, however it is a paid add-on that can enhance a user’s experience. Twitter reserves the right without notice to remove a user’s blue checkmark at any time in its sole discretion without offering a refund, including if such user violated the company’s Terms of Service or if a user account is suspended.

Twitter Blue has been buffeted by a myriad of changes since Elon Musk took over as the company’s CEO in October 2022. The subscription was initially launched in 2021, offering ad-free articles for $2.99 a month. However, Musk raised the cost to $8 a month and granted subscribers a blue checkmark.

Meanwhile, the feature was quickly disabled after users were able to impersonate official accounts. The subscription has since been relaunched to offer a collection of features that free users won’t have access to on Twitter.

Instead of just the regular Blue checkmark, the platform introduced multi-coloured checkmarks (Blue, Yellow, Grey) to indicate different things. The Blue verification badges are those that verify the authenticity of accounts.The yellow or gold badge is used to verify official company or media accounts on Twitter.

The grey checkmark according to Twitter is a way to certify certain profiles, such as government, political party, media and brand accounts. Twitter also says it applies to “certain other public figures” without any specifics.

It would be recalled that Musk has been clear in the months leading up to his acquisition that he wanted to revamp how Twitter verifies accounts and handles bots. He is currently keen on growing subscriptions to become half of the company’s overall revenue.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk has many investors in his other company called  Tesla. Watch out, Twitter may return to the market soon.

Individual investors still can’t get enough of Tesla. So far this year, they’ve poured $13.6 billion into its shares, zooming toward the record sum of almost $17 billion splurged in 2022: The EV maker is the hottest share around, followed by Apple and Amazon. The fact that Tesla’s investor day on Thursday produced little news didn’t deter fans from buying the dip that followed, either. Still, rising interest rates and doubts about the company’s strategy have set a lower floor for shares — as of Friday, Tesla stock remained about 50% lower than their November 2021 peak of $409.97.

CEO Elon Musk touted the heat-pump technology that Tesla uses in its cars during investor day, saying he was “extremely excited” to build a home HVAC system based on it. (LinkedIn News)

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