The Supreme Court of Nigerian has adjourned the lawsuit instituted against the federal government by states opposed to the naira redesign policy to March 3 for judgment, a week after the presidential election.

Three states: Kano, Kogi and Zamfara had on February 8, dragged the federal government to court over the February 10 deadline set by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) for the old N200, N500 and N1,000 notes to be phased out. The suit, which has now been joined by seven other states namely; Lagos, Ondo, Ekiti, Kano, Sokoto, Ogun and Cross River, is seeking to stop the CBN from implementing the monetary policy.

The Supreme Court had earlier issued an ex parte order restraining the CBN from enforcing its February 10 deadline. But the Attorney General of the Federation (AGF) Abubakar Malami, had argued that the apex court has no jurisdiction to entertain the case because the applicants did not include the CBN in the suit.

During the arguments on Wednesday, Kanu Agabi, counsel for the federal government, noted that the Supreme Court held that all reliefs are rooted in section 20 of the CBN Act. He further noted that the plaintiffs did not deem it fit to include the CBN as a respondent despite making reference to the apex bank 32 times in their originating summons and despite the fact that seven of the reliefs sought relate to the CBN.

Agabi, SAN, argued that the suit has nothing to do with the interest of the common man as claimed by the plaintiffs.

“The people who said they are fighting for the common man didn’t even bother to bring one common man along to court…even the Supreme Court had stopped collecting old notes before the restraining order was given.

“In all these processes, none of them has mentioned the common citizens. No one is complaining. They have not produced one single citizen who is complaining.

“Our processes have covered all the issues. All the cases should be dismissed. If court finds that we are right that under section 23 of the CBN Act, the defendants are crying in the wrong place, then cases should be dismissed.

“They made references to the CBN 32 times in their originating summons, yet the CBN has not been joined. Long before you made your order, everyone was rejecting the old notes, including this court. The President only acted to save the nation from drifting,” Agabi told the court.

The Kano State Attorney General, Sanusi Musa, SAN, who represented the 10 states, argued that the policy and its implementation did not follow due process.

“This naira redesign policy is an economic policy. It was never discussed in the Executive Council of the Federation. Our affidavit attests to that. The only body that should advise the President on economic policies is the National Economic Council, in which every state is represented,” he said. “The President did not consult the council. He consulted the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, who is not a member of National Economic Council. So, this policy runs foul of the law and the process.”

“This court has a reputation for saving democracy. It must do so again in this case and overrule the President,” he added.

However, the presiding judge, Justice Inyang Okoro, decried the use of the Supreme Court for trivial issues.

“The Supreme Court has been reduced to a customary court. Tenant slaps landlord, case must end here,” he said. He added that the Supreme Court is overburdened with excruciating processes with many cases to handle. The judge therefore called for the constitution to be amended to ease the apex court of the burden.

Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates said Google is likely going to see a significant decline in revenue derived from its search engine dominance due to the incorporation of artificial intelligence by Microsoft, its closest rival in the web search business.

Although Google has exerted more than 90% dominance in the web search industry for the past two decades, Gates believes Microsoft’s swift incorporation of OpenAI’s ChatGPT will help it wrestle off shares of the industry’s advertising revenue from the Alphabet’s subsidiary.

Gates said that on Monday in an episode of “In Good Company,” a podcast hosted by Norwegian sovereign wealth fund boss Nicolai Tangen, per Insider.

“Google has owned all of the search profits, so the search profits will be down, and their share of it may be down because Microsoft has been able to move fairly fast on that one,” he said.

Microsoft announced it’s incorporating ChatGPT into Bing, its search engine, in January – rattling Google to issue code red to employees in a bid to contain the threat that the development poses to its ad business.

Google accounts for about 93% of the global search-engine market, while Bing accounts for about 3%, according to web analytics service Statcounter.

In 2022 alone, Google posted $224 billion in advertising revenues, overwhelmingly eclipsing the $18 billion Microsoft posted the same year. The other search engine service, DuckDuckGo, also falls far short in the competition.

Microsoft, which betted $1 billion investment on OpenAI in 2019, saw ChatGPT’s humanlike contextual answers to queries as key to wrestling market shares from Google. ChatGPT has garnered over 100 million users in just about two months of launch, sweeping interest across professional fields and creating a chatbot frenzy that every section of the tech world is hurrying to catch.

Gates said on the podcast that he is surprised by how the development of AI accelerated in the last year, adding that it will be the “biggest thing in this decade.”

Microsoft is also expanding its use of AI language model to other services. Early this month, the tech giant incorporated OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 into its Teams Premium, expanding the office tool’s features with AI-powered capabilities. During that time, Gates told Forbes that AI is “every bit as important as the PC, as the internet.”

Google responded to Microsoft’s incorporation of ChatGPT into Bing with Bard, an AI-powered service designed to provide responses in a way similar to ChatGPT.

The AI race is unfolding amid concern that it poses a threat to critical thinking. While Microsoft leads the pack, Gates admitted on the podcast that he was not sure there’ll be a winner from the AI race, according to Insider.

While Gates believes the AI race is too open to call, Insider noted that he envisions AI’s integration into search engines as a “personal agent” that understands the requirements and style of users — replacing the need for separate services from different tech companies like what’s happening now with Google dominating search, Amazon owning shopping, Microsoft owning productivity tools, and Apple owning the devices market.

“A decade from now, we won’t think of those businesses as separate, because the AI will know you so well that when you’re buying gifts or planning trips, it won’t care if Amazon has the best price, if someone else has a better price — you won’t even need to think about it,” Gates said on the podcast. “So it’s a pretty dramatic potential reshuffling of how tech markets look.”

However, the cofounder of OpenAI, Elon Musk said there is need to regulate AI safety, because “frankly” It is “actually a bigger risk to society than cars or planes or medicine.”

While applauding the advancement of artificial intelligence, Musk explained that OpenAI, which he left as a board member in 2018, has been shifted from its original purpose.

“Initially it was created as an open-source nonprofit,” he said. “Now it is closed-source and for profit.”

If this is true that the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN)is looking for another foreign company, on e-Naira,  I have a message for it: do not do it. We can all agree that e-Naira did not deliver on its promises, as the new Naira scarcity tested it, and it failed. If that is the case, what is the next game plan on its evolution? In a nation with Touch and Pay, Interswitch, Flutterwave, and some really innovative banks, we do not need to source for these things from outside the nation: 

‘The federal government of Nigeria through the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) is currently in talks with a New York-based tech firm, to develop a new and improved system to manage the country’s digital currency, the eNaira….Bitt wrote in a statement, “We are aware that our partner, the CBN, works with various service providers to explore technical innovations for their digital infrastructure.” The company added that it continues to work closely with the Nigerian central bank and is “currently developing additional features and enhancements.”’

Simple things can make a product great. Just changing your blog image size from 800×450 pixel to triple that size could reduce your web traffic from Nigeria. Why? No mobile metered reader wants to waste money loading high resolution images. But a New York designer may not understand that for the Nigerian market, putting the highest quality images, and that becomes an own-goal, as people will avoid that website as it costs them tons of money to read contents.

Yes, business is not about technology, but solving people’s problems, and understanding how to deliver on the products to meet those challenges becomes strategic and catalytic. In the fintech space, local domain knowledge wins because commerce is local.

CBN: if you want manufacturers to source raw materials locally, it may be fair to source your secondary tech partners locally. Allow those young people to have the opportunities to pass or fail.