Nigerians cheered. JAMB (Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board) had remitted N5 billion to the federal government. We saw it as government working. Glory, even JAMB can remit money to CBN for the good of the Nigerian people.

The agency also said it had so far remitted more than N5 billion to government, the highest ever in the 40 years of its existence.

A statement signed by JAMB’s Head of Public Relations, Fabian Benjamin, said in Abuja on Sunday.

Unfortunately, that does not make it right. When JAMB charges more than it needs to run its exams into our tertiary institutions in Nigeria, it hurts the future of Nigeria. I do not understand the basis for JAMB to be remitting money to the federal government.

JAMB is not NNPC (Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation). We know that NNPC exists for the purpose of remitting funds to the federal government. JAMB should not emulate that feature. It is totally unnecessary.

JAMB is a vehicle to test and ascertain the readiness of our young people to transition from secondary to tertiary education. It is not supposed to be a revenue generating entity for the Nigerian government. .

If that is the new vision of JAMB, to show efficiency in the utilization and management of funds, we have a problem. Yes, it is a problem, because it is not necessary. I was expecting the federal government to reject that money with this instruction to JAMB Management: use it to further reduce the cost of subsequent JAMB fees and next time only charge to be revenue-neutral.

The world is investing in the future of its young people. Indonesia has free education up to university level. In Nigeria, we are turning our government-only entity that determines who enters our tertiary institutions into a cash milking factory. That is wrong.

Yet, I do not support government waiving any fee. I just ask that JAMB keeps its money and makes sure it does not charge more than required. The only benefit poor Nigerians get from the government is tertiary education which is heavily subsidized. Allowing everyone to compete for the available spots, irrespective of income level, will help the nation.

We know that Nigeria does not have cash. But the revenue from JAMB will not fix anything. We know where to go for revenue: we have NNPC, LNG, and other entities structured to generate revenues for Nigeria. JAMB is not supposed to be one. And government should make it clear to JAMB that it does not need its money. Let the exams be affordable, accessible and revenue-neutral. Set the fees to the extent that you can cover all your expenses. Do not wire anything to CBN.

Of course, they need to commend the Registrar of JAMB for his leadership. He has shown excellence by turning JAMB around with excess cash capacity. Government must acknowledge that. But we just have to thank him while challenging him to focus more on making the exams more affordable over fattening our national purse. The kids will take care of our national purse, if we get their futures right.

First, I do not support cryptocurrency; I am a big fan of blockchain, nevertheless.  The most popular cryptocurrency is Bitcoin and it is made possible by blockchain technology.

A cryptocurrency is a digital asset designed to work as a medium of exchange using cryptography to secure the transactions and to control the creation of additional units of the currency.  Cryptocurrencies are classified as a subset of digital currencies and are also classified as a subset of alternative currencies and virtual currencies.

Yes, even though I am not a fan of this type of currency, it does not mean that when guys have brought it home, to Abuja, that I cannot write about it. A group has published a whitepaper for Nigeria’s first cryptocurrency. The name of the currency is ABJCOIN. They are also raising money via initial coin offering (ICO) around it.

An unregulated means by which funds are raised for a new cryptocurrency venture. An Initial Coin Offering (ICO) is used by startups to bypass the rigorous and regulated capital-raising process required by venture capitalists or banks. In an ICO campaign, a percentage of the cryptocurrency is sold to early backers of the project in exchange for legal tender or other cryptocurrencies.

What is Abjcoin?

According to their website, this is what it is:

Abjcoin will connect banks, payment providers, digital asset exchanges and corporates to provide one frictionless experience to use money globally. Abjcoin aims to provide a payment process and trade exchange between Nigerians and other part of the world. This is achieved through the Abjcoin global trade market where African fiat currencies can be paired for and against the Abjcoin, and also through it marketplace were goods and services can be exchanged between Nigerians and other part of the world in escrow payment through Abjcoin.

AbjCoin Blockchain makes use of the Proof of stake algorithm as a system of securing the network. Users who keep their wallet open to secure the network via staking will get from 1% to 100% interest per year (varies according to network weight)

Anyone can run the wallet and transact with the same anonymity as Bitcoin, or better. No personal identifying information is required to create and use AbjCoin addresses for sending and receiving funds both locally and globally.

Everyone shares the bank history, so it’s entirely transparent.It is extremely fast, you can send money to anyone in the world within seconds.There is no fear of been hack because there is no central server that AbjCoin blockchain can be hacked from.

All payments in the world can be fully interoperable. AbjCoin allows any bank, business or individual to securely send and receive payments anywhere at any time, with or without a bank account. AbjCoin increases global access to commerce.

I do not want to write so much here to avoid sending the wrong message. Please you invest or participate at your own risk. But let me say that the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Nigeria must lead in this sector and come up with regulations. You cannot stop blockchain and we need to know the modalities that will make it possible for industry players to connect into Nigeria’s financial sector, at scale and in real time.

The Industry Change

There are many activities in this space: “A consortium of Japanese banks plan to introduce a digital currency “J Coin” ready for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics as they respond to the threat from China’s Alibaba, which recently launched its mobile-phone payments service in the country”. Nigeria may need to have its own strategy.

The J Coin is designed to wean the Japanese off their heavy dependency on cash, which accounts for 70 per cent of all transactions by value. That is higher than any developed country, which have on average reduced cash utilisation to only 30 per cent. “We like cash, because Japan is a very safety-conscious country,” said Mr Sato. “But cash is not so productive so we have to change the structure from cash to electronic money.”

I agree, Nigeria’s Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) which handles business registration and incorporation in Nigeria has improved. If you have all your documents right, you can get a company registered within two weeks. Yet, to get that done, you may need to use a lawyer who understands the CAC world. That costs money and makes incorporating a private limited liability company to require expenses of  at least N80,000. The government part of the N80,000 is largely small with the bulk going to the lawyer.  You may say that the amount is relatively small for the lawyer. But when you note that few graduates in Nigeria earn up to N70,000 per month, you will understand that the process remains costly for artisans and makers who we need to formalize their ventures.

But despite the cost of incorporating, Nigeria is making progress, just as many parts of Africa, but we are still far behind. When artisans and innovators cannot incorporate, they become invisible. Most times, they are forgotten in the national industrial policy. That is a problem.

It takes less than ten minutes to approve certain documents towards starting a new business in New Zealand. At most, it takes a day to get a business approved to open its doors to customers. And all the procedures are combined into a single step. That is why the World Bank ranks it among the top five in its Doing Business report. This pattern of quick new business approval is similar in most developed nations where it could take from a day to a week. In the United States, it takes hours depending on the state. In short, in some states, it could be automatic if they can validate your identity digitally.

But move to Africa. It takes 136 days to get approval to start a new business in Equatorial Guinea. Why? Because the country’s Prime Minister must approve all new businesses. Yes, a Prime Minister must approve a small business to be operated by a college student in that country. By moving this approval to the office of the Prime Minister, the nation creates about 20 procedures compared to 1 in New Zealand.

Yet, Equatorial Guinea does better than another country, Guinea-Bissau. Guinea-Bissau needs 213 days to approve a new business. The fees and legal costs are a factor of 807 more when compared to New Zealand. So if an entrepreneur in New Zealand pays $1 to launch a new business, the counterpart in Guinea-Bissau will pay $807, in relative terms.

The whole outlooks show that only the rich can afford to create new businesses in most parts of the black race. In Haiti, it takes more than three years to get a building permit with many layers of bureaucracy.

I have created firms in two countries. In the United States, it took less than a week and all was done via the web. In Nigeria, it took weeks when I first did it in 2010. Sure, I do blame myself. I had “engineering” in my company name when technically I was not a Nigerian engineer (I was not registered with the professional body, so I cannot have a firm with engineering title. It is irrelevant that I hold a PhD in engineering.). Since I registered, Nigeria has made progress. Yet, there are still many hurdles we need to overcome. Nigeria remains ranked in triple digits in World Bank’s Doing Business. That has to improve.  I understand that the government is simplifying that process.

From Cameroon to Botswana, the experience is basically the same. The high barrier to incorporation makes it tougher for most business owners to operate and join the formal economy. The reality is that unless Africa finds ways to improve its business registration climate, most entrepreneurs will continue to operate in the informal sector thereby depriving the state much needed taxes and fees.

I used some World Bank numbers to examine the relationship between the Doing Business ranking and the percentage of a nation’ GDP in the informal economy. There was no surprise: a correlation exists. As the burden of registering businesses increases, the percentage of GDP in the informal economy also increases. So, Guinea-Bissau has more of its GDP controlled in the informal sector than New Zealand.

There are many reasons why this trend happens in Africa where we have disproportional level of informal economies dominating our GDPs. A key factor is that most business owners in Africa are not educated and their businesses rarely need government approvals to thrive. The woman that sells oranges and carrots by roadsides may not bother to register with the governments as there seem to be no major benefit incorporating the business will give her. The same applies to most African subsistence farmers.

Another reason is the cost and time needed to incorporate. When most people consider these factors, they decide to go under and operate in the shadow economy. That does not help government statistics and national planning.

Nonetheless, most of these business owners will be most willing to incorporate if the process is efficient and affordable. From Nigeria to Cameroon, Africa must work very hard to modernize most of its business environments so that people could be attracted to launch businesses legally. If they leave the system as it is, governments are basically encouraging their entrepreneurs to shun the formal sector. Certainly, it will not be the best model for development.

As we expect to diversify our economies, moving away from minerals and hydrocarbon, the inventors and  innovators can only make progress when they are formalized. That is the only path through which they can attract funding and scale. It is a message that must be communicated with policies designed and implemented to make it easier for dreamers to become makers. 

There is a major problem in the world right now. It is not North Korea. It is not oil price and certainly not any of the global political leaders. The world has one key challenge: social media which has been turned into a fakecial media.

If we do not do anything in the next few years, the world will live fact-free, because anyone can create its version of facts and propagate it. The implications will be huge and could challenge the fabrics upon which civilization is built upon. As you read how the U.S. presidential election was allegedly affected by foreign hackers, you will agree that man has the capability to deceive at scale with supreme outcomes. From Bloomberg newsletter:

Cybersecurity firm FireEye found thousands of fake accounts linked to Russia that regularly posted anti-Clinton messages. It found that on election day, one group of Twitter bots sent out the hashtag #WarAgainstDemocrats more than 1,700 times. Suspected Russian bots even caused the hashtag #HillaryDown to start trending.

This is indeed scary. People can use social media to create a distortion and have excellent results. For something to “trend” on Twitter means that the item is popular. It means the world has joined in a bandwagon with agreement in commonality. Simply, many people were deceived, but they did not know. Why? The contents seemed genuine and real. But it was not.

The Distortion

The biggest challenge today is that while TV and radio are regulated, social media which is the 21st century radio and TV is not regulated. While antenna TV can reach people bounded in a geographical area, social media can reach the world, unbounded. Yet, the message carried by social media is not controlled. The implication is that messages which cannot go through radio and TV can easily find propagation paths via social media. The Russians which are accused to have swayed the U.S. presidential election could not have bought airtime in U.S. TV and radio stations, but they easily penetrated the social media sites and executed their strategies. It was immaterial if the content was heard on radio or read on Facebook. The expected outcome was achieved. Facebook delivered the goods. No law exists today to ensure a fact-based world in social media as we have for TV and radio. It is not likely anyone that tries creating such regulations will succeed unless you live in Eritrea, North Korea and possibly China.

“Everybody realizes that the lines between TV and online are blurring more and more everyday,” said Meredith McGehee, chief of policy, programs and strategy at Issue One, a group that seeks to limit the impact of large donors on politicians. “We have television and communication law that was written in the 1930s and we have campaign law that was written in the 1970s. Neither is appropriate for the 21st century.”

The Problem

There is a real issue. And the issue is that people can have identities which are fake in social media. That enables them to intoxicate minds, accelerating fake news with no consequences. With the structure of the web which has served the world very well for decades, there is nothing anyone can really do. The openness of the internet is going to create a real challenge in the future. It will be a real chaos because this distortion effectiveness will get better.

“Social-media platforms offer the ability to target millions of users based upon a wealth of highly-detailed information,” John Sarbanes, Elijah Cummings, etc wrote in a  letter to the Federal Elections Commission. “As we have seen, the low cost of reaching these users equips hostile foreign actors with a powerful new tool for disruption of our democratic process.”

When the Nigerian Army and the IPOB members clashed in Abia State few days ago, it was tough to ascertain the facts. Social media presented visuals and counter-visuals that left many confused. Even supposedly real videos were disputed. This is big. It goes beyond free speech to speech with free facts. If the world fails to fix this challenge, the global order will be broken.

In Nigeria today, politicians caught on tape committing crime will say that their voices were computer generated. Courts are struggling to admit evidence because anything digital can be discredited. It does not have to be so.

The Future

The next U.S. election will have this fake news and propaganda problem. It is not going away. It will go 2-3 election cycles before the U.S. Congress will pass a regulation requiring Facebook to demand users to validate their accounts with government-issued IDs before they will have posting rights, at least in contents U.S. users can see. Clearly, Congress will threaten Facebook and other social media empires. The threat will be: do it or we will break you into pieces. Facebook will do it. Twitter will do it. And Google will also follow along. Where they fail, the heart of civilization will be irreversibly broken.

In Nigeria, government will increasingly go antagonistic as it tries to control its message. As fake news move upstream in the 2019 election now that the art has been launched in America, Nigerian Senate will take drastic action to curtail.

But there is a challenge: both America and Nigeria cannot fix this problem. But that will not mean that they will not try. Because your fake news may be my fact news, no one can regulate that.