Sometimes I wonder if we should be building certain types of African organizations with obvious gaps in people resourcing?Then I remember what my uncle and his friends did for the financial sector with MAYO and PTC.

Edtech has actually been in Africa longer than we think.

Epic Win!

That was our team. 🔥

I am in a meeting now that is so annoying but I want to take my mind off things that upset me to talk about love and marriage.

I have been listening to people talk in many @joinClubhouse rooms about what they expect from potential partners and laugh very hard each time.

I laugh because those expectations are what keep a lot of people single. Being single is also not a bad thing as I have been more single in my lifetime than I have been in relationships. I also learned a lot about what kept me single for all those years. It was largely idealism.

Let me digress a bit to one of the pivotal encounters in my life when someone literally came out of the darkness to evangelize to me.

He deliberately ran towards me to deliver a message as if he had been sent on an errand. He told me that God doesn't want perfection.

He said, God wants us to strive towards perfection but knows we will never attain it. He said I should not beat myself up whenever I don't measure up but I should remain trying. It is the act of trying that is desirable. God is the only perfection and we strive to be like God.

I became an Atheist after that conversation. I took the opposite direction in search for perfection. In a roundabout way, it led me back to faith.

That is also my story of love and relationships. The best came at my most skeptical moment after I gave up on everyone else.

What is the calculation of the super-rich Nigerian and why don't they run to the hills whenever there is an economic crisis?

I think because each crisis presents new opportunities with loopholes to gain advantage. I’ve once said that Nigeria is the world’s opportunity capital.

What Nigeria produces in abundance is opportunists. We don't do capitalism or socialism in Nigeria, we do opportunism.

Opportunism doesn't think long term about anything. It takes lemons and makes lemonade, then tries to create a lemonade monopoly to have outsize sales margins.

This is why we import when things are scarce. We trade when we are broke. Importation and trade are very short-term value creation processes without long-term upside. It is why our wealthy people are ”low-quality” according to @DoubleEph 😂

There is generally no production depth

Our banking system is also complicit in supporting this charade. It is why most of the nonperforming loans have been made to these same opportunists masquerading as the ”super-rich”. I missed the opportunity to add quotes in my first tweet. Their so-called wealth is qualified.

Something is fundamentally wrong when an economy is almost completely transactional. Yes, I have made money from fintech but I also see the long term damage of the current fintech hype. Nigeria as a country has been in one long hype cycle. This is why I keep saying it isn't real.

One thing I am grateful about is the ability I have always had to keep living my life on my own terms without being drawn into trends. I am an obsessive extremist. I don't do middle ground obsession. When I love something, I don't do half measures. I can also do dislike that way.

What I have learned is that there are some trends you can't avoid even when you don't like the hype around them. One of those trends is crypto.

My boss @osuide ALWAYS without fail, predicts big things in tech. He introduced me to the Internet with my first infoweb account.

He introduced me to crypto too in spite of my misgivings. I bought $300 bitcoin and promptly lost it. The fact that I could lose something valuable that easily was my pain. I didn't at first see the bigger picture of custody aggregation. This was before coinbase became a thing.

I had actually searched for the domains ”bitbase” and ”coinbase” and maybe I even owned one of both domains at some point, I can't remember. I was, however, a very early adopter who dropped off when it seemed to become a fad. I was even on some ICO advisory board at some point.

I remember I wrote to @iaboyeji and @TechProd_Arch to take it seriously at Flutterwave. I also had a chat with one of the founders of the local exchanges about not using the .ng domain and using .africa to avoid the Nigerian government and their potential issues.

There are many Africans with a free $50k to $100k lying idle somewhere than we think. They keep cash as a contingency for many reasons. Anything can happen. Positively or negatively. Cash is sometimes worse than a dead asset. They keep it anyway. Most likely outside Africa.

I was having a chat with my best man about African investments and I could have tried to teach him ancient Sumerian instead. Dude’s mind is closed to Africa. He would rather invest in Dubai as it made more sense. Problem is there are African investments with much better returns.

I think Africa has a massive PR problem. The problems are real no doubt but the opportunities are also real. The news about the problems overshadows the details about the abundance of opportunities. I still can't forget the lady at @Ashesi who told me about African abundance.

I have seen magic done in 2001 with $285m raised all locally in a month for a deal. Over 20 years later, African startups are still hustling in a demo day abroad for thousands of dollars that other Africans already have to give but don't or can't. It is a complete mindfuck.

There is a reason African people don't believe too much of the good news. They have been brutalized and conditioned so much with bad news that it becomes their frame of reference. Where else can a train track be attacked twice in two days and nothing is said by the government?

THE EVOLUTION OF OUR NATIONAL FLAG (1857-1947)

The INDIAN NATIONAL FLAG is not just a flag! It's a testimony of patriotism and seamless sacrifice. A symbol representing one of the oldest civilizations on this planet.

Let's hope what happened yesterday never repeats!

(Thread)

After the revolt of 1857, the first Indian flag was designed. The design was based on western heraldic standards with "Union Jack" in the upper-left quadrant and a "Star of India" enclosed in the royal crown in the middle of the right half.(1)

The flag was a symbol of the direct imperial rule in India.(2)

In 1904 the first Indian flag which stood for India's independence from the British was devised. The design was provided by sister Nivedita, an Irish disciple of Swami Vivekananda.(3)

The flag was red and yellow with an image 'Vajra' (weapon of god Indra). The phrase 'Vande Mataram' was written in Bengali on it. The red colour and the yellow colour signified freedom and victory while the symbol of vajra stood for strength.(4)

In keeping with year-end tradition, I wanted to share the best books I read in 2020 – a year unlike any other - with a list of reads heavily influenced by global events including…

…Race and social justice. While not a planned reading theme as I started the year, social injustices that have plagued our nation for centuries rose up in a jolting manner. May we pass on to our children and grandchildren a more socially just world than we received.

Frederick Douglass, David Blight

Douglass was a self-educated slave who freed himself to become a tireless speaker, political leader & passionate reformer. Even reading his speeches today, you feel drawn to the power, drama & personal suffering of this great man.

Bonhoeffer, Eric Metaxas & Timothy Keller

Theologian, Pastor, Church Leader & spy/traitor. Quite a resume for an influential young German aristocrat. Details the rise of Hitler & pure evil unleashed in the face of the pure good of Christ as seen through Bonhoeffer’s eyes.

So You Want To Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo

Jarring. We have so far to go as we confront the realities of systemic racism. Since reading I've sought out reverse mentors to try and learn more. Get comfortable with being uncomfortable. (Much profanity for those sensitive to such)

NEW:
BBC has seen the official internal management data for the new post Brexit freight border - roll on roll off lorry outbound flows to EU now at 98% of last February - though was 73% in January... officials say “back to normal”...

That is reference to lorry flow rates - which is what Cabinet Office key committees most concerned about post Brexit in terms of knock on social impact for supplies of everything. Government now confident its “reasonable worst case scenario” of 7k lorries in kent won’t happen...

That is not same as saying trade has normalised - drawing on multiple sources - ferry manifests, Kent checks, french official data - the level of empty lorries on the short straits is around 50%, and was normally around 30%... ...

traffic here was 67% normal in Jan - 82% in feb

Combining those and you get to around 2000 fewer laden export trucks a day in January, still notable fall now. Officials say much was displaced into last year by stockpilers. On other hand French transport sources suggest the higher value Tunnel export empties more like 50-60%

Officials have been tracking the commodity codes on the ferry manifests and have distinguished between freight flows hit so far in 2021 by general COVID downturn - eg clothing and apparel, and post Brexit transition - agriculture, food and groupage

Iranian Reformist Front (Jebheye Eslathalabane Iran) was officially founded yesterday in Jamaran, Khomeini's historic house near Tehran.

The founding meeting elected Behzad Nabavi as an interim head since he is oldest.

And also 5 people as a committee to draft the IRF's by-laws

The five are:

1- Outspoken Tehran MP @mah_sadeghi
2- Faraj Komijani, politician with a base in an official teachers union
3- Ali Bagheri (low-key politician)
4- @MansooriAzar , noted reformist politician
5- Rouhani's ex-VP @mowlaverdi

Some more pictures of the meeting.

The next meeting of the group is on Wednesday and will be held virtually.

The top question remains whether and who (and how many candidates) to run for the coming #IranElections2021

The founding statement says the reformists will run a single candidate agreed by all reformist parties but only if elections are to be "free, legal, competitive, just and constitutional"... which is obviously not what's going to happen!

The founding statement also includes big demands like call for a referendum to revise the constitution. But as usual these big words aren't followed by any actions.