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.

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.

Epic Win!

That was our team. 🔥

There is this inertia that most people in business who think they are successful have that prevents them from acting on things until it is too late. It is why they are caught unawares by change.

I read ”Only the paranoid survives” and I am seeing it play out in real life again.

Constant paranoia doesn't mean acting like a crazy person or even a mean and greedy person. It means that you are constantly aware that adverse change can make you irrelevant very quickly. The speed of irrelevance is much faster now and it largely depends on team types.

Some teams can be deluded. They believe too much in themselves because of past glory that it clouds their ability to see future danger. When the unexpected finally happens, they turn on each other and blame themselves and abandon the ship. They have always been living a lie.

Some teams can be totally ignorant of what is happening around them and can have tunnel vision. They end up working on products that have become irrelevant before they finish. They still believe somehow that others will adapt to them and csnf understand why failure happens.

Some teams can have extreme keyman risk. One person knows most of what needs to be done and nothing works well when that person is not in the picture. This type is more prevalent than we can imagine. Once one person takes more initiative, others just become passive.

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.

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 Balkanization of Africa has long been a strategic aim of several foreign powers. As Zbigniew Brzezinski, a US foreign policy theoretician and top adviser to US President Barack Obama stated, a divided and warring Nigeria ultimately serves the interests of the United States.

The initial intention of the powers that be in covertly supporting Boko Haram was to destabilize Nigeria, trigger sectarian divisions and violence, and then rush in to ‘save’ Nigeria under the banner of military assistance and humanitarian aid. Today the powers that be

..has essentially created a conflict intervention industry. Some are testing and exhibiting new weapons system. Others are flexing their diplomatic influence. Private military contractors are securing lucrative contracts, with Russia leading the pack in this field with its

"Little green men" in Libya and Mozambique. Not to be left out Eric Prince, the founder of U.S based Blackwater, travelled to Abuja where he met with Nigeria's President and offered to destroy Boko Haram for a fee of US$1.5 billion. That offer was rejected. See the dynamics?

They criticized Eeben Barlows STTP involvement in Nigeria and then used the back door to try cut a $1.5 billion deal with the Nigerian government. Abuja chose the South African based Special Tasks, Training, Equipment and Protection (STTEP) International Ltd.

Why should we be careful when talking about a “jobs bounce-back” in South Africa? - A THREAD.

You don’t get better labour market economists in South Africa than the @NIDS_CRAM team, but the main finding of an “employment bounce-back” seems counterintuitive. What’s going on? 1/n

NIDS-CRAM does NOT show a rebound to pre-COVID employment levels. They report 700,000 job lost between Feb and Oct 2020, this is massive = 3.85% fall (broad definition). The authors of the employment paper say this could be as high as 5.3% or 960,000 jobs.

The authors @joshbudlender @ihsaanbassier (+ Rocco) also show that Oct employment is normally higher than Feb employment, super roughly Oct is plausibly around 102% of Feb. This means it’s plausible 360,000 jobs would have been gained between Feb-Oct *anyway*.

This would mean - within the study parameters - it’s possible COVID has caused up to (an outer outer limit) of 1.32 million job losses when comparing Oct 2020 with what we would have expected it to be in normal times. This is a total disaster in the context of the SA economy.

This is roughly what we should expect from the StatsSA QLFS. This showed 2.2 million jobs lost in first half of 2020, and 543,000 regained in Q3, meaning a loss of just under 1.7 million jobs in first 9 months. We’d definitely expect some more jobs regained in Oct-Dec.

[Thread]What makes a hadith authentic? The basics of #HadithLiteracy

Five criteria must be met for a hadith to be classed as authentic.
1. Morally upright narrators
2. Precision in transmission
3. Connected chain
4. Free from inconsistencies with other reports
5. Solitary reports must be free from reasons for suspicion

The first three of these deal with internal defects. The remaining two deal with external (or ‘hidden’) defects. The objective of these criteria is to ensure there be no chance of forgeries and to mitigate against the likelihood of errors in reports.

1) All narrators must be morally upright and known for their honesty. This is to eliminate all chances of deliberate lies in the name of the Prophet ﷺ. A morally upright Muslim would never lie about Allah and His Messenger ﷺ.

2) Precision in transmission is likewise necessary to mitigate against unintended mistakes. An upright narrator with weak memory, for instance, might not consciously lie but is nonetheless prone to erring when conveying a report.