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.

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?

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 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.

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.

MAYO/PTC was actually the first Ed-Tech company in Nigeria and also the first place I worked and did my NYSC. We took UK accountancy and banking institute materials and used tech to modify and republish local versions of study text for students preparing for professional exams.

We also provided prep classes and corporate training. This was how we also started @SwiftaSystems, it was initially from tech training before we moved to product development and services.

For tech, we were self-taught but we created a new market for ourselves with education.

Education ALWAYS comes first before adoption when it comes to tech. We aren't doing nearly enough at the moment. Everyone wants to build products for the educated market and ignore the uneducated market. Uneducated doesn't mean formal school, it is about industry and paradigms.

Current Ed-Tech initiatives are focusing on basic education but market education is a significant opportunity. No matter how simple you think your product is to use, there will be many who will not use it until they understand the fundamentals and why it exists at all.

🔴🔴Syria's Kurds ready to get in bed with their worst

Last week, SDC's rep. Sihanouk Dibo stated that they would announce the signing of a new memorandum of understanding with a Syrian opposition party. Yesterday, Ilham Ahmed said that they are planning to hold a national conference for all Syrian opposition forces this year...

These rapprochements might be applauded by Western powers that advocate for regime change, but are disturbing for people in the region. After all, these are the same forces the Kurds have been fighting off for years, and that have taken large swats from the lands they held.

Areas such as Ras al-Ayn, Afrin, Tal Abyad and Suluk, which were previously under Kurdish control, have been violently taken and occupied by the same ‘Syrian opposition’ the SDC now wants to cooperate with.

Dozens – if not hundreds – of civilians and Kurdish fighters were killed in these clashes, and I can only imagine how the families of the victims of these radical groups will feel about the prospect of cooperation with their killers.

Can anyone fathom out how weapons like this make their way into the hands of terrorists in Nigeria?

These weapons are in boxes marked with serial numbers. Where there are serial numbers there are invoices or receipts. Which means it was imported. This is worrisome and raise questions about where the terror groups are sourcing their heavy weapons.

Weapons proliferation was once linked to the fall of Gadaffi. Libya was at one point the main source of arms to terror groups on the continent. For those unaware of the dynamics ill give a brief explanation:

When NATO bombed the crap out of the Gadaffi regime in 2011, Libya lost control of a large part of the stockpile it had amassed in over 40 years. The CIA made several calls for ground troops to be deployed to secure Gadaffi's amoury from falling into the hand of rebel groups.

The French kicked against sending ground troops, saying it will give the impression Libya was under a NATO occupation, Its just not worth the political capital to do so. The CIA made this call TWICE and TWICE it was shut down. The logic was securing those sites

-THREADE-
#Germany #China #5G #Huawei

In contrast to countries like Great Britain, Germany does not exclude the Chinese with 5G across the board. But now the cabinet has agreed on stricter rules for foreign network equipment suppliers.

The federal government has been arguing for two years, now there is a draft law, the cabinet is supposed to get it underway on Wednesday. In contrast to countries like Great Britain and Sweden, Germany does not exclude Chinese companies across the board.

But Berlin, too, subjects the use of companies to strict rules. This is a problem for the German network operators: they have made themselves heavily dependent on #Huawei over the past few years. In the radio network of Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone and Telefónica,

around half of all components usually come from Huawei. With the new 5G cellular standard, data can be transmitted in real time. This opens up new opportunities for industry, but also increases the risk of cyber attacks. The focus on security is correspondingly large.

The draft of a “Second Law to Increase the Security of Information Technology Systems” therefore now uses a two-stage test procedure. In addition to an examination of the technology, there should also be a political assessment of the trustworthiness of manufacturers.

@fvckinashman @KarlitoRichII @JoLuehmann 1. Thanks, Jay. Yeah... the Gracies have had connections with oppressive violence in Brazil from day one. Their recent interaction with the fascist dictatorship (1964-85) is still not sufficiently told. @UrbanAntonio has been collecting pieces here and there.

@KarlitoRichII @JoLuehmann @UrbanAntonio 2. There is another phenomenon that grew as an offshoot of Gracie-inspired BJJ: the neonazi BJJ groups in large cities like Sao Paulo, Rio and Brasilia. Their shady relations with the repression institutions is still not sufficiently documented, as a lot about ....

@KarlitoRichII @JoLuehmann @UrbanAntonio 3... what happened in the dungeons of the dictatorship. Anyway, they have established a strong tradition of fascist support in BJJ. They openly support Bolsonaro and we believe (but have no hard evidence) that several MMA ...

@KarlitoRichII @JoLuehmann @UrbanAntonio 4... fighters in Brazil were intimidated into publicly supporting Bolsonaro. It's not hard to understand why: their tentacles are long and they can end a career. If you go back to social media in 2018, all of them posted something ...

@KarlitoRichII @JoLuehmann @UrbanAntonio 5... supporting Bolsonaro.

If any of you find info written in Portuguese about that, send it my way and I'll translate it. We have some awesome people in the fights there like @souljacker and @JrGabrielBjj but the left is still microscopic in BR MMA.