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Andy Obuoforibo Profile picture
Andy Obuoforibo
@andyRoidO
Head Of Product @FoundersFFA. Also Country Lead (🇳🇬). VC. Chief Minapakabo I of Okochiri Kingdom. Geekery. Global Village Chief. 🇳🇬🇺🇸🇺🇬
2 subscribers
Jan 14 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
In my opinion, Nigerian commentary exaggerates young Nigerians' desire for quick wealth and lack of willingness to put in the work.
All your Chowdeck/Glovo delivery folks are young people putting in work.
Your uner drivers.
Waiters.
Security.
Bank staff.
Teachers.
Traders. The devs, PMs, designers, growth hackers, and operators in every startup.
The carpenters making furniture.
POS agents.
Electricians.
Plumbers.
Lawyers.
Doctors.
Laundry people.
Dec 3, 2023 • 12 tweets • 4 min read
TL debate about Jaja, Opobo, Ibani, origins etc.
Mostly from honest oversimplification, applying a Nigerian lens to a maybe uniquely Ijaw phenomenon.
Ijawness (especially Eastern Ijawness) can be adopted after birth.
Short new thread to explain.
Jaja was born Igbo, to Igbo parents, in Igboland.
This wouldn't have been a strange/uncommon origin for many fellow Ijaws in the Ijaw State of Ibani.
Others were born Ijaw to Ijaw parents.
Others mixed.
But in Eastern Ijaw culture, origin is irrelevant.

Mar 27, 2023 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
Yes, let's be realistic.
What does reality say?
Reality says that without serious financial contribution from LP, OBIDIENTS funded a Presidential campaign that got the highest votes.
You don't need to start from defeatist position that only candidates can fund party.
Here's how: We saw Obidients crowdfunding for *everything* on the fly, as needs arose.
We saw donations in cash and kind.
We saw remittances from abroad.
This money came in because people believed and trusted.
Chasing the quick bucks of nomination forms endangers that trust.
Jun 23, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Yup. Our Identity Management systems are fragmented for non-technical reasons (corruption and bureaucratic silos).
Compare with what the Indian Government did with @India_Stack: A single ID management system, with an API all govt agencies can consume for their ID solutions. You know why INEC can't give you your PVC immediately you register? Because INEC doesn't know whether or not you've already registered elsewhere. They can't run duplicate checks on millions of records in 200K+ locations in realtime.
Jun 22, 2022 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
Listening to @SEzekwesili interviewing the MD of a 38-year-old resort near Badagry. Fascinating to hear her talk about how the business environment has changed in 4 decades. They have 20 hours of grid power a week. A WEEK. 200-room resort. Think of all the diesel needed to run those gens?
Jun 8, 2022 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
I am grateful for Peter Obi's candidacy, regardless of the outcome, because it may be giving Coconut Head/Soro Soke Generation the practical political apprenticeship they need to overthrow Establishment parties. Young folks decided they love the idea of an Obi presidency. Because he was seeking an Establishment Party ticket, they got interested in internal Establishment Party politics. They learned how delegates work etc. They decided they don't like what they hate. But they got educated
Jun 1, 2022 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
The poor design thinking in the structure of our road networks has doomed us to have okadas.
In transportation theory, there's something called the "First Mile Problem". Many big cities face the problem of how to get people from their homes to the bus/train.
Lagos's own is worse. Lagos has few "connecting roads" between inner roads and the main road in an area. This forces inner roads to be too long to trek. Since buses (danfos/BRTs) only run on main roads, okadas/kekes must appear.
If we had a better "connecting road tier", small buses could run there.
May 31, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Beautiful. It makes sense that DALL-E is doing this. I wonder if these "words" are a representation of how D "maps" concepts in its mind, such that the more 2 concepts are related, the closer the results of some "hashing function" using each of their strings as input in turn. Human languages are inefficient for a fresh learner because similar graphemes or phonemes map inefficiently to similar concepts.
Take "ring" and "king". Almost identical phonemes and graphemes, but wildly different meanings.
Jan 24, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
One thing I find fascinating about early Christian theology is how so many of the Church Fathers chose Traducianism (idea that souls are passed from parents to child) over Creationism (that God created each soul at conception) because the former justified Original Sin. They saw clearly that traducianism was problematic (Augustine himself was ambivalent), but they were so married to the idea that humans are born sinful, that they chose the doctrine which said the only soul God actually created was Adam's and that every other soul was derivative.
Jul 2, 2021 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Yup. I'm privileged to have come into Product from an M&E background.
M&E is all about:
Listing desired outcomes & their metrics.
Hypothesizing outputs (& metrics) that may lead to outcomes;
Listing inputs & expected effects on outputs;
Tracking all 3 constantly. Notice that the tracking is in 3 layers:

Track that inputs, outputs, & outcomes are on target;

Is correlation between inputs & outputs as modeled? If not, inputs must change;

Is correlation between outputs & outcomes as modeled? If not, outputs must change.
Jun 23, 2021 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
When intellectuals like Prof Lumumba complain that voters picked the person who shared money over them with ideas, they misdiagnose why, and blame the voter. The voter made a "rational" choice, because how can she know Prof isn't lying like EVERY other past politician? I've talked about this before, from my own experience. As an intellectual politician, those your brilliant ideas you're so in love with? Mama's heard them ALL in the last 6 campaigns. And each time, it was a lie. How have you shown her YOU are different?

Jun 16, 2021 • 26 tweets • 5 min read
As a 3rd Force candidate who (rightly!) wants to win without spending money, you're REALLY saying You want to get enough mostly rural, minimally educated, poor people, to know you so well, they reject money because you will do what everybody since 1960 failed to do. Needs a plan. An "APCPDP" candidate doesn't have that problem. Her party has workers in all 774 LGAs & 120K Polling Unit Areas. Workers who've spent YEARS building small networks of loyalists who WILL turn out for elections, & vote however the leader says. That's the "Structure" some scoff at.
Jun 15, 2021 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
When I was very small, he would give me the front/back and middle pages of the Vanguard so I could read the cartoons while he started on the rest of the paper.

He helped me memorize the human bones and muscles by tickling me on the spot in question whenever I got one wrong. He always gave me his fish eyes, "so you won't need glasses like me."

Took us for Chinese every Sunday afternoon.

His letters whenever he travelled.
Jun 14, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Beautiful.
A point that goes beyond this product: it's interesting how internal tools built to support the work of the main product(s) can give birth to great standalone products themselves. Slack comes to mind. At my job, we build a lot of internal or staff-facing products because our business operations have a lot of niche activities that enterprise software in the market doesn't really work for.

I've been thinking a LOT about which of them have markets/demand beyond our firm.
Jun 12, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Growing up, I was taught:

1. Avoid discussing money socially.

2. If it *does* come up and people are saying an amount I consider small is big, it's impolite, awkward, and at times demeaning to insist on correcting them. I was also taught to unlook if someone accused me of being wasteful with money, as it often came from them having a different context with money.

But please, don't tell people they're wasteful with money or money should last in their hand, to avoid insort.
May 21, 2021 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Why should FG have IMEIs of everyone's devices by default, and as a requirement for telcos to grant network access ("whitelist")? Globally, the standard is for consumers to give their IMEI data AFTER a theft ("blacklist/blocklist").
Why can't FG get warrants on a per case basis? Govt doesn't need to populate its CEIR ahead of time with every IMEI in the land, if theft control or anti-kidnapping are its aims.

If a phone is reported stolen, telco can retrieve IMEI from IMSI record, and hand over to Police based on the owner's report.
Jan 13, 2021 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
Hi, Kids! Wanna know why the Washington Monument changes colors midway up?
Once upon a time, there was a Political Party that hated immigration, and ran stuff into the ground.
No, not THAT one. Another one. The Know Nothing Party. So in the 1850s, the Know Nothings felt immigration was a threat to “native” Americans, by whom they meant White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.
They also opposed Catholics, who they felt were loyal to a foreign king, the Pope.
Sep 18, 2020 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
Allow me. Let me start by saying that the rule the Government handles were quoting, doesn't (or shouldn't) apply to everybody. If you're not a resident of another country, it doesn't apply to you. Now let me explain. So Nigeria signed up to an international agreement, arranged by the OECD. The goal of the agreement is to make sure that Country A is aware of any of its residents who are making money in other countries. This info is needed for proper taxation. @Chydee
Jun 27, 2020 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
Finally got around to re-reading the infamous Section 230, and large chunks of the Communications Decency Act to which it belongs.

Man, lots of the takes were very, very off.

Twitter is actually quite onside in its choices to flag and fact-check tweets. Section 230 immunity covers online platforms that even if they go as far as edited posted content, as long as they do not substantially change the meaning of the content.

The platform can flag the content to its heart's content.
Feb 9, 2020 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Last month, the OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY added new words taken from Nigerian English. These words & phrases violate traditional English usage, but OED added them in recognition of Nigerians taking ownership of English.

If grammar can change, so can pronunciation. Watch Sky News. You will see Britons pronounce the same words in different ways, based on their regional accents. Some of those pronunciations differ more from "standard" UK English than these Nigerian ones. Nobody is saying their accent isn't "proper".
Nov 4, 2019 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
"the scanners contracted under build operate own and transfer (BOOT) and transferred to Nigeria Customs Service in 2014/15 have all collapsed, thereby forcing the Nigeria Customs Service to embark on 100 per cent physical examination."

Collapsed in < 5 years. Hail Hydra. Civilization are systems that reduce their internal entropy. We should be able to add some new capability (e.g. port scanners), & expend energy to build systems to maintain it (revenue, technical know-how, institutional wisdom).

Nigerian Civilization actually accelerates entropy