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.

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.

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?

Epic Win!

That was our team. 🔥

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.

How PM Imran Khan was humiliated during OIC conference.

Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has condemned the construction of the Ayodhya Ram Temple in India at the Conference of Islamic Countries (OIC).

UAE,which chaired the confernce asked Imran,What is the problem for the Islamic world with India building a temple in their country?
What is the problem for the Muslims of the world with the AyodhyaRama Temple? We hv no interest in interfering in the intrnal affairs of India.

In addition, we have provided 13 acres of land in our country for temple construction and 13.5 acres of land for parking and other facilities for Hindus.

Nowhere in the world have Hindus, who live and study attempt or incite riots or carry out suicide attacks in the name of

religion. They are peaceful and live according to the laws of the land.

Temple construction in India is an internal matter of India.  That is not the issue to be discussed here now.  India will look after India.

When will Pakistan repay the money it

borrowed from OlC? All Islamic countries except Pakistan contributed to this fund. Pakistan only borrows but failed to pay up.

Then the President of the Maldives stood up and began to say "The separatist and coup attempts instigated by Pakistan have created many internal

1 So, today we turn to early Islamic Beirut. what do we know of the earliest times of #Beirut under early Islamic rule, starting with the #conquest. How and when did Beirut enter the emerging Muslim empire? -rm

2 Let’s start with traditional sources for the early Islamic period. Of those, only al-Balādhurī (d. ca. 892), the Abbasid scholar, is informative. Other Muslim and non-Muslim sources including al-Ṭabarī's Tārīkh are silent on the matter.-rm

3 In his small tome, Futūḥ al-Buldān, al-Balādhurī tells his readers: “After the conquest of Damascus, Yazīd came to Sidon, ʿArqa, Byblos, and Beirut which lie on the sea coast with his brother Muʿāwiya leading the van of the army.”-rm

4 Hence, the men who conquered Beirut were Yazīd b. Abī Sufyān (d. 639) and his half-brother and future caliph Mu‘āwiya (r. 661-680). The date of the conquest of the coast falls between 636 and 639 at the latest, the date of the death of Yazīd in the plague of Emmaus. -rm

5 Yazīd and the Muslim army likely took the coastal road to Beirut, a path taken by numerous armies before. They would have either swung from Damascus to Baalbek through the Hims gap to ‘Arqa, then Byblos, crossed the Dog River, and arrived at the eastern side of Beirut.

Greece's new minister of interior, former far-right activist Makis Voridis. Not "allegedly" and without a hint of exaggeration.

His past is wikipedia-level stuff

Voridis was violently anti-Semitic amongst other things

He is closely connected to the French Front Nationale, but in 2017 he tried to distance himself from them. BY CLAIMING THEY ARE ACTUALLY SOCIALISTS

To paraphrase Phillip K. Dick: the Golden Dawn lost, but the Nazis won

1/ By far, the biggest Ponzi scheme I've discovered until now was the diamonds one. In 2014, two years before other media and 3 years before prosecutors, I wrote stories about physical diamonds sold by 2 brokers through banks to tens of thousands of Italian investors.

2 / Diamonds were sold at constantly rising prices in a sort of linear progression, which wasn't related to real market prices. The prices were produced by the two brokers themselves, Intermarket Diamond Business (Idb) and Diamond Private Investment (Dpi), then published monthly

3/They published monthly table of their prices in markets pages on my newspaper, Il Sole 24 Ore, Italy's highest-selling financial daily. Then the 2 diamonds brokers cut the price tables from the pages and presented them to the public as "Il Sole 24 Ore records" but they weren't

4 / People were lured into the scheme with the promise of constantly revaluating physical luxury assets, easy to be hidden (a lot of diamonds were sold to tax evaders and probably gangsters). For just connecting their clients to the 2 brokers, banks earned 15-20% fees.

5 / The business throve thanks to a hole in Italy's financial regulations: diamonds weren't overseen neither by Bank authority Bank of Italy nor financial authority Consob. In two decades, the 2 brokers sold diamonds for 2/3 billion € proceeds.

#Yemen is a very active topic on Twitter these days, with a number of online campaigns underway, some of which are trending globally. What’s new and interesting is the massive participation by Yemenis using these hashtags #HouthiTerrorismInYemen & #StopHouthiTerrorismInYemen 1/13

These hashtags were started by a group called “Aqyal,” an emerging social movement that fights Hashemite supremacy and calls for equal opportunities for all Yemenis. It’s widely supported by Yemeni youth, including those affiliated with the existing political parties. 2/13

Aqyal was able to rally people across the political spectrum against Houthis for the first time, and this success was due to 1) their independence, 2) all of them are volunteers, 3) transparency in organizing, and 4) the fact that it’s a just cause. 3/13

On the other hand, Houthi supporters have rallied behind these two hashtags #YemenCantWait & #DayofAction4Yemen
These hashtags were originally started by NGOs& independent activists, but their goal coincided with the goal of t Houthi, which is ending support for Saudi Arabia 4/13

The top goal of Houthis since 2015 is to neutralize Saudi Arabia, so the group can more easily take control over the rest of Yemen. Therefore, Houthis hid behind these campaigns, taking advantage of NGOs’ anti-Saudi message.5/13