Author: Smart Megwai

On a rainy Tuesday in Lagos, I was buying groceries and noticed someone arguing at a POS terminal about high fees and unauthorised charges. The argument reflects common frustrations in Nigerian markets: hidden costs, a loss of trust, and the belief that complaining is useless. However, consumer complaints are yielding…

For millions of Nigerians living with diabetes, a vial of insulin isn’t just medicine, it’s survival. Yet for decades, that survival has depended almost entirely on imported supplies. This dependence has left patients and their families grappling with unpredictable shortages, crippling costs, and the constant uncertainty of vulnerable foreign supply…

Anyone who’s ever stared at those tiny WhatsApp checkmarks knows the weight they can carry. One tick, message sent. Two ticks, message delivered. Two ticks in blue? Message read, and now you’re waiting, wondering, maybe overthinking. For years, that classic grey-to-blue shift has been part of WhatsApp’s unspoken language. But…

It’s been a turbulent year for Temu. Once the darling of U.S. bargain hunters, the e-commerce platform was rocked by Donald Trump’s tariff changes, which effectively ended duty-free small parcel imports. The model that Temu had built its U.S. success on, which involved shipping low-cost goods directly from Chinese factories…

For months, the conversation around AI and music has been stuck on one question: who gets paid when the machines start composing? This week, Sweden gave the world its first real answer. The Swedish Performing Rights Society (STIM), which represents more than 100,000 songwriters and composers, has signed what it…

If you grew up in Nigeria, groundnuts are not just a crop. They’re a memory, sold in “cones” of old newspaper at motor parks, eaten roasted during long road trips. Groundnuts: “Gyada” in Hausa, “Epa” in Yoruba, “Ahuekere” in Igbo, are a staple of daily life. But behind the familiar…

It started with a growing unease. When Attaullah Baig joined Meta in 2021 as a software engineering manager, he eventually became the Head of Security for WhatsApp. But the system he found wasn’t a fortress; it was a security nightmare. Baig says he uncovered glaring vulnerabilities that would alarm any…

I can still remember the excitement of playing Call of Duty late at night, shouting things like “He’s on the catwalk!” into a microphone. For many of us, it wasn’t just a game. It was a place to hang out and bond with friends while battling in a virtual world.…

I have written more articles in my career than I could ever hope to count. Ten thousand? Twenty thousand? Maybe fifty thousand. But this one is different. It carries a weight of disappointment, even sadness. Because it is about a product that had everything going for it, yet still disappeared.…

Juggling a full-time job while building a side business has been one of the most formative experiences of my life. It has taught me grit, time management, and the raw mechanics of creating value from scratch. But the most unexpected lesson was how this entrepreneurial spirit transformed my performance at…

“Why must we import everything?” As a child, I frequently asked this question whenever I noticed the “Made in China” or “Made in Japan” labels on my toys, television, or other electronics. It was surprising to me that a country as vast and resourceful as ours struggled to produce even…

I’ve recently started watching documentaries, and it has had a profound impact on my writing. If you’re a writer, I highly recommend making this a regular practice. One by Augustine Chidiebere, Founder of Delvett, tells the compelling story of a billionaire who built Nigeria’s first car brand. A line from…

When my family has a hospital appointment, there’s a place we always end up. After each visit to TopTee Medical Centre in Surulere, Lagos, we head straight next door to Chicken Republic. It started the day we strolled in for lunch and ate their chicken for the first time. Since…

The last time you and I thought about memory chips might have been in our secondary or high school, during those lessons on floppy disks and how to shut down Windows XP “the right way.” Since then, we haven’t given them a second thought. They work quietly inside our laptops…

On Friday morning, I opened my laptop to begin work. I’d left ChatGPT open the day before when I finished work and hibernated my device. As the screen lit up, Chrome restored my last tabs. But the ChatGPT on my screen wasn’t the same one I’d left yesterday. At the…

For a long time, I thought tech was truly global. You open an app, send a message, check a map, stream a song, buy something — and it all works, wherever you are. I never stopped to wonder where any of it came from. Then one day, almost by accident,…

For a long time, I thought addiction was a private struggle. Something that happened quietly, behind closed doors. Painful, yes, but mostly the result of personal choices or bad luck. I assumed it was a consequence of bad habits, poor decisions, or maybe just being born with the wrong genes.…

I remember the first time I heard about ChatGPT. Someone mentioned it passing: “There’s this tool you could just give an instruction, and it generates content for you.” I thought, “Wait! Wait! How is that even possible?” Since then, I’ve seen what ChatGPT and AI in general can do. Honestly,…

I remember the first time I saw an Acer laptop. It was around 2018 or 2019. The design caught my eye, not because it was flashy, but because it was clean, portable, and surprisingly sleek. Back then, laptops were evolving. Manufacturers were moving away from bulky, heavy builds towards something…

If you’ve been using ChatGPT just to handle tasks, then you’re only scratching the surface of what it can do. AI isn’t just for writing emails, summarising articles, or helping with quick to-do lists. It’s becoming something much more valuable. More and more people are using it to enhance their…