Once in a while you see some things that just don’t add up and when they occur in isolation, you cannot but fight the urge to bring them together. Two of such largely isolated incidences happened this week in Nigeria – prices of data went down while tomatoes became very expensive. Is there any connection anywhere?
It would have made perfect sense if it were possible for Nigerians to download tomatoes on the internet. On the other hand, it confirmed that it’s not everything that the laptop could replace, tomato is one of them.
This week, the stories we covered somehow appear not to have any common thread – FedEx’s acquisition of TNT, Standard Bank getting hit with multimillion dollar ATM scam, Snapchat raising about $2 billion additional funding, the robot take over at FoxConn, the potential return of Walkie-Talkie courtesy of Apple, or Uber’s $100 million vehicle access initiative in Kenya.
Despite the seemingly lack of connection, we still had several developments in the social media space with Twitter relaxing its 140-character rule, Facebook taking on Google with recent video additions, and LinkedIn coping with data breach.
Several African companies were also in the news – they include MTN Business, Mara Group and partners, Interswitch, Konga, Tigo, NuRAN Wireless, Dangote, MyAds, Legend.ng.
As we join the rest of the world in celebrating Children’s Day today, we believe that the future generation will be better off even though China will play active roles in Africa’s tech future and the Diaspora will help to reinvent Africa.
An indication of the bright nature of Africa’s future was when African cities such as Lagos, Nairobi, Addis Ababa, Cape Town, and Paynesville joined 100 Resilient Cities Network. These African cities and others will continue to serve as incubators and homes churning out innovations for the rest of the continent and beyond.
From all of us here at Innovation Village we say Happy Children’s Day (May 27) and we wish all our Nigerian readers Happy Democracy Day (May 29). Just as the price of data is falling (not minding data zapping claims), may the price of tomato also fall and may we and our children prosper in this democracy.
