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Africa Can End Capital Flight in Technology Space via NEPAD- Monaisa

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Mokgethi Monaisa, consul-general, South African (SA) High Commission in Nigeria (since January 2012) believes that both countries share similar potentials and well-positioned to influence the continent’s economic developments.
Monaisa had worked as Ambassador for SA Embassy, Antananarivo; High Commissioner, SA High Commission, Cameroon; Ambassador, SA Embassy, Gabon and Director- Human Rights, Department of International Relations and Cooperation, Pretoria Area, South Africa.
To him, Africa shouldn’t have business importing technology from other continents. In this short interview with peter ugwu, at SAGE Software Day in Nigeria 2015, he also shares some insights into the unfortunate xenophobic incident in SA recently.

Nigeria & South Africa Economic Relationship
If we look back, we will remember that there is a bi-national commission between the two countries and normally what bi-national commission implies (at the top of agenda) is business and thus far there has been so many south African companies that have invested in Nigeria and there are also Nigerians business that are in a South Africa too.
The trade balance between the two countries is increasing but it favours Nigeria more, because South Africa imports a lot of crude from Nigeria and that is what tipped the scale in favour of Nigeria. And South Africa on the other hand exports consumer products into Nigeria.
The Trade figures are in the region of 45billion South Africa Rands (SA Currency). It is quite a huge Investment. So also our relations are not only at government to government level, industry to industry level, but also at people to people level.

Grey Areas in SA and Nigeria Bi-lateral Trades
I think there are vast manufacturing opportunities in Nigeria and that is the area which really has to be boosted.
Maybe, there could be a lot challenges that Nigeria is facing and these challenges could be based on Energy (Power) because when you drive industry you have to source plenty of electrical power and there are discussion in South Africa government also to try and boost manufacturing industry in Nigeria because we also want to be importing a lot of finished products from Nigeria and Nigeria also importing finished products from south Africa.
Also there is need for the refining of petroleum product in Nigeria which is another area that has to be boosted so as to be encouraging growth.
It is not good to be exporting a lot of our raw materials to other continents; and next thing, we don’t have to go and buy the finished product, so we need to redefine our own petroleum products.
And then we are looking forward to having more and more refined products being imported by Nigeria from South Africa.

Assessment on Level of Technology Evolvement in Africa Ecosystem
Some years ago our leaders on the continent conceived the idea of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) and if we can all as, African countries implement NEPAD as proposed by our leaders I think that will go a long way to promoting technology in Africa instead of looking for technology solutions elsewhere.
We have a lot of brain-powers in Africa and we need to utilize them. And we have a lot of skills that we need to tap into too.
And we have in the Diaspora, Africans who are holding positions at certain industries abroad and we could bring them with those skills into the continent, and go into production and refines our product and NEPAD could be the vehicle to achieve that.
The aim or objective of NEPAD is to inter-trade and promote investment in the continent and also to stop cash flow outside of the continent.
While we don’t break ties with our friends abroad, either in Europe or America, we don’t wish to ‘de-capitalize’ but we wish to be equal.
They need to also come and import from us finished product so we should be dealing at the same level with them as equals.

Concern of Insecurity in the Continent
It is true we are growing and going through a tough time on the continent, we see a lot of terrorist activities now, and suddenly a lot of our countries are becoming targets of these activities.
Therefore, insecurity could be part of that but also we must remember that nobody will come from anywhere else to come and secure the continent for us.
We are the ones that will secure the continent, at the same time promoting investments, build infrastructure.
They will come and destroy that, but we should also have plans in place to rebuild and with that we can boost of stronger and improved results.
I think we need to concentrate on dealing with the insecurity. We need to be able to tell people outside the continent that they can count on Africa for investment. And we need to know that we are the one to secure the continent.

Aftermath of Xenophobia
South Africa has been safe for so many years for many Africans; that is why we find many Africans residing and doing businesses in South Africa. If South Africa was not safe then we won’t have found so many Africans in the country.
About the issue of xenophobia, xenophobia is evident all over the world, as every nation has its own brand of xenophobia.
And normally xenophobia is not a policy of any government. Xenophobia is always caused by a few people and it’s not a culture of any nation.
But you find that it is in a particular minority. You may find out that there are some tendencies like those in which most of them are driven by criminals.
For instance the last xenophobic incidences in South Africa, when you look at them, they were more of criminal elements driven by their own agenda because as much as there were lots of noise about it but when you sit down and recount, you will see that there were only one foreigner who died out of that and three South Africans.
The figures we know are seven and the other three who died were unrelated to the xenophobi. It was just that they happened during that time.
But the noise that was made you will think that people have been killed at random in South Africa and there was nothing like that. What also happen then was that some people post on social Media images that have no relevance to what was happening there.
For instance there were some other images that were picked up from what happened in Rwanda during the genocide. 
And then the picture depicted scenarios there were not reflective of the happenings in South Africa then.
It was only a few people in Durban, Alexander and Johannesburg that was all; South Africa will always be safe.
Even if you look there were countries that sent planes to collect their citizens but how many did really go back home?
You can count them and those who left even came back. So they will always be lot of people going to South Africa then just that tells you that South Africa has never be unsafe for anybody.

South Africa’s Expectation from Buhari Led Government
To South Africans, we hope the new government will promote democracy, push human rights and all the tenets of good governance, because they are key issues; good governance, human rights and democracy.
So, we know that Nigeria has also demonstrated that it could be one of the strong homes of democracy.
The way the elections took place and also the fact that a sitting president could be unseated through the ballot box speaks a lot about the democracy in Nigeria and we expect that the new government of Nigeria will also follow those good steps of promoting democracy and good governance.
So, we say congratulations to Nigerians for smooth elections and congratulations for exercising their right to elect the government they want.


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Nigeria CommunicationsWeek believes that technology makes life more exciting and helps improve the lives of people around Nigeria and indeed the world. So since 2007, we have devoted our energy to independent reportage of technology and how they affect lives.

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Our 2023 Ads Safety Report

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By Duncan Lennox, VP & GM of Ads Privacy and Safety

Billions of people around the world rely on Google products to provide relevant and trustworthy information, including ads. That’s why we have thousands of people working around the clock to safeguard the digital advertising ecosystem. Today, we are releasing our annual Ads Safety Report to share the progress we’ve made in enforcing our advertiser and publisher policies and to hold ourselves accountable in our work of maintaining a healthy ad-supported internet.

The key trend in 2023 was the impact of generative AI. This new technology introduced significant and exciting changes to the digital advertising industry, from performance optimization to image editing. Of course, generative AI also presents new challenges. We take these challenges seriously and will outline the work we are doing to address them head-on.

Just as importantly, generative AI presents a unique opportunity to improve our enforcement efforts significantly. Our teams are embracing this transformative technology, specifically Large Language Models (LLMs), so that we can better keep people safe online.

Gen AI Bolsters Enforcement 

Our safety teams have long used AI-driven machine learning systems to enforce our policies at scale. It’s how, for years, we’ve been able to detect and block billions of bad ads before a person ever sees them. But, while still highly sophisticated, these machine learning models have historically needed to be trained extensively – they often rely on hundreds of thousands, if not millions of examples of violative content.

LLMs, on the other hand, are able to rapidly review and interpret content at a high volume, while also capturing important nuances within that content. These advanced reasoning capabilities have already resulted in larger-scale and more precise enforcement decisions on some of our more complex policies. Take, for example, our policy against Unreliable Financial Claims which includes ads promoting get-rich-quick schemes. The bad actors behind these types of ads have grown more sophisticated. They  adjust their tactics and tailor ads around new financial services or products, such as investment advice or digital currencies, to scam users.

To be sure, traditional machine learning models are trained to detect these policy violations. Yet, the fast-paced and ever-changing nature of financial trends make it, at times, harder to differentiate between legitimate and fake services and quickly scale our automated enforcement systems to combat scams. LLMs are more capable of quickly recognizing new trends in financial services, identifying the patterns of bad actors who are abusing those trends and distinguishing a legitimate business from a get-rich-quick scam. This has helped our teams become even more nimble in confronting emerging threats of all kinds.

We’ve only just begun to leverage the power of LLMs for ads safety. Gemini, launched publicly last year, is Google’s most capable AI modeI. We’re excited to have started bringing its sophisticated reasoning capabilities into our ads safety and enforcement efforts.

Our Work to Prevent Fraud and Scams

In 2023, scams and fraud across all online platforms were on the rise. Bad actors are constantly evolving their tactics to manipulate digital advertising in order to scam people and legitimate businesses alike. To counter these ever-shifting threats, we quickly updated policies, deployed rapid-response enforcement teams and sharpened our detection techniques.

  • In November, we launched our Limited Ads Serving policy, which is designed to protect users by limiting the reach of advertisers with whom we are less familiar. Under this policy, we’ve implemented a “get-to-know-you” period for advertisers who don’t yet have an established track record of good behavior, during which impressions for their ads might be limited in certain circumstances–for example, when there is an unclear relationship between the advertiser and a brand they are referencing. Ultimately, Limited Ads Serving, which is still in its early stages, will help ensure well-intentioned advertisers are able to build up trust with users, while limiting the reach of bad actors and reducing the risk of scams and misleading ads.

  • A critical part of protecting people from online harm hinges on our ability to respond to new abuse trends quickly. Toward the end of 2023 and into 2024, we faced a targeted campaign of ads featuring the likeness of public figures to scam users, often through the use of deepfakes. When we detected this threat, we created a dedicated team to respond immediately. We pinpointed patterns in the bad actors’ behavior, trained our automated enforcement models to detect similar ads and began removing them at scale. We also updated our misrepresentation policy to better enable us to rapidly suspend the accounts of bad actors.

Overall, we blocked or removed 206.5 million advertisements for violating our misrepresentation policy, which includes many scam tactics and 273.4 million advertisements for violating our financial services policy. We also blocked or removed over 1 billion advertisements for violating our policy against abusing the ad network, which includes promoting malware.

The fight against scam ads is an ongoing effort, as we see bad actors operating with more sophistication, at a greater scale, using new tactics such as deepfakes to deceive people. We’ll continue to dedicate extensive resources, making significant investments in detection technology and partnering with organizations like the Global Anti-Scam Alliance and Stop Scams UK to facilitate information sharing and protect consumers worldwide.

Investing in Election Integrity

Political ads are an important part of democratic elections. Candidates and parties use ads to raise awareness, share information and engage potential voters. In a year with several major elections around the world, we want to make sure voters continue to trust the election ads they may see on our platforms. That’s why we have long-standing identity verification and transparency requirements for election advertisers, as well as restrictions on how these advertisers can target their election ads. All election ads must also include a “paid for by” disclosure and are compiled in our publicly available transparency report. In 2023, we verified more than 5,000 new election advertisers and removed more than 7.3M election ads that came from advertisers who did not complete verification.

Last year, we were the first tech company to launch a new disclosure requirement for election ads containing synthetic content. As more advertisers leverage the power and opportunity of AI, we want to make sure we continue to provide people with the greater transparency and the information they need to make informed decisions.

Additionally, we’ve continued to enforce our policies against ads that promote demonstrably false election claims that could undermine trust or participation in democratic processes.

Overall 2023 Numbers

Our goal is to catch bad ads and suspend fraudulent accounts before they make it onto our platforms or remove them immediately once detected. AI is improving our enforcement on all these fronts. In 2023, we blocked or removed over 5.5 billion ads, slightly up from the prior year, and 12.7 million advertiser accounts, nearly double from the previous year. Similarly, we work to protect advertisers and people by removing our ads from publisher pages and sites that violate our policies, such as sexually explicit content or dangerous products. In 2023, we blocked or restricted ads from serving on more than 2.1 billion publisher pages, up slightly from 2022. We are also getting better at tackling pervasive or egregious violations. We took broader site-level enforcement action on more than 395,000 publisher sites, up markedly from 2022.

To put the impact of AI on this work into perspective: last year more than 90% of our publisher page level enforcement started with the use of machine learning models, including our latest LLMs. Of course, any advertiser or publisher can still appeal an enforcement action if they think we got it wrong. Our teams will review it and, in the cases where we find errors, use it to improve our systems.

Staying Nimble and Looking Ahead

When it comes to ads safety, a lot can change over the course of a year: the introduction of new technology such as generative AI to novel abuse trends and global conflicts. And the digital advertising space has to be nimble and ready to react. That’s why we are continuously developing new policies, strengthening our enforcement systems, deepening cross-industry collaboration and offering more control to people, publishers and advertisers.

In 2023, for example, we launched the Ads Transparency Center, a searchable hub of all ads from verified advertisers, which helps people quickly and easily learn more about the ads they see on Search, YouTube and Display. We also updated our suitability controls to make it simpler and quicker for advertisers to exclude topics that they wish to avoid across YouTube and Display inventory. Overall, we made 31 updates to our Ads and Publisher policies.

Though we don’t yet know what the rest of 2024 has in store for us, we are confident that our investments in policy, detection and enforcement will prepare us for any challenges ahead.


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InDrive Upgrades App, Announces New Safety Details

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InDrive, an e-hailing firm, announced app upgrades as well as new safety details for riders and drivers.

InDrive’s updated Safety Centre now allows its support team to contact a user’s trusted contacts in emergencies and the number of trusted contacts has been increased from one to five. InDrive says that it is also easier for its support team to share information with emergency services, among other things.

Also, the company said by clicking on the app’s SOS-button, users can see all the information needed when requesting help or reporting an incident – along with a button to call police or ambulance services.

InDrive’s app design has also been updated to improve user experience, making the Safety Centre more visible, it said.

Further, the company said: “inDrive is also testing photo sharing and automatic translation of chat messages, which have been added to the in-app chat function. These make it easier for the driver and rider to clarify the pickup point, and communicate in the same language while traveling.

“Passengers and drivers stay within the application when using these features, so there’s no need to use across other platforms, thereby protecting personal information. For now the feature is currently being tested by a limited number of users to improve its functionality before it is rolled out to everyone.”

The announcement today comes after the company recently revealed it had expanded its financing arrangement with General Catalyst to $146 million, allowing the company to engage in product upgrades, extend its service offerings, and enter new markets in Africa.


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NIN-SIM Linkage: Telcos to Bar More Phones Lines from March 29

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Telecommunications operators in the country are gearing up for another round of disconnections of phone lines for subscribers who have failed to link their National Identification Numbers (NIN) with their SIM cards.

NIN-SIM Linkage: Telcos to Bar More Phones Lines from March 29

The disconnection which will happen Friday, March 29, following a directive from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) requiring all registered SIMs lacking proper NIN linkage to be either corrected or completely disconnected from networks.

The ongoing process, which commenced on February 28, 2024, is part of the government’s efforts to curb criminal activities like banditry and kidnapping, contributing to enhancing national security.

There are indications of a potential third phase in April 2024.

Operators have reportedly cooperated with the NCC in executing the directive, affirming their commitment to national security objectives and assuring full compliance by the specified deadlines.

The second phase will target subscribers with five or more SIMs from a single operator lacking verified NIN-SIM linkages.

The third phase, set to commence on April 15, will focus on subscribers with four SIMs or fewer and unverified NINs.

While telecom companies seek a review and extension of the April deadline for the third phase, indications from the NCC suggest a steadfast adherence to the established timelines.

The first phase saw the barring of 40 million lines, comprising around 17 million active SIMs without NIN submissions and 23 million inactive SIMs lacking NINs over the past year.

 

 

 

 


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