According to this story, a Linux company, Mandriva, had sold computers with a customisable, open source operating system to the Nigerian government at a very low price. According to the head of Mandriva, the reason the Nigerian government chose their solution was because it could be customised to suit the customer's needs. The machines were tested, the government signed for a consignment of 17,000 computers, and the company started delivering. Suddenly, TSC, the company handling the contract on behalf of the government said to Mandriva, "we will pay you for your software, but after you supply the computers with it installed, we will delete it and install Microsoft Windows".

Now, Windows is not customisable, and there are several undocumented little programs that can send information back to Microsoft if you don't take steps to stop them. Fortunately, someone at the government funding agency in Nigeria, Nigeria's Universal Service Provision Fund (USPF), seems to have their head screwed on right, saw through the scam that the arrangement is, and stepped in to shut it down. Did I hear you say "Hooray!"? Well, it's not quite as simple as that.

It turns out that "Microsoft is still negotiating an agreement that would give TSC US$400,000 (£190,323) for marketing activities around the Classmate PCs when those computers are converted to Windows" according to Microsoft's Nigeria Country Manager, Chinenye Mba-Uzoukwu (see here). Mandriva's François Bancilhon, in a sarcasm-laden letter to Microsoft's Steve Ballmer, says the deal got "more competitive". Others might say it got dirty. Others may even say that Microsoft is bribing TSC. Or what would you call a situation where someone is paid to replace a perfectly good operating system with a bloated, buggy, and insecure one?

The Nigerian government, or its anti-corruption agency, the EFCC, must investigate who has been offered and obviously agreed to take money in exchange for compromising not only the security of Nigeria's IT infrastructure, but perhaps more importantly, potentially lock in the next generation of Nigerians into an operating system that other countries are rejecting in their national IT infrastructure. Anybody found guilty should be charged with nothing less than treason.

The following is from a Nigerian tabloid, the Daily Sun

On the apprehension of the people that barely a month to the election, the INEC had not released and published the voters’ register, Umeadi [Philip Umeadi is INEC's Commissioner in charge of information] dismissed the fears as unfounded, saying that the commission had since released the register and even forwarded it to all the political parties in soft copies, via diskette.

I cannot but keep wondering what the level and quality of IT intellectual capital in Abuja is. How would one explain the claim by INEC that it has fitted information about 61 million voters that it claims to have registered onto a diskette whose maximum data storage capacity is 1.4 million bytes. If we assume that the quantity of information collected on each registered voter is 100 bytes (to account for their name and address as a minimum), then 61 million people will result in 6.1 billion bytes, which will need over 4,000 diskettes to store! This is plainly ridiculous.

I just read this article on ThisDay - online edition - by Simon Kolawole (update: the above link requires you to login to read the article. Use this one on the same topic) lamenting the appalling security situation in Nigeria, and I can't find the words to express my sadness and anger at what Nigeria has become under the watch of a delusional egomaniac president who is more concerned with protecting his dubious legacy of economic reforms than ensuring the safety and security of his countrymen, most of whom now live in what has effectively become a failed state.

Clementina Saduwa was a tireless and extremely effective volunteer student leader a few years back, when the IEEE Nigeria Section was being revived, and she went on to become the first ever IEEE Region 8 Women In Engineering (WIE) Coordinator. This promising wife and mother of two has been denied the opportunity to pass along her legacy to her children by the failure of her country to afford her the most basic benefits of citizenship. Clementina will surely be missed.

I first knew of an HBO documentary with the above title when I received the November 2006 Cryptogram (an electronic newsletter on computer security published by Bruce Schneier of Counterpane Internet Security).

Because Nigeria had adopted electronic voting, I felt that the documentary would probably help me to better understand the issues, so I asked a friend to make a recording for me. I had a quick look at that recording a few days after I arrived in the US, and I've just finished watching it again. That documentary is nothing if not an indictment of the electronic voting processes in the US.

There has recently been a lot of comment on the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project for developing countries promoted by Dr. Nicholas Negroponte of MIT. Nigeria recently committed US$100,000,000 to the purchase of 1,000,000 units of the laptop, generating mostly negative comments from many Nigerians, who feel that the money could have been better spent on the provision of classrooms and teachers.

I disagree with these comments, but I also believe that the project needs to be re-designed if it is to succeed.

According to an article appearing in ThisDay online July 7, 2006 edition — http://odili.net/news/source/2006/jul/6/213.html — Nigeria's President Olusegun Obasanjo is expected to kick-start an "... ambitious programme of bringing computer application to the door-steps of every Nigerian, with the distribution of 500,000 computers at 50 per cent discount rate of the current market price under the Computer for All Nigerian Initiative (CANI)."

The so-called 50 percent discount begs the question of whether or not computers in Nigeria are overpriced to start with. By starting from the assumption that there is a saving to be made, this project is likely to be another avenue to further loot Nigeria's treasury. To put things in perspective, if the promoters of this scheme claim to be saving US$100 per computer, that represents a cool US$50,000,000 to be "saved", and therefore, it should not be too difficult to justify paying fees of US$10,000,000 to achieve these savings.

Effective November 29, 2005, Maori speakers will be able to download a language interface pack for Microsoft Office which will effectively turn their MS Office into the Maori version - i.e. the menus, dialog boxes, pop-up messages, etc. - will now be rendered in Maori. They will be able to download a similar software for Microsoft Windows from December 8.

Now, there are fewer than 500,000 speakers of Maori, while the Nigerian languages Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Efik, Fulfude, etc. have speakers numbering in millions - Igbo and Yoruba each have over 25 million speakers. However, there does not seem to be any plans by Microsoft to introduce interface packs for any of these languages.