Foss Naija

FossNaija provides Nigeria Linux users quality tutorials, reviews and news articles covering a range of topics about FOSS.

[Michael Pyrcz🌻 @GeostatsGuy]

"Howdy Folks, I'm Michael Pyrcz, a professor at The University of Texas at Austin, and I record all of my lectures and put them on YouTube so anyone can follow along!"

...and I kept doing that, and writing a Python package, along with 2 free, online e-books, 100s of Python demonstration workflows, dozens of synthetic datasets, etc. etc.

Why? So anyone can follow along!

Education changes lives. I know because it changed mine. I’m just paying it forward.

[Michael Taiwo @AskMichaelTaiwo]

My CPA sent over my tax returns yesterday for me to review and sign...

I looked at it, 200+ pages of numbers upon numbers, different forms, schedules, statements and so on.

I am not an accountant, how can they expect me to honestly review it? I don't even know what I am looking for.

Last year, I signed it like that.

This year, I gave it to three different AI with this prompt:

"You are a CPA widely known for your ability to break financial terms and tax law and tax forms down into simple language. Attached are six documents prepared by another CPA. Can you walk me through each of the form listed in the files, and what they mean? Also, do any numbers look off or contradictory? Are there any errors or areas for clarification that you spot? Lastly, in plain English, can you tell me whether I owe taxes or I am due a refund?"

ChatGPT & Claude said everything looked good.
Notebook LM pointed out four areas of clarification and one definite error in the documents.

I replied my CPA within hours.

He responded this morning: Wow. Good catch. We will fix all the areas and get back with you asap.

The world has changed.

[Foss Naija @FossNaija]

Sad!

However this is an outlier...

[Opeyemi Babalola @BOTAD01]

Young couple was profiled some years back. Husband was working as a tech engineer with one of the telcos and the wife, an accountant with one of the first generation banks in Nigeria. They have a boy and the wife was pregnant as at that time. Young family, they were doing fine. They rented the apartment and paid 2 years rent.

1 year 3 months, the husband was robbed inside traffic at Ketu, stabbed and died before getting to the hospital. Wife, with a new born baby can't cope alone. Time to renew rent, she couldn't afford it "alone". Rent was reduced for her and she was told to pay annually and also, twice instead of once, because the landlord was a good man.

She paid the first half, then got laid off at the bank. She struggled and managed to pay the second installment. The 4th year was war, she couldn't raise the rent and she had to move to Mowe when it was time to pay the 5th rent.

Profiling tenants before renting a house to them is good but "Nigeria" can happen to anybody at anytime.

[Oreoluwa Bukola, CFA. @BukkyOA]

Watch this👇

[Wolf of NGX @ngx_wolf]

Tony Elumelu just pulled off a masterpiece.
While the market was distracted by the holidays, he signed a deal that effectively makes him the new King of Nigerian Oil.

Heirs Energies acquiring a 20.07% stake in SEPLAT isn't just an "investment"—it’s a hostile-friendly takeover of the indigenous energy crown.

Here is why this move is historic and why the race to ₦10,000 is officially on.👇

Tony Elumelu has entered the building.
Heirs Energies just acquired the entire 20.07% stake (120.4M shares) in $SEPLAT previously held by the French firm Maurel & Prom.
Value of the deal? Approximately $500 Million (₦750 Billion).
This is the single largest equity trade in the history of the Nigerian energy sector.

The Whale Logic: Why SEPLAT?
Elumelu doesn't buy hope; he buys cash flow.
SEPLAT is no longer just an oil company; it is a money-printing machine.
Following the transformational MPNU (Mobil) acquisition in late 2024, SEPLAT’s production has skyrocketed from ~50k to over 130,000 barrels per day.

The First 5-Figure Stock Quest
Can SEPLAT be the first NGX stock to hit ₦10,000?
Currently trading around ₦5,800 - ₦6,000, it’s already the most expensive stock on the exchange.
But with the Otedolas and Elumelus of the world fighting for seats on the board, the scarcity factor alone could push this to 5 figures by 2026.

The Dividend Machine
Investors love SEPLAT for one reason: USD-linked dividends. The company just adopted a new policy:
• Core Dividend: US 5 cents per quarter.
• Special Dividend: US 2.5 cents (paid recently).
In a devaluing Naira environment, SEPLAT is the ultimate hedge. You earn in Dollars, spent in Naira.

The Production Powerhouse
Combined, the "Elumelu-Seplat" ecosystem now controls a staggering volume of Nigeria's energy:
• Seplat: ~286k boepd.
• Heirs Energies: ~70k boepd.
Total: 356,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day. That is roughly 15-20% of Nigeria’s entire daily production capacity. Elumelu is now operating like a petrostate.

The Synergy Play
Elumelu already owns OML 17. By taking this massive stake in SEPLAT, he is consolidating the indigenous Blue Chip oil space.
He’s moving from being just an operator to the landlord.
He now has a say in the gas that feeds his power plants (Transcorp Power). Vertical integration at its finest.

The Risks (The Wolf’s Reality Check)
Is there a catch?
• Oil Volatility: A crash in Brent Crude below $50 hurts the thesis.
• Security: Niger Delta security remains a source of worry for production stability.
• Liquidity: At ₦6,000/share, retail investors are being priced out. This is becoming a Whale-only playground.

The Wolf’s Verdict
Otedola cashed out of Power to buy Banks.
Elumelu cashed into Oil to buy the future.
SEPLAT is no longer just a stock; it’s a proxy for the Nigerian Dollar. If you want to own the "New Nigeria" energy landscape, SEPLAT is the only serious play left on the board...
Until Dangote Refinery enters the room.

The game is the game. 🐺

[Foss Naija @FossNaija]

It's crazy mehnnnnn.....

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last ~year and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue. There's a new programmable layer of abstraction to master (in addition to the usual layers below) involving agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, and a need to build an all-encompassing mental model for strengths and pitfalls of fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing entities suddenly intermingled with what used to be good old fashioned engineering. Clearly some powerful alien tool was handed around except it comes with no manual and everyone has to figure out how to hold it and operate it, while the resulting magnitude 9 earthquake is rocking the profession. Roll up your sleeves to not fall behind.

[Osaretin Victor Asemota @asemota]

Her analysis is always spot on!!

This right here should make us think:

"China operates with a clear, sequenced blueprint: infrastructure → industry → supply chains → value retention.

Africa often responds with ad hoc projects, political timelines, and negotiation teams that change every five years."

I remember starting a project in Tanzania with Google to revamp their educational institutions with tech, the government changed and that project was dead. Google avoided direct government projects after that. African politics is our greatest undoing. It is immature and selfish even when filled with old men.

China is indeed a mirror showing our flaws.

[Foss Naija @FossNaija]

@AladeseluD Upgrade from BN to Ltd nkó?

[Foss Naija @FossNaija]

@slimj_TRAP @CoachKingLeon Company registration????

[Foss Naija @FossNaija]

@slimj_TRAP @CoachKingLeon Or upgrade. How much?

[Foss Naija @FossNaija]

@slimj_TRAP @CoachKingLeon Company registration

[Foss Naija @FossNaija]

@CoachKingLeon Tax guide

[Shraddha Bharuka @BharukaShraddha]

"Introduction to Machine Learning Systems"

- FREE from MIT Press
- Authored by Harvard Professor
- 2048 Pages

To Get It Simply:

1. Retweet & Reply "ML"
2. Follow so that I will DM you.

[Osaretin Victor Asemota @asemota]

I am getting a founder from Zimbabwe to talk to another founder from Kenya about partnership and scale. Their common denominator is that I mentored them in two different Google for Startups Accelerator programs.

I have also introduced both separately to others in the past, simply because they followed up with me after the accelerator program. Several others I have mentored, and many who went through these African accelerators, don't connect with each other. There is no real and growing community built afterwards. People remain insular.

I read a very depressing Bloomberg article today about the need for one billion jobs in Africa and the lack of clarity on where they will come from. I have been involved in many activities related to innovation and technology on the continent, and there are still several blind spots. Lack of community is one of them.

Many people with the resources are trying to do good, but are either not doing enough or not doing it well. I have been involved with several accelerators with different organizers, from Village Capital and Google to Seedstars and Techstars. None of them can deliberately foster the connections and collaborations I just did myself with two promising young teams in different countries. They provide the platforms but it rarely happens without a deeper knowledge of different parties and their needs. We need more than acceleration, we need depth.

One can argue that we would not have known ourselves if Google hadn't facilitated the connection between people from different countries, and that will be correct. Google has done much more than others in this aspect, but my problem is with what hasn't happened and not what is miraculously happening. Deeper communities with deeper connections need to be built. Google alone cannot do that, we have to do it ourselves.

Diversity and fragmentation are a blessing rather than a curse, if you can read The Medici Effect by Frans Johansson, and the proper acceleration we need on the continent is these connections and serendipitous discoveries. MTN served as a better substrate for me to know Africa and work around Africa than any of the accelerators have done. I owe my migration to Ghana to MTN, and living in Togo to Ecobank.

MTN and ECOBANK strangely have startup acceleration and innovation projects that have also not done what I currently do between teams in Kenya and Zimbabwe. Most acceleration programs focus on individual startup growth within their chosen markets without exploring cross-continent collaboration and scale. Large corporations are not the answer, smaller communities are.

Startup Bootcamp and Timbuktoo Africa did something close to what I expected earlier this year. On my last visit, a founder I mentored from Senegal took me around there. Because of her, I also met key ecosystem players and connected a Nigerian startup to Wave. Startup Bootcamp went beyond acceleration to help build deeper ecosystem partnerships. This is the answer to better corporate involvement and more potential exits.

Most innovation-related activities on the continent play lip service to collaboration and partnerships but never measure outcomes and follow up to see if they actually achieve this goal. I know resources are scarce but they are still largely wasted on meaningless programs. I see the same group of startups jumping from accelerator to accelerator and not making progress. The real acceleration is community acceleration and growth.

Africa is an untapped diamond mine waiting to be unlocked through collaboration, not protectionism or xenophobia. I want to do what I currently do on a much larger scale. I am open to further cooperation and willing to talk to everyone.

I am just a Nigerian entrepreneur/investor, married to a Ghanaian, who lives and works in Ghana and Togo. I also started a company that has implemented mobile payments in 14 markets and worked in 20 African countries. There are 34 more for me to visit and collaborate with.

[Ziko Abara @zikohercules]

Computers used to be as large as 4 Mikano generators combined in the early days..
Look how technology over time shrunk down the size
My father's old IBM LAPTOP from the 70s is still in his library, I'll dust It and see if it will boot up later in the day

[Foss Naija @FossNaija]

And this comes from the quality of the relationship of the individuals pre-business

[Osaretin Victor Asemota @asemota]

The easiest way to avoid conflict remains effective communication and self-understanding. I have had a cofounder with whom I have never had a conflict for over three decades. He knows exactly how I think, and I know how he thinks, too. We trust each other and have never had any written agreement.

[tyro @DoubleEph]

This story has everything - globalisation, gender equity, skills transfer. The lot

[Foss Naija @FossNaija]

@0xDenzel Soundcore is beau too... 😆

[Prajwal Tomar @PrajwalTomar_]

How I designed and built a PWA using AI

The client wanted a mobile app, but I recommended a PWA for faster development and lower costs.

Here’s how I designed, built, and launched it using AI ↓