Olivia
Online
Babalola T.
@_therebirth
Frontend & Blockchain Dev | ALX & Web3Bridge Alumnus | Building Web3 & AI-powered applications | 七転び八起き
Lagos, Nigeria
Joined April 2018
2.2K Following
308 Followers
1.1K Posts
Pinned Tweet
The RWA revolution is here, and it's spooky good!👻
@Mantle_Official provides the institutional foundation & @redstone_defi provides the tamper-proof data. Together, they're turning TradFi assets into DeFi TREATS!🎃
👇here's a quick thread on how they brew the perfect potion
@Manodidio_01 @Hon_aremo The same thing I said... After 8 years , you still carry 6 years course... 14years in total..
The heck...
Solid Product
Does an agent that audits contracts, earns its own keep, and can't lie about its track record get a top-2 spot or does the intern want to keep auditing the old-fashioned way? 👀 that’s why I built Ares for the @Mantle_Official Turing Test Hackathon.
Most "AI security tools" give you a chat answer.Ares gives you a transaction. It watches Mantle for bug bounties, analyzes the contract, submits the vulnerability on-chain, and collects its own MNT payout.
It's not a vibes-based scanner. It's ERC-8004 agent on Mantle mainnet, with an on-chain reputation score that has to be earned before it's allowed to submit a single finding.😎😎
Try it out here live: https://t.co/ltMMakCE27
#MantleTuringTestHackathon
@Adikastakes Super useless, from their last match against Mexico...I just knew, they were just at the world cup to fill up space..
When on the ball they string up good passes.. but decisions to finish up with a goal is their major problem..
1/2
Let me make one thing absolutely clear.
I am not begging any of you to join the military.
I spent four years fighting Boko Haram. From Bulabulin to Damboa, from Talala to Metele, from Mafa to Ajiri. I have walked roads most of you only hear about on the news. I have buried friends. I have carried wounds. I have the scars to prove it.
I have seen enough of war to understand exactly what it costs.
So when I speak, I am not speaking from theory. I am speaking from experience.
If, by some catastrophic failure, terrorist forces were ever to overwhelm this country, if the airports shut down, if the borders closed, if the institutions collapsed under pressure, I know one thing:
I and my family will be among the last to fall. I will not say the same for the rest of you.
Because I understand violence. I understand survival. I understand the mindset of the enemy.
Many of you do not.
Some of you have reduced everything to politics.
You still think this is about Obi or Tinubu.
You think evil stops to ask who you voted for.
You think terrorists care whether you are Igbo, Hausa, Yoruba, Christian, or Muslim.
You think some Amir with a GPMG will pause in the middle of the slaughter to ask which politician you supported or which tribe you belong to. He will not. To him you are all the same: meat that still breathes. Your daughters and your sisters will be taken while you are forced to watch. Your politics, your hot takes, your tribal pride, none of it will matter when the blade is at your throat.
To these terrorists , you are not a political affiliation. You are not an ethnic identity.
You are simply a target.
That is the lesson people fail to understand.
Many of you use to talk as though insecurity is a distant problem.
What used to happen in Zamfara and Gamboru Ngala is no longer far away. It is already in Edo. It is in Oyo. It is in Enugu. The fire is moving. And still you sit in the comments arguing like men who have never smelled cordite or watched a friend bleed out.
Today the threat continues to spread into places that once believed themselves immune.
The distance between “their problem” and “our problem” becomes smaller every year.
Yet people still refuse to learn.
Again, nobody is doing the military a favour by joining.
My thread was not a recruitment campaign.
It was a warning.
You can argue about corruption.
You can criticize politicians.
You can blame government failures.
In many cases, you will be correct.
But understand something fundamental:
My words were only meant to strip away the illusion that the storm will never reach your street. When the government collapses, as we pray not , because every government eventually breaks under enough pressure, the politicians will flee with their passports and their foreign accounts. What remains will be you: the man with no exit, no combat experience, no passport, standing face to face with creatures who reach orgasm from the hot jetting of blood from your Carotid artery.
When nations fail, politicians are rarely the first to suffer.
The wealthy leave.
The connected find a way out.
The powerful relocate.
It is ordinary people who remain behind to face the consequences.
The farmer.
The trader.
The mechanic.
The teacher.
The unemployed graduate.
The people with nowhere else to go.
That is why security matters.
Because When the demons finally get you, They will not kill you quickly. They will take their time. They will pluck out your eyes on Monday, castrate you on Tuesday , and cut away your legs on Wednesday , keeping you alive long enough to understand what you have lost. These are the demons the soldiers have kept at bay while you typed.
That is why strong institutions matter.
The soldier has a role.
The government has a role.
The judiciary has a role.
After 4 years working on grassroots tech adoption in Nigeria, here are 10 startup ideas that will not scale massively in Africa:
1. Cooperatives and Collective Savings.
You are not filling a gap, you’re competing with something deeply embedded. An estimated 80% of Africans already participate in informal savings. This has been held together by Ajo or Esusu for generations. Whatever little percent of revenue your startup hopes to earn from. The leaders already man it.
However, the main killer here is dispute resolution. When someone defaults in a physical ajo the group handles through social pressure. The community knows, family gets involved, reputation takes a hit.
On an app? The scale you want requires enforcement infrastructure Nigeria does not have. Fast-track commercial courts and specialized dispute tribunals would be needed to make digital cooperative models work at scale. To tap into this market, build tools that these leaders can use.
2. EdTech Platforms for Majority.
Few parts of urban centers in Lagos or Abuja may have stable internet and electricity access, but many rural states record penetration levels below 20%. When schools attempted remote learning during COVID-19, children in wealthier neighborhoods continued while millions of others were cut off.
The people who can access data and afford their own electricity are graduates and working class who have little or no need for education. They only upskill at some stage in their lives. The truth is that Africans are largely poor. Not much is going into education. Folks are self learning by working practically.
So if you are looking to build in edtech, you are not solving education. You are solving infrastructure. Get familiar with primary and secondary school owners. Your problem to massively scale is with them.
3. API Infrastructure and Open Banking for Informal Sector.
Okra proved this the hard way. They raised over $16 million, onboarded major partners like Renmoney and Branch, and still wound down in 2025. The model assumes there is structured financial data to connect to whereas the informal market runs on cash, mobile transfers, and unstructured transaction histories. There is no API into a Mama Put's business account.
The startups that are winning are not plugging into existing behavior. They are generating it from scratch. OPay deployed 300,000+ agents into it, created the transaction volume, and then owned the data.
4. Standalone Crypto Wallets for Informal Market.
Tbh the number sounds juicy but the truth is that literacy is still low. So if your target is that huge untapped volume in the informal sector, what you need is a neobank-like. A product with fiat on-ramp, a daily utility and a dedicated agent network that is on call 24/7 for them.
5. B2B supply chain digitization for informal retailers: Marketforce raised $42 million for its merchant platform connecting retailers with consumer brands and still struggles with implementation. 90% of sales over here comes through markets and kiosks. They operate on relationship credit, cash float, and trusted distributor reps. To replace these humans with an app, that app has to be banker, a logistics company, and a dispute MANAGER simultaneously.
6. Waste Collection.
Apps don’t collect trash, people do. And In the words and accent of late President Muhammadu Buhari "KWARAPTION'.
Winning companies here only own trucks, routes, labor, municipalities, and recycling partnerships. But you still need to be careful. Be very careful or just donate your money to charity.
7. Agricultural Aggregation.
You can build the apps but you still need someone to inspect crops, negotiate prices, collect produce, transport, grade quality, manage spoilage. The real Agriculture company in Africa is logistics. The software can only coordinate.
8. Property Rentals and Management.
You cannot innovate your way out of corruption, Igadi be careful, I’m not here to motivate.
9. Recruitment for Blue-collar workers.
You can digitize applications. You cannot fully digitize trust, attendance, attitude, reliability, etc. Many employers over here still hire through referrals because reputation matters. You're better off building a brand as an expert HR.
10. Construction Management.
The software alone can’t solve this. You still need someone to supervise artisans, inspect work, source materials, and solve on-site issues. Construction remains operational.
If you notice the pattern, none of these fail because the software is bad. They struggle because Africa's constraints are trust, operations, and infrastructure.
Tell that neobank founder building for Africa to focus on fiat distribution first. Build daily usage. Own their financial attention.
Then gradually introduce crypto as infrastructure, not a product.
Crypto adoption in Africa is not a user acquisition problem. It is a trust accumulation problem.
@GaindeYi To think I was rooting for Senegal badly.... And stayed up late just to watch the match, cause I had high hopes the team were going to put belt to the asses of the Norwegians... was very disappointed man.
A very painful exit , can't even lie ...
Why are vibe coders mostly web developers?
Genuine question.
You rarely hear people vibe coding kernels, databases, compilers, or distributed systems.
@ossynoya Done that before ... Just instruct it to not add itself as a contributor or co-author in your commits or PR
It was great joining Njideka Akunyili Crosby — a gifted Nigerian-born, Los Angeles-based artist — to unveil our first portrait together. This piece reflects so many chapters of Michelle and my story, and we’re thrilled that it will be on display in the Hope and Change lobby at the Obama Presidential Center starting this Juneteenth.
Banditry is not surviving in Northern Nigeria merely because of government failure. It is surviving because the North, over time, has built an ecosystem that allows it to thrive.
Behind the man with the gun, there is often a village that fears him or protects him. There is a relative who knows where he sleeps. There is an informant who watches the road. There is a supplier who sells him fuel, food, motorcycles, or ammunition. There is a negotiator who profits from ransom. There is a praise singer who turns him into a legend. There is a politician who makes statements after every tragedy and returns to silence. And there is an educated northern public that can trend gossip or sex scandals for days but treat mass abduction like bad weather.
That is the part we do not like to say.
The forest did not create banditry. It simply gave it room to grow.
Banditry in Northern Nigeria did not begin today. Long before today’s headlines, northern trade routes and rural frontiers had a history of armed raids, cattle theft, attacks on traders, and criminal gangs operating in places where authority was weak.
That is one of the ironies of our history. Many people today, especially in Southern Nigeria, look at banditry and conclude that Nigeria should break apart. Yet insecurity along northern routes was one of the problems colonial rule claimed it was trying to solve when Nigeria was amalgamated in 1914.
Colonial authorities quickly discovered that the frontier was far less obedient than the maps they drew. Trade routes were disrupted by raids and ambushes. Traders and herders faced harassment. Rural authority was weak. Roads were unsafe. Violence had already become part of the region’s political economy. Even Lugard himself had some skimishes with armed bandits.
So the problem is old.
What changed was the scale, the weapons, the money involved, the collapse of local restraints, and the weakness of the modern state.
The modern form of banditry did not begin with mass kidnappings or attacks on schools Either. It started in ways that seemed smaller and easier to ignore.
In many rural parts of Zamfara, Katsina, Sokoto, Kebbi, and neighbouring areas, the first signs were cattle theft, highway robbery, and revenge attacks between communities. One man’s cattle would be stolen. Another group would retaliate. Villages accused one another of helping criminals. Violence gradually escalated.
This was the environment that produced men like Kundu and Buharin Daji.
Today, they are remembered as notorious bandit leaders. But before they became feared names, they emerged from communities already struggling with insecurity, poverty, and weak government presence.
In those communities, cattle were not just livestock. They were savings, school fees, food, and family wealth.
Losing fifty cows could mean losing everything.
At the same time, many people felt abandoned by the state. Some villages rarely saw police officers. Others believed security agencies only arrived after attacks had already happened. Many felt the courts were too slow or too corrupt to provide justice.
Then communities formed vigilante groups to defend themselves.
In many places, people welcomed them because they were desperate for protection. Nobody should mock people for trying to survive when the state has failed them. But over time, some vigilantes were accused of targeting entire Fulani communities instead of focusing on criminals. Others were accused of killing suspects without trial or punishing innocent people for crimes they did not commit.
Whether every accusation was true or not, the stories spread.
Young men heard that relatives had been beaten, arrested, or killed. They heard that Yan Sakai groups treated every Fulani man as a suspect. They heard that nobody would protect them. They believed nobody would listen to them.
Every abuse became evidence.
Every dead relative became a story.
Every injustice became a recruitment tool.
That does not excuse banditry. But It explains how it grows.
Some men entered the bush claiming self-defence. But to survive in the forest, they needed guns. Guns cost money. So they stole cattle. The stolen cattle were sold to buy more weapons. The more weapons they bought, the stronger they became. The stronger they became, the more young men joined them.
What may have started as a claim of self-defence slowly turned into organised crime.
But that was one doorway into banditry.
Another doorway was greed.
Not everyone entered the bush with a grievance. Some people simply saw that violence had become profitable. A man with a gun could steal cattle, collect levies, block roads, command fear, settle scores, and become more powerful than the honest farmer or herder trying to survive.
Once crime begins to pay more than work, society has already started advertising criminal life to desperate young men.
Then the cycle began feeding itself.
A man buys weapons for “self-defence.” Then he needs boys to carry those weapons. The boys need food. The food needs money. The money comes from cattle rustling. The rustling brings retaliation. The retaliation brings more weapons. More weapons bring more recruits. More recruits bring more mouths. More mouths bring more raids.
At some point, the original excuse dies, but the business continues.
That is how a grievance becomes an economy.
From there, the violence became more organised. Cattle rustlers became armed commanders. Armed commanders became negotiators. Negotiators became local power brokers. Eventually, some became men that governments found themselves bargaining with.
This is where figures like Dogo Gide and Awwalun Daudawa enter the story. They represent the stage where banditry moved beyond cattle rustling and rural raids and became a full ransom economy.
Roads became dangerous. Villages became sources of taxation. Farmers paid levies before harvesting crops. Travellers became targets. Schools became opportunities.
Daudawa’s role in the Kankara school abduction changed the trajectory of modern banditry. It showed that abducting schoolchildren could generate far more attention, pressure, and profit than traditional kidnappings.
Kankara opened the floodgates.
Bandit leaders across the region watched the panic, the headlines, the negotiations, and the pressure on government. What once seemed extraordinary quickly became a template. Schools became targets. Children became bargaining tools in a criminal economy.
But there is a question that should bother anyone who thinks seriously about this problem.
How do hundreds of schoolchildren get moved across difficult terrain by men on motorcycles and disappear into forests for days or weeks? How do armed men move, feed themselves, communicate, negotiate, and avoid capture across vast territories?
The answer is simple.
Bandits do not operate alone.
They rely on informants. They rely on people who know the terrain. They rely on suppliers. They rely on people who help them sell stolen cattle and buy weapons. They rely on negotiators who contact families and governments during ransom discussions. They rely on relatives, sympathisers, and terrified communities where silence has become a survival strategy.
As the Minister of Defence put it, the people around them are the oxygen of the business.
That is the ecosystem.
The men carrying the guns are only one part of it.
In many cases, people around them know who they are, where they operate, who supplies them, and who benefits from their activities. Some stay silent because they are afraid. Others stay silent because they are related to them. Some profit from the system. Others simply do not want trouble.
That is one reason banditry is so difficult to defeat.
But this ecosystem is not only about food, fuel, weapons, and informants. It also has a cultural side.
For generations, northern societies have had traditions of celebrating powerful and feared men. Figures like Kasu Zurmi and Gambo belonged to an older culture in which outlaws could become larger than life through stories, songs, and folklore.
Modern banditry inherited that tradition and adapted it.
Today, singers such as Late Suraju, Adamu Ayuba, Hamadu Makaho, Malam Jaka, Megari, and others help circulate the names of contemporary bandit leaders. The medium has changed, but the function remains the same. The criminal is transformed into a figure of prestige.
That matters because prestige attracts followers.
A young man is more likely to join a movement when its leaders are treated as powerful men rather than ordinary criminals. The praise song becomes part of recruitment. It becomes part of intimidation. It becomes part of the mythology that keeps the ecosystem alive.
Social media has only expanded the reach of that mythology.
The videos of bandits displaying weapons, cash, motorcycles, and armed escorts are not random acts of vanity. They advertise power. They project invincibility. They reinforce the status of particular commanders within the hierarchy of banditry.
But this is where the argument must leave the forest and enter the city.
Yes, communities around bandits have questions to answer. Some people are terrified. Some are trapped. Some are benefiting. Some know who supplies information. Some know who suddenly became wealthy. Some know which houses receive suspicious visitors. Some know which young men disappeared into the bush and later returned with money, motorcycles, women, and guns.
But the problem is not limited to rural communities.
The educated North also bears responsibility because too many of us have become accustomed to northern suffering.
A leaked chat can dominate discussion for days. A celebrity scandal can dominate discussion for days. Social media drama can dominate discussion for days. Yet villages are attacked, students are kidnapped, farmers are taxed by criminals, highways become unsafe, and entire communities are displaced, only for public outrage to disappear almost immediately.
We have attention.
We simply waste it.
That is why I struggle when people say the North lacks media power. The problem is often not the absence of a voice. The problem is how that voice is used.
We can spend endless hours discussing gossip, politicians, celebrities, tribal disputes, religious arguments, and social media controversies. But when farmers are paying taxes to criminals before harvesting their crops, many people suddenly lose interest.
That silence matters because banditry benefits when society quickly moves on. It benefits when attacks become routine news. It benefits when politicians know public anger will fade within days.
Compare this with Southern Nigeria. The South is far from perfect. It has its own problems, hypocrisies, and distractions. But when insecurity affects some southern communities, the public reaction is often different. People organise. Unions speak out. Community leaders are pressured to respond. The media keeps the issue alive.
In the North, we have become used to horror.
That is not resilience.
It is decay.
There is nothing admirable about becoming comfortable with the abnormal. The more we normalise it, the easier it becomes for leaders to ignore it. The easier leaders ignore it, the stronger the criminals become.
The farmer who cannot farm affects food prices in the city. The trader who cannot travel affects markets. The child who cannot attend school affects the future. A village paying levies to bandits is not buying peace. It is financing future violence.
Banditry does not stay in the forest.
The first thing we must do is strip away the romance.
The bandit is not a hero. He is not a defender. He is not a freedom fighter. He is not protecting any community by taxing poor villagers, kidnapping travellers, destroying farms, and turning schoolchildren into bargaining chips. Whatever grievance may have existed at the beginning has long been overwhelmed by criminality.
The second thing is to confront the ecosystem around him.
Praise singers are not harmless entertainers. Informants are not minor actors. Negotiation rackets must be exposed. Communities that knowingly protect criminals must face consequences, while innocent communities must be protected from vigilante abuse.
Security operations must be firm without becoming ethnic revenge. Traditional leaders must be held accountable. Rural economies must be rebuilt so that young men do not see the bush as their only path to power.
And the educated North must stop acting like spectators.
If we can make gossip trend, we can make the names of attacked villages trend. If we can spend days arguing about celebrities, we can spend days demanding action from governors. If we can organise political rallies, weddings, naming ceremonies, and religious gatherings, we can organise sustained pressure around insecurity.
This is not about blaming victims. Many northern communities are trapped between bandits, vigilantes, poverty, and a failing state.
But a society that wants to survive must tell itself the truth.
These men do not come from nowhere.
They come from communities. They rely on relationships. They depend on information, supplies, money, prestige, fear, and silence.
Until the North confronts the entire ecosystem, we will keep chasing the man with the gun while ignoring everything that allows him to keep fighting.
I've been a backend Engineer for 12+ years. Today, I'm a Principal Engineer at Atlassian.
I've designed systems that handle millions of requests. Sat on both sides of system design interviews.
Reviewed more architecture docs than I can count.
Starting today, I'm breaking down the fundamentals of scaling for the next 25 days.
If you're learning system design bookmark this thread, you're going to get a lot of learning from this.
@mfc_mrpage Gotta be Argentina
https://t.co/r1yBIAQhf5
After 3 incredible years and 1.6M students later, my journey at ALX Africa has come to an end.
It has been a life-changing experience, during which I made a lot of friends, worked with an incredibly dedicated team, and met so many talented students.
A few numbers. We scaled from a few thousand students to 1.6M students on our platform. Students loved it and many of them took more than one course: 4M total! For the famous #ALX_SE Software engineering program, our SE students made an average of 2,000 commits and our checker reviewed 180M of their projects. That’s 2B lines of code… and that was before Claude Code. They actually wrote these themselves (unless Kimba said otherwise :)
A big thank you to all my SE team mates, I am so proud of what we have accomplished, and I will really miss you all. Thank you to Fred for the trust he put in me and always supporting my crazy new and disruptive ideas.
Thank you to my students. It was an honor to work with you, watch you struggle but relentlessly move forward, no matter what, until you got this job. To those who are still struggling finding this job, keep pushing forward. Don’t let go. You got this. You all have worked so hard and I am so proud of you. You are the greatest thing I've ever been part of and I can't wait to see what impact you will have on the world. It’s your turn to shine now, and hopefully for some of you to give back to the community whenever you are in a position to.
I hope you’ll keep sharing the good news with me when you get this internship, this job, or when you launch your company. These messages are everything to me. In any case, I’ll be watching you from afar, and you can count on me to continue answering all your LinkedIn and X messages.
Can’t conclude without ALX Africa’s signature: continue to “Do Hard Things”. Remember who you are, where you are coming from, and where you set out to go. I’ll see you there soon.
With love.
J
PS: Want to know what's next for me? Drop your email here: https://t.co/yTz7qTwTfU
be cracked.
Applications for the Circle Developer Grants Program are now open.
We’re funding high-caliber teams building production-ready systems on Arc with USDC and the Circle Developer Platform across payments, treasury, FX, the agentic economy, and more.
We’re looking for strong integrations, clear paths to users and usage, and systems that expand USDC utility.
Learn more and apply: https://t.co/wVanBasrE7
Most Popular Users
Elon Musk 
@elonmusk
240.6M followers
Barack Obama
@barackobama
119.2M followers
Donald J. Trump
@realdonaldtrump
111.7M followers
Cristiano Ronaldo
@cristiano
110.5M followers
Narendra Modi
@narendramodi
107M followers
Rihanna
@rihanna
97.6M followers
NASA
@nasa
92.2M followers
Justin Bieber
@justinbieber
90.9M followers
KATY PERRY
@katyperry
87.6M followers
Taylor Swift
@taylorswift13
81.5M followers
Lady Gaga
@ladygaga
73M followers
Virat Kohli
@imvkohli
69.8M followers
Kim Kardashian
@kimkardashian
69.8M followers
YouTube
@youtube
68.7M followers
Bill Gates
@billgates
63.9M followers
Neymar Jr
@neymarjr
62.6M followers
The Ellen Show
@theellenshow
62.4M followers
CNN
@cnn
61.9M followers
X
@x
60.8M followers
Selena Gomez
@selenagomez
60.7M followers