In this interview, Favourite Ownuemene, the Chief Executive Officer of Bluebic, an indigenous Information Technology (IT) firm in Lagos with special emphasis on developing eLearning software and solutions talks about eLearning, challenges and the need to fund education sector in the country. Anthony Nwosu captured this in an exclusive interview.

Tell us about BlueBic as an IT firm?

BlueBic is an EdTech startup that builds software solutions that automate the tedious processes involved in running a school, giving school admins and teachers more time to focus on teaching. We strongly believe that the narrative in education ought to change and we are poised to make our own contribution towards this.

Over the years, you have demonstrated efficiency in development of e-learning software, what prompted this?

We noticed a need for an indigenous software product that is not just reliable, but also very easy to use. Giving our deep expertise at software development, we knew we were well-equipped to tackle this problem. This was the gap that we had in mind to fill. We saw the vacuum and we are building also capacity in that area.

What is the level of acceptance, do you think that Nigerian education institutions are open to deploying indigenous solutions?

The level of acceptance is growing rapidly as schools begin to appreciate the need for IT solutions that improves student outcomes, administrative efficiency, saves cost, and also creates a tech-savvy image for the school. Apart from e learning, our solution incorporates school management and all that has to do with day to day running of education facilities. We understood how human error can affect the optimization of many things in the school, we brought in automation.

You are one of the few IT firms that are deploying cloud-based software for learning, do you think that schools are ripe for this?

Yes, schools are more than ready for this. There are a few issues that affect a schools’ ability to deploy cloud-based School Management Software, and we have been, and continue to work very hard at mitigating against these issues. We have seen will to deploy these facilities in school.
How are you dealing with challenges like Lack of computers and poor power supply?
Most teachers today can afford or already own internet ready phones as Chinese smartphones can be bought for as little as $50, sometimes less. We have built our product from the ground up to be mobile-first. This ensures that our product can be used by schools with very few or no computers and does not require constant power supply as phones can be charged and used even when there is no power. Also, we know that cost of data in this part of the word can be prohibitive, we have built our product to use very little data. Records can also be viewed when offline. Finally, we conduct regular IT literacy training for employees of schools that use our product.

What are the challenges that you face doing this business in Nigeria?

Our biggest challenge has to do with the fact that the education sector is underfunded. A lot of school’s struggle to break even and this affects how much they’re willing to pay for services like ours. We must start funding the schools appropriately.
Have you ever deployed in public schools; do you think that the government funded schools are open to such a technology?
Yes, Govt. funded schools are open to deploying this technology, and we have deployed our product for a few. The challenge with deploying this for Govt. funded schools has less to do with their readiness and more to do with the long sales process and bureaucratic bottlenecks as there is usually a hierarchy of decision makers that all have to be convinced.

For a school to run an effective eLearning solution or platform like yours,there must be skills. What are you doing about this ?

Yes, it does. We, however, have put systems in place to ensure that teachers can be trained in a cost-effective manner. We strongly believe in capacity building; we have that in mind and that is the reason that we put forward training programs that would update teachers on the best practice. We are not the IT firm that dumps solutions on client, we incorporate training in our service delivery.

How can parents monitor their ward’s educational progress using BlueBic solution?

Parents get login access to the portal; via the portal they can monitor the performance of their wards and also pay their school fees.

As a stakeholder in the ICT space, what is your advice to the policymakers and government on how to deploy e-learning solutions this post COVID-19 era?

E-learning without the guidance of a teacher/instructor isn’t very efficient for the general population of students. My advice would be for the Govt. to focus on deploying e-learning solutions that are targeted not only at students, but also solutions that aid parents/guardians (or other adults) to play the role of a teacher in the learning process. Pertaining to our products and where we have deployed, the product is mostly developed in Nigeria. We have also deployed for schools in Uganda, Kenya, and Ghana.

Pertaining to our products and where we have deployed, the product is mostly developed in Nigeria. We have also deployed for schools in Uganda, Kenya, and Ghana.

· Urges Other Corporate Citizens To Emulate Him

The Community Policing efforts of the Nigeria Police Force have continued to receive commendable support from Governments, Corporate Bodies and Private Individuals as the Inspector-General of Police, IGP M.A Adamu, NPM, mni, today, 25th August, 2020 received three (3) operational vehicles donated by Innoson Vehicle Manufacturing Company Limited to the Nigeria Police Force in support of ongoing efforts at repositioning the Force for optimal performance.

The vehicles, Innoson G12 Series, consisting of the Single Cabin Pick-up Truck MSI, Double Cabin Pick-up Truck MSII and the SUV MSIII were presented to the Nigeria Police Force by Mr. Jonas Maduabuchukwu Ojukwu on behalf of Chief (Dr) Innocent I. Chukwuma, OFR and Management of Innoson Vehicle Manufacturing Company Limited in furtherance of their Corporate Social Responsibility, community support and other efforts directed at making the country peaceful, safe and secure.

The IGP, represented by the Deputy Inspector General of Police, Department of Operations, DIG Abdulmajid Ali, in his remarks, expressed his appreciation to Chief (Dr) Innocent I. Chukwuma, OFR and the Management of Innoson Vehicle Manufacturing Company Limited for their kind gesture towards the Force. He noted that with public support of this nature, the Nigeria Police Force will no doubt be able to meet its operational and infrastructural needs in combating crimes and criminality in the country. He enjoins other well-meaning individuals and corporate bodies to emulate the gesture.

DCP FRANK MBA
FORCE PUBLIC RELATIONS OFFICER
FORCE HEADQUARTERS
ABUJA

My eyes were soaked in tears that Christmas, when I traveled home to see my mum.

With a child’s feeling of a son who had missed his mum, I hurriedly alighted from my car upon arrival at my family home to embrace my heroine.

“Good afternoon Mama”, I heartily greeted her before a shocker followed.

My mum looked me in the face and said “welcome my inlaw”. What? In-wetin?

I knew that she was getting old but not too old not to recognize her beloved son, me Kanayochukwu!

“Ọ bụ m, Anayo nwa gị nwoke” meaning “it is me your son, Anayo”, I said to my mum who insisted that I was her inlaw. Unbelievable!

I hated that day, the day a highly priced mum would deny her son and call him someone else.

Not my mum, nne m ọma! Never!

Was it not the woman that lived for me, who would give me the last food available and would go to bed hungry; a woman I swore to work so hard to take care of till she dies? Devil is a liar!

My wife had made my life so beautiful and my dream of taking care of my mum come true.

Two years into our marriage, she suggested that my 72 years old mum come live with us in the city.

She wanted to let my mother have the best of what we could offer.

I never stopped telling her all that my mum did for me and how I would rather die than to live in comfort and she in need.

Who says that the two hearts of a loving couple don’t beat in concert?

My mum, though reluctantly, came to live with us and was “detained” for 12 years. It is usually a Herculean task to “uproot” an old Igbo woman from the village to come live in the city.

She nursed all our kids and formed a formidable team with my wife to keep me well behaved. Every judgement was in my wife’s favour.

All changed one day, 12 years after, when my mother called me into her room to complain that my wife had stolen £10 my friend from U.K. gifted her.

“That was a laughable accusation” I told her and she started crying.

I wasn’t swayed. It didn’t just add up.

She was my mom and I knew where and how she hid her money when I was growing up. I was sure she misplaced the money.

My junior brother and I would compete on who would be the first to “tap” 5 kobo from her bag which we used to buy akara and bread during recess periods in school.

I took her bag, her bank, and instinctively went for the zipped compartment by the inner corner and found the money and handed same over to her. She murmured that my wife must have surreptitiously returned the money.

How? When? I was confused.

Even though I had never doubted my mum or deemed her a liar before now, I was convinced that the devil was using someone who was using mum to destroy my marriage. My mum was too holy a vessel to be inhabited by devil.

Of all the amount of money in this world, how could my wife, a bank manager steal £10 from an old woman she provided for mostly from her own purse? Mbanụ!

But I never related this incident to my wife.

How would I?

That would have broken her heart and the damage would have been irreparable. Such tale could bring out the Jezebel in any daughter-in-law.

Then, another day came when my mum again accused my wife of stealing and seizing her bra.

My mum would not take it anymore.

She had determined to confront the accused but she waited for me to return from work before she tabled the issue.

This, like the other charge of stealing of £10, was also laughable.

What would my wife do with my mum’s bra?

Their upper hemispheres were just not comparable.

While my wife is like a modern day model both in shape and size, my mum was blessed with an envious pair of burst lines that would make boobsful Cossy Orjiakor look normal. Hers would made my father’s friends ask him “ị na-ayị ara?”

It was at this point that I concluded that my mum needed a medical evaluation.

I suspected Dementia.

An all-night search on the internet made me very nervous as her symptoms were pointing towards one disease which can only be managed and buy not curable .

Shame to money which would become useless when confronted by an incurable ailment!

Two consultants, one of which was a professor of Neurology at Lagos Teaching Hospital, independently diagnosed the same ailment.

Mama Obiora, my mum, had developed dementia after 12 years of living with my family in the city.

Broaching the issue with my wife made her open up. She was more dispassionate as she had long suspected that Mama had dementia.

She had noticed Mama’s rapid deterioration both in aggressiveness, poor memory and loss of continence. She was careful not to tell me and had prayed that I noticed them myself.

She was afraid that she might be misunderstood as most men who loved their mums so much would.

My eldest sister advised that I bring our mum home to her. She was ready to nurse Mama while I and other siblings would support with enablements.

With a sorrow-filled heart, I took mama back to my home town for a better care not without retaining the services of a well known professor at Nnamdi Azikiwe University Teaching Hospital, Nnewi.

At 84, my mum looked well fed and well taken care of but calling me an “inlaw” that Christmas was hard a punch for me to bear.

Medical science can go to hell! Perhaps, someone ws behind my mum’s sickness, I thought.

Yes! It was possible. Are we no longer in a wicked world?

Would anyone have blamed me if the prophecy of one freelance pastor who came to pray for my mum made me smell an evil rat?

The spirit-filled pastor was ready to reveal the name of the person who had cast an evil spell on my mum. That’s if we were ready to “engage” him formally.

I quickly came to my senses when he sent a very expensive bill for the deliverance. What an unbelieving customer I turned out to be!

My mum didn’t get any better but good care extended the doomsday as she joined her Maker at 86 years, 14 years after the diagnosis of her dementia.

Do you have aged parents?

Please verify those tales about your wife or/and other people based on which you took some decisions.

You might have been deceived.

Many old people in our families and in our national lives are presently at various stages of senile deterioration known as dementia but we hardly notice due to our blind love, religious affiliation, filial loyalty or hero worship.

My dear mum would have wrecked my home if not for God’s grace and my introspective capabilities.

Dementia, Alzheimer’s, Amnesia and Senility are conditions of old people.

These diseases may set in much earlier than anticipated.

The patient may look normal and be confidently acting a new normal which would have wrecked a family or a state before it becomes obvious.

Many people as young as early sixties have presented the symptoms of dementia.

Check around you. Test all you hear from your old pals. They may be feeding you with inadvertent but dangerous lies.

Refusal to sieve and verify all the tales from our aged ones could be destructive to a family or to a nation.

Anayo Nwosu

During my tour of the South and after a long and successful press conference in Calabar, Cross Rivers state, a journalist put up his hand for the last question and said,

“Well we do not know who is bankrolling you”.

This is not a question but an assertion and an insult.

And if this insulting ASSERTION were made before Trump or OBJ I know how they would have reacted.

Below is my response and I have no apology to offer for it.

The young man apologised to me during the press conference and sent his apologies to me after the conference. I have accepted his apologies in good faith and moved on.

I have always had respect for journalists and I always will. Those of them that know me or have worked with or for me over the last 30 years can attest to that.

However there is a distinction between asking a question and offering a gratuitous insult .

This is all the more so when it is clear that the assertion was sponsored and engineered by my political enemies who wanted to use the young man to insult and embarrass me and question my integrity. Well they got more than they bargained for.

I repeat this was not a question but an assertion and an insult and I will not accept that from any man born of woman. Thank you.

ADDENDUM:

Permit me to add the following to my earlier statement. I have taken note of the report by Daily Trust on the incident. The content is false. I didn’t send any of my security men to threaten their reporter.

I only reprimanded him for a premeditated plan to embarrass me and he apologised thereafter. That was all.

This is not a battle between me and the esteemed Nigerian journalists who respect the ethics of the noble profession.

I have always been and will always be a friend to journalists and a champion of freedom of speech. What I will not accept are brazen insults from an individual in the name of journalism.

The assertion or assumption that I am being bankrolled by anyone is deeply insulting.

Finally to the NUJ I say you have got me completely wrong. It would have been better if you had heard my own side of the story and established who was behind this whole incident and attempt to embarrass me, who paid for it and how much they paid before going to press. Nevertheless I still hold you in high esteem.

Fani KAYODE

Bayelsa State Government, on Tuesday, described as incorrect Federal Government’s categorisation of the state as insolvent due to its low internally generated revenue profile.

It also restated its call for restructuring of the country to address the current lopsided federalism that denied states, particularly Bayelsa, the due revenue from the resources in their land and region.

Chairman of the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC), Mr. Elias Mbam, while receiving receiving the Annual States Viability Index (ASVI) from the Editor-in-Chief of the Economic Confidential in his office in Abuja on Monday, stated that Bayelsa, Borno, Katsina, Kebbi and Taraba states had become insolvent because of their “extremely poor IGR” performance in 2019.

Faulting the report and the federal government’s position, the Technical Adviser to the Bayelsa State Governor on
Treasury, Accounts and Revenue, Mr. Timipre Seipulou, said the state was not financially insolvent.

Mr. Seipulou stated this in Yenagoa while presenting the income and expenditure profile of the state for the months of May, June and July 2020.

A press release by the governor’s Acting Chief Press Secretary, Mr. Daniel Alabrah, quoted him as saying that the actual problem was in the lopsided nature of the country’s funding structure.

He contended that the federal government allocates 54% of federal revenue to itself leaving the states with a little over 20% to share among themselves.

He also pointed out that a lot of monetary and fiscal policies were being driven by the federal government at the detriment of the states.

He expressed regret that Bayelsa with its vast deposits of oil and gas does not benefit from taxes and other revenues accruing from such resources to shore up its internally generated revenue based on the lopsided federal system the country operates.

Seipulou therefore called for restructuring of the country, saying “even on the issue of payment of taxes, we have been fighting that oil companies operating in the Niger Delta pay taxes to the states in the region.”

“Only last week, we had a lot of meetings over the issue of Federal Inland Revenue Service collecting taxes that should go to the states. And we had to go to court over that issue.

“If you look at the type of federating structure we operate, even the federal government depends on federation allocation. And so we cannot say that any state is technically insolvent. Besides, the 36 states of the federation are not companies that should be declared financially bankrupt.”

The technical adviser further contended that Bayelsa remains one of the states that is able to meet the obligations to its workers and appointees.

“Civil servants and political appointees in the state are not being owed salaries. Pensioners get their salary and gratuity regularly every month also even when other states are slashing the salary of workers and appointees. The state had not defaulted even for one month since the beginning of the year despite the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. So how can you categorise Bayelsa as insolvent?” Seipulou queried.

Giving a breakdown of the income and expenditure for the month of July, Mr. Seipulou said the state received a gross inflow of N9.8 billion, comprising statutory allocation of N2.4 billion, derivation N5.2 billion and value added tax of N1.8 billion.

He explained that the gross inflow for July as against the previous month showed a reduction of about 20%.

The governor’s aide also announced N1.7 billion as total deductions from the federation account, which include foreign loans N42 million, restructured commercial bank loans N741 million and restructured overpayment of 13% indices N128 million.

According to him, net receipts came up to N8.8 billion, excluding total deductions while the state recorded an IGR of N755 million for the month of June.

Seipulou said total receipts, including FAAC and other receipts, stood at N9.6 billion while total payments, excluding capital and recurrent expenditure, amounted to N7.9 million.

He said N2.987 billion was spent on capital and recurrent payments giving a net balance of N383.7 million for July.

Seipulou, who noted that that the balance brought forward from the month of June was N507 million, said in addition to the N383.7 million, the state was left with a closing balance of N123.3 million at the end of July 2020.

He earlier presented the figures for the months of May and June 2020.

In his remarks, the Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Information and Orientation, Mr. Freston Akpor, applauded the Governor Douye Diri administration for its commitment to prudent management of resources of the state even in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.