orode doherty

Since last Friday, Lendsqr has been battling a wave of cyberattacks. We are safe, lost no money and no data, and no customer account has been compromised. But we've lost sleep and I have probably drunk a barrel of black coffee. But that is not because they forgot about us. When a few fintechs got hit in early October, we turned on ourselves, found over 800 issues in our own systems and spent three weeks fixing them. That was three weeks before the attacks reached us. This wave has been going through the technology world since early October. Binance lost about $6.3 billion after one engineer's laptop was compromised. Railway told every one of its customers to change all their secret keys. Hundreds of developer accounts on GitHub have been taken over with stolen tokens. Abroad, companies come out and say it, and the next company learns. In Nigeria, we keep quiet. Every company whose people have spoken to me in confidence over the last few days has either been breached or lost money, and not one of them has said a word in public. So, the same people walk into the next company with exactly the same trick. I'm done keeping quiet about it. The way in is almost always a developer: stolen GitHub tokens, infected laptops, and fake recruiters sending a "test project" that compromises your machine the moment you open it. If you are a developer, revoke every GitHub token you have ever created today and scan your machine. If you run a company, turn on two-factor authentication everywhere, remove everyone who has left, change your keys, and pick up the phone when anybody asks you to change where money goes. I've written up everything: how they came at us, what we did, and every attacker address we saw, so you can check your own logs. The link is in the first comment. Thank you to Muyiwa Olufon and the team at @hinokisecurity for standing with us. Abeg, make we speak up. Fraud thrives in darkness.

I laugh whenever I write a well-articulated epistle under someone’s post, only for one ill-informed person to show up in the comments with, “ChatGPT final boss!” or “This is AI-generated!” Hello! Some of us have been writing beautifully structured, well-thought-out epistles long before ChatGPT became a thing. In fact, long before the internet even became mainstream in Nigeria! We wrote essays. We wrote stories. We wrote full scripts for webinars, public speaking engagements, campaigns, presentations and all sorts of professional engagements. We knew how to construct arguments, articulate our thoughts, tell stories and hold people’s attention with words. Heck, I wrote an entire book titled The Secret Cottage in JSS3, in 1998! It was a fictional story set in a European town, built around characters I created from years of immersing myself in books by Enid Blyton, Anne Rice, James Hadley Chase and other authors I grew up reading. And that was almost three decades ago. No ChatGPT. No Grammarly. No internet readily available to help us find our words. Just books, imagination, notebooks, dictionaries and an unhealthy amount of love for writing. So, please, don’t let the existence of AI make you intellectually lazy enough to assume that every well-written piece must have been generated by a machine. Some of us actually read. Some of us studied the art of writing. Some of us have spent decades learning how to express ourselves. AI can generate words, but it didn’t invent eloquence, articulation, critical thinking or the ability to tell a good story. And for the avoidance of doubt, I use AI. I appreciate the tool. I recognise its value. But I refuse to have years of reading, writing, learning and intellectual development dismissed simply because I can string a few beautiful paragraphs together. Not every good writer is using AI. Sometimes, you’re just witnessing the product of years of reading and a coconut head that refuses to stop thinking. Please, respect the craft! Selah

For me, what I expect from a Peter Obi's presidency may be completely different from many of you. I am not supporting him because I expect him to return fuel price back to what it used to be. I am not supporting him because I expect that prices of foodstuff will automatically become cheaper. I am not supporting him because I expect that Nigeria will be like Dubai under 4 years. Peter Obi cannot do that. For Nigeria to be anything near the semblance of any developed country, it will take a minimum of 20 years with consistent purposeful leadership. What I expect to benefit from the Peter Obi's presidency are completely different. I want to see a compete reset or overhaul of our political systems, structures and improvements in our participation as citizens in the process. I want to see a Nigeria where young people are not afraid or discouraged to go into politics because they know that their they can make a difference without having a god father. I want to see a Nigeria where people will have faith in the judiciary and get justice no matter who the person is in the society. I want to see a Nigeria where all these old politicians are retired and made redundant or irrelevant. And most of them go to prison for what they did. I want to see a Nigeria where people believe in INEC and do not need to go to court to challenge their loss or defend their victory. Peter Obi will not perform magic under 4 years. Anyone expecting him to perform magic in a bastardized country like Nigeria is being delusional. What Peter Obi represents is a symbol of hope, a new beginning and a complete reset button. The old ways of doing things aren't working. And we cannot continue to do things the same way, expecting a different result. A Peter Obi presidency will be the most important challenging, most criticized and most hated. Even far more than that of Tinubu. If you want to change Nigeria, you need a president that can lay a foundation for your children in the right way. And hope that the person who takes over doesn't take us back to what we are running away from. We have tried all the recycled leaders, and nothing has changed. If Peter is a symbol of that little hope, let's give him the chance, and reduce our expectations. Rome was not built in a day. End.