MINISTER BOSUN YOU ASKED ABOUT NIPOST Nigeria and Nigerians are faced by a reputational disadvantage in the global technology space. A lot of positive stories are needed to counter the unfair narrative Nigerians in Technology face. This is a perspective where GridCode Technology will help Nigeria shine on the global stage, a Nigerian’s technology, used in Nigeria, by the Government of Nigerian to solve an infrastructure problem in Nigeria that 75% of countries in the world are still trying to solve. You should be interested. It is an uncommon style for a minister in Nigeria to seek the opinion of the citizenry to inform policy formulation. The minister has opened a new door in the realms of governance.

He is demonstrating that social media can be a platform for direct engagement where leaders can request engagement as opposed to users demanding engagement. He is setting the bar for himself quite high and it might be deliberate that he is using NIPOST as a testbed considering how the organisation has had lack lustre performance through several spurts of stop-start attempts at bringing itself into the 21st Century relevantly. Examples of stop-Starts abound at NIPOST, ranging from commercialising assets for service penetration, the agreement with Egyptian partners on delivery enhancement, foray into attempting to license logistics/delivery companies and cycles of addressing projects that still haven’t met the mark. To be direct, addressing is the bane of all of NIPOST’s woes.

Get addressing right and everything else will build on top of it. Unfortunately, NIPOST has always treated addressing as a commercial opportunity instead of a national infrastructure on which all other commercial services depend. Even when GridCodes, an indigenous Nigerian offering globally acclaimed and patented digitally navigable addressing innovation came along, NIPOST still bungled it. GridCodes is in Rwanda now building and operating with iPOSITA Nigeria’s equivalent of NIPOST. So maybe Mr Bosun the new Minister, in Nigeria is the person to get this right. What are the issues? Providing all buildings with accurate, reliable, digitally navigable addresses is the responsibility of nation states that comes with the rights of the State over land and its use. In the simplest terms, this is achieved through address codification. Countries like UK and the US that have achieved address codification, have done so over the course of about 70 years and at costs running into the 100 millions in USD/Pounds/Euros. Emerging countries like Nigeria do not have the time nor resources to do it the way established nations have done it.

This is where disruption comes in. Think about disruption of cabled telephone lines by wireless technologies like GSM and CDMA. GSM made it possible for developing countries like Nigeria to avoid expensive, tedious and cumbersome nationwide cabling to get 60million wireless phone lines in relatively short 5 years that are even better than landlines.

Thats exactly what geocoding addressing systems like GridCodes offers Nigeria. GridCodes will help Nigeria get address codification that is better than the PostCodes of UK. Every codified address will be live the day it is created and the whole country can be done in 12-18 months if properly executed. We are in 2023 and this could have been achieved by 2020/21. Records of how the opportunity was missed abounds in the public domain. Starting in 2018 when the Founder of GridCodes had a press conference calling out the erstwhile DG NIPOST for signing a contract with his British competitor in violation of Executive Order 5 and adapting the weaker British Technology using his own GridCode model which he had earlier offered NIPOST. Subsequently, the then Chairman of the Digital Addressing Council, VP Osibanjo had the Ministry of Science & Technology evaluate the system for national adoption. It passed all stages of ministerial and inter-ministerial evaluations in flying colours and was presented to the Federal Executive Council for approval. NIPOST seems to have been called in again at that level because it’s parent ministry, Communication and Digital Economy, advertised for similar systems for evaluation, conducted symposia where GridCode was presented along others and at the end of the day, nothing happened. Another lost opportunity. It is common knowledge globally that the military industrial complex of many nations produce innovations and innovative people who go on to contribute technology that adds to the GDP of those countries.

This holds true in Israel, the United States of America and many countries in Europe. In this case and not surprisingly, the founder of GridCodes is a retired Regular Combatant Officer of the Nigerian Air Force. Outside the Air Force, on the speaking circuit, he is well respected by people who came across him as being erudite and received many a standing ovation after talking about and demonstrating the GridCode Technology. Everyone who has come across this in the industry knows and agrees that this is the solution. The person to solve this needs to understand that the classical methods being proposed for addressing and the wrong approach to the disruptive solutions available is the only problem because as usual, the solution is almost always out there. So Minister Bosun, here is one solution that you can use to kill several birds. The ball is in your court.

The associated website is www.findgridcode.com