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TechNigeria: A weekly digest of what went down in Nigeria’s tech space

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Taking off from the previous week, we saw another week that increased the portfolio on investments in Nigeria, featuring new partnership deal sealed between a UK-based firm and a local company, Hatixa.

The week also featured a new company entry into Nigeria as South Africa’s TG Boost considered expansion into black most populous nation. Meanwhile, Twitter’s solidarity to the #ENDSARS movement took another turn as Nigerian businessman Adamu Garba sued Jack Dorsey for allegedly inciting violence with is public support to the #EndSARS campaign against police brutality in Nigeria.

Below is a digest for the week, highlighting the major tech build up.

One billion dollar court case

Ex-presidential aspirant, Adamu Garba, threatens to sue Twitter boss, Jack Dorsey, for supporting endSARS

For allegedly inciting violence through his support for the #EndSARS campaign against police brutality in Nigeria, Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, has been charged to court by Nigerian businessman, Adamu Garba.

Demanding 20% of the techpreneur’s networth, Garba, a former presidential aspirant, filed a $1 billion lawsuit against Dorsey at the Abuja Federal High Court. Garba prayed the court to suspend the use of Twitter in Nigeria should Dorsey fails to meet demands and financial compensation.

New opportunity land

UK’s BrandMobile has considered Nigeria’s Hatixa as a springboard to penetrate Africa. True to its vision to scale its gamified ad-tech product, United Kingdom (UK) firm BrandMobile signed a joint venture deal with the Nigerian startup.

Read also: TechNigeria: A weekly digest of what went down in Nigeria’s tech space

The partnership seeks to launch BrandMobile Africa, with the goal of creating a scalable ad-tech product built on gamification principles. While this is expected to drive increasing investment to Africa, particularly Nigeria; analysts noted that the new deal will encourage talent exchange between the two countries.

New high-s

During the week, Moniepoint became Nigeria’s largest non-bank mobile money platform. The development followed a milestone that indicated that the startup, operated by Nigerian fintech player TeamApt, averagely processed 13 million transactions monthly.

Although, barely 1 year old, reviews revealed that the startup has a variety of products in stock including payments service AptPay, digital banking solution Moneytor, and Profectus Robotics, a back-office automation solution.

TG Boost in Nigeria

LATEST TECH NEWS: S'Africa's TG Boost considers expansion into Nigeria. 2 other things and a trivia you need to know today, October 19, 2020

Close to the UK’s new entry, South Africa’s TG Boost also considered expansion into Nigeria. The bid came on the heels of its latest seed funding round.

TG Boost, through the expansion, will build on its portfolio to increase its influence across Africa. Currently, some of the institution’s students have been hired by high profiled companies such as Sparkle, Spacepen and Investec.

Facebook bias

In what Nigerians tagged as a bias from Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg-led tech company has publicly acknowledged its shortcomings, apologising for erroneously flagging down #ENDSARS contents and posts by community users as fake news.
For incorrectly flagging #EndSARS posts related to the Lekki massacre in Nigeria as false information, Instagram, a subsidiary of Facebook, made the apology via a statement on its official PR team’s twitter handle. The social media platform assured Nigerians that it has reconciled the error.

Remarks

These stories, and many others, made headlines during the week. Join us next week for another edition of TechNigeria.

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