Technology
9mobile Sale: Why Glo May Finally Lose Out
By Dipo Olowookere
There are strong indications that Globacom, one of the four GSM service providers in Nigeria, may not be given the nod to acquire the troubled 9mobile, one of the mobile phone operators in the country.
9mobile, formerly Etisalat Nigeria, is desperately in need of a new investor after it was taken over in July 2017 following a N541 billion debt.
The telecoms firm obtained a syndicated loan from 13 Nigerian banks and after it failed its repayment plan, the lenders attempted to take over the company, but the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) and the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) prevented this.
After the regulators took over Etisalat Nigeria, Mubadala Group, the major investor from the United Arab Emirates, pulled out of the firm and said its brand name must not be used any longer, leading to the birth of 9mobile weeks later.
Barclays Africa, an arm of the Barclays Group, was appointed to shop for a new buyer of 9mobile and five companies have emerged the top bidders.
The firms are Bharti Airtel, an Indian telco that owns Airtel Nigeria; Globacom, the Nigerian company owned by Mike Adenuga Jnr; Teleology Holdings Limited, promoted by Adrian Wood, the pioneer CEO of MTN Nigeria; Smile Telecoms Holdings, a telco operating in Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, Congo DR and South Africa; and Helios Investment Partners LLP, an investment company.
According to a report by The Cable, Globacom desperately wants to acquire 9mobile, but it would take a miracle for this to happen.
This, according to the report, is because Glo does not have the financial muscle to revive 9mobile, which hopes to clear its debt with the banks.
“It is public knowledge that 9mobile is in dire need of real financial injection because of the debts, as well as a strong governance culture in view of its recent history.
“Glo is not the most financially buoyant to revive 9mobile, neither does it have the best-practice governance culture that 9mobile requires. Adenuga runs Glo like a kiosk or corner shop, and this cannot help the situation of 9mobile,” the insider was quoted as saying by TheCable.
However, it was gathered that Mr Adenuga desperately wants to acquire the telco and this is to claim the bragging rights of the largest telecom company in Nigeria.
Glo is currently the second largest operator in Nigeria with 37 million voice and 26.8 million internet subscribers, according to the October 2017 statistics from the NCC.
If it acquires 9mobile, it will automatically become the biggest network in Nigeria by adding 17 million to voice and 11.5 million to internet subscription base, he hopes.
Combined, the new entity’s 54 million voice lines and 38.3 million internet subscriptions will surpass MTN Nigeria’s 50.7 million and 32.5 million respectively.
“This, in sum, is why Adenuga wants 9mobile badly, despite the serious challenges Glo itself is facing in its business model,” the source said.
Glo would move from its 26.4% share of the market to 38.5%, including the benefit of recording more subscribers porting to its network.
Mr Adenuga’s company currently has the lowest number of gains from porting — an average of less than 1,000 per month — while 9mobile recorded a monthly average of 12,000 porting subscribers in 2017, industry’s highest by a distance, the journal reports.
Although the transaction is being handled by Barclays Africa, an arm of the Barclays Group, the telecom regulator, NCC, and the banking watchdog, CBN are expected to play a key role in the final decision.
NCC controls 9mobile’s operating licence while CBN regulates the banks. Both intervened to save 9mobile when it was going down.
The involvement of CBN and NCC, which had previously complained about “lack of transparency” by Barclays in the transaction, is not likely to do Mr Adenuga any favours.
However, Globacom remains confident that it would win the bid.
“Dr Mike Adenuga Jnr is never tired of pushing for improvement. Globacom boasts of arguably the most inspired and most passionate workforce in the industry.
We have the edge,” an insider told TheCable, refusing to be named because of internal rules.
Glo is the second national operator (SNO), licensed to provide national backbone for other networks as well as roll out landlines across the country.
“Since Adenuga got the SNO licence in 2003, he has not yet fulfilled the conditions of the licence. This is 14 years and counting,” a senior government official told TheCable on the condition that he would not be named.
“By now, it should have rolled out landlines nationwide and provided broadband access to millions of homes. The huge benefits to the economy have been lost over time. The notion that Globacom can get such an important licence and refuse to fulfill the conditions is unacceptable.”
Globacom was recently kicked out of the Republic of Benin after failing to meet conditions for the renewal of its licence, despite the fact that it took years for the company to roll out its service as a result of regulatory requirements.
The telecom company’s services in Ghana are also not well rated.
By Adedapo Adesanya
Lagos State’s representative, Team Nevo, won the 3 Million Technical Talent (3MTT) South-West Regional Hackathon, on Tuesday, December 9, 2025.
The host state took the victory defeating pitches from other south west states, including Oyo, Ogun, Osun, Ekiti, and Ondo States.
This regional hackathon was a major moment for the 3MTT Programme, bringing together young innovators from across the South-West to showcase practical solutions in AI, software development, cybersecurity, data analysis, and other key areas of Nigeria’s digital future.
Launched by the Federal Ministry of Communications, Innovation, and Digital Economy, the hackathon brought together talented young innovators from across the Southwest region to showcase their digital solutions in areas such as Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Machine Learning, software development, data analysis, and cybersecurity, among others.
“This event not only highlights the potential of youth in South West but also advances the digital economy, fosters innovation, and creates job opportunities for our young people,” said Mr Oluwaseyi Ayodele, the Lagos State Community Manager.
Winning the hackaton was Team Nevo, made up of Miss Lydia Solomon and Mr Teslim Sadiq, whose inclusive AI learning tool which tailors academic learning experiences to skill sets of students got the top nod, with N500,000 in prize money.
Team Oyo represented by Microbiz, an AI business tool solution, came in second place winning N300,000 while Team Ondo’s Fincoach, a tool that guides individuals and businesses in marking smarter financial decisions, came third with N200,000 in prize money.
Others include The Frontiers (Team Osun), Ecocycle (Team Ogun), and Mindbud (Team Ekiti).
Speaking to Business Post, the lead pitcher for Team Nevo, Miss Solomon, noted, “It was a very lovely experience and the opportunity and access that we got was one of a kind,” adding that, “Expect the ‘Nevolution’ as we call it, expect the transformation of the educational sector and how Nevo is going to bring inclusion and a deeper level of understanding and learning to schools all around Nigeria.”
Earlier, during his keynote speech, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Sterling Bank, Mr Abubakar Suleiman, emphasised the need for Nigeria’s budding youth population to tap into the country’s best comparative advantage, drawing parallels with commodities and resources like cocoa, soyabeans, and uranium.
“Tech is our best bet to architect a comparative advantage. The work we are doing with technologies are very vital to levelling the playing field.”
By Aduragbemi Omiyale
One of the high points of the 2025 re:Invent was the unveiling of Graviton5, the fifth generation of custom Arm-based server processors from Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Many tech enthusiasts believe that the company pushed the limits with Graviton5, its most powerful and efficient CPU, frontier agents that can work autonomously for days, an expansion of the Amazon Nova model family, Trainium3 UltraServers, and AWS AI Factories suitable for implementing AI infrastructure in customers’ existing data centres.
Graviton5—the company’s most powerful and efficient CPU
As cloud workloads grow in complexity, organizations face a persistent challenge to deliver faster performance at lower costs and meet sustainability commitments without trade-offs.
AWS’ new Graviton5-based Amazon EC2 M9g delivers up to 25% higher performance than its previous generation, with 192 cores per chip and 5x larger cache.
For the third year in a row, more than half of new CPU capacity added to AWS is powered by Graviton, with 98 per cent of the top 1,000 EC2 customers—including Adobe, Airbnb, Epic Games, Formula 1, Pinterest, SAP, and Siemens—already benefiting from Graviton’s price performance advantages.
Expansion of Nova family of models and pioneers “open training” with Nova Forge
Amazon is expanding its Nova portfolio with four new models that deliver industry-leading price-performance across reasoning, multimodal processing, conversational AI, code generation, and agentic tasks. Nova Forge pioneers “open training,” giving organizations access to pre-trained model checkpoints and the ability to blend proprietary data with Amazon Nova-curated datasets.
Nova Act achieves breakthrough 90% reliability for browser-based UI automation workflows built by early customers. Companies like Reddit are using Nova Forge to replace multiple specialized models with a single solution, while Hertz accelerated development velocity by 5x with Nova Act.
Addition of 3 frontier agents, a new class of AI agents that work as an extension of your software development team
Frontier agents represent a step-change in what agents can do. They’re autonomous, scalable, and can work for hours or days without intervention. AWS announced three frontier agents—Kiro autonomous agent, AWS Security Agent, and AWS DevOps Agent. Kiro autonomous agent acts as a virtual developer for your team, AWS Security Agent is your own security consultant, and AWS DevOps Agent is your on-call operational team.
Companies, including Commonwealth Bank of Australia, SmugMug, and Wester Governors University have used one or more of these agents to transform the software development lifecycle.
Unveiling Trainium3 UltraServers
As AI models grow in size and complexity, training cutting-edge models requires infrastructure investments that only a handful of organizations can afford.
Amazon EC2 Trn3 UltraServers, powered by AWS’s first 3nm AI chip, pack up to 144 Trainium3 chips into a single integrated system, delivering up to 4.4x more compute performance and 4x greater energy efficiency than Trainium2 UltraServers.
Customers achieve 3x higher throughput per chip while delivering 4x faster response times, reducing training times from months to weeks. Customers including Anthropic, Karakuri, Metagenomi, NetoAI, Ricoh, and Splash Music are reducing training and inference costs by up to 50 per cent with Trainium, while Decart is achieving 4x faster inference for real-time generative video at half the cost of GPUs, and Amazon Bedrock is already serving production workloads on Trainium3.
By Adedapo Adesanya
The National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) has issued an advisory on new vulnerabilities in ChatGPT that could expose users to data-leakage attacks.
According to the advisory, researchers discovered seven vulnerabilities affecting GPT-4o and GPT-5 models that allow attackers to manipulate ChatGPT through indirect prompt injection.
The agency explained that hidden instructions placed inside webpages, comments, or Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) can trigger unintended commands during regular browsing, summarisation, or search actions.
“By embedding hidden instructions in webpages, comments, or crafted URLs, attackers can cause ChatGPT to execute unintended commands simply through normal browsing, summarization, or search actions,” they stated.
The warning followed rising concerns about AI-powered tools interacting with unsafe web content and the growing dependence on ChatGPT for business, research, and public-sector tasks.
NITDA added that some flaws allow the bypassing of safety controls by masking malicious content behind trusted domains.
Other weaknesses take advantage of markdown rendering bugs, enabling hidden instructions to pass undetected.
It explained that in severe cases, attackers can poison ChatGPT’s memory, forcing the system to retain malicious instructions that influence future conversations
They stated that while OpenAI has fixed parts of the issue, Large-Language Models (LLMs) still struggle to reliably separate genuine user intent from malicious data.
The Agency warned that these vulnerabilities could lead to a range of cybersecurity threats, including unauthorised actions carried out by the model; unintended exposure of user information; manipulated or misleading outputs; and long-term behavioural changes caused by memory poisoning, among others.
It advised Nigerians, businesses, and government institutions to adopt several precautionary steps to stay safe. These include limiting or disabling the browsing and summarisation of untrusted websites within enterprise environments and enabling features like browsing or memory only when necessary.
It also recommended regular updates to deployed GPT-4o and GPT-5 models to ensure known vulnerabilities are patched.
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