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Buhari Describes $547m from 5G Auction as Good Funding Option

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Buhari multiplicity of taxes

By Aduragbemi Omiyale

President Muhammadu Buhari has described the $547 million generated from the sale of the 3.5Ghz spectrum to MTN Nigeria and Mafab Communications for the provision of the 5G network in Nigeria as a good source of raising funds for development.

He said this on Tuesday at the commissioning of the National Shared Services Centre in Abuja. The facility, which also houses a cybersecurity operations centre, network centre and call centre, is a one-stop-shop for Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) to interface with citizens.

The President said the money raised from the exercise, which was conducted two times, clears the doubts about the contributions of the digital economy in driving growth, creating employment and generating revenue for the country.

He said the Information, Communication and Technology ICT) sector had accelerated the diversification of the economy, and the Q2 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) report of the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) showed the extent of growth, with the ICT contributing an unprecedented 18.44 per cent to the GDP, close to three times the 6.33 per cent contribution of the oil sector in the same quarter.

“As part of our efforts to expand our digital infrastructure, we increased our 4G base stations from 13,823 to 36,751 from August 2019 to date, and this has increased the percentage of 4G coverage across the country from 23 per cent to 77.52 per cent, also from August 2019 to date. We have also followed this up with the roll-out of 5G services.

“It is noteworthy that the digital economy sector has excelled in generating revenue for the government. In particular, at the Ministerial Retreat that I chaired from the 18th to 19th of October 2022, our independent analysts adjudged the digital economy sector to have generated 594 per cent of its revenue target from the 2019 baseline. This is very commendable.

“As part of these unprecedented achievements, the sector generated over $547 million dollars from the auctioning of the 5G spectrum alone,” Mr Buhari said at the event, also witnessed by the Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Mr Isa Pantami.

The President applauded his administration for creating an enabling environment to thrive, stating, “To ensure that the digital economy sector remains successful and in order to reduce the burden on citizens, I recently approved the suspension of the proposed excise duty in the telecoms sector, as any initiative that will lead to hardship for the citizens would not be pursued.”

He further said, “Our administration’s commitment to promoting data promotion and privacy is receiving praise across the world, and we have increased our digital identity enrolments from 39 million in October 2020 to about 92 million today.

“The massive increase of about 63 million in about two years is a global success story and has led to several requests for partnership from countries within and outside Africa. I also approved the establishment of the Nigeria Data Protection Bureau on the 4th of February, 2022, to provide an institutional framework for data protection in Nigeria, in line with global best practices,” the President told the gathering of ICT experts and government officials.”

President Buhari commended the giant strides made by the digital economy sector under the Minister of Communications and Digital Economy and other stakeholders, describing it as impressive.

In his remarks, Mr Pantami lauded the President for his support for the digital economy, with turnovers in broadband/Internet penetration, skills acquisition for global competitiveness and infrastructure development, like the fibre optic cable, which was about 15,000kms in 2015 and increased to more than 60,000kms.

Also, the chief executive of Galaxy Backbone, Mr Muhammed Bello Abubakar, said 400 MDAs were already connected to the National Shared Services Centre.

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Truecaller, AnyMind Group to Expand Direct Sales Footprint

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New Truecaller Logo

By Modupe Gbadeyanka

The leading global communications platform, Truecaller, now has a strategic direct sales reseller partnership with AnyMind Group, a Business-Process-as-a-Service company for marketing, e-commerce and digital transformation.

Under this partnership, AnyMind Group will serve as the exclusive intermediary for Truecaller’s advertising inventory across Egypt, UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Ghana, Nigeria, Morocco, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam.

The scope of the partnership is focused specifically on enabling brands and agencies to leverage Truecaller’s premium ad formats to reach highly engaged, high-intent users through relevant, data-driven advertising solutions.

Through this collaboration, Truecaller will accelerate its direct advertising business across the Middle East & North Africa (MENA) and Southeast Asia (SEA) regions.

With a strong on-ground presence and established relationships with leading advertisers and agencies across MENA and SEA markets, AnyMind Group brings deep regional expertise that will support the scaling of Truecaller’s advertising footprint locally.

The partnership is designed to empower brands with impactful placements on Truecaller’s trusted communications platform, helping drive meaningful engagement with users in these fast-growing digital economies.

“As Truecaller continues to expand its global advertising business, partnerships with strong regional players like AnyMind Group are critical to delivering localised expertise and measurable outcomes for advertisers.

“MENA and Southeast Asia represent high-growth markets with evolving digital maturity, and through this collaboration, we aim to bring brands closer to consumers via trusted and contextual communication experiences on our platform,” the Vice President and Global Head for Truecaller Ads Business, Hemant Arora, said.

Also, the Managing Director for Growth Markets at AnyMind Group, Aditya Aima, said, “We are excited to partner with Truecaller to open its inventory to brands across MENA and Southeast Asia. With Truecaller’s scale and trusted user ecosystem, combined with our market depth and networks, we see strong potential to drive more relevant, high-impact advertising outcomes for advertisers looking to deepen engagement in these dynamic markets.”

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Capillary Technologies Acquires SessionM from Mastercard

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Capillary Technologies SessionM

By Modupe Gbadeyanka

A software product company established in 2012, Capillary Technologies India Limited, has acquired the customer engagement and loyalty company, SessionM, from Mastercard.

This followed a definitive agreement signed by the global leader in AI-powered customer loyalty and engagement solutions with the renowned digital payments firm.

The acquisition of SessionM is the latest in a series of strategic moves by Capillary, following its successful listing on the Indian Stock Exchange in November 2025.

With SessionM in its portfolio, Capillary reinforces its position as a global leader in enterprise loyalty, offering a leading platform to the world’s most sophisticated enterprise brands.

Mastercard has identified Capillary Technologies—consistently recognised as a Leader in The Forrester Wave as the ideal partner to lead SessionM into its next era of growth.

As part of the agreement, a specialised team within SessionM will transition to Capillary, ensuring that the platform’s deep technical expertise is preserved.

SessionM’s esteemed global customer base—which includes Fortune 500 retailers, airlines, and CPG brands—will continue to receive the same high-calibre support and service they experienced before the acquisition.

“M&A has been a key growth strategy for Capillary over the years, and as a public company, we are delivering on that promise to our shareholders and the market.

“By bringing SessionM into our portfolio, we are not just expanding our footprint across the globe; we are further strengthening our loyalty capabilities to deliver one of the industry’s most comprehensive offerings.

“Our mission remains to provide enterprises across industries with specialised, AI-native loyalty technology solutions,” the chief executive of Capillary Technologies, Aneesh Reddy, commented.

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Emergent Ventures, Others Invest $2.2m in Potpie

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potpie engineering software $2.2m capital

By Dipo Olowookere

About $2.2 million pre-seed round to help engineering teams unify context across their entire stack and make AI agents genuinely useful in complex software environments has been announced by Potpie.

Potpie was established by Aditi Kothari and Dhiren Mathur, who were determined to unify context across the entire engineering stack and enabling spec driven development.

As generative AI adoption accelerates, most tools focus on surface-level code generation while ignoring the deeper problem of context.

Large language models are powerful, but without access to system-level understanding, tooling history, and architectural intent, they struggle in real production environments.

Traditional approaches rely on senior engineers to manually hold this context together, a model that breaks down at scale and fails when AI agents are introduced.

The platform enables teams to automate high-impact and non-trivial use cases across the software development lifecycle, like debugging cross-service failures, maintaining and writing end-to-end tests, blast radius detection and system design.

It is designed for enterprise companies with large and complex codebases, starting at around one million lines of code and scaling to hundreds of millions.

Rather than acting as another coding assistant, Potpie builds a graphical representation of software systems, infers behaviour and patterns across modules, and creates structured artefacts that allow agents to operate consistently and safely.

A statement made available to Business Post on Monday revealed that the funding support came from Emergent Ventures, All In Capital, DeVC and Point One Capital.

The capital will be used to support early enterprise deployments, expand the engineering team, and continue building Potpie’s core context and agent infrastructure, it was disclosed.

“As AI makes code generation easier, the real challenge shifts to reasoning across massive, interconnected systems. Potpie is our answer to that shift, an ontology-first layer that helps enterprises truly understand and manage their software,” Kothari was quoted as saying in the disclosure.

A Managing Partner at Emergent Ventures, Anupam Rastogi, said, “In large enterprises, the real challenge is not generating code, it is understanding the system deeply enough to change it safely.

“Potpie’s ontology-first architecture, combined with rigorous context curation and spec-driven development, creates a structured model of the entire engineering ecosystem. This allows AI agents to reason across services, dependencies, tickets, and production signals with the clarity of a senior engineer. That is what makes Potpie uniquely capable of solving complex RCA, impact analysis, and high-risk feature work even in codebases exceeding 50 million lines.”

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