Technology
Lagos Ready to Host GITEX 2025—Hamzat
By Adedapo Adesanya
The Lagos State Government has expressed readiness to host the GITEX Nigeria conference in September 2025.
The event which is currently ongoing in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates, is scheduled to be held in Nigeria next year, with Lagos as the destination of choice.
According to the Lagos State Deputy Governor, Mr Obafemi Hamzat, who led a team to this year’s event, “bringing GITEX to Lagos is very good, and it will allow even other countries to see what is possible.”
Mr Hamzat said this during a meeting with Ms Trixie LohMirmand, the Chief Executive Officer of Kaoun International, and her management team in the Lagos Pavilion in Dubai.
He noted that the Lagos State Government and indeed the entire technology ecosystem in Nigeria would be very receptive to the coming of the global tech show to the country, especially Lagos State, where tech and innovation have found a good ground in Africa.
“Another great thing that we’ve discovered is that the number of young entrepreneurs in Lagos State is unbelievable, and as you said, we can’t bring everybody here to Dubai.”
The Deputy Governor stated that there could not have been a better time for the tech world to make its presence felt in Africa, particularly Nigeria, than now, when the country is experiencing an upsurge in the growth of talents in technology and innovation.
Mr Hamzat said Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu’s administration was deliberate in its decision to make technology drive more of the State’s development programmes.
“Lagos, for example, does what we call Art of Technology (AOT), which is now in its fifth year. With the AOT, a lot of young entrepreneurs in the IT and innovation space have been discovered, and many of them are now running as businesses, with its attendant effect on our economy and the entire ecosystem.”
The Deputy Governor added that the young innovators in Lagos are already creating real solutions, saying their creations are solving real-life problems and are helping their immediate families, friends, and communities.
“There are 10-year-old, 12-year-old children that all they do is coding because they want to help their parents sell their products and services. For example, young innovators whose parents are fishermen or fish sellers. The parents are probably petty traders. But these primary and secondary school pupils sit down, and do the codes to help their parents sell, and people come all over the place to buy. The parents are surprised to see the massive turnout of customers at their stalls—that is the power of technology and innovation, and as a state government, we are more than happy to host an event of this nature that would help to connect these talents that we have in abundance to the countless opportunities out here.
“We have pockets of knowledge in our state. The question for us is, how do we explode it, how do we actually make it out there, and then allow people to benefit? The creators also need to benefit from their thinking. So, I hope that GITEX Nigeria can do that for us when you can bring all these young people from different areas.
“I know it’s technology, but how do we take it to entertainment? Entertainment is big in Nigeria; the creative industry is the next oil as far as we are concerned, and that is why we are investing heavily in that sector,” Hamzat said.
On her part, Ms LohMirmand, said, “Technology is a necessity; it is not a luxury, saying that the world needs it for survival.”
She said the last time she visited Nigeria for a meeting, she and her team saw young Nigerians who “sat in a small room with systems on their laps doing great things.”
Ms LohMirmand, whose company organises GITEX Global, said they are committed to discovering new partners and connecting Nigeria to opportunities that are yet untapped in the technology space.
“That is our role. We will need a lot of support from your Government in terms of logistics and security for us to organise a good show in Lagos, Nigeria.”
By Aduragbemi Omiyale
One of the players in the Nigerian gaming industry, Secure Electronic Technology (SET) Plc, has appointed Ms Leticia Otomewo as its acting secretary.
This followed the expiration of the company’s service contract with the former occupier of the seat, Ms Irene Attoe, on January 31, 2026.
A statement to the Nigerian Exchange (NGX) Limited on Thursday said Ms Otomewo would remain the organisation’s scribe in an acting capacity, pending the ratification and appointment of a substantive company secretary at the next board meeting.
She was described in the notice signed by the Managing Director of the firm, Mr Oyeyemi Olusoji, as “a results-driven executive with 22 years of experience in driving business growth, leading high-performing teams, and delivering innovative solutions.”
The acting secretary is also said to be “a collaborative leader with a passion for mentoring and developing talent.”
“The company assures the investing public that all Company Secretariat responsibilities and regulatory obligations will continue to be discharged in full compliance with the Companies and Allied Matters Act, applicable regulations, and the Nigerian Exchange Limited Listing Rules,” the disclosure assured.
Meanwhile, the board thanked Ms Attoe “for professionalism and contributions to the Company during the period of her engagement and wishes her well in her future endeavours.”
By Adedapo Adesanya
The Russian government on Thursday confirmed it has blocked the WhatsApp messaging service, as it moves to further control information flow in the country.
It urged Russians to use a new state-backed platform called Max instead of the Meta-owned service.
WhatsApp issued a statement earlier saying Russia had attempted to “fully block” its messaging service in the country to force people toward Max, which it described as a “surveillance app.”
“Today the Russian government attempted to fully block WhatsApp in an effort to drive people to a state-owned surveillance app,” WhatsApp posted on social media platform X.
“Trying to isolate over 100 million users from private and secure communication is a backwards step and can only lead to less safety for people in Russia,” it said, adding: “We continue to do everything we can to keep users connected.”
Russia’s latest move against social media platforms and messaging services like WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram comes amid a wider attempt to drive users toward domestic and more easily controlled and monitored services, such as Max.
Russia’s telecoms watchdog, Roskomnadzor, has accused messaging apps Telegram and WhatsApp of failing to comply with Russian legislation requiring companies to store Russian users’ data inside the country, and of failing to introduce measures to stop their platforms from being used for allegedly criminal or terrorist purposes.
It has used this as a basis for slowing down or blocking their operations, with restrictions coming into force since last year.
For Telegram, it may be next, but so far the Russian government has been admittedly slowing down its operations “due to the fact that the company isn’t complying with the requirements of Russian legislation.”
The chat service, founded by Russian developers but headquartered in Dubai, has been a principal target for Roskomnadzor’s scrutiny and increasing restrictions, with users reporting sluggish performance on the app since January.
By Adedapo Adesanya
Nigerian startup, Decide, has emerged as the fourth most accurate Artificial Intelligence (AI) agent for spreadsheet tasks globally, according to results from SpreadsheetBench, a widely referenced benchmark for evaluating AI performance on real-world spreadsheet problems.
According to the founder, Mr Abiodun Adetona, the ranking places Decide alongside well-funded global AI startups, including Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic.
Mr Adetona, an ex-Flutterwave developer, also revealed that Decide now has over 3,000 users, including some who are paying customers, a signal to the ability of the startup to scale in the near future.
SpreadsheetBench is a comprehensive evaluation framework designed to push Large Language Models (LLMs) to their limits in understanding and manipulating spreadsheet data. While many benchmarks focus on simple table QA, SpreadsheetBench treats a spreadsheet as a complex ecosystem involving spatial layouts, formulas, and multi-step reasoning. So far, only three agents rank higher than Decide, namely Nobie Agent, Shortcut.ai, and Qingqiu Agent.
Mr Adetona said SpreadsheetBench measures how well AI agents can handle practical spreadsheet tasks such as writing formulas, cleaning messy data, working across multiple sheets, and reasoning through complex Excel workflows. Decide recorded an 82.5% accuracy score, solving 330 out of 400 verified tasks.
“The result reflects sustained investment in applied research, product iteration, and learning from real-world spreadsheet workloads across a wide range of use cases,” Mr Adetona told Business Post.
For Mr Adetona, who built Decide out of frustration with how much time professionals spend manually cleaning data, debugging formulas, and moving between sheets, “This milestone highlights how focused engineering and domain-specific AI development can deliver frontier-level performance outside of large research organisations. By concentrating on practical business data problems and building systems grounded in real user environments, we believe smaller teams can contribute meaningfully to advancing applied AI.”
“For Decide, this is a foundation for continued progress in intelligent spreadsheet and analytics automation,” he added.
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