Technology
Nigerians to Know New Tariffs for Calls, Data, SMS Today
By Adedapo Adesanya
Nigerian will today, Friday, January 10, 2025, know what they will henceforth pay to make calls, send SMS, and browse the internet as telecommunication operators have received the approval of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) to raise tariffs.
This will bring an end to the long-term tussle for a hike in tariffs, which telcos wanted to be at 100 per cent, but the Nigerian government rejected.
Industry sources have shared with the media that the new tariffs will be announced by the NCC on Friday.
on Wednesday, the Minister of Communications, Innovation, and Digital Economy, Mr Bosun Tijan, at a stakeholders’ meeting in Abuja, said the NCC would come up with modalities for tariff adjustment in the telecoms industry.
“We’ve look at a number of things in terms of how to ensure that can meaningfully contribute to the development of Nigeria.
“Some of those things include implementing the Executive Order around ensuring that we can protect infrastructure around telecoms, driving up significantly local content and importantly, ensuring the sustainability of the companies themselves that as we see inflation across the world that telecommunications companies, we don’t run them down but we allow them to continue to be sustainable so that they can contribute to our economy.
“You have seen over the past weeks that there has been agitation from some of these companies to increase tariffs, requesting for 100 per cent tariff increase. This is not something that as a government we will be able to subscribe to at the minute,” he stated.
Recently, the chief executive of MTN Nigeria, Mr Karl Toriola, said in an interview that although operators have put forward the 100 per cent suggestion, he doubts that the regulator, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), would accept.
“Now, we’ve put forward requests of approximately 100 per cent and type increases to the regulators,” he said.
The operators have also said the sustainability of the telecommunications industry in Nigeria needs to be addressed, if not, it could negatively impact Nigeria’s economy.
Mr Toriola’s counterpart at Airtel, Mr Dinesh Balsingh, in an op-ed published by this newspaper said it was needed to acquiesce to the proposed tariff adjustments in order to ensure the long-term sustainability of the sector while unlocking significant benefits for Nigerian consumers.
“For over a decade, tariffs have remained static despite the dramatic increase in operating expenses, which have surged by over 300% in the last 18 to 24 months alone,” he wrote.
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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