A year ago today, Tejiri was born.I wrote this blog post while I waited for news of her birth and posted it once she was born.
A few days later, my mother-in-law held Tejiri in her arms. Well, a year has gone by, and on this day of Tejiri’s first birthday, my mother-in-law is not here to hold her. She will never hold her or any of her grandchildren again. My mother-in-law was taken away from all of us, in part by a deadly (but survivable) disease, but primarily by indifferent medical care.
This is my 100th blog post on Digital Crossings.
I started this blog in order to start writing again. As a university student, I had fully planned writing to be a key part of what I do for the rest of my life. Of course, like many can imagine, things didn’t work out that way. After putting writing on my New Year’s resolutions lists for several years, in 2009 I actually started writing again. I didn’t care what I wrote as long as I could write (call it my Startup story if you like @Possicon). I wanted to write regularly, so I committed to writing at least once a week. As an IT guy, I chose to write, what I imagined would be easy, non-controversial and would not require a lot of regular effort. 
From that perspective, this exercise has been an unqualified success. Since February of 2009, I have written a blog post every Tuesday and a few more besides. It hasn’t always been effortless or non-controversial, but it has been a lot of fun. Right now, I can’t imagine not writing weekly.
And yet there won’t be a Digital Crossings post next week Tuesday or for many Tuesdays to come. This is the blog post in which I press the “Pause” button on Digital Crossings.
I have written criticizing the rationale behind the new SIM registration requirement. However, there isn’t really any groundswell of opposition to it (no #NoSIMRegNigeria hash-tag on Twitter). Unless our history of not doing such things well comes into play, soon enough there are going to be several huge databases lying around the place that would have the names, addresses and biometric information of at least a quarter of our populace. Indeed if the NCC is to be believed, we have already passed the 50% mark in tele-density. My reasoning is if that data has been gathered, and it is our data, then we should derive some positive benefit from it, not just the government.
While I still stand by my recommendations around have the data should be stored and accessed, I believe there are opportunities for the citizenry to be served by that data. This will have to be built upon secure APIs providing controlled access to that data. This also assumes data quality without which no benefits can be achieved whether in security or commerce. Be that as it may, I believe the following benefits can be achieved.