On Thursday and Friday I was at University of Lagos for the G-Nigeria Day 2010.  This is part of Google’s initiative for Africa to improve ICT and the Internet. Read more here.

With these things in place then there is a valuable service and solution to problems. This is the main goal of ICT – to simplify processes, improve efficiency and accuracy, and reduce cost.

But I started realizing the opposite of it since the first step of using the portal. For the activation we needed to go and submit our registration numbers somewhere and then patiently wait for a number of days before we get going. Unfortunately for me (and many others) we had to wait for the whole session for our accounts to be activated. And since I was in my final year I was not going to be among those that would make use of the portal; let’s not talk about the money I paid for the ICT. Anyway since it was the first time it would be very kind if we give it a time grace to go through testing and quality assurance phases. At least we contributed our own quota as a case study for testing the applicaton.

One (1) year after I left school I thought everything should be fine now, I inquired from friends and was shocked to learn that it was a total failure and our manual method was preferred, so they had to go back to it.

This tale is not just in Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University, Bauchi (ATBU), the university I graduated from. Two (2) years before ATBU started the project, I recall University of Maiduguri (UNIMAID) to have been one of the pioneers to implement it. I was amazed to learn about that and was hopeful that our universities would soon be going into IT solutions and move to another level in process improvements. Unfortunately almost all the solutions in many universities and high institutions have failed.

I finally understood that there is a unique problem that contributes to these failed systems: the main objective is not to solve problems but rather to use ICT buzz-words in order to extract funds.

Why it fails

As I said earlier, the main cause of the failure is having a different objective far away from providing solution for some problem; and because of that there is no any feasibility studies in order to design and implement a system that would suit the ICT development of our universities. Most of the systems therefore are unusable and have very poor quality; and for any software to provide any solution it must be usable. No matter how feature rich the software is, it is worthless if it becomes unusable. Software usability is very important that ISO developed standards like ISO 9126 and models to specify and measure software usability.

To understand what I mean by an unusable and poor quality system, imagine a bandwidth of 128/64 kbps or 256/128 kbps used to serve 20,000+ students, or a system that allows a student to register 100 units of courses in a semester, or registration links that display ‘Database Access Error’ or ‘This Page is Invalid’.

The Scratch Card Business Model

Payment methods have been part of ICT solutions. Services that require payments could be integrated with the solution using some payment methods in order to make lives of customers easier. In Nigeria, one of such methods is the scratch card particularly in schools.

However, instead of making lives of students easier, it has become a business model by extorting students. The student therefore becomes the victim of the portal system instead of its beneficiary.

Even with the scratch card model, students still have to queue to make their payments. This keeps one still wondering what problem has the model solved, and only stops (wondering) when he realizes that it has solved the business problem of the beneficiaries.

The Mighty Banks

The bank is always chasing for money to beef up its deposit, and that is what it has been chasing in our universities. They promise the universities to assist them in implementing these unusable systems, making it seem to be at no cost whereas the victims (students) end up paying the price. Students are therefore forced to make payments in these banks.

The Solution

It is very simple. Instead of emphasizing on the scratch card business model and extorting students, the first step is to have an objective of trying to solve at least the following problems:

• A system that would simplify the registration process for students
• Lecturers should be able to use the system and save students’ scores
• The system should be able to compute students’ results based on the saved scores
• Students should be able to view their records from the system and print their result slips
• The system should be able to generate reports including end of semester results, graduation list, transcript, etc.

The system must be usable. Instead of hosting the portal online and providing limited bandwidth to students, the system should be hosted locally in the school. A stable Local Area Network (LAN) for the whole school is therefore a pre-requisite (which ideally every school should have). A public IP can be obtained for the network so that users can also have online access if they have good Internet connection and also enjoy non-compromised speed within the school’s network.

Comprehensive user requirements must be specified before the system implementation. The system should also go through testing and quality assurance phases so that students cannot be able to register 100 units of courses when they are supposed to register a maximum of 23.

Subscribe for more posts:

Share this Post

Facebook

FriendFeed

Other quotes:

=> On Software Architecture

=> On Knowledge

Subscribe for more quotes: 

Just about two weeks after District 9 debuted and defames Nigeria, Sony Coorporation has followed the same suit to reference Nigerians as major scammers on the Internet in its new PlayStation 3 (PS 3) Slim TV spot advert.

Subscribe for more posts:

Share this Post

Facebook

Twitter

FriendFeed

In the movie, a gang of Nigerians were depicted as black marketers having weaponry deals with aliens, which is led by Obesandjo. (Sounds familiar?)

The Nigerians were also depicted as illiterates, trading weapons they don’t have idea of how they are being operated.

While the Rebranding program suffers from recognition as it strives to achieve its goals, District 9 has gained world fame and earned $37 million at the box office over its opening weekend, $7 million more than its cost price.

Its popularity was also influenced by social networking sites which the Rebranding program failed to utilize. District 9 has been trending on Twitter long before its release.

“Nigeria’s Rebranding Program Suffers Again“

Subscribe for more posts:

Share this Post

Facebook

Twitter

FriendFeed

The Google Technology User Group, Nigeria (the first GTUG in Africa) provides an avenue for Google geeks in the country to meet, share and learn. And of course they are going to spread these great opportunities to everyone out there.

Learn more here.

Subscribe for more posts:

Share this Post

Facebook

Twitter

FriendFeed

I customized the widget to return tweets with the keywords Nigeria, #nigeria or #lightupnigeria.

The #lightupnigeria hashtag is particularly interesting. It is a movement in regards the current situation of Power in the country and Nigerians are now expressing their desperate need of steady Electricity. There is a good post about it here.

The customized widget is now running on my home page. I also created a Google Gadget for the widget and I have it running on my iGoogle page. Click to add to your iGoogle page.

Subscribe for more posts:

Share this Post

Twitter

However, I have queries which vary considerably depending on some options selected by a user, so I needed to create my queries on the fly instead of having named queries which keep growing. I therefore extended the Generic CRUD service to generate dynamic queries.

In the CRUDService interface I added findByDynamicQuery():

public interface CrudService {
     //...
     <T> List<T> findByDynamicQuery(Class<T> type,
                     List<ParameterDefinition> parameters);
}
 

Class<T> type represents the entity class for the query to be made and List<ParameterDefinition> parameters is used for specifying the query parameters (more on that).

The DynamicQueryParameter

I needed to specify parameters for OR conditions as well; Map<String, Object> could not satisfy the requirement since each key can map to at most one value and some queries may define one key (field) for many values. E.g. “SELECT c FROM Candidate WHERE c.program = :prog1 OR c.program = :prog2″ (program twice).

To solve the problem I used List<ParameterDefinition> to specify the parameters. ParameterDefinition is a simple class that defines the parameter type, name and value:

public class ParameterDefinition {
   private final String name;
   private final Object value;
   private final ParameterType paramType;

   public ParameterDefinition(ParameterType paramType, String name, Object value) {
      this.name = name;
      this.value = value;
      this.paramType = paramType;
   }

   public ParameterType getParameterType() {
      return paramType;
   }
   public String getName() {
      return name;
   }

   public Object getValue() {
      return value;
   }
}

ParameterType is defined using an Enum:

public enum ParameterType {
    WITH, AND, OR
}

The dynamic version of the QueryParameter is therefore as follows:

public class DynamicQueryParameter {
   private List<ParameterDefinition> parameters = null;

   private DynamicQueryParameter(String name, Object value) {
      this.parameters = new ArrayList<ParameterDefinition>();
      addParameter(ParameterType.WITH, name, value);
   }

   public static DynamicQueryParameter with(String name, final Object value) {
      return new DynamicQueryParameter(name, value);
   }

   public DynamicQueryParameter and(String name, final Object value) {
      addParameter(ParameterType.AND, name, value);

      return this;
   }

   public DynamicQueryParameter or(String name, final Object value) {
      addParameter(ParameterType.OR, name, value);

      return this;
   }

   public List<ParameterDefinition> parameters() {
     return this.parameters;
   }

   private void addParameter(ParameterType paramType,
      String name, final Object value)
   {
      parameters.add(new ParameterDefinition(paramType, name, value));
   }
}

And finally the CrudService implementation:

@Stateless
@Local(CrudService.class)
@TransactionAttribute(TransactionAttributeType.MANDATORY)
public class CrudServiceBean implements CrudService {
   @PersistenceContext
   private EntityManager em;

   //...

   public <T> List<T> findByDynamicQuery(Class<T> type,
       List<ParameterDefinition> parameters)
   {
      //generate query
      String queryString = generateQuery(type, parameters);

      Query query = this.em.createQuery(queryString);

      //set parameters
      int k = 1;	//parameter position
      for (ParameterDefinition param : parameters) {
           query.setParameter(k++, param.getValue());
      }

      return query.getResultList();
   }

   //helper method
   private <T> String generateQuery(Class<T> type,
      List<ParameterDefinition> parameters)
   {
      final String VAR = "obj";
      StringBuilder queryBuilder = new StringBuilder(
      String.format("SELECT %s FROM %s %s",
         VAR, type.getSimpleName(), VAR)
      );

      if (parameters.size() == 0) { //no conditions
           return queryBuilder.toString();
      }

      //WHERE clause
      Iterator<ParameterDefinition> itr = parameters.iterator();
      int k = 1;	//parameter position
      ParameterDefinition firstParam = itr.next();  //always type WITH
      queryBuilder.append(String.format(" WHERE %s.%s = ?%d",
           VAR, firstParam.getName(), k++));

      //append parameters
      for ( ; itr.hasNext(); ) {
           ParameterDefinition nextParam = itr.next();
           queryBuilder.append(String.format(
               " %s %s.%s = ?%s", nextParam.getParameterType(), VAR,
               nextParam.getName(), k++));
      }
      return queryBuilder.toString();
   }
}

The query can be constructed from a client as follows:

List<Candidate> candidate = crudServiceBean.findByDynamicQuery(Candidate.class,
      DynamicQueryParameter.
      with("id", "111").
      and("program", "SE").
      or("program", "IT").
      and("mode", "FT").
      parameters());

where Candidate is an entity bean and crudServiceBean is a reference to CrudServiceBean session bean.

In the beginning of the year we predicted that 0.5 million (or more) Nigerians  would be on Facebook by mid-year. Today there are 573,780 on the platform with more engagements being noticed. Google Trends show that more than 50,000 Nigerians return to Facebook daily.

The effect of the growth has started manifesting in the country: lot of groups are now formed with active participations and discussions.

A very interesting group recently is the “SUPPORT FOR SENATE BILL AGAINST CHILD DESTITUTION” formed to support Senator Tafidan Argungu and Forty others’ bill to stop child destitution in the country. There are more than 1,380 members on the group now. The group has certainly made an impact in this campaign which made Thisday publish an article about it.

In the last 2 months, Facebook attracted more than 100,000 Nigerians each month. With this rate, we should expect 1.2 million users by the end of the year and about 2.4 million by 2011. Indeed with this number, it is going to be an interesting platform for politics for the next general elections. There are numerous political groups already.

However the biggest question still remains: do we expect to see positive developments in the country through the power of information sharing and collaboration Facebook offers?

[Other posts on "Nigeria and Facebook"]

Nigeria and Facebook


Nigeria and Facebook – Update I

Nigeria and Facebook – Update II

Nigeria and Facebook – Update III

Subscribe for more posts: 

Share this Post

Subscribe for more posts:

Share this Post