e&

Mm-hmm

... right, and fund government projects, right? So let's say Etisalat is a publicly owned utility that makes a lot of money.

You create a stock exchange in order to give it to people in order to make that money.

It was not at that stage a capital generating entity for private businesses.

Both Bold Food and Jumia Food Nigeria living because of economic pressure and unprofitability and unfavorable economic cost.

Similarly, Etisalat, the network service provider, and ExxonMobil.

Just to mention some of the renowned and famous businesses that we know, not to talk of the SMEs that couldn't make it to certain points in their businesses because of the unfavorable conditions of running business in this country.

And now we are seeing another exit of a major tech solution, the renowned e-hailing app, Uber.

The customers don't really care in many countries which operator they use, but they care passionately whether they are Android users or iPhone users.

Under his leadership, Etisalat became E&, a shift that actually went way beyond just name.

AI has two different powers, the power to replace and the power to augment.

So some people will be replaced.

As an angel investor, do you see yourself backing products, markets or people first?

As I've seen brilliant ideas crash and burn.

I invested when it was under $10 million valuation, got all the way to 80 and then zero.

Oof.

So from a placement perspective, actually a lot of companies from very diverse backgrounds are interacting with inclusion.

We've got hospitality, healthcare, Etisalat is one of our key partners, retail, Shalhoub is one of our key partners.

We also have a lot of government sector heavily working on this.

So we've got both government and private sector, but you know the enthusiasm in the UAE, it really shows from the way the employers are moving forward with this agenda.

I've now asked ChatGPT the question.

Which is the fastest out of all those internets? EAND and DoFiber are the fastest, both advertising speeds, up to 10 GPS speeds.

Starlink is sitting at around 400 MBS, but where fiber is unavailable...

Okay.

I'm your host, Lolita Ejeifo.

My next guest trained as a lawyer, graduated from the Nigerian Law School, and then walked into a retail sales role at Etisalat instead.

15 years later, she has built and scaled sales teams across telecoms, fintechs, and enterprise tech, managed ecosystems of over 40 channel partners, and led multi-country go-to-market strategies across some of the most complex markets in Africa.

She was recognized as one of Nigerian's top 100 career women in 2022, and leads Oracle Women's Leadership in Nigeria.

What was going on, and what were you following when you walked into the retail sales role-

Mm

... at Etisalat?

Okay, first of all, shout-out to my mom for not killing me.

Hmm.

I- I want you to close your eyes and imagine if Obasanjo had, uh, hadn't, um, established a process that produced MTN, Airtel, Etisalat way back then, and so on and so forth, are we still have NITEL? Many people forget that NITEL too had a GSM license.

And for how long are we going to say something that is very obvious? These people are protected i- in, in protecting the elite, all the big businesses who bring in the import fuel, have, uh, uh, uh, uh, all kinds of things.

Nigeria should have a target of about two years to say, within the next two years, there will be no importation of fuel.

Mm

... which is also a very cool service from, from Etisalat, where you can use all of your data and all of your calls in the roaming country for one week, which is taken from your, uh, home data allowance and your home call allowance, which is pretty-

Mm

... amazing, right? Something like...