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Exposed! How Nipost DG, Bisi Adegbuyi, Plans Extorting N180bn From Nigerians Yearly For A Free App Service

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Squadron Leader Adefola Amoo (rtd) at a press conference which took place on 18th September 2018 in Abuja, has called the attention of the nation on a framework that will potentially remove N180bn from the pockets of Nigerians annually, as planned by the NIPOST Director General, Mr Bisi Adegbuyi.

Amoo is an innovator that built a technology called GridCodes for digital addressing. He is the only Nigerian and one of few Africans with a viable and proven product in this technology space.

Bisi Adegbuyi & What3Words CEO Chris Sheldrick

Squadron Leader Adefola Amoo (rtd) asserted that this collection of money is unnecessary and fraudulent because the service on which it is claimed to be based is 100% free. If the UK company headed by Chris Sheldrick requires 1,000.00 from Nigerians for the service, then it should be collecting an equivalent $3 annually from everyone using its product globally, yet it collects nothing from users of the service. Hence, any collection in Nigerian to access the service is therefore fraudulent.

“Collecting money for this service defeats its entire purpose and it is the reason why my GridCodes is free and was offered to the Government for free”, he said. “All that is required is for government to declare that MDAs collect the GridCodes of addresses submitted by anyone.”

The Techpreneur Adefola Amoo further explained that the verification component as proposed by NIPOST takes what is essentially a government responsibility, supposed to be undertaken at Government  expense, and transfers it to citizens and asks them to pay for it whilst exposing the citizens to risk of attack in their home. GridCodes saves Government this expense, time and effort by solving the problem digitally. So if government no longer needs to spend money on solving the problem, why collect money from citizens.

As he said, NIPOST has juxtaposed property enumeration, property occupation and residence vetting. Outcomes of property enumeration by government includes a reference platform able to provide assurance that this plot allocation is as claimed, contains this kind of property and once done it will be unchanged for 99% of properties. Citizens already pay government for this service through land use charges collected periodically across the country. Successive Governments have been unable to deliver on this responsibility and it is not a problem of this administration. Why should anyone still pay N1,000.00 to NIPOST annually for this? Again any such payment is the responsibility of the property owner and not the resident when he/she is not the property owner. Now here is a system GridCodes, that can deliver this enumeration for free, saving government time, money, effort, project management and solves a huge National Infrastructure problem yet, NIPOST is telling government to make citizens pay for it. Property enumeration is a government responsibility and not that of citizens. It is like saying that each individual should pay for population census.

Property occupation data, on the other hand is used mainly for delivery of services. A bank or a delivery company that will make money from citizens being their customers throughout their engagement has already charged the citizen for getting data about the properties they occupy. They will continue to make money from all of us every day, every month as a bank and we pay delivery companies for every delivery they make to us. All commercial entities already charge us money for translation of our property occupation data every time they deliver to us. So why should we pay NIPOST for getting our property occupation data when we already pay all these companies that have anything to do with us, our residential and business addresses. These companies are all willing to pay anyone who can give them accurate property occupation data for their customers, so why should NIPOST make us pay for what they will be selling to commercial companies who we all already pay for the service of finding us. GridCodes collects no money from citizens, businesses and governments and allows all these entities to find each other. GridCodes by its very nature will save all commercial entities time and money when they use it to navigate to their customers. The savings in billions of naira accruing to business and billions in new opportunities makes it entirely unnecessary to ask citizens to still lose N180bn from their already seriously challenged incomes. Property occupation data used for commerce is procured by commercial entities as part of their business process which is paid for by only the customers using their services and only to the commercial entity we need. After doing this, ALL citizens cannot be made to annually to government again.

Finally, residence vetting is the only process that requires visit to the physical residence of anyone. It could be intrusive or non-intrusive. It is a highly restricted process used to affirm information about people taking up highly sensitive jobs in security, finance or movement of small sized highly valuable commodities. It is done by security and intelligence agencies or commercial security companies on very few people who hardly know when it is done and they certainly do not pay for it. Are all Nigerians undertaking security jobs requiring address vetting? Certainly not!

These explanations by Adefola Amoo seem to detail reasonable basis for his assertion that the money being targeted for collection by NIPOST is unnecessary. This story is definitely going to unfold further and we will be watching it for you.

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