Business TSA and Remitta: The Crucifixion of John Obaro By Collins Onuegbu

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LequteMan

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John Obaro, the CEO of Systems Specs, owners of Remitta is one of the most unassuming and successful IT entrepreneurs in Nigeria of his generation. He has run SystemSpecs for over 20 years with modest success in a time when the software industry lacked telecoms and the more popular hardware business.

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His company built one of the most successful local HR software called Human Manager which lots of organizations in Nigeria use to manage their HR departments. When he entered the payment systems business with Remitta, he was competing among the big boys like Interswitch ,MasterCard and Visa. Until recently, few people knew about Remitta and what it did . That he was trying to get Remitta as a platform to assist the Federal Government clean up its messy accounts made no headlines.

Then enter Buhari and the directive to fasten this project which was started by the Jonathan government. It was only Remitta that was prepared to be the platform for this service. Others like Interswitch or Visa can be made to do same but in the time frame demanded by government, I am not sure any of them would deliver. Remitta has been tested to run pilots for TSA.

That Remitta , a locally built software delivered on this mandate should normally be celebrated. And for John, this should be his finest moment after over twenty years of struggling to show that software entrepreneurship can become big.

But today, he and his efforts and company are being demonized and crucified. There are all sort of stories about Remitta ripping Nigeria off . Some outlandishly claim that the company was paid N25b daily for the transfer. Politicians have latched onto the narrative. The senate that is struggling to learn to use Facebook wants to go the roots of the "fraud". In our beer parlors and market places, a hardworking Nigerian who had delivered a service to Nigeria is being branded a thief, and in our corruption wearied nation, we are comparing him to people who put their hands in the till and stolen our national reserves.

I will not want to go into the propriety or otherwise of the approximately N9 billion that was paid for his service. But he had a contract and for a while when he was earning little or nothing from his hard work of piloting this service, we did not complain. And no one is querying how much MasterCard, Visa and Interswitch are making transferring money for all of us. Or how much banks have made from COT and other transfer schemes imposed on us without our consent.

As a gracious man, I am told he quickly refunded the money. But he had a contract with Nigeria and can go to court, win and walk away with the money to pay back for years of toil. People who have stolen Nigeria blind did not toil 20 years to make enough money to buy private jets and flashy yachts. The nature of technology is that you can work for 20years slaving on an idea and then one day hit a jackpot. Or never do. That in summary is what happened to John.

I am against the crucifixion of John. If Nigeria must diversify her economy, people like him should be beacons that the rest of the society should follow. Who knew you could make billions by not stealing money from the treasury? By not groveling to power and being rewarded with an oil block, or an import license to import fuel?

It is curious that our senators want to investigate. For people who are importing consultants from Facebook to teach them how to use a social media site popular with teens who are barely out of school, how will they understand that Facebook was started by a teenager and the force of his ideas is minting more money than our oil that fuels their large salaries and allowances? I hope when they meet John, they will see someone who can call their bluff and that they will be humble enough to understand what his idea means in a Nigeria desperate to build an economy that will serve us all. Including the unhealthy appetite of our legislators.

And for the rest of us who have joined the lynch mob for John, he is not the villain here. And the earlier we realize that the better for all of us. If the government should refuse to pay him because we demanded so, all for political correctness, we are saying that hard work should not pay. That a man who has an idea should not be paid for it in a world increasingly driven by ideas from technology visionaries who we pay dearly for making our lives easier.
 
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