[heymijo]

I saw your comment before reading the article and, I get it. There's a cynic in me too. However, after reading the article, I'm thinking, who cares?

I'm a sucker for a story about potential, especially in the underdog, and the parts jumping out at me are all about the potential of the people in Nigeria.

I somehow ended up following Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, but it's Twitter so the picture I get is very incomplete. To read that he got up at a formal demo day ceremony during Zuckerberg's trip with the VP of Nigeria in attendance and then criticized the country for being resistant to change is enthralling.

It's hard to be cynical about the article's puffery for Zuck, when it illuminates the intestinal fortitude of entrepreneurs making a hell of a run at it in a place that is infinitely less geared to making startups a reality than Silicon Valley.

[nullstyle]

I spent several weeks in Lagos at the beginning of this year for my work at stellar.org; I was struck by how excited all of the developers were to talk with someone who works in silicon valley. I'm a nobody, but the guys at iDEA Hub, CC Hub, and Andela rolled out the red carpet for me and it seemed like they hung on my every word with regards to tech.

I met many smart, driven entrepreneurs while there, but as a new friend said while I was there: "It's tough to be Nigerian on the internet". The number of obstacles that a Nigerian web developer has to fight through even for something so trivial to us like getting a webhosting account, is shameful.

Additionaly, it's tough for the Nigerian developer community to get taken seriously by the outside world... I had several stories related to me about tech companies promising then balking at trips into Nigeria, in one specific instance for totally bullshit reasons. Google apparently does a great job with the developer relations in Lagos, but it seemed like that was about it.

I hope that in the future we get to really see what the Nigerian entrepreneurial community can really do; If they can chip away at their road blocks I think someone from there will eventually build something really special for all of us.

I also hope I get to go back and work with their community some more.

[uola]

I don't mind Zuckerberg going to Nigeria. I don't even mind the fluffiness of the article. But the whole narrative of Silicon Valley saving the world by showing up, is getting old. Zuckerberg isn't going to go home again and be like "You know what? We need to deploy ipv6, bring computer science curriculum's closer to the real world, have a fundamental programming language that lives up to the requirements of today, fix software patents and get robust standards in place instead if reinventing everything all the time, so these guys can catch up to us and build their own future".

[M_Grey]

It's an effective way to generate positive spin... hell the "on site guidance" has been the major theme the Kims have used for three generations in North Korea. It's a way to appear generous, helpful, and subtly signal your indispensability at the same time.