Akintokunbo Adejumo, M Sc., ACIH, MCMI, a social and political commentator on Nigerian issues, lives and works in London, UK as a housing professional. He is a graduate of the University of Ibadan, Nigeria (1979) and University of Manitoba, Canada (1985). He is also the Coordinator of CHAMPIONS FOR NIGERIA, an organisation devoted to celebrating genuine progress, excellence, commitment, selfless and unalloyed service to Nigeria and the people of Nigeria.

Chika A. Ezeanya is a Ph.D. student of African (Development and Policy) Studies at Howard University in Washington DC. She holds an M.A. in International Relations from the University of Warwick in Coventry England, with specialization in International Trade. Prior to taking up temporal residence in the United States for graduate studies, Chika worked at the Oil & Gas Desk of one of Nigeria’s foremost commercial banks. As part of a larger group concerned with portfolio management and business development, Chika was in charge of the financial transactions of the major upstream and downstream oil companies operating in Nigeria. She was able to garner invaluable firsthand experience of the Nigerian economic and business climate and the operations of multinational companies in developing countries. Her one year stint with the Foreign Operations Desk also exposed her to global import and export regulations, and the dynamics of international trade between sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, Latin America and Western Europe.  

 Chinweizu is an institutionally unaffiliated Afrocentric scholar. A historian and cultural critic, his books include The West and the Rest of Us (1975), Second, enlarged edition (1987); Invocations and Admonitions (1986); Decolonising the African Mind (1987); Voices from Twentieth-century Africa (1988); Anatomy of Female Power (1990). He is also a co-author of Towards the Decolonization of African Literature (1980). His pamphlets include The Black World and the Nobel (1987); and Recolonization or Reparation? (1994) He lives in Lagos, Nigeria.

Dapo Oyewole is a World Fellow at Yale University & Director of CAPPS, a Lagos-based policy think tank. E-mail: dapo@thinkafrica.org

Dele Oluwole (MBCS) 

Dele who is a member of the prestigious British Computer Society (BCS) graduated in England with a BSc and master’s degree in computing from Staffordshire University.

He began his IT career as a software test engineer (ISEB certified) with Argos Retail group. He has several years of experience in software validation with focus on software quality assurance engineering. Presently consulting for Virgin Mobile Telecoms in the UK Dele is also an avid sports man.

The Suya Spot – featuring Iwedi Ojinmah

Levi  Obijiofor is a Senior Lecturer in Journalism at the School of Journalism and Communication, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. He was at various times Sub-Editor, Production Editor and Night Editor of The Guardian newspapers in Lagos, Nigeria. Between March 1995 and May 1996, he worked in the Division of Studies and Programming (BPE/BP) at the Paris headquarters of UNESCO where he edited the bulletin FUTURESCO and also coordinated the future-oriented studies program.

Levi has taught postgraduate and undergraduate classes across a range of journalism and communication courses and has successfully supervised PhD, Masters and Honours students. 

He holds a PhD and a Master’s degree in Communication from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, Australia. He also holds a Bachelor’s degree (BSc First Class Honours) and a Master’s degree in Mass Communication from the University of Lagos, Nigeria. In May 2000, he completed a Graduate Certificate in Education (Higher Education) course at the University of Queensland.

Max Siollun is a historian and commentator on Nigerian political and governmental issues, with a focus on those pertaining to Nigerian history and the Nigerian military’s participation in politics.  He has written a number of articles regarding Nigeria ’s military coups, and is the author of a forthcoming book on the origins of military engagement in Nigerian politics.  Mr Siollun welcomes reader feedback on his articles and may be contacted at maxsiollun@yahoo.com.

Ogaga Ifowodo

Ogaga Ifowodo, was born in Oleh, Delta State. Trained originally as a lawyer, he holds an MFA from Cornell University where he is currently finishing a Ph.D in English. He has published three collections of poems: Homeland and Other Poems, winner of the 1993 Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) poetry prize; Madiba, winner of the 2003 ANA/Cadbury poetry prize; and The Oil Lamp, winner of the 2005 ANA/NDDC Gabriel Okara poetry prize.

Ifowodo was a frontline student leader as an undergraduate at the University of Benin. He worked for eight years with the Civil Liberties Organisation, Nigeria’s premier human rights group, and between 1997 and 1998 was held under preventive detention by the Abacha military regime; a memoir of his prison experience, excerpts from which have been featured in Gathering Seaweed: African Prison Writing (edited by the Malawian poet, Jack Mapanje), New Writing 14 (published by Granta), Nigeria’s Vanguard newspaper, and at www.africanwriting.com is in progress. His poems have been translated into German, Dutch and Romanian and have also been widely published in anthologies and magazines, including Voices from all Over: Poems with Notes and Activities released last year by Oxford University Press, Step Into a World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature, The Times Literary Supplement, Poetry International, English in Africa, The Massachusetts Review, among others. Ifowodo is a regular contributor to the op-ed pages of The Guardian, Nigerian Village Square and other major Nigerian newspapers.

 Okey Ndibe is currently an associate professor of English at Simon's Rock College in Great Barrington, MA. In 2002, he won the college's New Faculty Teaching Award. During the 2001-2002 year, Ndibe was a Fulbright Lecturing/Research Scholar at the University of Lagos, Nigeria. 

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

After over ten years of managing agencies Dr Osuji decided to return to academia and secured a position at the University of Alaska. He taught Organizational Behavior (Psychology) and Political philosophy. Thereafter, Dr Osuji established Africa Institute Seattle. At the Institute they do research on African issues and conduct seminars on the same topics.

Dr Osuji has written on several topics. Some of his books are: Leadership Arts for Africa, Thoughts on Nigeria’s Constitution, Nigeria’s Political Economy etc. Dr Osuji is married and has three children (Ijeoma, Obi and Kelechi). He can be reached at: Ozodi@africainstituteseattleor ozodiosuji@gmail.com

P H I L I P     E M E A G W A L I
Profile from Time.com

A     C a l c u l a t i n g     M o v e    

It's hard to say who invented the Internet. There were many mathematicians and scientists who contributed to its development; computers were sending signals to each other as early as the 1950s. But the Web owes much of its existence to Philip Emeagwali, a math whiz who came up with the formula for allowing a large number of computers to communicate at once.

Emeagwali was born to a poor family in Akure, Nigeria, in 1954. Despite his brain for math, he had to drop out of school because his family, who had become war refugees, could no longer afford to send him. As a young man, he earned a general education certificate from the University of London and later degrees from George Washington University and the University of Maryland, as well as a doctoral fellowship from the University of Michigan.

At Michigan, he participated in the scientific community\'s debate on how to simulate the detection of oil reservoirs using a supercomputer. Growing up in an oil-rich nation and understanding how oil is drilled, Emeagwali decided to use this problem as the subject of his doctoral dissertation. Borrowing an idea from a science fiction story about predicting the weather, Emeagwali decided that rather than using 8 expensive supercomputers he would employ thousands of microprocessors to do the computation.

The only step left was to find 8 machines and connect them. (Remember, it was the 80s.) Through research, he found a machine called the Connection Machine at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which had sat unused after scientists had given up on figuring out how to make it simulate nuclear explosions. The machine was designed to run 65,536 interconnected microprocessors. In 1987, he applied for and was given permission to use the machine, and remotely from his Ann Arbor, Michigan, location he set the parameters and ran his program. In addition to correctly computing the amount of oil in the simulated reservoir, the machine was able to perform 3.1 billion calculations per second.

The crux of the discovery was that Emeagwali had programmed each of the microprocessors to talk to six neighboring microprocessors at the same time.

The success of this record-breaking experiment meant that there was now a practical and inexpensive way to use machines like this to speak to each other all over the world. Within a few years, the oil industry had seized upon this idea, then called the Hyperball International Network creating a virtual world wide web of ultrafast digital communication.

The discovery earned him the Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers\' Gordon Bell Prize in 1989, considered the Nobel Prize of computing, and he was later hailed as one of the fathers of the Internet. Since then, he has won more than 100 prizes for his work and Apple computer has used his microprocessor technology in their Power Mac G4 model. Today he lives in Washington with his wife and son.

"The Internet as we know it today did not cross my mind," Emeagwali told TIME. "I was hypothesizing a planetary-sized supercomputer and, broadly speaking, my focus was on how the present creates the future and how our image of the future inspires the present."