| Bayero University
in Kano
At BUK, I met with the
Vice Chancellor, the DVC Academic, the DVC administrative, and the
chairman of their NUNet committee (Dr. Ado Dan Isa – Dept. of
Electrical Engineering). My affiliation with the
Nigerian Universities Commission did not seem to impress them.
Apparently they've had less than sterling experience with the NUC.
However they are using the NUC's NUNet e-mail. Everyone was
cordial enough as I explained my mission, although the VC seemed a
little irritated that I didn't have anything more concrete to offer
them.
They reported having
several machines wired up into a network, four in one building and three
in another, the library, but as the conversation matured, it turns out
that two of the machines in the library are no longer functioning and
the radio link between the two networks has failed. The Director of their
NUNet program, Dr. Ado Dan Isa, kept mentioning “monkey networking.”
I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. Later, however, we met
one of his technicians who, it turns out, had attended one of our
trainings in Jos a year prior where I had taught about “guerilla
networking.” (Given the cultural context and the geographical
proximity to East Africa, as well as the unfamiliarity with Latin
American politics in Nigeria, I am afraid I am going to have to abandon
my guerilla networking concept. I rephrased it for this group
calling it "commando networking".) So, it turns out that the gentleman who had been to our training in Jos the year earlier, had returned to BUK and wired up the first seven computers at Kano. The machines I saw were all low-end Pentium clones.
Like many of their
counterparts in Nigeria, BUK is at a loss at how to train their
technicians and where to go from this point forward. Like many
other universities, BUK is still in the mode of training faculty members
– not staff – to set up and maintain their computers, as if they
expect professors will end up supporting the network long-term.
They reported having several dozen e-mail accounts but very light actual
message traffic through their system. They reported a number of
problems in dialing consistently into NUC. I asked them if they had
investigated getting connected to the Internet and they reported, a flat
“no.” They have heard of others making attempts to set up an
ISP in Kano, but to date there has been no success. Some in the
room had experience with dialing in to Lagos and said it was both
expensive and terribly slow. They stated very clearly
that they could not afford a satellite connection to the Internet, as
they understood it to be prohibitively expensive (having been approached
by a Lagos-based Internet service provider.) I asked them how much
they were willing to pay and mentioned the four million Naira suggested
in the NUC plan. They didn't exactly say yes, and they didn't
exactly say no.
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