Ndubuisi Ekekwe: Africans are Building their Own Tablets, Don't put them Down

This is one very important chat I had with Ndubuisi Ekekwe at the just concluded Tech4Africa. When we talked of VMK from Congo, Kaboo by a Kenyan and Encipher by a Nigerian, many of the Bachelor of Arts graduates now writing tech stories in Kenya and beyond came out guns blazing and launched attacks on the bloggers and even the said innovators trying to create “African tablets”.

Some of the claims from the pundits and journalists were that the Kenyan, Nigerian or Congolese could not have launched or managed to design a tablet so soon without 2 or so years of R&D. Most of these arguments were lame and just brought out the stupidity of the bloggers, pundits and journos. They forgot that many Africans have created far greater ideas without having to go the formal way of innovation.

Ndubuisi who is one of the great young African minds out there agreed. He wondered why Africans should be forced to produce new processors, screens and other parts of a tablets while others have already done so. Ndubuisi is of the opinion that to create some of these ideas you just need to know how to assemble a product, make it look African and solve African problems. Africans need not reinvent the wheel.

Watch Ndubuisi Ekekwe in this video;

[youtube width=”620″ height=”450″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yepaSZzWF9w[/youtube]

Professor Ndubuisi is an inventor who holds a patent on a microchip used in minimally invasive surgical robots and has authored breakthrough papers, including a roadmap on African single currency which he presented in an AU congress. He holds two doctoral and four master’s degrees, including a PhD in electrical and computer engineering from the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore and MBA from University of Calabar, Nigeria, all completed by March 2009.

Ndubuisi is the brain behind Fasmicro which also has the best-selling tablet in Nigeria, Ovim.

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The manufacturer being African is by no means a competitive advantage. Sell us on other credible aspects like price, battery life, graphics quality etc.