Nigerian, Peter Aikude Ranks Africa’s Number 1 Web Builder
My first encounter with Peter Aikude was on Elance, the popular outsourcing portal. I’d placed a project for a touch-up of my two websites, and in a couple of days his proposal came in. First thing that stood out was its origin – Nigeria. Next thing I noted was his approach. Take this: “I come from a background of 6 years spent differentiating offers and winning hearts online, in difficult markets…”
OK, this wasn’t the typical techie kind of response I’d become used to getting. Dude sounded more like a salesman than a coder! Infact, as it turned out later in our conversation, he’s a little of both actually. But that’s a different story altogether.
Unfortunately, I haven’t yet come round to actually doing up my websites yet, but a few impressions from that first encounter stayed with me to this day.
This was hardly my first time hiring a freelancer on Elance. Running a solo shop like mine, infact means that I eat, sleep and breath freelancers for every outstanding task if I don’t want to be bogged in 15 hour work days.
On checking out his profile, I quickly noticed he had the top 5% icon next to his PHP skill (the leading web development language). Now that was something I don’t believe I’d seen on my prior providers’ profiles.
Now I’m not one to discriminate (though you gotta admit, that when a dude’s Internet profile says “Nigerian”, you’re not immediately thinking you’ve found help
), but this discovery, (plus, my nose for a scoop) led me to a few skill searches on the Elance database, and also a short email interview with him. The results, for me, were unexpected.
For a start, Peter is currently skill-ranked as Africa’s number one PHP web programmer. He’s also an author and Internet business expert who has apparently, trained thousands of people in his country over some 6 years or so, to “earn honest income” online. Plus he owns the star1960 blog, which tracks Nigerian Celebs in Hollywood movies – many of whom I’d known before, but didn’t know were Nigerian!
Peter believes his country’s popular reputation abroad is not entirely deserved, and plans to commit his accumulated depth of technical skill into doing something about it. He did reveal the makings of what I’d call a highly innovative (not to say ambitious!) approach, chock full of facts, figures and timelines of how he intends to bring a “strong change” in how Nigerians “see themselves, manage their affairs, and are received by the world”.
Are you getting all this?
After this thoughtful encounter, I learnt 2 important lessons:
1. Never judge a book by its location.
2. Coffee does stick on keyboards (I had a little mishap a I typed…).
I’m touched by Peter’s effort and I hope he gets all the help he needs. Why not checkout his Nigeria news and entertainment blog and see what you think.
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