News
Plateau APC Addresses Concerns Over State Assembly Primary Election Announcements
The Chairman and Returning Officer of the All Progressives Congress Governorship Primary Election Committee, Fidelis Bemse, has clarified issues surrounding the announcement of Plateau State House of Assembly primary election results.
Speaking shortly after the governorship primary election in Jos, Bemse explained that the APC constitutional guidelines provide that House of Assembly primary election results must be announced at the constituency level and not at the state level.
“The conduct of the State House of Assembly primary elections and the announcement of results are done at the constituency level and not here at the state level,” he stated.
According to him, the elections were conducted at designated council wards serving as voting points before the results were collated and officially announced within the affected constituencies.
He noted that bringing the various constituency results to the state level for announcement would amount to a violation of party procedures and existing legal provisions.
“I will be doing great injustice to the APC family in Plateau State if I bring the results of the various state constituencies and announce them here,” Bemse said.
The committee chairman further referenced Supreme Court decisions which, according to him, had established that announcing such results outside the approved constituencies could render the process illegal.
“The Supreme Court has held that such announcement and such election is illegal. I will not encourage anything that will make the process questionable,” he added.
Bemse maintained that the primary elections conducted across Plateau State were credible, free and fair, stressing that members of the committee monitored the exercise across different locations.
He congratulated all candidates who emerged victorious during the primaries and urged them to see their victories as belonging to the entire APC family rather than personal achievements.
The APC official also appealed to aspirants who lost during the primaries to remain committed to the party and support the eventual candidates ahead of the 2027 general elections.
“For those who could not make it this time around, I encourage them to embrace their brothers and sisters who won the tickets and work together as one APC family for victory in 2027,” he said.
Bemse concluded by appreciating party members across Plateau State for their peaceful participation during the primaries, expressing confidence that the APC would emerge stronger and more united ahead of the next general elections.
Business
NCC Appoints Oforitsenere Emiko as Interim Board Chairman to Drive Nigeria’s Tech Skills Transformation
BY NKECHI NAECGE -ESEZOBOR—The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has appointed Princess Oforitsenere Emiko as the Interim Chairman of the Governing Board of the Digital Bridge Institute (DBI). This strategic move is part of the Commission’s ongoing efforts to reposition the institute to meet the growing demands of Nigeria’s evolving digital economy.
The announcement was disclosed on Monday in a statement by the NCC’s Director of Public Affairs, Nnenna Ukoha.
According to the Commission, the appointment is aimed at strengthening the institute’s capacity to respond to the rapid transformation of the communications sector and the emerging requirements of the broader digital market.
Alongside Princess Emiko, the NCC named Engr. Abraham Oshadami, Executive Commissioner for Technical Services, and Ms. Rimini Makama, Executive Commissioner for Stakeholder Management, as interim board members. They are expected to work closely with the President and Chief Executive Officer of DBI, David Daser, as well as other continuing board members whose tenures remain valid.
Established by the NCC in May 2004, the Digital Bridge Institute was originally created as a specialized training center for telecommunications and information technology.
However, the Commission noted that the sector has since transitioned into a wider digital economy that demands continuous skills development and advanced technical capacity.
The NCC emphasized that the restructuring of the institute reflects the vital role communication infrastructure plays in national development and economic sovereignty.
A major driver of this initiative is Nigeria’s youth demographic, with approximately 70 percent of the population under the age of 30, making targeted skills development a critical component of the national transformation agenda.
To address this, the Commission stated that the renewed focus of the institute will center on five key areas: education and training, research and development, innovation, economic impact and growth, and emerging policy and regulation.
This new strategy was developed through extensive consultations involving key public stakeholders, including the Federal Ministry of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, the Federal Ministry of Education, TETFund, the Federal Ministry of Science and Technology, and the National Agency for Science and Engineering Infrastructure (NASENI). The initiative is ultimately designed to align DBI’s mandate with modern technological realities and strengthen Nigeria’s overall position in the global digital economy.
The post NCC Appoints Oforitsenere Emiko as Interim Board Chairman to Drive Nigeria’s Tech Skills Transformation appeared first on Business Today NG.
In India, consumers receive a lot of calls every day, ranging from spam and scams to delivery people and financial service companies trying to contact them. There are apps like Truecaller and the government’s Calling Name Presentation (CNAP) system to identify who is calling, but knowing the name of the caller is often not enough. That is why Equal AI is creating an assistant that can receive calls on your behalf, gather information, and tell you why someone is calling.
The app is currently available on Android, and since its launch last year, it has grown to more than a million monthly active users and over 300,000 daily active users, it says. The app screens the call and displays the reason someone is calling you.
The dialer shows quick reply options like “Leave the delivery near the door” or “Give it to the neighbor,” and the AI reads them back to the caller. You can also type a custom message for the AI to read out. The app records the call, and users can see the recording and transcription history with a summary in the app.
Equal AI said today it has raised $30 million in Series B funding led by Prosus Ventures and Tomales Bay Capital with participation from Think Investments and Valiant Fund. Individual investors include Indian fintech PhonePe’s founder Sameer Nigam, Zubin Bharti Mittal from Airtel Family Office, Skyflow AI co-founder Anshu Sharma, Meta India and Southeast Asia’s VP Sandhya Devanathan, and CtrlS Datacenters’ Chairman Sridhar Pinnapureddy. With the new funding, the company has raised over $42 million to date.
The round is structured in three tranches, with the startup carrying a different valuation at each stage depending on whether it hits predetermined targets — a growing but still uncommon approach in which startups sell equity at different prices within the same round. The structure has an unusual quirk: it lets a startup advertise the highest valuation achieved, even if the bulk of the equity was sold at a lower one. Equal AI declined to provide its specific valuations.
The startup was founded by Keshav Reddy in 2022. Reddy comes from the family behind Indian conglomerate GVK, which has holdings across infrastructure, energy, and healthcare. Equal started as a data-sharing company for financial services and still offers data for financial analysis and know your customer (KYC) verification services for employers.
“We always wanted to be a customer-facing company, and with Equal AI, the first use case we launched was a call assistant because we realized users get a ton of calls for financial services or job openings. If you are buying car insurance, you might get 20 calls over a week, and that is hard to tackle for a human,” founder Reddy told TechCrunch about why the company started there.
The app currently only screens unknown calls, but the company is planning to introduce the ability to screen calls from known numbers too. The company also wants the AI assistant to take proactive action on a user’s behalf — such as texting a delivery person your address (with consent) or making outbound calls to book appointments. The startup said it is also working on an iOS version of the app and a paid subscription tier with more features.
Equal AI is using a mix of speech recognition, automatic speech recognition (ASR), and speech generation models with its own orchestration layer. English support matters, but consumers in India often speak in their native language or blend multiple languages in a single sentence — a phenomenon called code-mixing. Equal AI says it has built support for over 10 languages with this in mind.
The startup has stiff competition. Google and Apple both have call screening products. Truecaller, already a household name in India, has been building out its own AI assistant features. In the U.S., a16z-backed privacy startup Cloaked also launched call screening last year. Thiago Viana, global co-head at Prosus Ventures, said that Equal’s understanding of local context gives it an edge.
“Equal AI promises to screen calls for you and provide context on why someone is calling. We think that if an app does well in a few use cases, it can quickly become popular in its niche and create user stickiness to expand in different areas later on,” Reddy told TechCrunch by phone.
Prosus has been investing in AI assistant startups that focus on local markets. Its portfolio includes Spain-based Luzia and Latin America-based Zapia. Both were caught up in Meta’s ban on third-party AI bots on WhatsApp, which serves as a cautionary tale for platform dependency. Equal AI said that it didn’t want to create that kind of dependency — which is why it built around calls and its own app rather than piggybacking on a messaging platform.
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