So far, I’ve surmised that we like to cheer our heads off when somebody shouts “disrupt Interswitch”. But when it comes to who will do the actual disrupting, I’m yet to see any serious takers.
Feel free to disagree, but we can’t disrupt shit. At least not while we’re paying lip service to the concept. Nigeria’s developer community is missing a lot of the proactivity that you’d expect from a group of people who are supposed to be intellectually and technically capable of solving problems. We’re busy pretending to solve other people’s problems while our own follow us around like the hump on Quasimodo’s back.
That’s why we should clap for the the UK based dev who wrote a WordPress plugin that connects Interswitch Webpay to WooCommerce. Afterall, it didn’t occur to the any of the actual developers concerned to write one, all these years. And even if it did, they never wrote it. And even if they wrote it, they never released it to be used for free on the WordPress plugin repository. Thanks a lot, Sean.
But in every Israel that is scared to go into the promised land for fear of giants, there’s always a Joshua and Caleb who’ll rush in head first. They’re not necessarily the strongest or the brightest. All that matters is that they see what needs to be done, and they just fucking do it.
Case in point — Takinbo and Kehers. You might know them.
Last week, I found out that unlike the rest of us rabble rousers, they’re actually trying to disrupt Interswitch. Takinbo set the ball rolling by creating a python library that provides an interface to interact with Stanbic’s Mobile Money service. He uploaded it to Github last week. Kehers then took the original Python library and ported it to PHP, which I imagine is a more familiar platform for most devs. The idea is to allow site owners accept and confirm payments via Stanbic Mobile Money, thus making it a possible (even if as of yet unlikely) alternative to Interswitch’s Webpay.
Okay maybe it doesn’t quite qualify as disruption, given its limited scope, but their hearts are obviously in the right place as far as I’m concerned. I’m hoping other people will be inspired to contribute to their ideas and find ways to extend them into solutions that can really make electronic payments more accessible than they are now.
I particularly like these guys because they’re both active on developer communities/code repositories and they’re both active bloggers. That’s two out of the 7 (or 8) habits of highly effective developers — a series I’m currently developing.
The point of this rant. We can start putting our collective intellect to good use by banding together to solve the problems in the ecosystem. Or we can keep waiting for someone to write WordPress plugins for us when they feel like it. What if I told you that there’s a platform that aims to bridge the skill gaps for upcoming developers, and that it needs your help? What if I told you that an opensource project can help developers optimise their apps over our notoriously low fidelity bandwidth networks needs contributors to help maintain and scale it? Would you pitch in? I don’t care if you can code circles around Zuckerberg. If it’s not contributing something to the larger ecosystem, it doesn’t exist.
Leave the Interswitch bitching to me, that’s my job. Yours is to start putting your code where your mouth is, march the hell up to Jericho, and tear it down. Problems of policy aside, if there’s a problem that clearly requires technical skill, why should it exist for longer than we can come together and hack a script to kill it? The real coderatti need to please stand up.
