The Cameroonian government had all the bad intentions to block some regions considered to be English speaking from accessing the Internet, the affected areas as are in the Northwest and southern regions of the country. Details start to emerge indicating that the government indeed put some pressure on telecommunication firms to stop their services in the regions believed to be the source of protests asking why French is the preferred official language yet they share the same status as English.
Internet users realized that they could no longer communicate on social media, the question then remains, what do people who live under such regimes do , few people and pressure groups try to brave the harsh regimes and continue pursuing their goals and of one particular interest is a young boy who when everyone was taken back by the #BringBackOurInternet hashtag protests on the social media platforms,
https://twitter.com/NiloSeba/status/831228907269521409
Retweeted AfricaInternetRights (@AfricaNetRights):#BringBackOurInternet pic.twitter.com/E1yKcUgxnt https://t.co/cRhFZUo32P
— CITAD (@ICTAdvocates) February 13, 2017
A 17 year old Nji Collins Gbah overcame a lot of obstacles to compete in Google’s code jam, a competition that is open to young adults aged between 13 and 17 years which normally attracts an international audience. Google uses this competition as a way of recruiting top engineering talent to work for in Silicon Valley. The young man managed to defeat 1,229 other contestants who presumably may have had unlimited Internet access at the time of the competition.
Being the first ever winner from Africa , the young programmer comes from Bamenda, a small rural town situated in the North-Western part of the country and further away from the capital Yaounde, at the moment he lives with his cousin in the capital city. He is a self taught coder who unlike his age mates who use most of their Internet time ‘socializing, Nji was busy learning how to become a coder using online resources and old books that he could come across. He sharpened his skills by practicing ideas he gathered while practicing. He had already completed 20 tasks in all the categories defined in the competition and by stroke of good luck he made his submission a day before the deadline . Had he not done that he would have not submitted his work because the government decided to shut down the Internet on the day of submission.
Being a lover of technology and no Internet connection and schools in the area closed he still wanted to get a connection to continue studying and be in touch with Google. He is an example of a resilient person who is determined to overcome all adversaries to get success. After he was told of his success as the winner in this years category, the teenager who turns 18 in the nest few days, still was determined to be able to access Internet, that is when he went to his live with his cousin who is 8 hours away from Nji’s home if you travel by bus. He says that he had to go through previous winners list to confirm if indeed he was the first African contestant to be a winner and up to this date no government official has been in touch with him yet.
People of Bamenda village with a population of about half a million people are hopeful that the government may feel compelled to restore Internet connection in the wake of this news.
He is now on the verge of meeting top engineers and gain more in a world where Internet is considered a basic need not a luxury. In the near future he hopes to finish school and study computer science in college. He is currently reading on artificial intelligence and neural networks as he develops his own data compression model. His desire is to make a huge step in the possibilities of data transfer and storage.
Interviewed by the BBC he said it worked for him because of his hard work and writing a lot of codes. He was awarded a four-day trip to the prestigious Silicon Valley, Google’s Headquarters. Hopefully, in future he will be part of the engineering staff at Google and who knows, he may be writing a code on how to bypass Internet blockage. Hopefully in future he will be part of the engineering staff at Google and who knows , he may may be writing a code on how to bypass Internet blockage.
