Nigerian, Peter Aikude Ranked Africa’s Number 1 In Web Skills
I first met him when I put out a project on Elance looking to update my blog and Facebook page. His response started along the lines of “Hello, I’m Peter Aikude, and I come from a background of 6 years spent differentiating offers and winning hearts online, in difficult markets…”.
Naturally, this didn’t sound to me like your regular techie guy speak, and as his communication progressed he came across ever more like a business executive than tech support.
While I didn’t quite get round to awarding that particular job, I still remember that day as one that stood out a little for me, in a few ways.
This was hardly my first time hiring a freelancer on Elance. Being a home office owner myself, means that I have to frequently work with Virtual assistants if I don’t want to be bogged in 15 hour work days.
What struck me at the time was that his work profile (Geosentry Enterprises) had the Top 5% skill mark for the web’s most popular programming language, PHP. Now that was something I don’t believe I’d seen on my prior providers’ profiles.
Intrigued by what I’d call my first chance meeting online with (I assumed) a real solutions guy from that particular country, I moved in to see if there wasn’t something interesting here. I searched the Elance listings a bit, and shot Peter a quick email interview. 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!
During our interview, I gather that Peter is quite convinced that his country’s current reputation abroad is entirely undeserved, and in his words, he’s “out to prove it”. He goes ahead to sell a good summary of his life commitment to use his tech skills for what he calls “a step-wise mass-evolving of our population” using planned “non-stressing” entertainment programs.
Folks, you get an earful when you go snooping around and being a journalist!
When my interview was through, I’d learned two things:
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 site and see what you think.
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Rob Fleming is a Freelance writer with over 10 years experience in Developing unique website content, Website Marketing, and SEO techniques. He has authored hundreds of powerful articles on building site authority and driving traffic to websites. 
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