Crypto tapping, a poverty barometer for the Nigerian government

   A few months ago, not quite long. I happened to be under the weather, so I decided to visit a trusted pharmacy in my area. After the back-and-forth procedure of describing my health issues, across the counter, the pharmacist attending to me was arranging my supposed medication. I tried to ask her a couple of questions just for me to notice how out of reach her ears were to me, so I tiptoed to steal a glance at whatever she was doing. Lo and behold, she was tapping. Yes, she was tapping virtual coins on the infamous Hamster Kombat platform. Just the other day, I was in a five-star hotel in the Eastern Heartland of the country, and what I saw might sound funny. The general manager of the hotel was busy tapping away on Tapswap. Inflation is eating up people’s salaries. It’s already been reported that Nigeria’s inflation hit a 32.70 percent rise in the month of September 2024, according to the Guardian Newspaper, a record rise I must chip in. Most Nigerians have steadily been gazing helplessly at how inflation is consistently eroding the purchasing power of their salaries. An average Nigerian earns thirty thousand Thousand Naira per month, and when you check or divide this by the days of the month, what you would get is a pitiful one thousand naira per day income. Meaning that a huge percentage of Nigerians live below the one-dollar mark since a dollar gives one thousand six hundred naira only. The cost of fuel and diesel isn’t taking a rest while, on its way up, federal universities in the country are hiking up their tuition and miscellaneous fees, such that federal universities, which were once considered the poor man’s school of choice, are drifting away from the grasp of the poor masses. The fees of these federal universities are now almost at par with those of state and privately funded universities across the nation. People have lost hope in the government. I was interacting with a group of crypto enthusiasts the other day, and one said, “I do the tapping because no one is coming to save me, not even the government.” “It takes only my data to tap,” another reiterated. Do you expect me to cast my lot with a government that responds to humanitarian and financial disasters with a bag of rice? Yes, I know that crypto mining is outlawed in the country, but the country leaders do not give a hoot about the country’s people. Another one doubled down. For a government that capitalises on the economic woes of its people during election time, how then do you expect them to care about the poor masses when it’s not yet election time? Their assumed leader asked me. Read also: Cryptocurrency: Role in redefining privacy & freedom A lot of fellow country people want to go to Japa. It actually seemed to me as if I was the only Nigerian who wasn’t tapping. One of the janitors in a hotel confided in me how he keeps on tapping in order to raise funds to travel overseas for good. As if his statements were not enough, he chipped in, “When I Japa una no fit, see me again for this country,” and I could tell he wasn’t bluffing, for I could see and feel the determination in his eyes and voice. What this means is that with the current Japa trend, financial constraints have been the main reason holding a lot of Nigerians back. Had the Tapswap tapping been a major financial success for its participants, Nigeria would have had to battle with a huge demographic decline in the coming months, not just losses of skilled manpower. Potential cybercrimes and malware: To the layman tapper, all you have to do is just keep on tapping your phone screen to accumulate coins. Cryptocurrency is such a decentralised currency and platform that no one knows who is who or who controls what. After tapping, you get your coins turned into cryptocurrency, and to do this, you have to submit your crypto wallet. Remember that your crypto wallet itself houses critical and sensitive information about you. This in turn can serve as a gateway for scammers, bots, and malware to steal sensitive and private details. One of the commonalities in this crypto tapping is that to engage or tap, you must have a Telegram account. Even Pavel Durov, the telegram founder, has stated countless times that his social media platform is an all-for-all, where you are free to sleep like a bat if you wish to. Meaning that scammers and scams are just a pace away. In the first few months of its breakthrough into the Nigerian population, Tapswap (one of the main tapping cryptocurrency platforms) gained 50 million users since it launched in February 2024. What does this mean? It means that if there’s a privacy breach or malware, the data of 50 million Nigerians will be at risk, and subsequently the country’s data too. Some of these apps periodically require the tappers to share posts and data from their platforms with the users’ social media accounts; these posts could be illegal, against the laws of the country of residence of the user. The post itself could be to spread misinformation since we do not even know who generates these posts and what they aim to achieve by having them shared. Honestly, the country’s elites and governing council need to read, keep records, and also act on these barometers of high poverty levels in the country because it poses more than enough risks to the nation at large, not just to the tappers. Let the leaders of the country show know-how on ameliorating the financial disasters plaguing the masses and not just respond with a bag of rice and microphone diplomacy.