K.D Derek

Corporate Values In Leadership – Do what’s right, even if it’s tough In Collaboration – Leverage our collective genius, be a team In Transparency – Be real In Accountability – Recognize that if it is to be, it’s up to me In Passion – Show commitment in heart and mind

Ghana's NITA Bill 2025 affects almost everyone in the tech space. Let me break down who gets hit and how. 🧵 1. LOCAL STARTUPS & FOUNDERS If you're building a SaaS product, app, or digital platform in Ghana — you need a licence. No exceptions. Operating without one is a criminal offence with fines and potential jail time. 2. FREELANCE DEVELOPERS & INDEPENDENT CONSULTANTS Section 46 says NO ONE can work as an ICT professional in any institution — public or private — without NITA certification. That includes you, the guy building websites from his bedroom. 3. FINTECH & MOMO-ADJACENT BUSINESSES Payment platforms, reconciliation tools, and digital financial services fall squarely under ICT services. Expect licensing requirements and compliance audits. 4. DATA CENTRE & CLOUD OPERATORS You need a Data Centre Operator Licence. Hosting critical data without NITA accreditation? Up to 7 years imprisonment. This is not a light provision. 5. FOREIGN TECH COMPANIES OPERATING IN GHANA If you provide cloud services, SaaS, or ICT infrastructure to Ghanaian institutions — you are not exempt. The bill covers anyone operating in Ghana's ICT sector. 6. PUBLIC SECTOR ICT OFFICERS Every government ICT officer must be NITA-certified. Ministries, departments, assemblies — all of them. Non-compliance triggers administrative penalties on the institution. 7. ICT STUDENTS & FRESH GRADUATES You're entering a regulated profession. NITA certification will likely become a prerequisite before you can be formally employed anywhere in tech. 8. GHANAIANS STUDYING ABROAD 🎓 This one's important. If you study abroad and return to practice ICT in Ghana, your foreign qualification alone won't be enough. You'll need NITA certification on top of it. Plan for that repatriation step before you come back. If you're studying CS, software engineering, data science, cybersecurity — factor NITA certification into your return-to-Ghana plan. 9. RESEARCHERS & ACADEMICS IN ICT Universities and research institutions that deploy or develop ICT systems may need to register projects with NITA's ICT Project Registry (s.54) and obtain technical clearance. 10. NGOs & CIVIL SOCIETY USING DIGITAL TOOLS Organisations running digital platforms or collecting and hosting data may fall under licensing and data accreditation requirements depending on scale. 11. INVESTORS & VCs BACKING GHANAIAN TECH Any sale, merger, or acquisition involving an ICT service provider requires NITA approval BEFORE it takes effect (s.49). Due diligence now includes regulatory clearance. 12. THE OPPORTUNITY IN ALL OF THIS The Regulatory Sandbox (s.60) exists for innovators to test products under relaxed rules. If you're early-stage, apply for it. It could buy you time and legitimacy while you build. Bottom line: if you touch tech in Ghana — building, coding, consulting, studying, or investing — this bill touches you back. Read it. Plan around it. And make noise while it's still a bill. #GhanaTech #NITA #DigitalGhana #TechPolicy #StartupGhana #GhanaICT

Ghana is failing us.

Claude Code is about to release a feature called /workflows that I think will be extremely significant. Especially for Enterprise AI. I talked about this in 2024 in a post called Companies Are Just Graphs of Algorithms. Basically the idea is that all work is just an algorithm, i.e., a series of steps to accomplish a goal. Skills and Cowork have been heading in this direction already, and we've seen what that's done to company valuations in various spaces. Well this is closer to the final form. It's turning the regular, expected work that's done in companies into pseudo-deterministic workflows that follow defined SOPs. The human role will be determining what problems to solve (taste, expeirence, etc), building new products from that, and then optimizing these workflows from above. But the work itself will be these workflows executed according to SOPs.

A 39 year old Slovak-Canadian researcher just paused his AI school to join the company that's racing OpenAI for the future of intelligence. His name is Andrej Karpathy. And his career is one of the strangest in modern AI. Karpathy was born in Bratislava in 1986, in what was then Czechoslovakia. His family moved to Toronto when he was 15. He did his bachelor's in computer science and physics at the University of Toronto, where he sat in on Geoffrey Hinton's classes and reading groups long before Hinton became a household name. He did his master's at UBC. Then he went to Stanford for his PhD under Fei-Fei Li, the woman who built ImageNet. In 2015, while still finishing his PhD, he designed and taught Stanford's first deep learning course. It was called CS231n. It started with 150 students. Two years later it had 750. The lecture videos went on YouTube for free and became the standard reference for an entire generation of AI engineers. TIME magazine later reported that those Stanford lectures alone have over 800,000 views. That same year, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Ilya Sutskever started a research lab called OpenAI. Karpathy was one of its founding members. He stayed at OpenAI for two years. Then in June 2017, Elon Musk hired him to run Tesla Autopilot. He spent five years there as Senior Director of AI, leading the computer vision team behind every Tesla on the road. In February 2023 he went back to OpenAI. He quit again in February 2024. And then he did something nobody in his position had ever done. He turned his YouTube channel into a school. His "Neural Networks: Zero to Hero" series walks through how to build a GPT model from scratch in plain code, math, and English. The flagship video, "Let's build GPT: from scratch, in code, spelled out," is just under two hours long and has millions of views. People at every major AI lab cite it as how they actually understood transformers. In July 2024 he announced Eureka Labs. The pitch was an AI-native school. Human teachers paired with AI teaching assistants, scaling one great teacher to a million students. The first course was LLM101n, an undergraduate program that would teach anyone to train their own ChatGPT from scratch. Then in February 2025 he coined the phrase "vibe coding" in a single throwaway tweet. The phrase became Collins Dictionary's Word of the Year. It now has its own Wikipedia article. Last week, on May 19, 2026, he announced he is joining Anthropic. Eureka Labs is on pause. He said the next few years at the frontier of large language models will be especially formative, and he wanted to get back to research. At Anthropic he will lead a pretraining group focused on using Claude to accelerate Claude itself. The man who left two of the most powerful AI labs on Earth to teach the world for free just walked back into one of them. The videos are still up. All of them. Free. Forever. And he still answers questions in the comments.

Anthropic onboarding day: Michael Scott introducing Karpathy like he just signed Wemby in free agency.

@pazunre @MikelAsamoah Nice one We Dey active

@jrdegbe @MikelAsamoah We go wake up, don’t worry. They will get to know me well well 😊

Because??

We wish to inform the general public and all stakeholders that the proposed X Space discussion on the new NITA Bill has been rescheduled. 🗓️ New Date: Tuesday, 26th May 2026 ⏰ Time: 1:00 PM GMT The rescheduling is to allow for broader /1

I’m going to @NITAGhana’s upcoming Space. Will you join too? twitter.com/i/spaces/1RKZz…

I’m going to @NITAGhana’s upcoming Space. Will you join too? twitter.com/i/spaces/1RKZz…

Sam, you are not being asked to abandon the bill. You are being asked to answer for it. The tech community is not arrogant. It is not uninformed. It is not — as some of your sharper supporters have implied online — a cabal of "noisemakers." It is the constituency that grew Ghana's ICT sector by 19% a year for six straight years without a single NITA certificate, that built the fintech ecosystem moving US$36 billion in transactions, that drew Twitter to choose Accra over Lagos and Nairobi, and that you yourself purport to be training a million more of. We are asking you ten questions. Please answer them — directly, in writing, citing the sections and the statutes, and on a timeline that allows the answers to inform the parliamentary debate rather than follow it. If the bill is as defensible as you say it is, the answers should be easy. If they are not, then perhaps the bill is not as defensible as you say it is. @koboateng @pazunre #StopTheNITABill

10. On the standard you set for yourself In April 2026, defending another piece of restrictive legislation, you said: "To those who say we have other priorities, this is a priority for us… Any country worth its salt can deal with multiple priorities at the same time." You also said, of NITA's previous management, that you would never preside over a system that operated outside its statutory boundaries. Question 10a: If a future government uses the powers in this bill — particularly Sections 46, 101, and the inspection-and-seizure powers in Sections 68–73 — against developers whose only offence is publishing software critical of the government of the day, will you accept responsibility for having drafted the instrument that made that possible? Question 10b: Will you publicly commit, on the record, that you will not certify, license, or refuse to license any ICT practitioner or ICT business on the basis of their political views, public commentary, or association?

Sam, Your post — and the @NITAGhana statement it amplified on 22 May 2026 — rests on a simple proposition: that the fees and licensing regime Ghanaians are objecting to are not new, that they already exist under Act 771 (2008), Act 772 (2008), Act 1080 (2022), L.I. 2481 (2023) and L.I. 2512 (2025), and that critics are therefore "conflating two distinct legal processes." Fair enough. Let us take you at your word and ask the questions that follow directly from your own framing. These are not rhetorical. They are the questions any Ghanaian — developer, founder, investor, parliamentarian — should be able to put to you and receive a straight answer. 1. On Section 38(1) of Act 772 The Electronic Transactions Act, 2008 (Act 772), which you cite as part of the "existing law" anchoring NITA's authority, contains an unambiguous prohibition at Section 38(1): "A licence shall not be issued or granted by the Agency to an individual." NITA is currently issuing — or proposing to issue — licences and certifications to individual ICT professionals. Question 1a: Under what legal authority is NITA licensing individuals today, when its enabling statute expressly forbids it? Question 1b: If the answer is that the new NITA Bill is needed to overturn Section 38(1), can you confirm — on the record — that the "existing law" defence is therefore incorrect, and that the bill is in fact creating a new regulatory regime rather than codifying an existing one? You cannot have it both ways. Either the licensing of individuals is already lawful (in which case, please cite the provision that overrides Section 38(1)), or it is not (in which case, the bill is the substantive change you say it is not).