Nigerian singer and rapper Lanre Dabiri, known as Eldee, has revealed how his father’s role brought about the internet to Nigeria.
Eldee stated this during an interview on Adesope Live, he spoke about the progression of his music and how access to certain technology was an initial problem for him and his crew at the time.
He explained, “I was doing a lot of directing for my music and trying to pick up skills like mixing and mastering. I was also trying to figure out what we didn’t have access to. We didn’t have access to being able to shoot good videos and being able to produce high-quality sounding music and those were the things I focused on.”
He also revealed that his father was the person who set up the first internet connection in the country, including the first cyber café in Lagos State.
Eldee claimed, “Thankfully, I had my dad, who was in technology and was a pioneer of technology of sorts in Nigeria, in his own space as well. Fun fact: that man was the first person to connect Nigeria to the internet. This is something people go back and forth about and just argue because they don’t know his name.”
The rapper added, “He just wasn’t that guy who wanted to put his name out there but the very first cyber cafe set up in Lagos was set up by my dad. The very first connection for mobile and CBN and the government, really, my dad was the one doing that. ”
Eldee also highlighted how his father’s work gave him access to technology that wasn’t available to most people at the time.
He said, “At the time, we had access to technology that wasn’t really available so having all those things functioning out of the same building was good. I just had a room in the building where my studio was, where the music was being produced. Bro Mayowa was a pioneer in Nollywood was also breaking grounds because of the technology we had around us.”
“Nonlinear editing; we were the first to start it because we had access to the internet to download all this software. All these things really positioned us to do things at the level we were doing it at,” he concluded.
