Piql West Africa Strengthens Board with New Chairman in Significant Deal

Fadekemi Ajakaiye

Piql Africa Ltd, a leader in data preservation and access solutions and operator of the Piql brand in West Africa has announced that its board of directors has been 

seriously strengthened by the agreement of Nze Edward Keazor to join Piql West Africa board as Chairman.

“It is with great pride, excitement and satisfaction that we welcome Nze Ed Keazor to

the Piql business. He is well-known and successful in the legal and history 

disciplines not only with established credentials, but also with an eminent business career. His addition to Piql West Africa can only mean that we can face the historical archiving and preservation challenges in the region with a renowned and brilliant mind,” announced Esona Onuoha, Executive Director, Piql Africa Ltd.

“Piql West Africa faces an historic opportunity offering its data preservation 

technology in the coming years within the region, and I believe that it now has both the leadership and management to prosper,” added Mr. Onuoha. “I look forward to working with the board to reach our goals of providing data protection and preservation solutions to government, development agencies, and multinationals as the gold standard option for record preservation.

“We in Piql are extremely happy for this addition to the Piql West Africa Team. 

Having had the pleasure of having Mr. Keazor with us in our headquarter in Norway and learnt about his extensive experience and insights in the domain of archival and preservation, Mr. Keazor will not only add value for Piql in Nigeria and West Africa, but also globally across the network of Piql Partners. We share ambitions and visions, and together we shall make a true difference in providing the best possible solutions to keep memory and history well preserved for the benefit of future 

generations – for both institutions as well as businesses across West Africa,” said Rune Bjerkestrand, Founder and Managing Director of Piql.

Nze Ed Keazor has had a long, illustrious international career as distinguished historian, lawyer, museum curator, filmmaker and archivist. He joins the Piql family bringing many years of experience, innovation and ideas for the planning and 

structuring of archives, digitization of analogue content and offline plus online storage to our operations. He is the founder of Eagle History Media, member of the 

Board of Trustees of the Legal History Society of Nigeria, as well as Iba Ajie The Ukpabi Asika Knowledge Resource Centre; Fellow of the Royal Society for Arts and 

Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a member of the Institute of Chartered Secretaries and Administrators of Canada. His museum projects include the curation of the Total Energies, FirstBank mobile museums and the Iba Ajie Museum, amongst others. He was also a consultant to the Horniman Museum, London and provided pro-bono advice on the recent Benin bronzes restitution. He 

also received an award from the African Society of Cambridge University for his work. 

Nze Ed Keazor is also a partner at Rose and Berkeley Chambers, Attorneys at Law

and was previously, publishing Director at the Cavendish Group and Legal Specialist at Age UK.. He has authored and several books published on Legal, Social and Commercial history, including the critically acclaimed „Lagos- Hamburg Line- A Short 

History of German Companies in Nigeria‟ and „120 Great Nigerians We Never Knew‟.

“I decided to invest in Piql Africa because of the uniqueness and quality of its product and service specialisations as well as its strong global footprint. My career long advocacy has been towards a more robust approach to information archiving and

investing my expertise and resources with a global leader like Piql was a natural step. I sincerely look forward to being part of what shall certainly be an exciting and productive journey in the Nigerian data archiving space.”

In addition, Nze Ed Keazor sees a future where in partnership with Piql AS Norway, he helps develop a series of programs to identify cases where African contributions 

made significant impact and were recorded for the first time in diverse spaces and deposit the collections as African contributions to the Arctic World Archives, a safe repository for world memory designed to withstand man-made and natural disasters.

Nze Ed Keazor, becomes the Chairman of the Board of Directors and is expected to set Piql West Africa on a trajectory of higher achievements that will attract relevant organizations and people, from all over the world, towards a better future for the long term storage and management of valuable data in many industries across Africa.

Mr. Onuoha added that “We believe the Piql opportunity will lead to enormous and 

instant gratification for our stakeholders. At the same time companies who are willing to utilize the Piql platform will benefit from managed, secure long-term preservation of valuable data with guaranteed future access, enjoy greater longevity of medium and realize the rewards of a true fail-safe solution.”

Prof. Chima Korieh, the Vice Chancellor, Admiralty University, who has spent many years working on endangered Archives Projects added that the addition to Piql Africa

was a welcome and timely development, while Prof. Emeka Oguzie, Deputy Vice Chancellor at the Federal University of Technology, Owerri, who heads the World Bank‟s African Centre of Excellence at the University, acknowledges that Nze Keazor‟s pedigree places him in the right position to lead the company and shape 

Piql Africa for years to come. They are both members of the Piql Africa advisory board, while Mr. Kanu Emejuiawe is the country manager, Nigeria.

Piql is a Norwegian innovative technology firm that represents a unique fusion of a Deep 

Tech and Green Tech company – making a difference in this world! Piql offers a disruptive 

and holistic technology and solution for truly secure and long-term data storage for the 

archival/digital preservation, cybersecurity, storage optimisation (for sustainability) and 

resilient operations (for business continuity) markets, Piql is the creator of the Arctic World 

Archive, a safe digital repository for world memory.

• Piql provides a unique, commercially proven and highly sustainable solution (making a 

positive impact on the clients‟ sustainability profile) for secure and non-hackable data 

storage, in a market where the amount of data is exploding and demand for storag

Piql is the only solution that can meet current and future requirements for long-term data

storage. The proven business model is highly scalable for growth in the global market. Piql 

has attracted clients such as GitHub, European Space Agency (ESA), Vatican Library, 

UNICEF and many more.

• The data preserved today, needs to be accessible in the future. A challenge to future 

access is the continuously changing technological standards and platforms (i.e. software, 

hardware and interfaces). The piqlFilm is future-proof with no technology or vendor lock-in.

• Cyber-attacks and the manipulation of digital data are major concerns in this era. Piql 

offers immutable, non-hackable, offline storage of digital data with online availability through

the SaaS platform – piqlConnect. The data stored on piqlFilm is permanent and unalterable.

• A global network of 20+ business partners (Piql Partners and Resellers) for distribution of

services have been established. A network of B2B Partners is under establishment, first

deployment will be Crayon (NO + 35 countries) and Microsoft (NO + global)

The self-contained attributes and the extreme longevity (1000 years+) and durability of

piqlFilm enables data access in the future with guaranteed data authenticity and integrity.