Oluniyi D. Ajao » Nigeria

GOtv Africa. A new digital pay TV service.

Oluniyi D. Ajao — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 06:56:14 +0000

I noticed multitudes of GOtv Africa banners and balloons in the ancient city of Ibadan Nigeria in the last quarter of 2011. The similarity with the name/logo of DStv was clear. Promotional drives were ongoing at different vantage points in Ibadan.

GOtv is a new digital terrestrial TV (DTT) service by Multichoice Africa, operators of DStv. Instead of broadcasting via satellite, GOtv broadcasts from TV masts, sending encrypted digital signals to proprietary GOtv decoders. The signal is then decoded and sent to the television set.

From their sales website:

GOtv, Nigeria’s newest pay TV service was launched in Ibadan on 15 October 2011. Using the latest DVB-T2 technology, this brand new digital service is dedicated to offering television lovers affordable family entertainment. Featuring 2 great bouquets, consisting of 29 and 25 channels respectively, GOtv is an exciting service delivering great television at a price everyone can afford.

GOtv Africa is promising to offer:

Excellent picture quality
Sharper sound
Electronic Programme Guide (EPG) that displays what’s on TV at the touch of a button

The above features are all started with DTT technology. The wide variety of channels offered are all extracted from their DStv service. None of the channels are exclusive to GOtv.

In Nigeria the monthly subscriptions for GOtv is 1,000 Naira and for GOtv Plus is 1,800 Naira. Launch price for GOtv (including decoder and 3 months GOtv subscription) is N9,000 and for GOtv Plus is N12,000.

A screenshot of GOtv Africa

Digitization of terrestrial television broadcasts is on-going in many countries globally at this time. Whilst DTT frees-up valuable frequencies for other uses like wireless broadband connectivity, it offers better picture and sound quality even with a minimal signal strength. The Nigerian broadcast industry regulator is the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC). NBC’s website reveals that the government of Nigeria started the digitization process in December 2007 with a target date of 17th June 2012. Aside satellite and cable (MMDS), most TV broadcast in Nigeria today is still analogue. Before now, Startimes TV had been the only widely available DTT service.

The GOtv pay service is already available in 3 other African countries: Kenya, Uganda and Zambia.

Fly540: the budget airline for African destinations?

Oluniyi D. Ajao — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 05:25:40 +0000

Too many people in Africa happen to fall within the low-income bracket. Thus, one would expect budget airlines to be commonplace on this continent, catering for the masses. This is not so. Budget airlines are rather common in high-income countries of Western Europe, North America, India and many Asian countries.

The relatively few airlines that ply major African cities do so at rather exorbitant fares. As of 21 Nov 2011 7:30am GMT:

a return flight (19 to 26 Dec 2011) from Accra (Ghana) to Abidjan (Cote d’Ivoire) costs $538 on Emirates or $567 on ASky Airline (an Ethiopian Airline subsidiary). The distance is only 259 miles and the flight duration only 1 hour.

Compare this to a return flight on the same dates from London Stansted Airport (UK) to Dublin (Ireland) for a fare of only $78 on Ryanair (a budget airline) or $173 on Aer Lingus. The duration of this flight is 1hr 10 mins.

The very low fare offered by the Irish budget airline, RyanAir, demonstrates how low air fare can go when the market conditions are right.

A low-cost carrier or low-cost airline (also known as a no-frills, discount or budget carrier or airline) is an airline that offers generally low fares in exchange for eliminating many traditional passenger services. (Wikipedia). There are very few of them in Africa with most catering for domestic destinations within their respective national boundaries only. They are:

Egypt: Air Arabia Egypt
Kenya: Fly540
Nigeria: Aero Contractors
Morocco: Jet4You, Air Arabia Maroc
South Africa: Kulula, 1Time, Mango, Velvet Sky
Tunisia: Karthago Airlines

A change in the status quo?
Fly540 seems ready to position itself as a pan-African budget airline. As of now, Fly540 already flies to about 20 destinations in these East African countries: Burundi, Kenya, South Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda.

In 2008, the airline opened-up its pan-African ambitions in a report by Ugandan newspaper, The Monitor:

“…we will open up Kigali and then head to West Africa. Ghana will be the hub for West African region. In Southern Africa, we shall use Angola as our hub, so it will become a pan African low cost airline”.

I didn’t give much weight to their lofty dream until I saw a Fly540-branded jet take-off on the runway of Kotoka International Airport in Accra Ghana on 18th November 2011. While Fly540 Ghana has not commenced revenue flights as of now, they plan to do so by the end of 2011 and have already taken delivery of aircraft, recruited staff and obtained the necessary licences.

Senegal and Equatorial Guinea are among the first destinationsto be serviced by Fly540 Ghana.

Fly540

Have smartphones become indispensable business tools?

Oluniyi D. Ajao — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 06:21:31 +0000

I have used smartphones (mostly Nokia) for a few years now but started using BlackBerry since July 2010 and have never been a day without a BlackBerry ever since – until now. The BlackBerry device became the central point of my daily communication routine. I could read, forward, reply personal and business emails quickly. I could follow the conversation streams on Facebook and Twitter apps when I was idle. I could take photos at events and post same to Twitpic without waiting till I got to my laptop. I could chat with friends far and near via BlackBerry Messenger or some of the other chat apps installed on the device. I used phone calls and SMS only where extremely necessary, thus saving costs. I could manage my blogs from the device: moderate comments, publish new blog posts, view traffic stats etc. I could grab trophies from FourSquare as I explore new places. I could find my way around using Google Maps. I even completed hotel bookings on the device, using BlackBerry Travel app. Granted, the BlackBerry smartphone could never replace the full experience of a laptop for me, but it made me much more efficient as I had a lesser workload to tackle when I sat behind my laptop.

A BlackBerry Curve 8900

You can thus understand how frustrating it has been in the past 10 days that I have been without the full benefits of my BlackBerry smartphone. Most personal emails remain unread, I’m struggling with a piling workload, over 150 comments are pending moderation on my personal blog alone, I’m out of touch with friends I normally chat with regularly. I’m unable to share the fun of: Cape Town, WordCamp, how I celebrated my birthday, and other escapades in South Africa. In a nutshell, life has not been so frustrating in recent days.

Yes. I have tried very hard to fix this problem. I’ve subscribed to BlackBerry Internet Service from two cellular operators: Vodacom SA and MTN SA. I’ve contacted MTN Nigeria where I last used the device successfully and they confirmed my device is not tied to their network, I’ve called MTN and Vodacom customer service over 16 times, I’ve visited MTN offices in Cape Town and Jo’burg 3 times, I’ve wiped the device and re-installed the operating system in case any of the installed apps is causing the problem. MTN is suggesting the device is the problem, I’ve entered the settings they gave me and diligently followed all their suggestions. All to no avail. Now I am in touch with RIM, manufacturers of BlackBerry smartphones.

This little experience I am still going through has emphasized how much many of us have come to rely on smartphones, for running our personal and business lives. It is quite normal fiddle with the smartphone before falling asleep and it is the first thing we grab before brushing our teeth in the morning or saying those morning prayers. Ah, I use the Bible app on my smartphone more than my bulky physical Bible.

Business life is much easier with a BlackBerry but when things go wrong, life can be hectic. Very hectic.

Have you been separated from the joy of using your smartphone for a long period? Share the experience in the comment area.

Petition: Cybercrime Legislation for Nigeria

Oluniyi D. Ajao — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 16:15:18 +0000

I wanted to draw your attention to this important petition that I recently signed: “Cybercrime Legislation for Nigeria” http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/cln/

I really think this is an important cause, and I’d like to encourage you to add your signature, too. It’s free and takes just a few seconds of your time.

Challenges of Shopping Online in Nigeria

Oluniyi D. Ajao — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 11:15:57 +0000

I got the following message from a reader of this blog:

Good day Mr. Ajao.
I am a post graduate student at the university of Northampton, United kingdom, studying MA International Marketing Strategy. I am really proud as I see a Nigerian like you writing good articles on current issues on the internet. I have read about 4 of your articles and I must that I am very impressed. You are making us proud here in the United Kingdom.

After reading one of your articles I had the urge to write on how internet can be improved in the Nigerian economy. I have now decided to write on the challenges of online shopping in Nigeria. My objective is to propose ways in which most of our Nigerian companies and major retailers can engage in online shopping. As you rightly said in one of your articles online shopping has a lot of opportunities in Nigeria which can be carried out at minimal cost.

Sir, please can you take part in my topic “challenges of online shopping in Nigeria”.

I will be very grateful to hear from you.

To address this issue, I would list some of the challenges to e-commerce in Nigeria.

A. Lack of Trust

Trust is a very rare commodity, especially in Nigeria. There are multitudes of stories about scams and betrayals. Since trust is in short supply, many find it impossible to sit behind a computer to buy online by sending money to a strange company or person.

E-commerce has not reached its full potential in Nigeria. Photo by BTO Educational.

B. Credibility

This is still a human reason but is different from Trust because this reason hinges on the merchant.

How credible is the Nigerian e-commerce merchant? This is a hard question to tackle. While there are multitudes of genuine Nigerian merchants online today, some are reckless with customer service whilst others are deliberately out to fleece Nigerians, and have no intention of shipping the good nor delivering the service.

Poor customer service scenario:
A good friend of mine in Nigeria bought a textbook over the internet from a leading online book store. The textbook was delivered on schedule to her office via courier in a very attractive package that impressed me. With this experience, she ordered another textbook from the same store another time. The second time, the book was not delivered on schedule. Days turned into weeks and weeks into months. By the time the book was eventually delivered, she had lost faith in Nigerian e-commerce.
Scam scenario:
Some online stores appear with no intentions of shipping anything. The scam is to disappear after getting paid. There are too many complex examples of this.

C. Shipping/Delivery

NIPOST (postal) system is not as efficient as it can be, and courier services are not cheap. Would you buy a DVD online for N2,500 and have it shipped to you in Kaduna for N5,000? Unless it’s a “How to make Millions of Naira from oil ~~bunkering~~ business” DVD, I am not sure many would be eager to spend that much on courier delivery. Thus, there is a question mark on timely delivery to every nook-and-cranny of Nigeria.

D. Online Payment

The Nigerian online payment systems that exist are not effective, for varying reasons. Examples:

Interswitch: their financial & technical requirements are too steep for most Nigerian sole entrepreneurs and small businesses. Despite forming the bulk of Nigerian online enterprises, this market segment steers clear of the ‘almighty’ Interswitch.
Etranzact: the grandfather of online payments in Nigeria – launched in 2003 – is still alive and kicking. The company is not exploring its full potential successfully, thus making it unattractive to most Nigerian e-commerce merchants.
ValuCard Nigeria: despite being Visa International’s official acquirer in Nigeria, they are hardly visible in the e-commerce payment processing arena. They seem solely focused on being the power behind all Visa cards and Point Of Sale terminals issued by Nigerian banks.
There are a multitudes of smaller payment systems like CashEnvoy, dudupay, NetNaira, SurePay etc. Each of them is trying to fill the void, by catering specially to small business owners and entrepreneurs. Sadly, none of them seem to have the muscle to massively impact a big market like Nigeria. They have not gained widespread usage – yet.

One might then wonder, why are the merchants not using international payment processors?

Well, Nigeria-based merchants are not welcome on Paypal (the global leader in online payment) and most international credit card processors do not do business with anything that contains the word “Nigeria”.

In summary, e-commerce despite its huge potential in Nigeria, seems stuck in the crawling phase.

A spotlight on the Esoko platform and apps

Oluniyi D. Ajao — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 03:15:44 +0000

This is the 3rd and final part in a series of posts related to Esoko.

Esoko: The Platform

Esoko is an agricultural market information platform. It takes advantage of the explosive growth of mobile communication services in Africa. Managed on the web and delivered via mobile, individuals, agri-business, government and projects use Esoko to collect and send out market data using simple text messaging. The Esoko platform provides automatic and personalized price alerts, buy and sell offers, bulk SMS messaging, stock counts and SMS polling.

API team with partners from Nigeria & Sudan

The platform is currently available in 4 languages: English, French, Portuguese and Arabic.

Some of the apps, that serve as nodes of the Esoko platform, are explained below, as featured during the recent Esoko Tech Showcase:

1. Scout

This is a polling app that sends poll messages and returns specific answers from respondents. It runs via the ubiquitous SMS and also offers reports based on the polls. The app is based on SMS since most of the respondents would be farmers, or rural users. SMS is easier to handle for this demography. Esoko is working on an Android version that will take some concepts from the web app. The new version would also take advantage of GPS technology.

Explaining Networks & Contacts to partners from Ghana & Madagascar

2. Bulk Uploads via Excel

Considering Esoko is a service-oriented platform with a web interfacing for collecting data, it makes sense to have a means of uploading data in bulk. The Bulk Uploads via Excel feature is a recent improvement on Esoko’s web interface that enables users to upload bulk data stored in an Excel spreadsheet. This was developed based on feedback from Esoko users who had hitherto had to enter data manually in a time-consuming process.

3. Esoko Helpline

This is an interactive voice response system – an automated system for users to gather information from computerized recordings. The template for this system is flexible and can be applied to varying businesses within the confines of what’s reasonable. While the system is currently available in English and Twi for Ghana, work is in progress to introduce Hausa and other languages. Human agents would be available on the IVR during business hours but the IVR itself is available 24 hours everyday. The system is not released to the public yet and is expected to come with memorable and/or toll-free phone numbers.

Infinity TV goes premium

Oluniyi D. Ajao — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 22:02:43 +0000

Infinity TV Nigeria

Infinity TV, a direct-to-home satellite TV service on Astra 2B has gone premium. Most of the channels they offer which have hitherto been free since early 2010 are now encrypted.

Meet WACS, the latest submarine cable into Africa

Oluniyi D. Ajao — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 06:57:56 +0000

In case you missed the memo, Africa is rising. Having been largely ignored in the development of the Internet, things have been changing rapidly in the past decade with telecommunication companies forming alliances with financial institutions to bring serious data connectivity into Africa, and with it, lots of potential for prosperity. You can thus understand my excitement each time a new submarine cable is announced.

WACS logo

West Africa Cable System (WACS) is the latest and biggest submarine cable to connect Africa to the world, and the world to Africa, through the Internet. The cable has been laid from United Kingdom to South Africa, branching at several African countries along the way. Though the end of the cable landed in South Africa in April 2011, it is expected to be operational in the 3rd quarter of 2011 with full commercial service expected in the second quarter of 2012.

Being constructed by Alcatel-Lucent, the cable is 14,000 km in length, linking from Yzerfontein in South Africa to London in the United Kingdom. It has 15 terminal stations along the western coast of Africa. The total cost for the cable system is $600 million. MTN Group has invested $90 million in the cable making it the largest investor, and in return will receive 11% of the initial capacity of the cable. MTN Group is a South Africa-based multinational mobile telecommunications company, operating in 24 African and Middle Eastern countries.

The cable is expected to land in the following countries (countries with MTN presence are marked *):

South Africa*
Namibia
Angola
Democratic Republic of Congo
Republic of Congo*
Cameroon*
Nigeria*
Togo
Ghana*
Côte d’Ivoire*
Cape Verde
Canary Islands
Portugal
United Kingdom

Though within reach of other pan-African submarine cables, Namibia, the DRC, the Republic of Congo and Togo would gain access to their first direct connections to the global submarine cable network, via WACS.

WACS was initially designed with a capacity of 3.84 Tbit/s but this was later upgraded to 5.12 Tbit/s, making it the submarine cable with the biggest capacity into Africa at the time it goes live. WACS is also significant because it branches at Portugal before terminating in the UK. Glo-1 (the most connected of them) branches into Spain and Portugal before terminating in the UK. SAT3 terminates in Spain and Portugal while MainOne terminates in Portugal. For comparative analysis, I have listed some other African submarine cables and their respective capacities:

EASSy: 4.72 Tb/s
GLO-1: 2.5 Tb/s
MainOne: 1.92 Tb/s
Seacom: 1.28 Tb/s
TEAMs: 1.28 Tb/s
SAT3: 120 Gb/s

*ACE is expected in 2012, with an installed 5.12 Tb/s capacity.

Active and planned African submarine cables as of May 2011

The WACS consortium members and landing parties are:

Neotel: South Africa’s second fixed line operator
Telkom SA: South Africa’s incumbent fixed line operator
MTN Group: a South African based regional mobile operator
Vodacom: a South African based regional mobile operator
Gateway Communications: a leading pan-African wholesale connectivity and telecommunications provider
Broadband Infraco: a South African state-owned telecom infrastructure company
Angola Telecom: leading Angolan telecom operator
Cable & Wireless (London UK point-of-presence)
Telecom Namibia: leading Namibian telecom operator
Portugal Telecom: leading Portugese telecom operator
Sotelco: telecom operator in Congo Brazzaville
Tata Communications: owns majority stake in Neotel and is also a landing party for WACS in Portugal and the UK.
Togo Telecom: leading Togolese telecom operator

MTN Group seems to be the most excited since WACS would enable it connect some of its operations in West and Central Africa directly to the world. Before now, MTN has been leasing data capacity on the other cables.

Though prices of broadband to end users in West Africa have not been falling as radically as one would have expected, there is hope that the launch of WACS would affect the market forces: consumers would have access to bigger internet bandwidth at much lower prices than are currently obtainable.

Tayo Aderinokun, MD of GTBank, passes away

Oluniyi D. Ajao — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 19:09:19 +0000

GTBank's Tayo Aderinokun

GTBank announced the passing of their former Managing Director a few minutes ago, via Facebook and Twitter:

We regret to announce the passing on of our CEO, Tayo Aderinokun, today, aged 56. As MD, Mr. Aderinokun led the Bank to the top of the banking industry and the Bank became the 1st sub-saharan bank to be listed on the London Stock Exchange. He will be dearly missed…

Under his watch, GTBank consolidated its leadership in Nigeria’s banking sector and maximized the use of social media to engage its customers. GTBank is one of the most active brands in social media today especially on Facebook, Twitter & YouTube.

Mr Tayo Aderinokun answered questions from the public in a video published on Youtube in January 2011. You may watch it below:

We are proud to welcome you ALL to the Inaugural GTBank Webcast with Tayo Aderinokun, MD GTBank. Please look out for your names if you sent in Questions 15 MINUTES is a Service Initiative from GTBank.

From his personal website tayoaderinokun.com:

[...] In 1990 he co-founded Guaranty Trust Bank Plc where he served as Deputy Managing Director before taking over in his current position as Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer in August 2002. He is responsible for strategic policy direction as well as day-to-day administration of the Bank.

He is a fellow of the Chartered Institute of Bankers (CIBN) and holds a recipient of the national award – Member of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

Twitter is currently abuzz with tributes to Mr Aderinokun. A few of them are published below:

@Akin_dee:

My sincere condolences to the Aderinokun Family. Never met TayoAderinokun but GTB is truly a world class bank. He was a world class leader.

@DemiladeR:

He didn’t even live long enough to enjoy his money and early retirement Tragic! R.I.P Tayo Aderinokun :’(

@MuhammedOjeifo:

A Seasoned Professional Colleague passes on….RIP TayoAderinokun ….U made ur mark…U will be missed…

May his gentle soul rest in peace.

ICTWorks Interview: Oluniyi on ICT4Dev, E-Commerce, Mobile Phones, Web Hosting in Africa

Oluniyi D. Ajao — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 14:37:39 +0000

I granted the following video interview to ICTWorks.org in January 2011, and spoke about ICT for development, mobile communications, e-commerce, web hosting in Africa. Enjoy.