As far corporate dreams go, Titus Naikuni’s is a grand one. The group managing director and chief executive officer of Kenya Airways (KQ) wants to become the British Airways of Africa by doubling its fleet and destinations in the next five years.
“We want to expand our fleet from 33 to 68 in the next five years, then to 170 in the next 10 years,” he says. “And our destinations from the current 55 to slightly over 100.”
The airline flies to 45 countries in Africa, and if you throw in South Sudan, Kenya Airways has nine countries to go before its deadline of 2013. From those 45 destinations the airline rakes in 60% of business from the continent, carrying more than 1.8 million passengers a year. “We still have a lot to do in terms of frequencies. We have more than one frequency only in East Africa and South Africa. I want to be in a position where every city has more frequencies. Right now you can fly from here to Jo’burg in the morning and come back in the evening. See what that has done to business.”
In Naikuni’s top drawer lies an A4 printout of an economic analysis of Africa by The Economist and the International Monetary Fund, titled African Opportunity.
According to its figures, the continent is among the fastest growing economies in the world. In the 2001-2010 decade, six African countries—led overall by Angola at 11.1%, then Nigeria, Ethiopia, Chad, Mozambique and Rwanda in that order—were among the world’s 10 fastest growing economies alongside China, Myanmar, Kazakhstan and Cambodia.
But what has caught the eye of managers at KQ headquarters lately is the 2011-2015 projections of global economic growth. While it puts China number one overall, with 9.5% average annual growth during the period, it lists seven countries from Africa among the top 10, led by Ethiopia at 8.1%, followed by Mozambique, Tanzania, Congo, Ghana, Zambia and Nigeria.
“That tells you where the money is,” says the Harvard Business School graduate and qualified mechanical engineer from the University of Nairobi.
“Africa has the biggest potential for business in the world. African routes are profitable, if you don’t look at a route on its own but the network created. You could lose money on one route but feed into others to make up for it.”
It has not been all rosy for Kenya Airways, though.
There have been bad moves, like flying to Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, where government restrictions led to the airline closing.
For close to four years, airlines have been on tenterhooks after demand fell during the financial crisis. The latest forecasts are not a pretty sight.
While the International Air Transport Association (IATA) upgraded its net profit forecast for the global airline industry in September from $4 billion to $6.9 billion in full-year 2011, it still projects a lower net profit of $4.9 billion for 2012 due to sluggish growth and weak profits.
Yet with the rise of Africa’s economic power, airlines are often times dealing with the opposite: moments when there are too many travelers for a few planes to soak up.
So, those who can afford it are increasing frequencies and routes to draw in excess travel demand when it happens.
“Amazingly, Africa is starting from a low base in economic growth. Many of the things that affect other major airlines globally like SARS, the 9/11 recession, don’t affect Africa. What tends to be common is fuel,” says Naikuni.
Kenya Airways, listed on the Nairobi Securities Exchange in 1996, has managed to survive fuel cost volatility which it hedges by taking long-term fuel contracts at a fixed price. “Three years ago, we didn’t get it right. We hedged top end, at a higher price, and when it came down it was so much, we really suffered. Now we hedge top and bottom but you can’t hedge everything,” he told FORBES AFRICA.
Naikuni joined KQ in February 2003 from a mining company, and talks of competition with the spirit of a Moran, the name given to the ferocious warriors of his Maasai community.
“Competition will never kill you, it is healthy,” he says.
Naikuni has arguably turned around Kenya Airways to be one of the most profitable airlines in Africa. It remains a top performer on the Nairobi Securities Exchange, where it listed in 1996 through an IPO.
Brought in from February 2003, after revenues started slowing down in 2000, Naikuni introduced what he called “shock therapy”. It included streamlining management and reducing waste—some managers were fired and new faces brought in.
“You must focus on people and lead them in the right direction. Give them hope and pay them well, though no one has been satisfied with money. I also give people space, but it doesn’t mean I won’t come down on you,” he says.
The same year that Naikuni took the helm, Kenya Airways bought a 49% stake in regional Tanzanian carrier Precision Air, to counter South African Airways’ 49% buy-in in Air Tanzania.
Later, he closed down Flamingo Airlines, which had been set up in 2000 to provide feeder services for domestic fleets. Now, he is reviving a similar model next year through Jambo Jet.
“Abandoning the domestic circuit was a mistake. We let our rivals dominate but we are regaining the market,” he says.
The other strategic move was to pull out of Kencargo, the cargo firm jointly owned by KLM, to form KQ Cargo, which has proved profitable.
His tactic of offering lower prices on domestic routes, which has turned Kenya Airways into a virtual monopoly, is deeply unpopular at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, the region’s airline hub where rivals like JetLink, Fly540 and Air Kenya also operate.
Many view the move as tantamount to grounding its competitors, to which Naikuni replies: “If you go in the kitchen, be prepared to face the heat and if you are not, open the window and jump out.”
Then, there’s the issue of the Douala accident, in which a Kenya Airways Boeing 737-800 crashed in a swamp in Cameroon and killed all 114 people on board. As the African opportunity expansion unfolds, that incident remains etched  in Naikuni’s mind.
“We have recovered from it,” he says, but the impact is still evident in his tone.
It’s a sobering thought as Naikuni reaches for the skies.

Sky High— Where The Money Is

It takes a lot of passion and persistence to make a film in Africa. Very few succeed; many more fall by the wayside in a tough game.
Carolyn Carew, CEO and executive producer of Born Free Media (BFM), is one of the survivors with 25 hard years in the film business. It has been a lifelong love affair with film, which began when she was a child.
“We’d put up a little white sheet in the sitting room and watch movies on our 16mm projector. Around the World in 80 Days and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang were among my favorite movies. We also had a local cinema in Krugersdorp, where I grew up, called the Vordet, and we used to go there every Saturday—it was like an outing for all the girls and boys.”
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Carew’s path into working in movies was more difficult. She left the University of Cape Town with a post-graduate degree and worked for 10 months as a social worker. Through her sister, Carew snuck into the film industry in 1987, as a driver on a film called African Farm.
“I would also observe on set what the first and second assistant directors did; and from there I went and applied for other jobs. I then worked as an assistant director for a few years—and that’s basically how I got in,” she says.
Carew is now established, but life on set is far from easy.
“SA is one of those countries on the continent where you get the patriarchal attitude. I think sometimes people don’t really like to take advice or take direction from a woman—so that can be quite challenging. For me it wasn’t so much the gender issue that was challenging, but the amount of hours. When I look back on my 25-year career, I think I’ve worked an average of 14 to 15 hours a day, a good six to seven days a week. It’s been an incredible commitment that one has had to put into it. SA’s has got a competitive edge; we’ve got very good crews here, very good locations and we’ve got very good equipment. On average per year, we service at least 10 to 15 feature films—big ones; and about five or six co-productions,” she says.
Money remains the industry’s greatest problem.
“It would be the most amazing thing if we could get local individuals, people who have money and want to invest in cinema, to invest in the film industry. I think a lot of the time, the risks can outweigh the profits, so people don’t really want to invest in film. It’s quite a challenge,” says Carew.
Taking advantage of the Brazil, Russia, India, China (BRIC) relationship is another way to build and grow SA’s film industry, Carew says. South Africa already has a co-production treaty with India, but not with China and Brazil. “I think if we could find a way even within those four countries to exploit our content, we’d be able to achieve a lot because therein lies a huge industry.”
She reckons the markets where South African or African products could do better are Europe, some parts of Asia, India and Latin America.
Carew is at the legacy stage of her career.  She helped to found the Newtown Film School in Johannesburg in 1992, and has won several awards. Her most memorable achievement was in 2007, when BFM won Best Director for the TV drama series, When We Were Black, at the South African Film and TV awards. Recently, BFM won the Amnesty International Award for Human Rights for a documentary called The Life and Times of Robert Sobukwe.
Despite the industry being so tough, Carew says she would encourage her son to follow in her footsteps.
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With three feature films in the pipeline, her life’s work is film, and with it, the hope that one day an Oscar for Africa will shine through the financial worries and long hours.
Many drift into making movies, including Carew, but for Kutlwano Ditsele, it was all he ever wanted to do.
“My mother says she stopped watching television with me when I was about nine years old because I was already spotting things that people wouldn’t normally see. By the time I was 11, I had more VHS tapes than I had toys; I even started building towers with my tapes, that’s how many I had,” he says.
It was also tough getting his mother to support his choice of career.
“My mom knew how difficult the industry was, so she didn’t want me to pin all my hopes on film knowing that a lot of people don’t make it; she wanted me to have security,” Ditsele says.
First he went to study public relations at Varsity College, and media at Boston Media House. But because his heart wasn’t in it, it wasn’t long before he applied to the New York Film Academy in Los Angeles to follow his dream. Ditsele then worked at a Johannesburg production company before co-founding Ripple Films in December 2010. He believes it can tell the great untold African stories.
“The first stories were told in Africa; we love telling and hearing stories. We no longer sit around fires and tell stories; the fires have now become the screens. I think we’ll be telling stories for a very long time to come in Africa; filmmakers will always have jobs. The main thing is finding a way to get the original stories out there.”
But this is proving to be difficult. For many people, African stories live in soap operas, where the viewership figures are high.
“The key is to get those people who are sitting and watching soap operas to sit in the cinema. South Africa doesn’t have a cinema-going culture and due to our small industry, our institutions don’t have the liberty to take as much risk as Hollywood.”
Ditsele says the African film industry needs to take more risks, but all too often creative freedom is choked by cautious investors.
“Our biggest problem here is we have too many people telling us what the audiences want and what we should do. They say, ‘This guy made a movie like this and it did well; you should make a movie like that guy too.’ No variety will come out of that and audiences will end up watching the same thing over and over again.”
“I still have the opportunity to live and make films in Los Angeles, but I choose to stay here because of the promise and the talent that the South African industry has. I think we have what it takes to get to the Nolly, Bolly or Hollywood level. Sticking to our guns, knowing exactly what we want to do and not giving up is what will get us there. You also need to find mentors – and don’t be arrogant; take notes.”
Ditsele believes it is also all about distribution.
“You can make the next City of God or Avatar, but if you don’t have distribution, it means nothing. Our own distributers don’t play our films enough because of quality control. But as it is, we don’t have enough films, and the two or so films that we do make are screened for a week and then taken off because X-Men is coming out,” he says.
For Ditsele the challenge is to make an African film that is better than X-Men.

Film In Africa? Be Ready To Strive And Suffer

This is the story of businessman Ronnie Apteker, his money and his expensive passion. A man sharp enough to get in early on the internet boom in Africa’s biggest economy; a man wise enough to have sold out before the market became crowded, three years later, for $55 million. He doesn’t know how much he is worth, but does admit he never has to work again.
This is also a man who has lost nearly $7 million in 11 years, chasing the elusive dream of fathering a blockbuster movie.
“I would be far wealthier if I had done nothing for the last 11 years, but my life has been richer for the risks I have taken… I love story telling. I love magic and I love trying to inspire people,” he says.
This month will see the release of a film he thinks is a winner that will compensate for the years of pain and losses. It is a low-budget film called Material, set in the gritty inner-city district of Fordsburg in Johannesburg and starring South African stand-up comedian Riaad Moosa. He says it could be a cheap and cheerful international hit like Bend it Like Beckham or Billy Elliot.
It all started in the early 1970s in Cape Town, when Apteker’s father won a 16mm film projector in a game of backgammon. From then on, Sunday night was film night at the Aptekers.
“The whole neighbourhood in Cape Town used to come in and see them. You remember those leather cases with the handles. In our rented house we used to watch Dirty Harry, The Dirty Dozen, The Guns of Navarone, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. I grew up in a movie-watching home. I watched more movies by the time I was 13 than most people watch by the time they are 30,” he says.
Apteker’s working life took a different turn. It was the internet, not movies, that became his bread and butter. In 1993, he founded Internet Solutions in the days when 99.9% of South Africans didn’t know even what it was.
“People used to phone us and say the internet is broken, or they used to ask who they can email. I used to give them my email address and they used to email me because they had no one else to email!” he laughs.
The internet made Apteker a fortune before he was 30. Then he tried a much harsher business—movies.
“If you build a cheap house, you can sell it for half price and get some money back. If you make a bad movie, you may not sell one ticket and lose everything. You can even end up owing money. It is not a normal business, it’s like a casino.”
Apteker started writing scripts in 1996 and the first film came in 2000—a 95-minute movie shot in Los Angeles called Purpose, the tale of the battle for the soul of a young entrepreneur working in California’s Silicon Valley.
“A lot of people said it reminded them of The Social Network, but sadly, it wasn’t as good,” says Apteker.
The film didn’t do well. It cost $8 million and Apteker was lucky enough to claw back $3 million by selling it to distributors Lakeshore International.
A string of homegrown movies with limited success followed, including: Jerusalema, The Flyer and Crazy Monkey: Straight Outta Benoni.
Fast forward to the latest offering, Material, starring South African comic flavor-of-the-month, Moosa. In many ways, the film mirrors his own life. In a nutshell, Material is the story of a father who wants his son to stick to his day job—that is, running the family store—instead of telling jokes on stage.
In real life, Moosa also gave his day job the slip. He trained as a doctor at the University of Cape Town and carried out his internship at Natalspruit Hospital, near Johannesburg, before settling down to practise as a GP in Cape Town for a couple of years.
The draw of the stage proved too strong and in the evenings, Moosa was cracking around the small theatres of the Western Cape. He had no illusions and already knew what it felt like to “die”—as the actors say—on stage.
“It used to happen a lot when I was younger. The most difficult time was when I was doing magic in high school. It was comedy magic. I had studied at the College of Magic in Cape Town. I was supposed to make a ball fly across the stage—there was a wire involved. There was a dude taking photos with flash and every time the flash went off, you could see the washing line across the stage. I was trying to make it dramatic and it was obvious. I heard one little girl say: ‘There is a wire there, mum!’ At that moment, I thought ‘I had another eight minutes to go of this sham.”
Material is Moosa’s first foray into film and he identifies with his character. “I am really proud of it. I think when people watch, they will laugh and cry. They will be challenged.”
So what happens if Moosa makes it to Hollywood and the big time? He pledges not to let success go to his head.
“What is this fame thing? One minute you are normal, the next minute you are shaving your head on the cover of Heat magazine. One minute you are normal, the next you are getting an 18-year-old pregnant. I prefer driving home at night and getting shouted at by my wife… I shouldn’t let it go to my head; I think through medicine you face reality head on.”
Apteker believes any success would be a good thing and refuses to give up his movie quest, whatever the cost.
“It is an obsession. I have got to get this right. It is like you either get this right or die trying. There is no middle ground in love, there is no middle ground in art. There is no middle ground when you are an entrepreneur—you either win or go home in a coffin,”  he says.
<h3>Well, Is It Any Good?</h3>
There is mistrust when it comes to homegrown cinema. Everyone has waited long for the great African movie—maybe, just maybe, Material is it. So says Rea Bantseke, who went to the preview screening in Sandton, near Johannesburg.
The story is simple. A young Muslim man wants to become a stand-up comedian, but has to do it behind his family’s back because it clashes with their culture. The movie examines clearly the struggle of a Muslim family to uphold its traditions in 21st century South Africa.
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I was looking for the mistakes and the glitches, but there was nothing. The movie is shot beautifully and it makes you feel like you are part of the family. The story flows and is well told.
Everyone will have something that they can identify with in this movie. It will make you laugh, it will make you question, it will bring a tear to your eye.
This unique movie is hard to classify as a genre because it fuses drama, romance and comedy. It is likely to appeal to all ages. Material will leave you with hope that if this story can see the light of day, there must be many more.
&nbsp;

Who Would Spend  $7 Million On A Dream?

One morning in mid-August, seven months into the Arab Spring protests and government crackdowns in which thousands have been killed, something strange happened on Syria’s Internet. As users aimed their Web browsers at Google and Facebook, they instead saw a page of white Arabic script scrawled across a black background.
“This is a deliberate, temporary Internet breakdown. Please read carefully and spread the following message,” it read. “Your Internet activity is monitored.”
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Then the page switched to a white screen filled with instructions on using free encryption and anonymity software like Tor and TrueCrypt to evade surveillance and censorship. Emblazoned above the text was a round, mysterious symbol: a star inside an omega, hovering over a pyramid surrounded by lightning bolts. Below it were written the words: “This is Telecomix. We come in peace.”
Telecomix, a loose-knit team of international hacktivists, had been scanning the Syrian Internet in a massive sweep, dividing 700,000 target connections among its members in Germany, France and the U.S., probing for hackable devices with software tools like Nmap and Shodan. They compromised vulnerable Cisco Systemsproduced network switches to find other devices’ passwords, snooped on open cameras revealing street scenes and even officials’ desks, and at one point retrieved the log-in credentials for 5,000 unsecured home routers, which they used to insert the above-mentioned surveillance warning into browsers across the country.
As the globally distributed hackers combed Syria’s networks and posted their findings in a crowd-sourced document, one American member of the group, who uses the handle Punkbob, spotted a Windows FTP server filled with data he recognized: logs from a Proxy SG 9000 appliance built by the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company Blue Coat Systems. In Punkbob’s day job at a Pentagon contractor, he says, the same equipment had been used to intercept traffic to filter and track staff behavior. The Syrian machine’s logs showed the Internet activity of thousands of users, connecting the sites they attempted to visit and every word of their communications with the IP addresses that pointed directly to their homes. In short, he had discovered American technology being used to help a brutal dictatorship spy on its citizens.
“At first we were just poking around, but when I saw that, I had this feeling of dread,” says Punkbob, who requested that FORBES not use his real name. “To see exactly what Syria was tracking and who was providing the technology to do it.…That was when it felt real.”
Since Telecomix published 54 gigabytes of those logs, the resulting attention has forced Blue Coat to admit that its gear had been used by Syria, a potential violation of international sanctions against that country. The company didn’t respond to FORBES’ request for an interview, citing an ongoing internal review and a related Commerce Department probe. (Note that the investigation didn’t deter private equity firm Thoma Bravo and the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan from a recent deal to take Blue Coat private for $1.3 billion.)
The disclosure of Blue Coat’s gear in Syria has touched off revelations that hardware from other U.S. firms, including NetApp and HP, was also used by blacklisted regimes. The industry now faces tough new questions about tech firms’ responsibility for how their products are used—and by whom.
Telecomix sees its Blue Coat discovery as a turning point in the group’s mission: Founded to fight for free speech, it now aims to also expose those who fight against that ideal, including any Western tech firm aiding the wrong side. “I hope that the Blue Coat thing was the start of something much bigger,” says Chris Kullenberg, a lean and lip-pierced Swedish political science grad student at the University of Gothenburg and a Telecomix founder. “The goal is to put political pressure on these companies. It started with rage and frustration. What can we do? Well, we can hack a few boxes and expose this to the world. That’s the motivation that drives hackers deeper and deeper into the networks.”
Telecomix likely broke Syrian law. But some more traditional advocates appreciate their work. “It crosses a line we wouldn’t be comfortable crossing,” says Brett Solomon, president of the digital human rights group Access Now.
“But sometimes it takes someone like Telecomix to put a spanner in the works.”
Actively hacking networks is a new game for Telecomix’s Web revolutionaries, who call each other “agents” or “Internauts.” But unlike the hacker group Anonymous, which began with juvenile pranks before attacking Scientologists, opponents of WikiLeaks and defense contractors, Telecomix was born political. The group was created at a Gothenburg conference in 2009 to oppose the European Union’s so-called Telecoms Package, industry-influenced laws that would have cut Internet access for anyone repeatedly downloading copyrighted files. “In a sense, corporations have always been the enemy,” says Kullenberg.
The hackers dug up and published the phone numbers of every EU Parliament member, then convinced the copyright-flouting Swedish download site the Pirate Bay to post a link on its home page, which received 20 million monthly visitors. The Parliament’s phones were jammed for days, and the statute was eventually dropped.
The populist uprisings of the Arab Spring brought Telecomix’s goals—and its enemies—into sharper focus. A few days into the Jan. 25 protests in Egypt Hosni Mubarak shut down all but one of his country’s Internet service providers. “Telecomix members consider themselves citizens of the Internet,” says one American Telecomix hacker who goes by the nickname the Doctor. “So we took that as a personal affront.” Agents arranged with the hacker-friendly Internet provider French Data Network to fire up modem banks and give users free dial-up connections. Then the group faxed thousands of leaflets to Egyptian universities, offices and cybercafes, explaining how to skirt the blackout.
Telecomix’s scanning of the Syrian Net began as reconnaissance to prepare for an Egypt-style Internet shutdown. Stumbling onto the Blue Coat logs was a fateful fluke. When the hackers realized what they’d found, they downloaded close to 100 gigabytes of data, using the Tor anonymization network to cover their tracks. The process took weeks. In October Telecomix released hundreds of millions of lines of text listing hundreds of sites the Syrian government was blocking, from porn to Facebook to Chat- roulette, along with enough users’ communication logs to show that the regime was using their Blue Coat gear to not only filter but also monitor dissidents’ activities.
Blue Coat’s scandal demonstrates the complexity of regulating surveillance technology. The firm claims it hadn’t known about its devices in Syria, arguing they must have found their way into the country through a reseller in the United Arab Emirates. “Blue Coat is mindful of the violence in Syria and is saddened by the human suffering and loss of human life that may be the result of actions by a repressive regime,” it wrote in a statement. “We don’t want our products to be used by the government of Syria or any other country embargoed by the United States.” But critics like cryptography guru Bruce Schneier and Tor developer Jacob Appelbaum point out that Blue Coat devices link back to its servers for licensing and updates, implying the company may have turned a blind eye to its Syrian users.
Some Telecomix agents say they’ve also spotted equipment sold by Fortinet in Syria. Fortinet responds that it “has in place a policy prohibiting shipping its product to countries where shipment is embargoed.” And what about resellers who pass it on to those countries? “At that point it’s out of our hands,” a spokesperson says. Hazy as the line may be, it’s clear some companies have crossed it. Marketing documents published by Wiki Leaks show 160 firms advertising surveillance gear, often in Arabic as well as English. British firm Gamma International brags that it can spy on users of Gmail, Skype and iTunes; its sales pitch was found in the files of the Egyptian government after Mubarak fled.
Telecomix is determined to remain a watchdog against Western firms aiding foreign Big Brothers. Two Swedish members, Chris Kullenberg and Jonatan Walck, have registered a site called Internaut.cat where they plan to publish future disclosures of the group’s findings, using Sweden’s strong media laws to shield their sources. “We’re at a point now where Internet users are becoming aware of what’s being done to them,” says the Doctor. “Companies that sell gear designed to track people should expect to be outed.”

Web Vigilantes

There are few entrepreneurs in Africa who can claim to have been imprisoned three times by Idi Amin for allegations of being a political threat. There are fewer still who can say they were forced into exile in Europe and imprisoned by the Uganda National Liberation Army for four-and-a-half months. This is the story of Gordon Wavamunno, Ugandan entrepreneur—a man who didn’t go to high school but who holds three honorary doctorates and is worth millions.
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“It has not been easy, but one has to eat and one has to persist,” he says.
Building a successful business in Uganda is hard enough without the complication of political instability and persecution.  Wavamunno, founder and chairman of the Spear Group of Companies, knows this all too well. The Ugandan businessman has built a $30-million empire despite his country’s turmoil.
Wavamunno chose business over high school. He began training at his father’s trading business, moved up to become a cashier, and ventured into the produce-buying business in 1961. It was a prelude to breaking away from his father’s business.
This busy and self-proclaimed “shrewd businessman” spent a decade growing his transport fleet. When Ugandan president Idi Amin nationalized the only motor company in Uganda, Wavamunno saw an opportunity in the market and approached Daimler-Benz for a possible franchise. It was the beginning of a 34-year-old business relationship that has survived political upheaval. Daimler’s decision to enter Uganda during the violent rule of President Amin was surprising, but it paid off.
“1971 to 1988 was a hard time,” says Wavamunno with typical understatement.
It was during this time that Wavamunno was thrown into cells and had to rebuild his business over and over again. Yet despite these crises, he has been
voted Businessman of the Year in a poll by a national newspaper for 10 years running.
He attributes his success to his will, support from banks, good managers and his principle of diversification. In his career he has ventured into transport, tourism, dry cleaning, hotels, television and radio, banking and property.
But how do you keep track of all your eggs in many baskets?
“I believe in what I’m doing. If there is an opportunity, then one should go after it. This is the key to success,” says Wavamunno.
He is also a man who demands much from his employees.
“You need to make sure that they are there to work for the company, not to throw it in the fire. The people who work for the company own it more than the shareholders do,” he says.
There were mistakes along the way. Wavamunno cites his worst business blunder as a $4 million foray into flower export. Heavy winds destroyed his first crops, sending him running back to the bank. There was also poor advice, leading to Wavamunno planting the wrong variety of flowers.
By the time the flowers were ready, the market had dropped. Since then, the farm has recovered and is looking to expand.
Wavamunno believes there is a lot of potential in Africa and feels that the continent can do better. He adds that a lot relies on the integrity of leaders to improve the living conditions of African people and improve skills.
“Uganda has recently discovered some oil; we have minerals, but we are still backward,” he says.
Looking forward, Wavamunno is working on a $60 million project with partners.
“Currently, our organization is involved in investing in three core countries, namely Kenya, Uganda and Southern Sudan.”
His message to young African entrepreneurs?
“First and foremost, young Africans need training and exposure; they have to accept that they cannot get rich within a day, month or year&#8230; most important is confidence in themselves and their countries. The future is bright for Uganda and East Africa as a whole.”
Wise words, from a wise old African.
Uganda In A Box
To say that Uganda has been through some rough seas would be putting it mildly. In 1966, Uganda was under the authoritarian rule of Milton Obote. In 1971, Idi Amin declared himself president. Amin was toppled in 1979, after eight years of political and economic collapse. It was during this time that he expelled Asians from the country. Obote won the 1980 elections but was replaced by General Okello in 1985, who was replaced by Yoweri Museveni in 1986. Uganda has since reached economic stability and operates under a ‘non-party’ political system with Museveni as head of state and of government.

Out Of Adversity Comes Opportunity

Sitting down to white wine and a breath of fresh air during sunset at one of Luanda’s newest and finest seaside restaurants, Miles October, the managing director of Internet Technologies Angola (ITA), harks back to the dark days of 2003.
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That was the year he moved to Luanda with his friend, Rolf Mendelsohn—a Namibian who is now ITA’s technical director—to start a company from scratch amid the chaos of post-war Angola. Mendelsohn was just 20 years old.
“We knew there were lots of opportunities in Angola right after its civil war, but none of us had been to Angola before,” he says.
The biggest problem was they didn’t have any money.
Times were tough, Angola lay in ruins and business was difficult. The two friends, who were joined by another Namibian, Barney Harmse, almost gave up, but fate took a hand at the end of another frustrating week.
With a smile and a twinkle in his eye, October recalls their judgment day.
“Three months after our arrival in Angola, we were down to our last $100.
Rolf and I looked at each other that Friday night and said: ‘Are we going to party tonight, or try and prolong our stay for another week?’ We decided to go and party. That Monday, we got our first deal, with an NGO called Intersos… We got our next deal, and the next, and the next. It was mostly work in the NGO sector; setting up networks, fixing PCs and reselling other ISPs’ (internet service providers’) connectivity.”
Economic progress in post-war Luanda lumbered like an old Russian tank. It took a year for the company to employ someone and move to a bigger house.
“Behind it was one of the biggest and most dangerous favelas (slums) in Luanda,” says October.
“You won’t believe how many visitors got mugged at gunpoint at our doorstep. We also discovered years later that we had been providing electricity to the entire favela.”
The company employed more people and grew rapidly as word spread.
“From there on things just got crazy,” says October.
It was still tough. The partners couldn’t afford to pay themselves a salary for the first three years.
In these early crazy days there were also problems in the boardroom. ITA began as a partnership with an Angolan company, but it didn’t work out. The three founders then registered ITA as their own company in 2005. By that time they had a new German shareholder.
That year, the four men set up an ISP, MaxNet, a joint venture with two Angolan companies.
“That partnership didn’t work out either,” says October.
“So in 2008, we got out and started running the ISP business on our own. We now operate independently and provide Internet and data services to all our customers via wireless and satellite technology, 80% of whom are in Luanda and 20% in a few large provincial towns. We now have more than 60 staff.”
It was a tough nut to crack. The Internet is incredibly expensive in Angola. Clients wanting the same internet speed as in Europe can pay up to 200 times more. Despite the fact ITA’s services are more expensive than its many competitors it has won business with large clients including BPC Bank; BP Angola; Trafigura Group (Pumangol); GA Angola Seguros; Casa dos Frescos and Shoprite.
“Banks and oil companies require a 24/7 availability and superior quality of service. We have very, very skilled technicians, 90% of whom are Angolan.”
ITA’s annual turnover, in US dollars, is now in the seven figure range.
For October, it has been a meandering path to the helm of an IT company in Angola via dance floors and ball parks.
As a 19-year-old, back home in South Africa, October was scouted by professional American baseball club, Vero Beach Dodgers, and moved to the United States. He doubted he would make it to the major leagues and returned to South Africa after a year to study psychology and earn money as a DJ.
With his Bachelor’s degree in his pocket, he kept spinning the discs in dance clubs from Johannesburg to Germany to pay his way through more studies. By 2002, he had earned an IT degree and worked for an internet company before accepting a job with Worldcom.
“In 2002, Worldcom filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the USA. That’s when Rolf, Barney and I decided to quit our jobs and start our own company in Angola.”
It means every year October studies keenly the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business report. The 2011 report ranks Angola 163 out of 183 countries—another headache for fledgling companies like ITA.
“For us, the biggest obstacles have been the volatility of the kwanza-dollar exchange rate, major problems with paying our suppliers outside of the country due to the Central Bank’s increasing red tape, and also finding skilled labor… The last few years we’ve seen a clear increase in Angolan returnees, who have studied abroad, which makes finding skilled Angolan employees much easier. The Angolan education system has also improved significantly since the end of the war.”
In Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index 2011, Angola ranks among the world’s 15 most corrupt countries—168 out of 183.
“But I think the Angolan government is doing a lot to minimize corruption,” October says.
Roger Ballard-Tremeer, the former South African ambassador to Angola and now the CEO of the South African-Angolan Chamber of Commerce, agrees.
“Angolan society at large has, especially since 2010, reflected on the profound damage inflicted by the civil war on the social and moral values of the nation and has launched a quite remarkable pro-ethics movement aimed at rescuing the nation’s societal values from the abyss into which they had plunged. Today better and more transparent governance is a very obvious feature, not only of the way in which the public sector generally conducts its activities, but also, specifically, of the manner in which a new generation of Angolan businesspeople seek sustainability over short-term profitability. Sound business ethics are now taught very effectively at tertiary level,” he says.
October says then there was the global financial crisis. “It started filtering through to Angola in 2009. As a result, we no longer see the phenomenal growth of the first few years. A few clients called it quits and left Angola. But we are still a healthy and growing company, and I expect next year to be better.”
Well, if you’ve been down to your last 100 bucks and survived, surely there is always hope.

Crazy Days Of Cash And Chaos

<div id="attachment_326" style="width: 272px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-326" class="wp-image-326 size-medium" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Airtel-037-262x300.jpg" alt="" width="262" height="300" />Manoj Kohli</div>
Forget oil and gold, there is new treasure in Africa—mobile phone subscribers. By the end of 2011, Africa will have surpassed the half a billion mark in mobile phone subscribers and the number is rising. In 2008, there were 246 million and three years later, this number has nearly doubled.
Manoj Kohli is at the heart of this growing business as the CEO (international) and joint managing director of Bharti Airtel. It launched in November 2010, after acquiring Kuwait-based mobile telecommunications company Zain for $8.3billion. The company inherited operations in 15 countries, cementing its position as the world’s largest single country mobile operator.
As of March 31, 2011 the operator had 220 million customers around the world and $5.9 billion in revenue. At the time of this interview, Airtel had hit 50 million paying customers in Africa; its target is 100 million customers by 2013.
“The Bharti Airtel business is doing well and we are satisfied with our first year in Africa. We are making good progress on all fronts, in terms of financial performance, market growth, market share growth, cultural aspects, government relationships and brand equity. We are happy that the first year has gone very well,” says Kohli on the seventh floor of Parkside Towers, the Bharti Africa headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya.
Bharti, the number one player in India, landed in Africa knowing that it was going to have to fight it out with established players like Britain’s Vodafone, South Africa’s MTN, France Telecom (Orange) and Luxembourg’s Millicom.
“India has a population of 1.2 billion and Africa has about one billion. India is very diverse; Africa is more diverse not only because it is large geographically, but it also has different communities, different countries and therefore different governments and regulations—whereas India is one nation, with one language, one government, one currency, one time zone, and one cricket. Therefore, in that aspect India is less diverse than Africa. Both have scale in terms of population and opportunity, but because Africa is more diverse, it makes it more complex. India has 13 to 14 competitors, which is not viable for any market. Africa has anywhere between three to five major competitors but the quality of competition is good,” says Kohli.
The Airtel brand made its presence felt by slashing call rates, sparking a price war in major markets. In Kenya, for example, where Airtel is number two—with 3.6 million subscribers by June 2011—there was a major decline in average tariff for on-net calls from KSh3.92 ($0.04) per minute to KSh2.67 ($0.03) per minute, according to the industry quarterly statistics in May from the country’s industry regulator, the Communications Commission of Kenya. Bob Collymore, Safaricom’s CEO, was quoted as saying that the price cut was “morally reprehensible”. Safaricom is Vodafone’s brand in Kenya. As the new kid on the block, Airtel was not letting up and Safaricom followed suit.
As Kohli looks back at Bharti’s performance in the last year, he says the company has established its brand. This, Airtel has successfully done by associating itself with the youth and the two big passions in Africa—music and football. In 2010, the operator brought together American R&amp;B musician R Kelly and eight African music superstars—2Face, Amani, 4×4, Movaizhalene, JK, Alikiba, Fally Ipupa, and Navio.
In football, Airtel has partnered with Manchester United in launching the Airtel Rising Stars program for under-17 boys and girls in 15 African countries.
The second major milestone, says Kohli, has been replicating Bharti’s Indian business model in Africa.
“It is still a work in progress, but all the initiatives of bringing in our global strategic partners like IBM, Ericsson, Nokia and Huawei have kicked off, which is a huge transformation for Africa. For example, IT education, training and employment will go up because IBM has come along with us to various countries in Africa.”
Bharti has entered into a 10-year agreement with IBM where the latter will install and manage the operator’s information technology infrastructure and applications in line with its objective of ensuring affordable and innovative mobile services in Africa.
In the coming years, Bharti has several strategies. One is taking networks deep into Africa’s small towns and villages not currently covered by mobile networks. The second is a wide distribution.
As Africa opens up, thanks to fiber optic cables, Bharti is keen on enhancing the internet culture in Africa through 3G data. Already, the operator has 3G licences in 12 African countries. In November 2011, Airtel was awarded licences to operate 2G and 3G GSM services in Rwanda.
Although Bharti is betting on 2G and 3G services to increase penetration, the telecom brand is also eyeing a mobile money service, already  a major cash-cow for Safaricom—to date, $1.8 billion has been transferred through its money transfer service M-Pesa, which was launched in 2007.
Kohli admits mobile money has been a small aspect in the business because in India, the business has had to comply with strict restrictions by the Central Bank. “Our M-commerce product will be a great differentiator for us in the long-term,” he says.
According to Jupiter Research, the number of active users of mobile money services will exceed 200 million by 2013. Nearly 40% of active users by 2015 are expected to be in Africa and the Middle East.
Looking into the crystal ball, 2012 will be about supremacy and transformation of wireless broadband. “There are many countries that are already mature on the voice side, but on the broadband, they would like to have more capacity and better experience. In Africa, where the average subscriber age is 18 years old, there is a propensity for youth to need voice (2G) and internet (3G),” says Kohli.
As far as mobile use in Africa goes, the only way is up; 2012 is likely to see massive investment aimed at increasing internet penetration through wireless internet.
The other growth will be driven by penetration into Africa’s smaller towns, not covered by wireless. This expansion will see the further growth of M-commerce as more of the unbanked population log on.
For new technology, Kohli says his company will test 4G in India first.
“Regulators in Africa will have to make licences for that and it could take anywhere between two to three years.”
Bharti Airtel will invest nearly $1.5 billion in its 2011/12 financial year. Also in 2012, there will be HSPA+ (an evolved high-speed packet access) to Africa. This will see internet speeds of up to 21 megabytes per second.
So does Kohli see more investors coming to Africa in 2012?
“I believe that in small countries, the viability of operators beyond the third is not likely. In small markets, I don’t think you will have more than three players. In larger markets, it could be four; I think that is the right level of viable competitive intensity for Africa, primarily because huge investments are required for Africa and it is very important that the operators are financially healthy for them to make all those investments in the coming five years.”
As a first-time investor in Africa, Bharti is grappling with poor infrastructure and power shortages. For a company that has to run its networks round-the-clock, it has forced the operator to turn to diesel generators which is obviously pushing up operating costs.
“That is why we are converting many of these sites to be run by solar and wind energy because the diesel cost is high and we want to avoid polluting the environment.”
The other hurdle for Bharti has been a high cost structure. The operator is benchmarking with its Indian operations, where costs are significantly lower. To deal with this, the operator is exploring economies of scale and sharing. “We are currently engaging regulators and competitors to support sharing of passive towers, networks and fiber optic. In some countries we have already had positive responses.”
In an earlier interview, Kohli told telecomasia.com that Bharti was talking with Etisalat, MTN, France Telecom, Millicom and Vodafone.
Bharti also has to handle the problem of weak telecom skills in Africa. “Ideally, we would like 100% of employees in each country to come from the country itself. However, this is not possible today because many skills are not available locally. Therefore, we have to bring skills from other countries in Africa, as well as from India. But we are determined that in the next two to three years, we will invest a lot in building these skills in each country and grow young African leaders to lead our operations in their home countries,” he says.
Kohli adds that, despite the challenges, Africa is still a great place to do business because of the available opportunities of growth and a growing population that is embracing technology. “In India, infrastructure only improved in the last 10 years. The cost structure is lower because India has a local manufacturing and service sector whereas in Africa, the manufacturing and service sector is not as big. India has gone through that improvement period in the last decade and I am confident that Africa will go through a similar improvement period in this decade.”
With unemployment plaguing the continent, Bharti wants to contribute towards job creation by involving young entrepreneurs in its business operations.
“We are developing young entrepreneurs who like technology and would like to sell technology as distributors of our various services and products. There is tremendous scope. Silicon Valley and India have many entrepreneurs doing outstanding work for value-added services, content creation, new applications. I am confident that in the next two to three years, young talent from Africa will also work towards development of new value-added services and applications.”
Kohli believes telecom can be the growth engine for the continent.
“Because the infrastructure in Africa is weak—roads, rail and air connectivity—it makes telecom an integrator that can bring speed, efficiency and productivity to Africa. With internet wireless broadband coming, I think the contribution of telecoms will be far greater in the next three to five years in building Africa into a strong economy, with growth going up from 4-5% and maybe 8-9% in the coming five years.
“India went through the same curve. We had a 4% rate of growth and because of IT and telecom, we have gone up to 8-9%.”

The Battle For  The Ear Of East Africa

When Sunil Joshi took over as Neotel MD and CEO on April 1, 2011, misery was written all over South Africa’s second national fixed line telecommunications operator. Five years after its establishment—amid fanfare and incredibly high hopes—the experiment looked destined for the doldrums, facing one public relations and marketing nightmare after another.
<div id="attachment_319" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-319" class="size-large wp-image-319" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/308-367_1-1024x683.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="316" />Neotel CEO Sunil Joshi in the corporation&#8217;s Telepresence Suite, Midrand, South Africa; 1 December 2011 &#8211; Photo by Brett Eloff.</div>
A couple of months earlier, auditing firm, Deloitte, had declared that “the company’s recurring losses from operations and shareholders’ deficit raise substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern”. This after Neotel had reported losses of $188 million and announced to staff that some of them faced retrenchments.
The revelations were a big blow—not only to the government’s concerted effort to liberalize a sector long held to ransom by the previously state-owned monopoly operator, Telkom—but also to the country’s 48 million people. Expectations had been high that the new provider would help bring down the costs of telecommunications, offer a much better service than the complacent incumbent operator, create employment, as well as facilitate numerous business opportunities.
Although analysts blasted Neotel management and shareholders for, among other things, lacking vision and leadership, they sympathized with the new entrant in instances where they felt it was a victim of circumstance. For example, two years after Neotel got its operating licence, a technology group challenged the government’s “managed liberalization” process in court, and won. This meant that privileges initially reserved for Neotel would now also be enjoyed by the country’s mobile phone giants, as well as by numerous other players.
On the day the FORBES AFRICA team is visiting Neotel’s Johannesburg headquarters, it’s exactly seven months since Joshi took over after a big management shake-up that saw founding CEO Ajay Pandey return to India.
Joshi quietly asserts that numerous realities were ignored when the story of Neotel’s perceived failure was being told—though he maintains “that’s no excuse”. One such reality, he says, is the cardinal truth that a business has to make an investment before it can reap rewards.
He points out that five years ago, Neotel started from a zero base—with no infrastructure, no employees and no customers—in an industry that grows at about 4% annually.
Neotel has had to invest over R4 billion ($485 million) in the business, he says, most of it spent laying out about 7,000 kilometers of optic fiber. The company has had to employ more than 1,000 people and build more than 400 base stations.
Joshi has spent the past seven months “integrating” the business—something he believes will result in much better offerings. He has called on his parent company, the India-based Tata Group, who are 68.5% owners of Neotel. The other shareholders are South African consortium Nexus (19%) and Namibia’s CommuniTel (12.5%).
“Tata Communications are the world’s largest owner and operator of submarine cable systems. They have about 207,000 kilometers of submarine cable assets on the sea bed,” Joshi boasts, with a lot of glee, “so as we integrate our domestic capability and our submarine cable into Tata infrastructure, we now have the unique capability to enable customers to expand at any geography across the Pacific or Atlantic, on primary or secondary parts on our own infrastructure, giving us the ability to provide resilience,” he says.
What that means for Neotel business clients is that one public room in Midrand, Johannesburg, is connected to 36 others across the world. The facility enables local customers to hold meetings with other people who are based in other parts of the world, without having to travel. Two new data centers that Neotel has built in Cape Town and Johannesburg are now seamlessly connected to 42 other data centers across the world. So if, for example, a business in South Africa wants to expand into Asia, and wants Singapore as a hub but also wants a single point of service for network and data services, Neotel can provide that with ease.
Joshi says Neotel is also serving its consumer portfolio with competitive voice and internet solutions.
The biggest news came in November when, for the first time, the company announced that in the previous quarter it had reached positive earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization (Ebidta).
Last year, Neotel raked in R2.3 billion ($279 million) in revenue, which Joshi reckons is “significant in such a short time”. But was it the best Neotel could do? “There’s always room for improvement,” Joshi quips, before adding: “Revenue streams will only come once critical mass has been achieved. Our revenue streams are growing 30-35%, year on year, enabling us to grow between six and seven times industry growth rate, albeit off a small base.”
Market share stands at 5%, while business customers grew by 23% and consumers by 40%. Neotel now has more than 50,000 retail customers.
Joshi believes the worst is now behind. He is turning his attention to four “strategic imperatives” he’ll be pursuing this new year: profitability, increasing market share, improving customer experience, and training and empowering his “ambassadors” (staff).
But, he says, he will also do with a little bit of help from the country’s national regulator, the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA).
Decades ago, South Africa’s then state-owned telephone company laid out copper wires throughout many parts of the country so that it could be easy for telephony to reach homes and offices. For now, only formerly government-owned Telkom can use the infrastructure. Others have to rent from Telkom at significantly high rates. For years now industry players have been trying to convince ICASA to regulate the use of underground copper infrastructure so that other service providers can use it too—not just Telkom. The industry players’ argument is that by making the local loop available to all service providers, telecommunications will reach more people and bring down costs.
“What we are asking for is a fair, competitive and affordable price that industry can bear. We are certainly not asking for it to be free. The investment was made decades ago,” says Joshi.
The second area Neotel would also like to see government paying attention to is the pace and rate of approval in local municipalities. Companies have to get municipal approval for their fiber footprint layout plans, and Joshi says the process is often fraught with delays.
If the relevant South African authorities could attend to those two obstacles, Joshi reckons, there would be no stopping Neotel.
And how does he think history will judge him when his contract ends in three years’ time? “We will all look back and say we made history—by bringing a second operator to  South Africans, and making it successful.”

The Worst Is  Now Behind Us

It cost two young, bright companies millions to grab a slice of Africa’s hottest telecommunications market. But now they are both limping and left out. What went wrong?
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-large wp-image-316" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/iStock_000018391050Large-1024x680.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="315" />
It was a cold June morning in 2006 and Kenya’s telecommunication sector was buzzing. EM Communications Limited had just been awarded a license as the second local loop operator in Kenya, trading under the name Popote Wireless. The company had just invested almost $6 million in rolling out operations and the mood was ecstatic. Reporters trooped to their glistering headquarters in Nairobi, each angling to interview the company’s managing director, Eric Muthi, in his boardroom overlooking Nairobi National Park.
“We are like this park. It has a lot of opportunity but within it also lurks danger,” he said. It turns out there were more dangers than opportunities.
Local loop operators (LLOs) are small telephone operators with a nationwide license, set up to increase access to fixed lines offered by state-owned Telkom Kenya. The plan was to give callers connections in their own district, but the problem was that if you wanted to call further afield, you had to go back through national operators.
Back then, Telkom Kenya was an inefficient state-owned monopoly that took months, if not years, to connect a subscriber. This led to a long waiting list, keeping telephones away from the masses.
The Communication Commission of Kenya (CCK) thus licensed 24 operators. But of the 24, only Flashcom and Popote started operations. CCK told FORBES AFRICA that others were in the process of being deregistered, after failing to open up shop.
Flashcom invested $3.6 million; Popote $6 million. Initially, business was good. According to the CCK’s 2008 report, subscribers increased from 8,481 in 2006 to 10,312 by March 2008.
The growth was because LLOs had an advantage. While a subscriber could wait for months to get a Telkom line, they could walk into a Flashcom or Popote shop and walk out with one.
But more than five years on, the dangers Muthi warned of emerged snarling from the bush.
“Popote had ceased operations at some point due to internal challenges. However, they are now back, though in a limited scope,” says CCK’s acting director general, Francis Wangusi.
And it is not just Popote Wireless. Flashcom, though still in existence, is limping.
According to its CEO, Julius Kinyua, it has shed half of its more than 4,000 subscribers.
“It has been a rough business environment but we are determined to keep going,” he says with a chuckle. CCK no longer keeps count of LLO subscribers; the last time it did so
was in 2008. The regulator was unable to comment at the time of going to print.
How did two firms go from hot start-ups to examples of what can go wrong in Kenya’s telecommunication market in five years?
The privatization of Telkom Kenya dovetailed to the LLOs’ disadvantage, but other reasons were also at play.
“Inadequate investment, interconnection challenges, unavailability of spectrum, and more importantly, the market preference for GSM mobile communication systems were their undoing,” says Wangusi.
The first hurdle they faced was negotiating interconnect rates with the then fully state-owned operator, Telkom Kenya. According to Kinyua, Telkom considered them competitors; they refused to connect LLOs to other networks, saying that the networks were “not compatible”.
A Flashcom subscriber was thus unable to call other networks. This erased the efficiency advantage they had enjoyed.
“Then the agreed-upon interconnect rate with Telkom was changed to suit it,” says Kinyua. “It meant subscribers would only be able to call within its network and it became ‘an island’.”
For interconnection, LLOs were supposed to charge $0.12, out of which $0.08 would go to Telkom Kenya. The remaining amount, according to Kinyua, was too little to meet their expenses and make a ‘decent’ profit.
Also, the technology that the LLOs got was of higher frequency and thus lesser reach than the ones given to Telkom Kenya. Flashcom got
1 900MHz, while the state company got 800MHz.
“We thus needed more base stations to roll out our services, increasing our costs further in an environment where profit margins were minimal,” he says. To maintain its bases in Nairobi alone costs almost $24,000 a month.
When Telkom Kenya was privatized in 2008, the government ceded 60% of its shareholding to European telecommunication giant France Telecom. This was a bittersweet moment for LLOs. The new management was more open to negotiation and compromise on infrastructure and interconnection rates.
However, the sleeping giant had woken, threatening the LLOs’ business model. The entry of France Telecom injected more capital in Telkom and revitalized the formerly inefficient operator, which was rebranded as Telkom Orange. The days of long waiting lists were coming to an end.
Telkom Orange courted the customer aggressively and at cut prices. Its fixed wireless subscriptions soared from 10,685 in 2006 to 154,161, according to CCK reports.
“LLOs relied too much on Telkom Kenya’s inefficiencies. France Telecom changed all that. They had better change their modus operandi or they’ll sink,” says one telecoms analyst who requested anonymity as he works in one of the major firms.
Then in 2009, intense price wars in Kenya’s telecoms sector destroyed any advantage the LLOs had by halving call rates overnight.
When LLOs realized the tide was turning, they tried to change their business model.
Popote tried to venture into outsourcing but got its fingers burnt.
It was implicated in a fiasco that involved charging potential employees for non-existent jobs, by Kenya’s Business Daily in 2008. The company still holds the LLO license, and hopes for a buyout.
Flashcom, according to Kinyua, is looking beyond the voice and leveraging on the increased demand for data as the future business plan.
The decision by CCK to give telcos a unified license has given the firm a new lease of life and it is now banking on data for growth.
“CDMA (code division multiple access) speeds are like the 2.5G and very good for internet,” says Kinyua. The CEO hopes that advanced CDMA handsets that have modern features like cameras, internet connection and smart phones may turn the tide in the LLOs’ favor. But for now, it needs hope as much as technology to survive.

Wrong Number—The Great Kenyan Telephone Blunder

More than 700 emails await Toby Shapshak, according to his Apple iPhone 4, lighting up on the retro red cabinet in the doorway of his Johannesburg home.
<div id="attachment_310" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-310" class="size-large wp-image-310" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/CTX8990-678x1024.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="716" />“[The cellphone] changed from something you hold next to your ear, to something you hold in your hand and look at.” Toby Shaphak</div>“I’m sure there’s many more than that,” he says.
What a difference a couple of decades makes. During the late 1980s, Shapshak wouldn’t have known what an email was and would have been carrying a cellphone that you could hammer a nail in with.
Compare again the iPhone of 2011 to the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X of 1983—the iPhone has 200 hours of standby time, a global positioning system that can geographically locate where you are and can send a picture of your mother to Thailand in two seconds. You had to charge the Motorola DynaTAC for 10 hours to make a one-hour call and it was as light as a lump of lead.
Shapshak, the South African editor of international men’s electronic magazine, Stuff, was one of the first journalists in the country to own a cellphone. “I remember being one of the only journalists with a cellphone and it was completely remarkable to be able to call the newsroom and tell people where I was or what I was doing [and] for people to be able to get hold of me. I remember putting my cellphone number on my first business card. You had a land line, your office address and your postal address, then I had a cellphone number and along came email.”
Motorola came up with the mobile phone in 1983; it weighed nearly a kilogram and could only be used to make calls, nothing else, with a small black screen used to see the numbers punched in the keypad.
Two years later, it reached African shores. Its first African customer was the then government of Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo.
<div id="attachment_312" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-312" class="size-large wp-image-312" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/7-1-1024x689.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="319" />Albert Gatare 2011</div>
According to the African Leadership Academy, President Mobutu Sese Seko issued the first ever private telecommunications licence to a company called Telecel, founded by Rwanda-born, Miko Rwayitare (who died in 2007) and American, Joseph Gatt.
Rwayitare and Gatt bought 200 of Motorola’s cellphones for President Mobutu and his administration, in a bid to convince the government to switch from land lines. They sold each phone for substantially more than what they were going for in the US at the time. It meant these phones were merely for the moneyed elite of Kinshasa.
Albert Gatare, Rwayitare’s youngest brother, was one of the first Africans to use the phone and says back then it was a symbol of wealth in the city.
“That time those phones were $3,000 or $4,000. It is difficult to understand [now] how people could have bought phones for that much.
“After the commercial launch, it became a symbol of high class; everyone knew that only ministers, CEOs and rich people had those types of phones. Today you take your phone and put it in your pocket, but that time when you went to a restaurant you would put it on the table, just to show off.”
<div id="attachment_311" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-311" class="size-large wp-image-311" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/4-717x1024.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="677" />Joan Joffe 1994</div>
Telecel’s success was also helped by the continent’s poor fixed landline system, says Gatare. According to Mobile Monday, an international networking organization run by mobile industry professionals, their 2011 Africa report showed that the number of mobile phones exceeded the number of fixed lines by the year 2000. The African Development Bank says the number of land lines is declining.
The company expanded from Zaire into nine other countries: Burundi in 1992; Guinea in 1993; Madagascar in 1994; Central African Republic in 1995; Ivory Coast in 1996; Zambia in 1997 and Zimbabwe, Niger and Togo in 1998.
In South Africa, Joan Joffe was one of the people who launched Vodacom in 1994, the same year she picked up her first cellphone.
“It was amazing that you could walk around and speak. It weighed a ton, though; you could not put it in your handbag, but it was amazing,” she says.
“Our forecast was for 250,000 subscribers in the first 10 years. I can tell you that we had a huge party when the number of connections reached 50,000 towards the middle of the first year. It was a big deal for us,” says Joffe.
Vodacom has customers in South Africa, Tanzania, Lesotho, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Mozambique, and is considered one of the top four networks on the continent along with MTN, Airtel and Orange.
“Today single operators cannot survive, they must be part of a bigger group,” says Gatare.
Rwayitare sold 80% of his Telecel shares to various telecommunication companies, including Orascom in Egypt, MTN in the Ivory Coast and other smaller companies, for
around $47 million. He moved to South Africa, where he built the most expensive house in Johannesburg’s wealthy suburb, Sandhurst.
According to the International Telecommunication Union, in 2010 41.4% of Africans had a cellular subscription.
One of them is South African entrepreneur Jenna Clifford. The founder and designer of a luxury jewellery brand, in the late 1980s, she had what she called her “porty”—short for portable telephone.
“It looked like a little metal suitcase, but it was state of the art at that time. My previous husband bought his first porty and I saw the benefit of being contacted outside of the office and bought one of my own, [but] you could not take it overseas, the costing was huge in those days,” she says.
As her finger glides along the iPhone 4 in her palm, she says: “It has liberated me. It is not rocket science; you check the picture and you click.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-large wp-image-313" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Photos-1024x546.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="253" />
“I felt intuitively that with the advent of the porty, more people would be using them and they would get smaller. Just like computers were once the size of rooms,” says Clifford. “I’m a bit of a prophet.”
Africa is second only to Asia regarding the highest number of mobile subscriptions. And it is not finished yet.

From A Brick To A Flick

Amolo Ng’weno always wanted to be a doctor. But when she went to college, it all changed. At Harvard University in the Unites States, Ng’weno, a then 20-something ambitious Kenyan girl, became fascinated with computers and everything they could do—especially transmitting information. Overnight, she fell for the new, wide world of technology.
“My first experience with computers was at a US trade exhibition when I was in high school, but I didn’t actually get to use a computer until I got to college,” she says.
<div id="attachment_304" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-304" class="size-medium wp-image-304" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Amollo-028-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />Amolo Ng&#8217;weno</div>
Luckily, Harvard had a course for every student to learn the rudiments of computers.
“This experience totally changed my perspective on the tools for getting any kind of work done and has shaped my career ever since.”
Ng’weno studied psychology and social relations at Harvard, but the computer bug had bitten and not even a master’s in economics and public affairs at Princeton University, or working for the World Bank would get in the way.
Fate took a hand through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the east coast town of Cambridge. Here, two fellow Kenyans—Ayisi Makatiani and Karanja Gakio—had developed a similar obsession. So, when the three met one evening, breaking bread and sipping black coffee at a small café in Cambridge, the idea of an online news service was mooted. It began on an internet community, hosted at MIT, called KenyaNet. In 1994 it became Africa Online, the internet giant that lives to this day.
“We saw the utility of local news to the African diaspora and we thought the opposite would also be true; people in Kenya would want to communicate with the world and know what was going on internationally,” recalls Ng’weno, who quit as an economist with the World Bank in Washington to help set up Africa Online.
“It was the very early days of the internet in the US and although we were ambitious for our company, we didn’t dream it would change all our lives the way it has.”
As the internet boom kicked off, Africa Online shifted focus from providing news to connecting Africans to the internet. In 1995, it was bought by Boston-headquartered International Wireless, which became Prodigy. That year, Ng’weno was sent to launch the Kenyan operation, becoming the first internet service provider (ISP) in East Africa’s largest economy. A year later, perhaps after proving herself as start-up honcho, she was moved to Côte d’Ivoire to set up a subsidiary.
Africa Online was on a roll. It expanded to Ghana, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Swaziland, with the three coffee drinkers from Cambridge in charge. It acquired several ISPs, such as Pipex Internet Solution (Swaziland), Net2000 (Kenya), UUNET (Namibia) and Swift Global (Uganda).
In 1998, Prodigy sold the company to African Lakes Corporation, a British investment firm that was diversifying from agriculture and mining. For a while, the company traded on the London Stock Exchange, enjoying favor from investors, then listed on the Nairobi Stock Exchange in 2001.
As the new century turned, the internet (dotcom) bubble burst, wiping out many companies around the world and leaving erstwhile eager investors in the red.
“The company needed additional cash for growth which could only be supplied by international investors,” says Ng’weno, who won’t reveal what stake she held in the company, in a country where too much wealth is frowned upon.
“At the same time, the internet bust and investor jitters about Africa had really hammered the share price of our UK parent company, The African Lakes Corporation, forcing its management to de-list from the London and Kenyan stock exchanges.”
In 2001 the three founders exited, with the company firmly in eight countries and the largest ISP in sub-Saharan Africa outside South Africa.
<div id="attachment_303" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-303" class="size-medium wp-image-303" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Amollo-035-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />Surveying the scene: Amolo Ng&#8217;weno looks over Nairobi&#8217;s bustling city</div>
Six years later, in 2007, South African fixed-line telecommunications company Telkom SA bought Africa Online Limited from African Lakes Corporation for £10.32 million ($15.8 million). The ISP, which had been running at a loss, had just started to make some profit, but it was not enough to raise the necessary capital to take full advantage of the opportunities in Africa’s fast-growing telecoms industry.
Ng’weno left to work for a number of organizations, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Now, aged 46, Ng’weno is trying to make a comeback in the industry where she made her name, at a time when many would be slowing down.
In April 2011 she launched a business process outsourcing (BPO) company in Kenya, just a month after leaving Bill and Melinda Gates. Digital Divide Data (DDD) Kenya blends a for-profit technology business with social welfare.
“We’re a social enterprise,” she said recently in an interview at her office on the seventh floor of Paramount Plaza in Nairobi.
“Which means, while we’re a for-profit company in Kenya, we also have a social mission which is to give young people from disadvantaged backgrounds a path out of poverty.”
Most of DDD Kenya shares are owned by the US NGO, also called Digital Divide Data (DDD), which received a grant of $895,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation to bring its social enterprise model to Kenya. DDD has invested in an information technology services business that targets to train and employ 300 youths from slum areas in Nairobi.
The grant is part of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Poverty Reduction through Information and Digital Employment (PRIDE) program. PRIDE is working in Africa to foster and scale up a new arm of the outsourcing industry called “impact sourcing” by supporting projects aimed at creating jobs for the poor.
Ng’weno, who is managing director at DDD, says the organization hires young people from Nairobi’s vast slums to deliver high-quality BPO services. There’s also a team of deaf people working as digital management operators.
“Our staff works with us half day and go to tertiary education the other half day,” she says. “It’s a model that has worked well for DDD in Asia, where our staff typically graduate from their university education, and from the company, after four to five years.  When they graduate, they are on a path to careers in IT and other fields that would have been difficult for them to access without our support.”
From 35 workers at inception, DDD Kenya has grown to more than 100.
“We don’t think profit is incompatible with achieving a social mission. We actually believe the profit motive is an important one—and the only way that we can grow our business sustainably so that we can fulfill our goal of providing employment and career development to young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. If we don’t make a profit, we can’t deliver on our mission,” says Ng’weno.
It is this social enterprise that has anchored Ng’weno’s second coming on the internet platform, albeit at a more advanced level. The company is championing digital marketing by helping organizations use the internet to grow their brands and markets. Recently, the company became the first in the region to be certified by Google to offer advisory and technical services for the search engine giant’s AdWords advertising service. Ng’weno says DDD Kenya has a growing number of clients in Kenya drawn from various sectors including tourism, real estate and financial services as well as big clients across Africa and overseas.
Digital marketing covers a broad range of channels marketers can use to communicate with their customers. It could be anything from email, desktop text and banner ads, social media marketing or mobile and text ads.
But it is the banner ads placed on websites that have been attracting the attention of marketers and brand managers lately. With more than 25% of the 44 million people in Kenya online, according to the Communication Commission of Kenya (CCK), advertisers are increasingly realizing that they need to fish where the fish are.
“The internet has become an integral part of everyday life in Kenya and Africa and it’s changing the way people work, shop, look for information, communicate and meet people,” says Olga Arara-Kimani, Google Kenya’s country manager.
“This, coupled with the fact that advertisers are increasingly looking for mediums that deliver high, measurable returns on their investment, has led to higher proportions of ad spend going to online channels.”
A number of big businesses in Kenya are advertising online. Kenya has one of the highest internet penetration rates in Africa and emerging markets, currently at 25% and growing at 17% annually. About $8 trillion exchanges hands each year through e-commerce, but only a tiny fraction of that is in Africa. DDD Kenya hopes to increase this figure.
“Because it’s so targeted, this kind of online marketing is cost-effective. Many people want to get into digital marketing because it’s possible to know exactly who you are targeting.”
DDD Kenya recently diversified into electronic books. It is already digitizing reading materials for the government-run Kenya National Library Services, with a number of other projects in the pipeline. It’s betting on e-books and hopes publishers will buy into the idea.
“The Kenyan education system seems to give us a great pool of candidates, despite having gone to schools that are not seen as being high achievers. Our staff speak, read and write good English, which is important for all our international and many local clients.”
Harking back to the days when they set up Africa Online, Ng’weno says technology has come a long way on the continent. The infrastructure has improved dramatically, especially with the arrival of undersea cables.
“However, it’s still not clear to me why the entire internet slows down in the late afternoon (especially on Fridays),” she says.
For Ng’weno, training at Harvard, the world most prestigious business school that has produced some of the world’s biggest entrepreneurs played a part in shaping her into a shrewd entrepreneur. “Harvard is a great place to be challenged and to grow intellectually,” she says. “I’m sure it has contributed to my life in many different ways, which is the purpose of a good university education.”
Tenacity appears to run in the family. Her father, Hillary Ng’weno, was the owner and editor of the Weekly Review, Kenya’s first independent news magazine. He was a ground-breaker in lively and objective journalism. Ng’weno had a degree in mathematics and nuclear physics from Harvard. Fleur, her mother, is a naturalist and expert on bird life. She ran the Rainbow Magazine for children in the 1970s and 1980s.
So what does it take to be a great entrepreneur? Amolo Ng’weno says it is simply taking advantage of an opportunity when it presents itself and surviving disasters, so you are still there to fight another day.
In a patriarchal society like Africa, where men dominate business and leadership, success stories like Ng’weno’s are rare. You may wonder if being a woman has worked against her in business.
“People usually think it would be a disadvantage. But I’d say I was raised to see the potential in each individual, regardless of their sex or social background. And I think that’s what I’ve also found in my dealings with others.”
Tall and endowed with an African female figure, Ng’weno does not cut the image of a tech nerd. She’s easy in her attire and conservative in her use of jargon. Unlike the noisy tech types Ng’weno, who loves horses, talks as if it is not her job to be audible, yours to listen carefully.
On a warm Wednesday in Nairobi, she paces in her hi-tech office to oversee the Kenya National Library Services e-books project is completed on time. She is undeterred by road construction noises outside, which includes a huge trench outside her office building. It means she has to park her car 300 meters away and walk through the mess of rubble, earth, man and machine.
“Right now I’m too busy for hobbies,” she says when asked if she finds time for leisure. “Given the Nairobi traffic situation, maybe I will say, sitting in traffic listening to radio while doing email on my laptop computer. Our car was imported from Japan and can only get two stations so I listen to Ghetto Radio (a Nairobi radio station that broadcasts in local slang known as sheng) a lot.”
To succeed in business, she has learnt to turn what is perceived as her weaknesses on their heads. It all depends on how you look at strengths and weaknesses, she says.
“I am frequently told I’m impatient but I regard this more of a strength than a weakness. Similarly I can be detail-oriented and meticulous, which my staff complain about, but I think I’ve found a line of work in which that is, again, a strength rather than a weakness. Overall, I think most attributes can be strengths in some circumstances and weaknesses in others and the trick is to find the right combination.”
With a meticulous eye for detail backed with zeal for results, it is surprising that a team with Ng’weno on its side could go wrong. Yet, while running Africa Online, she realized that even IT wizards can make terrible miscalculations.
“We had acquired a company in Zimbabwe but we failed to take into account that our corporate cultures were very different,” she recalls. “Their IT people could not get on with our customer service people. Within a month most of their staff had resigned, taking with them most of their customers.”
Africa Online ended up paying money in Zimbabwe but getting next to nothing in return. “This,” Ng’weno says with a shy smile, “was a big lesson in thinking about corporate culture issues.”
Many more big lessons surely await the comeback kid in Kenya’s tough and competitive digital world.
&nbsp;

The Queen of the Internet Reboots

As the sun beat down on the roof of a community center in the tiny Togolese village of Wome, the staffers of SunPower Afrique rushed to put on sunscreen. The rays were a reminder that their latest project—the system of solar panels being nailed to the building’s roof—is hot in more ways than one.
<div id="attachment_271" style="width: 235px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-271" class="size-medium wp-image-271" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Herman-shoot-and-Togo-095-225x300.jpg" alt="" width="225" height="300" />Solar panels power a building in Kpalime</div>
The area around Kpalime, Togo’s second-largest city, is hardly the obvious site for a solar energy revolution. SunPower’s business technique—matching solar customers with small microfinance lenders is taking root. The city, tucked into a verdant corner of Togo, is becoming a model for a new energy infrastructure in a country known for its frustrating power shortages.
“Togo has a really strong microfinance community,” says Kira Costanza, SunPower’s founder. “It has more microfinance institutions than other countries. The largest obstacle to solar is the high initial cost”—which can run into the thousands of dollars for just a few panels— “and being able to get a loan.”
The 27-year-old Kira Costanza, the American daughter of a solar engineer, started SunPower in 2007 after living in Kpalime and watching the city and its surrounding villages live with energy shortages. Cuts in the city can stretch from 15 to 24 hours.
War in neighboring Côte d’Ivoire, an energy provider, has also cut Togo’s supply. FECECAV, the Kpalime area’s largest microfinance co-op, was struggling to carry on its business as it dealt with power shortages.
Nearly 80% of Togo’s energy currently comes from biomass, the charcoal and wood burning that destroys forests, and 16% from petroleum products. Existing fuel shortages made Costanza realize that solar power was a competitive and environmentally-sound alternative to gasoline-powered generators.
But how to fund it?
“I worked at FECECAV, and I witnessed first-hand the problem of not having electricity,” Costanza says. “So I decided to start there. I hope it’s something that becomes important to the community.” The problem was finding the financial source needed to begin widespread installation.
Inspiration struck when Costanza began linking schools and homes needing power with the small microfinance institutions, including FECECAV, which dotted the area. The unique alliance—a first for the underdeveloped region—provided both business for the lenders and energy for their clients.
The loans are necessary in a city like Kpalime. The bill for three of SunPower’s rooftop projects in the city totaled $25,000 for panels that could power smaller items like laptop computers and light bulbs.
“For a house, it can hit $10,000, including import and export fees,” she says. “That’s out of reach for most people.”
The test project at FECECAV’s headquarters cost $50,000, with importing, exporting and logistics taking the lion’s share of the cost. (It took nearly a month, and $2,000, to get a recent batch of panels from the US through the Togolese port.)
Costanza and her team are trying to minimize costs so that hospitals, schools, community centers and individual homes will have an easier time taking out loans.
The SunPower team is also working on building solar power systems in a box, which come complete with panels that will be easy to install—and have a cheaper initial cost than the current larger installations.
Besides micro loans, another necessity in Kpalime’s solar evolution has been education.
“In one village, there was no power. We set it up so they could run two laptops and three bulbs at a given time. Then someone wanted to plug in a fridge, which would have fried the system. They don’t understand.”
On the roof in Wome, Koffi Dzodsi, a local resident who serves as the project’s chief technician, worked alongside Dave Staller, an engineer visiting from the US. Together they worked to drill a foundation for panels that were delayed, tied up at the port.
“People here knew about it, but before this they didn’t have financial access to it,” Dzodsi said of the solar technology. “Projects have been going here since 1992 but now there’s a boom because there’s [less] problems with money. There’s a lot of interest.”
SunPower and its success in Kpalime is at the forefront of a solar movement that is quickly growing across Togo and the rest of West Africa.
In 2010, James Gbeho, president of the region’s ECOWAS Commission, said the demand for power across Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Ghana and their neighbors would reach 22,000 megawatts per year in 2020, up from just 6,500 in 2003.
As demand for power grows, governments are struggling to implement renewable energy sources while often working without advanced technology and trying to skirt red tape, namely high importing fees and delays for arriving solar panels. Even when energy is available, it can be too expensive for residents of a city like Kpalime to afford.
Businesses like Costanza’s, which have partnered with local microfinance chapters, have the greatest chance of reaching citizens on the ground level. And the ripple effects of her alternative energy micro-projects are spreading to the highest offices in West Africa. In November, Bukun-Olu Onemola, the Nigerian deputy United Nations envoy, said that nuclear-powered electricity would be a key focus for the country’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, and his “transformation agenda”.
An hour’s Vespa ride from the Kpalime offices of FECECAV, tucked at the base of forested mountains, sits an innocuous village—small and pretty and lacking electricity, like many others in the area.
But look closer; off its dirt roads, a revolution is underway. A hospital, a wealthier two-story home—both have sets of solar panels tucked away, small reminders of the march of Togo’s sun power.

Power To The People As A Bright Idea Shines

The Inga Dam project in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has been work in progress for more than 50 years.
<div id="attachment_267" style="width: 222px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-267" class="wp-image-267 size-medium" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/043_BGA11475-212x300.jpg" alt="" width="212" height="300" />DRC CONGO BELGIUM OFFICIAL VISIT DAY3</div>
The first feasibility studies for the initiative being investigated in the 1960s. The construction of Inga I, the first of four stages of the venture, was commissioned in 1972. The project is intended for completion sometime between 2020 and 2025 and could cost up to$80 billion. The Inga hydropower scheme is touted as being the solution to Africa’s energy woes—it is thought that when complete it could generate as much as 45,000 megawatts—more than South Africa, the biggest producer on the continent.
On the Inga Dam rests new projects, like BHP Billiton’s $5 billion aluminum smelter project, which could consume as much as 2,000MW.
“The major shortage of power is stopping development in many sectors,” says Thierry Naweji Kankwala, chairman of the South Africa-DRC Chamber of Commerce.
Capital is the biggest issue. A slice of a $100 billion green energy fund  could emerge from the COP17 talks in Durban and that could help.
Another one of the comlications is the structure of the finance for the project. In 2004, the Western Power Corridor, or Westcor, a cluster of African countries including the  DRC, Angola, Namibia, Botswana and South Africa, signed a memorandum of understanding  to finance Inga III, but in 2009 the government of DRC changed its mind and turned to  private investors.
Environmental concerns such as deforestation have also been raised. The World Energy Council estimates that the project could save 100 million tons of carbon being spewed into the atmosphere.
The completion of the Inga Dam project could be a coup for the continent with transmission lines planned as far afield as Egypt and Europe.
“The project will have a big impact in the continent, especially in the Southern African countries (Zimbabwe, Mozambique, South Africa and others),” says Kankwala.
&nbsp;

Damming Investment

SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS have long imagined a future in which facial recognition technology makes anonymity in public obsolete.  A research study at Carnegie Mellon University suggests that this Minority Report future has already arrived, thanks to facial recognition products now commercially available, combined with the 750-million-person identity database called Facebook.
<div id="attachment_86" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-86" class="size-large wp-image-86" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/FO091211_066-1024x576.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="267" />Carnegie Mellon prof Alessandro Acquisti—the real guy, with his biometric face print—worries technology may expose everyone to constant scrutiny</div>
A CMU research team led by associate professor Alessandro Acquisti took candid photos of 93 random students on campus using a $35 webcam. Within seconds the researchers were able to determine the identities of a third of their photogenic guinea pigs, using of fthe- shelf facial recognition software from PittPatt, a software company recently acquired by Google, and publicly available profile photos from Facebook. The researchers had an even higher rate of success using the same technology to identify more than 100,000 Pittsburgh singles with otherwise pseudonymous accounts on a dating site, adding yet more complexity to the world of online dating. “We’ve been thinking about privacy in cyberspace, but we need to start thinking about it in the real world, with augmented reality,” says Acquisti. He was also able to determine the first five digits of some of the identified students’ Social Security numbers based on previous research he has done showing that those numbers are predictable if you know a person’s birth date and birthplace. That information is usually available on a person’s Face- book profile page.
It seems that Aldous Huxley was right and George Orwell was wrong. Ubiquitous surveillance isn’t being orchestrated by the governmental- Big Brother of 1984 but by advances in technology designed for convenience’s sake adopted eagerly by private citizens. Acquisti calls it the “democratization of surveillance”. And it’s coming fast. Soon after the riots broke out in London at the beginning of August, a technophile band of vigilantes formed a Google Group to discuss applying the methods pioneered by Acquisti’s research team to online photos and videos of rioters, in order to help identify looters for prosecution by law enforcement. Facial recognition tools identify a person by analyzing dozens of features, such as the length of a forehead and the distance between the eyes and the nose. Google, Facebook and Apple have already made them freely available for people to tag their friends and family in photo albums. But at what point will you have the option to snap a photo of a stranger and then pull up his or her name and whatever information the Internet offers up about them? The capability is there, but the willingness to unleash it isn’t. Yet. Google has said that its image search tool, Goggles—which uses a photo instead of text as a search term, letting you snap a photo of a painting, for example, and find out who its creator is—has the capability to find people’s identities based on a photo. But the search giant had chosen not to enable the feature because it was deemed too creepy.
When Facebook recently rolled out an internal facial recognition tool allowing friends to automatically tag other friends in photos, it inflamed some privacy advocates (whose combustion levels tend to be high around anything new that Facebook does). Those advocates seemed to overlook the fact that the very existence of Facebook’s extensive database of photos linked to people’s names creates the possibility for third parties to build a facial biometric print. While Facebook’s terms of service prohibit the scraping of information from its site, there are no technological tools in place to prevent it. And, even if there were, scraping is certainly not limited to Facebook.
“For most of us there are already identified photos of us somewhere on the Internet, and this trend will only increase,” says Acquisti. (Face.com did the doctoring on the photo on page 58.) The CMU researchers wrote a facial recognition iPhone app but decided not to release it to the public. “We developed the app to make a point,” says Acquisti. “A future in which we infer sensitive information from faces is already here, and we better start thinking whether we really want to live in that future.” Their tool, though, would be valuable only for those seeking to identify the 25,000 CMU students whose photos the researchers grabbed from Facebook. We’re still a few years away from an app that would work on a national or global scale. The two main hurdles, Acquisti says, are finding a large and reliable source of facial images (hello, DMV!) and securing enough computing power. Comparing a photo to a database of, say, 300 million photos would take many hours, whereas a functional app would need to do it in ten seconds. “If I had to guess, I would say that we are less than five years away,” says Acquisti.
Specialized facial recognition products are already on the market. BI2 Technologies has developed a $3,000 iPhone add-on called MORIS (Mobile Offender Recognition and Identification System) that dozens of police departments across the country started adopting this year. Police officers can use MORIS to take photos of suspects, and the app, using iris scans and facial recognition, will identify anyone who already has a photo in a criminal database. Microsoft and Intel have worked together to create digital billboards with face-detecting cameras that pick up on the gender and age of passersby to show them relevant ads. A startup named SceneTap installed similar cameras in bars in Chicago earlier this year, so that Windy City nightlife lovers can use their smartphones to check the crowdedness, gender ratio and average age of patrons at a given bar before deciding where to go. So far law enforcement officials are tentative about using the technology to identify people not already in criminal databases.
Though a Canadian insurance corporation graciously volunteered the use of its driver’s license photo database to Vancouver police after the devastating post-Stanley Cup hockey riot there in July, authorities declined the offer after privacy advocates expressed concerns about violation of Canadians’ civil liberties. In London, Scotland Yard is using facial recognition tools along with tips from the community to identify rioters. As good as the technology has become, it still has accuracy problems that can cause significant harm. A Massachusetts driver sued his state DMV after his license was wrongfully revoked because he looked too much like another driver, leading to ten days of administrative wrangling to get it reinstated. “We are not the beautiful and unique snowflakes we think we are.
There are many people who look likeus,” says Acquisti. More than 30 state DMVs already apply facial recognition algorithms to driver’s license photos to prevent identity fraud. If you’re worried about your privacy, now might be a good time to change your Facebook profile photo to one in which you’re wearing ridiculously oversize sunglasses.
&nbsp;

Hello, Stranger

BERNARD JOHNSON IS a trucker and a math problem. From his home in Columbia, S.C. the 49-year-old drives for Schneider National, one of the country’s largest freight haulers. Johnson pulls trailers filled with everything from TVs to toilet paper on as many as 25 trips a month for stretches of up to 500 miles.
The Green Bay, Wis. Company has to design the most efficient routes for Johnson and 13,000 other drivers. With diesel at $4 a gallon, this is not an equation it can afford to get wrong. “It’s like a big jigsaw puzzle,” says Ted Gifford, an operations research scientist at Schneider. At any given time the company has 10,000 trucks on the road, with another 33,000 trailers available and waiting to be picked up. Drivers are on the road between four days and three weeks at a time— alone and in pairs—and Schneider must get them back to their homes by a certain date. Drivers have to take breaks according to government regulations.
<div id="attachment_83" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-83" class="size-large wp-image-83" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/FO091211_002-1024x681.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="315" />Schneider’s Ted Gifford helped design a computer model that simulates operations.</div>
Their customers are only open during certain hours. “We want to avoid the situation where a driver may live in Alabama, and it’s time for him to go home, and he’s in Minnesota,” says Gifford. “And we don’t have any freight for him to get home, so he has to drive empty.” For most of its 76-year history Schneider, which grossed $3.1 billion last year, has relied on pilot projects to answer these key logistical questions. Whichever department was considering a policy change would carve out a group of 20 to 200 drivers, make them function as a separate business and test the results. The pilot projects cost “hundreds of thousands of dollars,” but results were often ambiguous. All too often a system that worked well for a sample of 20 drivers wouldn’t work when scaled up to the whole company. “You could spend more on the pilot than what you’d save making the policy change,” says John Nienow, a senior logistics engineer. To test another variable the only choice was to rerun the entire pilot and therefore double the cost.
In 2003 Schneider decided to invest in a fleet-wide “tactical planning simulator” that would use software algorithms to mimic the decision making of human dispatchers on an inhumanly large scale. Schneider looked to one of the leading practitioners of logistics simulation, Warren Powell, a professor of operations research and financial engineering at Princeton University. The algorithms that came out of Powell’s lab in the 1980s had changed the industry’s “less-than-truckload” segment (consisting of parcels and smaller freight) by mapping out a more efficient way to plan routes and using terminals that break down shipments.
One model, called SuperSPIN, had been embraced by Yellow and Ryder to survive the recessionary late 1980s. Powell’s software was also behind the launch of Roadway Package Systems, which later became FedEx Ground. What interested Schneider, a full-truckload carrier, was Powell’s work in the field of approximate dynamic programming, which is a way to make decisions in the presence of uncertainty. Schneider needed a model that could take into account the nonobvious and sometimes random variables that affect the efficiency of thousands of drivers over weeks of time and at a high level of detail. “Warren gave us a really nice hammer, and we had to take our problems and make them look like nails,” says Nienow.
A team of Schneider and Princeton engineers spent two years and “between $2 million and $5 million” developing software for the simulator, which lives on an eight-processor server in Green Bay. The simulator, which Schneider launched in mid-2005, pretends that it’s assigning freight and gathering orders based on a scenario posed to it by Schneider’s analysts. That could be something such as adding more drivers in Chicago, adding an hour in mandated break time for drivers or having a big customer change the location of its distribution center. The simulation runs forward in time for three weeks in order to approximate the value of having a truck and driver at a certain location at a certain time, and gets a first result. Then it runs backward in time to the “present”, reconciling the results with those that happened in the simulated future. Then it runs forward three weeks again and then backward, continuing to improve its estimate. It does that until it “converges” and starts to make only minor changes. For each three-week run, it makes hundreds of thousands of decisions. Gifford estimates that the simulator has helped Schnei- der save tens of millions of dollars. The simulator has, for example, allowed Schneider to justify price hikes to customers.
In 2008 a customer wanted to restrict the number of hours that Schneider could drop off goods. Schneider ran the simulator. “We showed that we could limit the hours but that doing so would cost us $600,000 more,” says Gifford. “We went back to them and said, ‘This is the impact of restricting your hours.’” The customer ultimately decided not to limit its hours. One of Schneider’s biggest challenges is maintaining its fleet size, since drivers often burn out and leave the company. Schneider regularly uses the simulator to determine how many jobs to offer and where it’s best to hire drivers. The model can determine the marginal value of hiring ten new drivers who live in central Illinois, say, based on the number of times that freight departs from the Midwest. In the future Schneider wants to use the simulator to decide which new business to pursue. The company currently employs three different fleets of drivers: long-haul truckers who live in one city but can travel all over the country, regional drivers who drive within a 500-mile radius of their homes, and dedicated fleets for specific customers.
A decisionto increase one of those fleets can affect the others: When Schneider creates a regional business, for example, it cannibalizes some work that the long-haul fleet is doing. “The thing that’s so powerful is that when someone presses us on the impact of different policy changes, we have the facts, we have the data. We can produce reports and analysis so that if someone else brought in their scientists, they would have to agree,” says Gifford. “The value is to be able to take these complex business opportunities and give them a good, solid analysis.”

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