Few people are as keen to bridge Africa’s digital divide and connect the continent to the global information infrastructure as Funke Opeke.
As an engineer, entrepreneur, mother, mentor and founder of Main Street Technologies and CEO of MainOne Cable Company, a trailblazing telecoms infrastructure provider out of Africa’s most populous economy, she is helping to attract more females into the “meritocracy” of science and mathematics and deepening the strategic alliances between the business, computing technology and telecommunications landscape.
Once described by a telecoms industry buff as a “brilliant mind; and a nice, easy going, friendly geek”, FORBES AFRICA also found her to be a witty, diligent executive with a canny flair for corporate diplomatese. She was also once worth millions of dollars on paper… but that’s a story for another day.
Opeke excelled in mathematics and physics at school but loathed biology. Her father’s career choice for her was medicine. She however had other ideas, enrolling for undergraduate and graduate-level degrees in electrical engineering at Nigeria’s University of Ife in Ile-Ife, now Obafemi Awolowo University, and Columbia University in the United States. She spent the next two decades in North America gaining invaluable international engineering and management experience, and during that time she noticed that the poor statistics of females in engineering did not significantly improve.
“I was the only female in my class at Ife,” she says. Social profiling is partly to blame for this. Engineering in Nigeria, and even in a matured market economy like the United States is still somewhat riddled with gender stereotypes.
“Even in computing today, you still hear things like ‘whilst guys write code, women can only check or test code,” she says.
While engineering might be struggling to attract more female talent, Nigerians have had no qualms embracing digital mobile technology. The country had about 450,000 functional telephone lines for a population of about 140 million people as at December 2001. By December 2012, it had 113 million active subscriber lines, according to the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), the industry regulator.
Nigeria’s cellular transformation began with telecoms industry reforms that culminated in the 2002 auctions of GSM licenses for $285 million each to Econet Wireless in Zimbabwe, South Africa’s MTN and Nigerian-owned CIL. All the new operators had grossly underestimated their market projections for Nigeria. As the country gradually became one of the fastest growing telecoms markets in the world, Nigerians flocked home in droves, especially professionals in computing, engineering and telecoms law, whose skills were in short supply.
In 2005, Opeke quit her job as executive director of Verizon Communications Wholesale Division in the USA to take up a role as chief technology officer of MTN Nigeria. The MTN experience lasted only a few months. She moved on to help with the resuscitation and privatization of state-owned Nitel (Nigerian Telecommunications), acting for a while as chief operating officer of the still moribund entity. With entrenched institutional graft and high-wired politics, it became obvious that Nitel was a complicated case; and barely two years after upending her career and cozy life in the States, Opeke was jobless, unfulfilled and in search of new meaning for her life in Lagos.
This turbulent landing into the deep waters of Nigerian telecommunications helped Opeke identify salient opportunities in the sector, especially the need to upgrade West Africa’s internet infrastructure. It also prepared her adequately for the rough and tumble realities of doing business in Africa. She could see an opportunity: everyone was tilling the retail space, but Nigeria lacked robust connectivity at the enterprise level. She galvanized private and institutional investors, and established Main Street Technologies, a telecoms infrastructure provider, which gave birth to MainOne. No mean feat for someone who was barely three years old in town.
“After almost 25 years in the US, I saw an absence of telecoms infrastructure for business. I found it fascinating that we were running our ATMs on GPRS networks, and based on my experience, no country ran its business on mobile networks. The mobile network infrastructure is not robust and resilient enough, even though technology is developing to allow us to push data around more efficiently, I still don’t know serious stock exchanges functions or defense applications that run purely on mobile infrastructure…that was one of my key motivations for joining Nitel.”
“Because a lot of African countries never had well established telecommunications infrastructure, we were able to start with mobile and create a veneer of infrastructure but that underlying, unifying infrastructure, that enables different companies new services to plug in to, does not exist,” she argues.
A decade after the GSM auctions, and despite multi-million dollar investments in the sector, cellular teledensity has clearly improved. But decades of underinvestment meant a lack of bandwidth capacity for international traffic, a decrepit nationwide backbone and total disregard of the all important ‘last mile’ infrastructure, which is the bedrock of municipal and metropolitan access to data and voice-based communications services. She therefore disagrees with the view that Africa is awash with bandwidth, notwithstanding the plethora of fiber optic cables between Africa and Western Europe.
“The real challenge is getting the capacity to the people who require it. We are leapfrogging in some services but we are not necessarily deepening the infrastructure. We are dealing with situations now where some of the landlocked countries have so much difficulty getting access to the internet because they do not have the infrastructure, but they have mobiles for phone calls. No backbone, no last mile, only mobile, and mobile voice.”
To plug this gap, MainOne Cable Company is investing in its own terrestrial infrastructure in Nigeria. This pan-Nigeria link will enable ‘efficient, more affordable’ connectivity inland, and assist the hook up to the company’s coastal fiber optic link. MainOne currently employees 250 people; its initial capitalization of $250 million was for its trans-Atlantic submarine cable, which was completed in 2010. With clients in Burkina Faso, Togo, Benin, Ghana and Nigeria, the company is looking to expand its services to Senegal, Cote d’Ivoire and Cameroon. Opeke reckons the current worth of the business is about $500 million. The firm continues to reinvest extant revenues into the business and will open its new data center in 2014, a strategic milestone development for the company and tactical response to customer needs for hosting and outsourcing services.
“The new baby when fully deployed will cost us between $40 and $50 million,” Opeke says.
MainOne’s large institutional customers wanted more than reliable connectivity from the company.
“As connectivity improves and becomes the norm, companies will migrate to outsourced facilities. Private cloud computing infrastructure as a service will grow. Our data centre will provide co-location spaces and handle disaster recovery activities, and we believe this is the first of its kind in this environment, indeed in West Africa.”
The fact that MainOne will be competing for a share of the corporate services market with established operators like MTN, Airtel, Glo and Etisalat, Vodacom, across Africa does not bother the bandwidth queen.
“Our focus is our key asset. We operate at the high-end of the market where customers expect 100% reliability. We’ll continue to invest in world class infrastructure. We will continue to grow because we provide a high degree of quality and accountability that is not typical of service providers in this region,” Opeke says.