When Mike Lawrie fretted and sweated to connect Africa to the internet he expected a handful of dusty academics to use it. A quarter of a century on, African truck drivers, domestic workers and office clerks can’t live without it – the internet in Africa is as much a part of living as is breathing for millions.
“We know internet use in most of the continent has been growing. But it’s not even. So you have countries like South Africa and Kenya on the one hand where many people are using the internet. Then you have Ethiopia, the second largest population in Africa, and very few use the internet,” says Indra de Lanerolle, head of the South African Network Society project at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), in Johannesburg.
De Lanerolle is the author of The New Wave, a paper released in 2012 that looked at the internet users of Africa.
“The internet has grown, but there is one thing that hasn’t… fixed lines. Traditionally you would connect with a PC. But only two percent of households have a fixed line. PC penetration hasn’t been going up much. In that context it’s not surprising that it leaves us with mobile and mobile devices.”
“It’s a success story in one way that this infrastructure works. But it’s also evidence of a failure in another. Many African countries have failed to deliver those other networks, or they are way too expensive.”
Internet on the move is expensive. Net costs are high, which means the poor, without PCs, surf less.
“You are buying data in sachet size bytes, 5MB at a time, and you are rationing yourself. Our research shows you are very biased against services when you know how much data they use. One of the good things about Facebook is lowering the data consumption in order to use it.”
Internet means economic growth, says Ibrahima Guimba-Saidou, Senior Vice President Commercial Africa at SES.
“According to our research, if a developing nation has 10 percent more broadband connectivity, it results in a 1.38 percent GDP growth for that country. It is expected that Africa’s population will double to 2.4 billion people by 2050. In 20 years, the number of cities in Africa with over 10 million inhabitants will double. Remote areas are pulling African economies down. Today, over 300 million Africans live more than 50 kilometers from the nearest fiber or cable broadband connection – 400 million people have no internet access at all, that’s 700 million unconnected people. This equates to 60 to 70 percent of the African population living in remote areas, cut off from the bigger cities without access to information and the necessary facilities required for sustainable growth. These people, by no fault of their own, are pulling their country backwards as they are not able to contribute to the economy, as much as they no doubt would want to,” says Guimba-Saidou.
Language is also a barrier, says De Lanerolle. The language of technology tends to be in English, French or Portuguese, making it difficult for those who don’t speak them to navigate on their phones.
“At a bank machine you can get numerous languages but on an app its less. In general e-commerce is generally English in South Africa. If I am a Sepedi speaker in Polokwane, and I go to a shop, I can probably speak Sepedi to a shopkeeper. I can use Sepedi to transact. I can go to a post office and do the same thing,” says De Lanerolle.
“There are a lot of people in South Africa who do not read and write English easily. It’s a significant barrier, but is a solvable one. People, who design services and content, need to take account of that, especially when you have got these limits when you have reached the limit of your clientele.”
Internet users on the continent may be on the rise, but almost half the population lives below the poverty line. According to De Lanerolle’s research, in 2008, one in seven people in South Africa were online. In 2012, this grew to one in three. By 2016, there could be as many as two out of three, he says.
The research bears out that the younger you are, the more likely you are to use it. Almost 50% of those under 25 are internet users, while less than 20% older than 45 use the net. Businesses need to be cautious when it comes to developing apps.
“When people are launching the business they say let’s design an app for an IOS system. First, ask why do an app? If your target market is a low-end income user, they are most likely using a BlackBerry. Why use smartphones?”
“Research, from the US, shows that most users use only 10 apps. It’s quite hard to develop an app that is quite easy to use. More seriously, it’s harder to make an app absolutely necessary that will be in that top 10. Most apps will be used and then dropped in a very short time, like games,” he says.
For those who have dreams of becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg and designing a multimillion-dollar app in their garage in Africa, the road may belong and rocky. There is a shortage of developers in Africa, for a start.
“By far our biggest constraint is developers. I was speaking to a CEO of a fairly big company in Sandton; they alone have a hundred vacancies for developers. The problem is we don’t have enough, especially at an entrepreneur level. Because they have such shortages in Sandton, they are offering pretty good salaries. You have to be pretty brave and pretty confident to say ‘screw that I am going to do my own thing and hope I score.’”
Social media is the king of the internet. Seventy five percent of users have at least one account on Facebook, Twitter, Mxit or LinkedIn or other social platforms.
Dinesh Balliah, New and Social Media lecturer at Wits, has taught students to use the internet in journalism for four years. The growing generation of internet users are far less computer savvy than they are made out to be, she says.
“Students these days don’t even know how to burn a CD. I feel like the generation we have now, that deals in apps, don’t learn how to troubleshoot on a computer. Back [in 2000], if you stuffed up on a computer you had to fix it. Even a software error, you had to fix it. Now you just try something else, or reinstall. The way in which we learn about computers has completely changed.”
“I think social media has changed the game for everyone. What’s shifted drastically is initially when the internet came out it was very top down. Those who had power, money and influence were the people producing content. So you had very exclusive content producers. Then you shifted to Web 2.0, where internet users were producing internet content of their own. Now you have moved to a situation where it’s not very clear what production content is. Is a tweet content? Is a Facebook comment content? The individual matters now more than ever.”
The language of computers could be more important than learning Mandarin, she says.
“With me, my general rule with my kids is that they need to read and write properly first and then they can have access to a computer. If you look at people who became tech innovators, they played computer games. People have this aversion and get scared of games and computers, but we should be teaching our kids how to code through games,” says Balliah.
It may be for a privileged few, but it’s clear Africa is set to be changed even more by the growing, dynamic power of the internet.

Eat, Pray, eMail

It was a warm spring afternoon in September last year when Hosea Malope was on his way to the capital city, Pretoria in South Africa to entertain key clients at a rugby game. It all turned pear shaped before he even arrived at the stadium.
Malope, of Zonke Monitoring Systems (ZMS), was set to leave the next day for Las Vegas in the United States to exhibit the Central Electronic Monitoring System (CEMS), a new system to monitor Limited Pay-out Machines (LPM). His company was trying to get into the lucrative American market.
ZMS is a supplier of management and monitoring systems for gambling machines. It monitors around 8,000 of these machines for the National Gambling Board.
Back in Pretoria, two other colleagues had left for Las Vegas the day before. Malope had just arrived in the city, from a funeral in Hammanskraal, just outside of Pretoria, when he took a call from a client traveling in Europe. He was informed that some of the LPM’s on his sites had broken down and they could not get them to work. It meant Malope had to fix them.
To make matters worse, this happened at a time when ZMS had just won a contract with the client to implement the monitoring system for machines on sites in Swaziland and Zimbabwe.
“When he phoned me I said, ‘Well, let me not disappoint the man, let’s find out what’s happening’. My other IT engineer was there, he was coming to the rugby with us. He’s the one that looks after infrastructure and I asked, ‘What is happening?’ He was not aware,” says Malope.
The IT engineer phoned the help desk, who said the problem was the machines were not sending the necessary instructions.
“For a gambler, he or she wants to be assured that the machines they are playing on pay according to regulations and they’ve been tested, they’ve been certified and the return-to-player percentage is configured correctly,”adds Malope.
If there are certain errors on a gambling machine it will make the machine unplayable. The only way to fix it is to use a dial up to communicate with the device on site that will enable that machine.
“We thought it was a simple issue so we waited a bit, then an hour later, this thing was still not resolved. And this customer was flying around Europe,” says Malope.
“Whenever the client landed somewhere, he would call me to say ‘By the way…’,” constantly alerting Malope that the problem was still not fixed.
Malope had to leave the party immediately after the final whistle signalling a win for the South African team against Australia in the Tri-Nations, to try and solve the problem. At least South Africa beat Australia on the day. But Malope faced further frustration.
When he arrived at the ZMS offices in Johannesburg, he and the IT engineer went down to a building that hosts their systems only to find that some cables were cut. The day before, Telkom, the country’s premier telecommunications company, were doing maintenance work and managed to cut some cables by mistake.
“When the machines are down it means no revenue for the site; the pub owner, for the route operator, no taxes for the provinces, no VAT (value added tax) for government and no revenue for us, because we charge a fee for providing monitoring services,” says Malope.
In South Africa alone, the various provincial gambling boards make around $1.5 million and the treasury makes around $1.6 million in VAT every month.
Only a few weeks before, they had tested their systems in a disaster recovery plan which worked well. If one Internet Service provider (ISP) failed, such as Internet Solutions or Data Pro, another would kick-in and continue operations.
“But what we neglected to do in that process was consider Telkom lines being cut off. We never actually tested the situation where the system is still intact at Internet Solutions, but there’s no communication, there’s no Telkom lines,” says Malope.
He went home just before midnight that evening with everything still not fixed. The next day, just over 24 hours since their systems went offline, they managed to get two lines working through Data Pro.
“It was end of the month and that’s one of the weeks where we really perform well,” he says.
By the afternoon, ZMS had about 10 to 12 lines running, instead of the usual 30 and Telkom could only fix the cables on Monday. The problem was only solved on Monday evening.
Following this, ZMS beefed up its disaster recovery plan and made sure they had enough lines at Data Pro.
“We split our Telkom lines between the two centers and made sure we can use any of those lines at any given point in time. We are at a stage now where we think our system is solid,” says Malope.
With everything running smoothly now, Malope says the company is trying to expand into other African markets and around the world.
To this day, ZMS fears Telkom workers bearing sharp tools.

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