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.

The Bandwidth Queen

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

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.
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The Bandwidth Queen

From A Brick To A Flick

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