Showmax bests Bester

Telecom

Last week, a major fibre cut of four internet service providers—Nigeria’s MainOne, The West Africa Cable System, South Atlantic 3, and South Africa’s Seacom—led to wide disruptions of internet service across eight African countries.

The internet disruption has reduced productivity for individuals, made businesses lose monies, and caused an existential crisis for social media influencers across the affected African countries—Ivory Coast, Liberia, Nigeria, Benin, Ghana, Cameroon, Senegal, and South Africa. 

While shifting of the sea beds is identified as a likely cause for the fibre cuts, the exact reason is yet to be identified. Internet speeds across the affected nations have also retired to a slow pace as the internet disruption enters the fifth day.

Per Bloomberg, the estimated time for repairs is expected to take weeks or months depending on the severity of the cuts and weather conditions needed to fix. Ghana’s comms regulator also estimated that repairs would take at least five weeks. MTN Group has joined hands with ACE and WACS undersea cable systems to send a dedicated vessel to repair the affected cables.

A major cut for businesses: The Internet outages have caused problems for businesses in the affected countries. Ghana’s stock exchange moved its closing hours for trading by an hour on Thursday and Friday. BUA Cement, Nigeria’s second-largest cement producer postponed its call with investors, and Microsoft also reported outages on its cloud services and Microsoft 365 applications across the continent.

Banking services in Nigerian major banks—Zenith, Sterling, UBA—and have been affected, with users unable to access USSD services. In South Africa, MTN Group and Vodacom also reported outages to their services. The impact is estimated to affect millions of lives across the globe. 

A way out? Mobile network provider, MTN, which relies on MainOne as its network provider, was among the most affected by the recent internet cut for Nigeria. With MTN leading Nigeria's telecoms markets, several hundred users have taken to social media to express frustration as their internet speeds dwindled to less than 1Mbps.

Other internet providers, however, have come out unscathed. For instance, Globacom which runs a different submarine cable along the west coast of Africa between Nigeria and the UK was not affected. Several users of MTN have explored alternatives in Glo to surf the internet. This writer remained loyal, using an MTN router—that provides speeds of up to 45mbps—as a workaround.

People, read: rich people, have explored also alternatives in Elon Musk’s satellite-based internet Starlink to hedge against the bad internet. Others have sought refuge in VPNs—Tunnel Bear, X Vpn—and other internet service providers like Tizeti and FiberOne—who were quick to put out ads to their customers to claim they were unaffected by the cuts.

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Streaming

From 2021 to 2023, convicted rapist and murderer Thabo Bester put on a show for South African authorities. 

While incarcerated, Bester—a scam artist—hosted the launch of a digital media company that convinced people that he, posing as CEO Tom Motsepe, was in New York. In May of 2022, Bester upped his game; he faked his own death in prison by setting a corpse on fire. Then Bester and his lover and abettor Nandipha Magudumana would spend the next year being sighted across South Africa shopping…right up until the duo would be caught miles away in Tanzania in April 2023. 

Now, Showmax wants to replay Bester’s infamous tale in a documentary that could be likened to Netflix’s Inventing Anna. The company, last week, was set to release a four-part documentary on Bester’s prison escape and eventual recapture on March 15. Bester’s lover Madugumana, however, sought an injunction from the courts just 16 hours before its premiere, claiming the streaming service did not receive her permission to record or air the show. The duo claimed that the documentary would cause “irreparable harm” to them. They also requested to see the documentary before Showmax could air it. 

On Friday, a South African court ruled against the South African Bonnie and Clyde. Per the ruling, pretty much everything in the Showmax documentary is in the public domain. Judge Wilson, who resided over the case, also ruled that both Bester and Madugumana had failed to show how airing the documentary would cause harm to themselves or to the public. The trial also revealed that Showmax had paid Madugumana’s brother R30,000 ($1,600) to share his side, while her father had sent threats to deter the Showmax production team from airing the documentary. 

The show, Tracking Thabo Bester, premiered on Showmax on Friday, and its last two episodes are set for a March 22 release. 

Crypto

In a bid to regulate Nigeria’s crypto space, the country’s Securities Exchange Commission, in May 2022, released its first guideline for crypto and digital assets service providers, stylised “New Rules on Issuance, Offering Platforms and Custody of Digital Assets.”

The guidelines would become the holy grail of Nigeria’s crypto ecosystem, detailing several instructions for crypto service providers in the country. The guideline contained among many other rules, an application fee and registration fee for crypto service providers pegged at ₦100,000 ($62) and ₦30 million ($18,620) respectively. 

Fast forward to last week Friday when the regulator had a rethink to rebrand the crypto guidelines and up the application prices in the process.

The news: The SEC proposed raising its registration fees for crypto service providers from ₦30 million ($18,620) to ₦150 million ($93,000) as well as increasing application fees from ₦100,000 ($62) to about ₦300,000 ($186). The providers will also now need to have at least ₦1 billion in capital before they can be registered, up from the ₦500 million ($553,000) earlier reported. Per the SEC, the new changes were made to provide clarity and align with the CBN and other industry stakeholders' suggestions. The SEC also renamed the guidelines from “New Rules on Issuance, Offering Platforms and Custody of Digital Assets” to “Rules on Digital Assets Issuance, Offering Platforms, Exchange, and Custody.”

This move is the latest episode of Nigeria’s embattled crypto space. Last month Nigeria authorities detained two Binance executives who had flown into the country to resolve their banned website.

The latest move suggests the SEC might be aiming to get consensus or avoid conflicts with the CBN, however, the proposed increases are in their preliminary stages and are yet to get regulatory approval.

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E-commerce

Nigeria is a thriving e-commerce market, with a projected revenue of $2.6 billion by the end of 2024, and a booming logistics sector expected to reach $58.6 billion by 2029...and road deliveries leading the charge.

The ripple effects of Nigeria’s naira devaluation are, however, threatening the country’s e-commerce sector with headline inflation at 31.70% in February 2024, up from 29.90%. 

How has this affected Nigerian businesses? Businesses and their customers are now forced to navigate a landscape where fast deliveries are a luxury and affordability comes at a cost. In the past two months, the prices of next-day deliveries have doubled, and delivery companies like DHL have also doubled their prices in Nigeria by 100%.

International deliveries are also getting more expensive. In December, it cost around ₦30,000 ($18.84) to send a 2kg parcel to the UK and ₦33,000 ($20.73) to the US and Canada. Now, those prices have almost doubled to ₦65,000 ($40.82) and ₦75,000 ($47.10) respectively.

With both products and deliveries becoming expensive, will Nigerians choose between affordability or efficiency? 

Find answers here.

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Our March 9 story, "IFC sues Africa's Talking" incorrectly stated that IFC had sued Africa's Talking. Following clarification from the IFC, we immediately retracted the article. We strive to uphold ethical journalistic standards, and regret any damage this may have caused.

Crypto Tracker

Source:

Coin Name	Current Value	Day	Month
Bitcoin	$68,082	+ 3.71%	+ 32.32%
Ether	$3,645	+ 3.12%	+ 30.98%
Book of Meme	$0.016	- 10.75%	+ 1739.28%
Solana	$196.24	+ 9.10%	+ 79.45%

* Data as of 11.15 PM WAT, March 17, 2024.

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Written by: Mariam Muhammad & Faith Omoniyi

Edited by: Timi Odueso

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