In the process, mobile phones have transformed everything from Africans’ sense of empowerment to the way their countries work. Fierce competition among multinationals and prepaid phone cards have placed the devices within reach of people without bank accounts or credit records. Modern digital networks have given citizens unprecedented power to scrutinize–and criticize–their leaders. Governments intolerant of dissent have grown to fear the mighty mobile. And its proliferation has forced greater transparency in government and business alike–sometimes voluntarily, as elites seek to liberate their countrymen; sometimes enthusiastically, as they contemplate the hefty incomes that licensing fees and tax revenues will generate, and sometimes reluctantly, as popular will and a nascent middle class push them into the cyber age. For whichever reason, says Strive Masiyiwa–one of the cell-phone entrepreneurs founding a new crop of African multinationals, “what you’re seeing is a quiet revolution.”
In just over five years, the number of mobile connections in sub-Saharan Africa has surpassed the number of fixed lines installed over four decades: more than 12 million versus 9 million. (There are still more fixed lines in Manhattan than in all of sub-Saharan Africa.) In diamond-rich Botswana, more than one citizen in eight has a cell phone. South Africa boasts more than 9 million cells, compared with just 5 million conventional lines. In just a few years even poor countries like the Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Malawi have installed 100 percent digital networks with thousands of subscribers. Incredibly, on a continent where half the population survives on less than $2 a day, African mobile-phone users now spend more time–and more money–on calls than Europeans do (this despite a lower average tariff: about 25 cents a minute in Africa versus 70 cents in Europe, says Masiyiwa). Though the poor restrict their calls to off-peak periods, premium-rate business users have abandoned less-reliable fixed-line networks, boosting Africa’s average monthly mobile bill to $36 per capita, compared with $22 for Europe. Even beer sales–long an indicator of average Africans’ buying power–are falling as consumers opt to spend their limited disposable income on calls, according to South African Breweries, the continent’s largest conglomerate.
In the early years, mobile-phone entrepreneurs made easy fortunes in Africa by building small networks in countries with dilapidated state-run telephone systems. They operated in places without roads, rails or a stable power supply, where other kinds of public infrastructure had collapsed. In the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo, the number of bulky “Telecels” lined up on an official’s coffee table is still a reliable guide to his status. In the Somali capital of Mogadishu, wireless services are popular because they don’t rely on overhead lines vulnerable to stray gunfire. (Instead, the city’s three mobile operators employ militia to guard against regional warlords.)
Africa’s new digital networks are a very different kind of business. Building big national networks requires deep pockets, discipline and transparency. The old analog networks were funded with borrowed money, forcing operators to pass the exorbitant interest costs on to customers. The second-generation digital networks, by contrast, require the multimillion-dollar financing of multinationals. To win their confidence, governments across Africa have revamped telecom licensing authorities to meet Western norms. Securing an operating license is now less likely to mean being on good terms with a greedy president and more likely to involve serious calculations by hardened financiers.
Today the key to cellular success–and the explanation for its democratizing influence–is scale. “The first generation of cellular operators were really buccaneers,” says Masiyiwa, CEO of Econet, a Pan-African cell company. “Yes, you can make a lot of money out of 10,000 very rich members of your society. But you can have packages that bring down that glass ceiling and bring the thing within reach of the ordinary man and woman.”
Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, stands as both proof and proving ground. The opulence of the cavernous air-conditioned showroom of Phones-4-U on Victoria Island, the most affluent of Lagos’s three island conurbations, reflects the mobile phone’s short history in Africa. Like the crown jewels, handsets are displayed in gleaming glass cases. Immaculately made up shop assistants clickety-clack on stiletto heels across the polished marble tiles, watching for the passing limousines and luxury 4x4s of potential customers. Until recently, phones sold at up to $1,000 apiece. Each relied on analog networks built by well-connected generals who enjoyed the favor of past military regimes and reached no farther than the Lagos suburbs. As a result, Nigeria has fewer than 50,000 subscribers in a population of 120 million.
Not for long. New digital networks, using the Global System for Mobile (GSM) standard, were switched on this month. Rival operators bid more than $1 billion for four GSM licenses auctioned in January by the country’s first independent Communications Commission. Bidding took place at the Nicon Hilton in Abuja, under the supervision of British management consultants. Hourly updates aired live by the Nigerian Broadcasting Corp. turned the auction into a public spectacle. True to the national style, it is an ambitious project. The new operators must collectively notch up 6 million new connections within five years or lose their licenses. Expectations are high. The entire length of the four-lane highway linking Lagos airport to the country’s commercial center is flanked by giant billboards touting the new networks, reflecting the mass audience the new GSM industry is hoping to reach.
For Nigeria’s 28-month-old democracy, the success of the new venture is a litmus test of reform. President Olusegun Obasanjo’s administration survives only with the reluctant blessing of the powerful interests it has displaced after almost three decades of mostly military rule. The main political parties–only a few years old–are all bankrolled by the khaki guard. To date, efforts to curb corruption and revive moribund utilities have jeopardized the militariat’s interests but delivered few tangible gains. The GSM networks are a clean slate, where a new generation of technocrats aspire to keep the generals in check. “People are watching to find out how much Nigeria has changed,” says Ernest Ndukwe, chairman of the Nigerian Communications Commission. “If indeed telecom facilities improve, it’s also a stamp on the reputation of this present government and how serious they are.”
Elsewhere, old power blocs have already yielded to the vanguards of the revolution. In Zimbabwe, Strive Masiyiwa’s career began with a five-year legal battle against the government of President Robert Mugabe. When authorities turned down his bid to launch a cellular network in the mid-1990s, Masiyiwa appealed to the high court. Judges eventually accepted his claim that the crumbling state-run telephone network infringed on his constitutionally enshrined freedom of expression. Within two years of its launch in 1998, Econet was–at the height of the tech boom–the biggest company on the Harare Stock Exchange (by market valuation). Today it is a homegrown multinational, with operations spanning six African countries. Its 091 dialing code carries a subversive cachet in Zimbabwe–a subtle token of solidarity among Zimbabweans who oppose an increasingly autocratic Mugabe.
After 21 years in power, Mugabe is resisting pressure to follow his reluctant liberalization of telecoms by licensing independent radio broadcasters. For good reason: mobile phones and commercial radio have proved a fateful combination for some of Africa’s other dinosaurs. For instance, Senegal’s former president, Abdou Diouf, ended 40 years of one-party rule last year when he accepted defeat in a presidential election. There was little point in contesting the results; the count at each polling station had been relayed, ballot box by ballot box, by journalists and volunteers connected via mobile phones to Senegal’s new FM radio stations.
The power of commercial radio and mobile phones was also evident early this year in the defeat of Ghana’s National Democratic Congress. After two decades in power, the party retained control of only four provinces–all remote regions with no commercial radio. Despite assiduous efforts by ex-president Jerry Rawlings’s government to grant radio licenses to his friends, airwaves in urban areas buzz with talk shows and phone-in programs. Often critical of the ruling elite, they encourage scrutiny of sometimes reluctant Democrats. “That’s part of the liberating effect,” says Charles Wereko-Brobby, a politician who pioneered Ghana’s first pirate radio station. “With the cell phone, the radio and the Internet, you are breaking down barriers [to] information reaching people.”
Those barriers–and the consequent “information deficit”–remain formidable. In Nigeria, fewer than one person in 200 has a telephone at all. In South Africa, where under apartheid whites were 100 times more likely to have a telephone than blacks, the pent-up demand for mobile phones is massive. Eight out of 10 units sold last year use prepaid cards, as networks vie for business from township youths, market traders, taxi drivers and street hawkers. Tariffs vary widely between the premium business market and basic “vanilla” services, stripped of gimmicks such as call waiting and conference-call facilities.
The old bugbears of doing business in Africa are not yet banished. This year’s telephone auction in Nigeria, for instance, may have given corrupt generals an opportunity to launder petrodollars looted from national coffers under military rule–a risk inherent in a first-past-the-post auction that rewards the highest bidders. Moreover, the auction was poorly timed for the European telcos that had moved swiftly into other parts of Africa in the last years. Their international expansion has been reined in as shareholders take stock of the crippling prices they paid for licenses to run the third generation of Internet-compatible cellular phones in Europe (3G). Their absence created opportunities for several new African multinationals based in South Africa, Egypt and Zimbabwe, but a shortage of hard currency and successive delays means that only two networks have been switched on. In the first week of operations, many potential users have been priced out of the market by a “novelty premium” charged to the first subscribers.
But crucially, in a continent scarred by the serial failures of multilateral agencies to prescribe “structural adjustment” from afar, Africa’s newest private industry is succeeding. Research in other developing countries suggests that every dollar invested in telecoms generates up to $6 of economic activity in other sectors–from old-fashioned manufacturing and retail to new cybertechnologies. The benefits extend to foreign businesses, too, which routinely cite inadequate communications as an obstacle to investment in areas with poor infrastructure. “The biggest changes that you see in Africa derive from telecommunications, and that’s going to be sustained,” says Richard Wilkinson, an executive at Africa Online, the continent’s biggest Internet service provider.
As important, as digital networks spread their tentacles across the continent, this contemporary gold rush–unlike so many other scrambles for Africa–has not been at the expense of a long-suffering majority. Perhaps for the first time, the new wealth accrued by an entrepreneurial elite depends on delivering broader public benefits. As the volume of calls multiplies, the cost falls. The charge for an off-peak cell call in Zimbabwe, for instance, is now on a par with the fixed-line rate. Other markets can be expected to follow the trend, allowing Africa–as analysts had theorized–to skip a generation of technological development, going from analog land lines straight to digital cell.
The results of Africa’s cell revolution reach beyond the grim realms of politics and economics. Perhaps its most profound promise lies in the effect it’s having on the children of the revolution. On the far side of the road where Trevor Meintjes watches over parked cars, a queue of razor-headed homeboys gathers every Wednesday evening outside the studios of Yfm, South Africa’s first black-run hip-hop radio station. Many are schoolchildren–boys in striped ties, girls wearing fake Italian sportswear sold by street hawkers in Soweto.
Tonight is the weekly Rap Activity Jam, when hopefuls flock to the studio to perform in any of South Africa’s 11 official languages–making Yfm the first of the country’s commercial media to abandon the apartheid-era convention of single-language broadcasting. These kids are enjoying a real African renaissance, a chance at self-expression denied to previous generations. The sound is polyglot and multiform–Shangaan techno, Xhosa house, styles absorbed from a world their parents at their age barely knew existed. More aspiring rappers clog the switchboard, waiting to audition by phone. “Twenty seconds is enough to know they can flow,” says DJ Fresh, opening a fader on the studio desk.
The airwaves fill with the sound of four 12-year-old girls rapping their account of preteen sexual politics in the “colored” township of Eldorado Park. On the far side of the studio glass sits Hugh Masekela, the legendary jazz trumpeter, waiting to be interviewed. A vociferous critic of what he calls “imperialist” U.S. hip-hop, he nods approval, ignoring the crackle of the cell phone. In much the same way that Masekela imbibed the potent riffs of American jazz in the 1950s, the girlish voices rapping into the remote handset have customized an imported idiom to tell their own story. And used what was once a rich man’s toy to do it.
