Content creators in America, Australia, Canada and South Korea were the first to be able to earn through “Ads on Reels,” in 2023, a performance-based program that pays according to how the number of plays their reels get. 

“With a performance-based model, creators can focus on the content that’s resonating with their audience and helping them grow,” Meta said in May 2023 after months of testing the program. 

On Friday, Clegg hosted some of Nigeria’s top creators in their Lagos office as part of a week-long visit to South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria, some of its important African markets. 

“Nigerian creators have global reach,” Clegg said in a conversation with TechCabal on Friday afternoon, pointing out that creators will soon have “the ability to run ads in-stream and use other tools such as Instagram stars and gifts that are available to creators elsewhere in the world.” 

Clegg also spoke about Meta’s 45,000km subsea cables, which landed in Lagos and Uyo in February 2024. It was a timely conversation, one week after damages to subsea cables across Africa slowed down internet service and disrupted banking in at least two countries. 

“The way we built to Africa is that [the subsea cables] are sunk by 50% more under the seabed, so it will be less susceptible to that disruption, which I think will enhance connectivity,” Clegg shared. 

But connectivity and resilience are not the only issues. Funke Opeke, the CEO of MainOne, a fibre operator acquired by Equinix, said in 2018 that the broadband capacity of most fibre providers was underutilised. 

Clegg acknowledged the problem, adding that he had met Funke Opeke during the week and also spoken about underutilisation with the government. 

“I learned from my meetings with the President and the minister in Abuja yesterday that they are very focused on this and trying to fund different ways of leveraging external expertise and capital to increase internal connectivity. That will happen over time.”

Seacom, a South African internet connectivity provider, told its customers that it is experiencing a service-affecting outage via the West African Cable System, a submarine network.

MainOne, a major internet provider for most Nigerian banks and internet providers, also suffered a major fibre cut in Ghana that has knocked many major Nigerian banks offline, according to internal communication sent to bank staff and seen by TechCabal. As a result, customers of major Nigerian banks cannot access their banking apps or use any USSD service.

Multiple sources have also confirmed that they have been unable to use their banking apps or access the internet smoothly since Thursday morning. Sterling Bank, a Nigerian bank, has issued a communication to customers informing them that some online banking activities have been “experiencing difficulties”. Lemfi, an African remittance startup, has also informed customers that it is experiencing a downtime.

“A technical team is actively working on a solution,” someone familiar with MainOne’s business told TechCabal.

A spokesperson for MainOne declined to comment on the situation.

“Traffic is currently being rerouted via alternate paths, with no current congestion. However, services towards Europe from Maputo and South Africa are at risk should the alternate paths fail,” a statement from Seacom said.

Thursday’s internet outage extends beyond Nigeria, with South African internet users also experiencing slow speeds and unresponsive internet. According to news24, Vodacom confirmed that multiple subsea cable failures between South Africa and Europe were impacting several network providers.

Several other submarine cables such as AAE1, EIG have also suffered outages across Africa.

Following the subsea cable cuts, which affected the Africa Coast to Europe (ACE), the West African Submarine Cable, and MainOne cables, MTN Group’s Bayobab, a digital connectivity solutions company, issued a statement on Friday informing its customer that ACE and WASC are already being repaired. 

“We are working with the cable consortiums and partners to enhance interconnection along both the west and east coasts, with further interconnections between WACS and Equiano, and the introduction of the end-to-end connection between WACS on the west coast and EASSy on the east coast,” the statement said. 

Main One has also issued a statement saying that it is “working with cable systems that are not affected by this incident or previous outages to secure restoration capacity”.

Editor’s note: This article was updated on March 15 to reflect statements from Bayobab and MainOne.

With 32 full-time employees, the layoffs will affect all employees not in core operations, one person familiar with Spleet’s business said. The company pushed back against this claim but declined to share specifics.

“I cannot comment on the number of people that will be affected; we’re still in the middle of the process,” said Adetola Adesanmi, the company’s CEO.

Founded in 2017, Spleet allows Nigerians to rent properties and pay monthly instead of the typical yearly rental charged in many parts of Lagos.

The argument for property tech startups like Spleet is that monthly rental arrangements allow people to plan around their finances better. The asset-light model revolves around properties the company leases.

“We’re letting go of some team members because when prices went up, landlords began renewing at 0.8 to 2.2x last year’s rent,” said Adesanmi. “Many of our tenants can’t afford that, and the best way to continue as a business is to lay off people.”

The company told employees about the layoffs at an all-hands meeting on Tuesday, two people present at those discussions said. “There will be difficult decisions because of the present macroeconomic conditions,” one person at the meeting recalls the CEO saying. 

Another person also said the company’s revenues were under pressure last month, citing significant revenue dropoffs that TechCabal could not immediately confirm. 

In Nigeria, soaring inflation and massive currency devaluation is pushing property owners who partner with Spleet to demand more value for their property. Some of these properties are in prime areas of Lagos and already come at a steep cost relative to the city’s average monthly income. 

The property tech sector in Nigeria enjoyed attention and funding from 2018, with players like Fibre, Spleet and Muster pioneering a pay-per-month model they claimed would revolutionise Nigeria’s housing market and solve a worrying housing deficit.

Yet, Nigeria’s real estate market has resisted disruption, with some of those startups eventually closing their doors. The website of Fibre, the pioneer startup that sent termination notices to tenants in 2021, is no longer reachable.

“We still have a business,” Adesanmi said, refuting any insinuation that the company may be winding down. 

*This is a developing story

Weeks after Amazon Prime beat a hasty retreat from Africa, Showmax, the streaming service majorly owned by MultiChoice, presented a spectacle that shows how much it is betting the house on African streaming. 

For four days in the first week of February, the Showmax team went to great lengths to show its guests—journalists whose stock in trade is skepticism—who were in Johannesburg for a grand launch, how much it believes in its ability to crack Subscription Video On Demand (SVOD) in Africa. 

For months, the company has talked up Showmax 2.0, its second iteration, the new technology that underpins the new app, the partnerships it believes will serve as a competitive advantage, and its unique understanding of the African market. A fun game would be taking a shot whenever a Showmax executive mentions their unique understanding of the African market. 

But this is not a game. Instead, last week was the final stretch before it migrates all of the data from the old app on February 12. It was about celebrating the sheer amount of work that has gone into this moment: the beginning of what the company hopes will be a long march into dominating and making a solid business of African video streaming. 

Showmax, which started as an idea three years ago, will be the major drive of MultiChoice’s goal of attracting 50 million paying subscribers in five years—a fifth of Netflix’s 260 million subscribers in Q4 2023. However, all markets are not created equal, and 50 million paying subscribers in the African market is ambitious. A mix of a startup mentality and riding the coattails of an established parent business will be critical for success. 

“We’re over here because we began as a startup, and we wanted that startup mentality. We wanted to begin without the guidance of our parent company,” said a member of the company’s marketing team, explaining why the Showmax office sits in the corner of the MultiChoice campus, away from the rest of the main building. 

Showmax’s office is quirky and has all the clichés of a fashionable startup office in the middle of a big launch: whiteboards in spaces designated as war rooms, employees hunched over big screens, drinking too much coffee and looking stressed, and a Lego board the design team uses to destress.
“We had more than three meetings every day,” one person tells me, explaining the pace of work in the lead-up to the launch party. Everything had to be right. 

As launches go, Showmax pulled off a masterclass in branding, with its colourful X logo prominent. The stars of some of its original shows, like Wura, The Real Housewives of Abuja, Spinners, and Adulting, were on hand, and the team created experience booths for those shows. 

Despite the entertainment, the conversations were serious, and the theme was Showmax’s plan to become the king of African streaming. While most tech publications would call it a bet, Andrea Zappia, the former Sky executive recently named chairman of the Showmax, disagrees.

“This is a logical investment,” he told an excited crowd of about 400 people at the MultiChoice dome, the venue of the launch, on Tuesday evening. Alongside Calvo Mawela, the group CEO of MultiChoice, the pair discussed some behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing that made this iteration of Showmax possible. 

“It took a lot of convincing for these partners (Comcast, NBCU) to make their first investment in Africa,” said Mawela, referring to NBCU’s 30% equity investment in the streaming company. The conversations began in 2020 and were slowed down by the pandemic, but now everything is in place.

Technology, check. Important partnerships, check. Extensive investment, check. Passion, check. 

Now the race is on for MultiChoice, a publicly listed company, to show its shareholders that it can pull off this bold bet. And if it’s feeling any pressure from Canal+ breathing down its neck, the company’s executives and employees didn’t show it. 

Just before the party started, Mawela told the crowd, “Showmax and streaming are not just a project, it’s a passion.” 

But passion doesn’t pay any bills. The company has set its own goals publicly, and now we must measure success or failure by its ability to capture 50 million paying subscribers by 2029. The journey starts now. 

Per Bloomberg, the offer from Canal+ is 105 Rands per share, a significant markup on MultiChoice’s current share price of 79 Rands. 

Canal+ increased its focus on Africa in the past decade and has grown from just 1 million African subscribers in 2016 to 7.6 million in 2023. In July 2019, it bought ROK Studios, a prolific Nigerian film production company, from IrokoTV to increase its slate of original content offerings. 

A timeline of Vivendi’s MultiChoice stake 

Buying MultiChoice will represent a grand step in Vivendi’s African ambitions if it can get the deal over the line. With Vivendi’s history of hostile takeovers, industry watchers had predicted it would attempt the same play with MultiChoice. 

In October 2015, Vivendi spent €180 million to acquire minority stakes in two publicly traded gaming companies, Gameloft (6.2%) and Ubisoft (6.6%), eventually buying a 10% stake in each company, a TechCabal report from 2020 said. 

It also made a hostile takeover of Gameloft by buying over 30% of the company before convincing other shareholders to sell their stakes. In June 2016, Gameloft became a Vivendi subsidiary.

Since 2020, Canal+ has increased its stake in MultiChoice from 20.1% to around 32.6%. In 2022, Vivendi received $40m in dividends from Multichoice Group (up from $23.3m in 2021).

Under South African law, Canal+ must make a mandatory takeover offer when its shareholding reaches 35%. But a complete takeover of MultiChoice may be impossible in the near future.

Regulation pumps the brakes 

By law, Canal+, a foreign company, cannot have more than 20% of the voting rights on the board of directors of a South African broadcaster. MultiChoice enforces this rule through a voting rights cap.

“A full takeover of MultiChoice looks unlikely to us,” said a Bloomberg intelligence analyst in February 2023.  

The new Showmax, which represents one of the company’s most significant investments for the future, has three subscription tiers: entertainment, Premier League and a bundle subscription of entertainment and the Premier League. 

The mobile-only subscription for the Premier League, an incredibly popular sporting offering in Africa, will cost ₦2,900, ten times cheaper than the premium subscription for DStv, its cable TV offering. 

A mobile-only entertainment subscription will cost ₦1,200 a month, while a mobile bundle of entertainment and the Premier League will only cost ₦3,200. 

“Nobody understands this market like we do,” said Arinola Shobande, the marketing manager of Showmax, referring not only to the product’s pricing but the “data economy” built into it. “You can watch Showmax for 24 hours for just 1GB of data,” Arinola added, addressing one of the biggest obstacles to streaming on the African continent. 

Given its extensive investment into Showmax, MultiChoice is targeting 50 million subscribers in the next five years. In March, it inked a partnership with NBCUniversal, and the new app will use NBCU’s Peacock technology platform. The company will pay R247 million (~$13 million) to license that technology for seven years and give NBCU a 30% stake in a new holding group.

The relaunch of Showmax coincides with increasing competition in Africa’s SVOD sector. Foreign players like Netflix and Amazon Prime are increasing their spend on the continent, partnering with local studios to churn out original content. 

Yet, Multichoice will be buoyed by two considerations. First, a recent research from Omdia Research, a tech research firm, showed that Showmax is Africa’s video streaming market leader with 1.8 million subscribers. The second is its library of original content, which is likely the largest in Africa. With popular entertainment offerings like Big Brother Nigeria and original shows like Wura, the company believes that nobody understands the market as it does. 

In 2024, it will launch 21 new originals as it prepares for a February 23 launch. The new app will be available for download by January 23.

“The email was unauthorised and was immediately recalled,” a highly-placed person at the company told TechCabal.

“After a thorough analysis of the current market dynamics and their impact on our business model, Woven Finance has resolved to cease its payment services operations in the first quarter of 2024,” part of the company’s Wednesday email said.

The company also denied a crucial detail in the email where it told customers that it would transfer its services to Hydrogen, a fintech owned by the Access Group. “There are no plans to transfer any service,” the same source said, perhaps referring to the Payment Solution Service Providers (PSSP) licence it received in 2022.

The fintech told TechCabal that it would send communication clarifying the error and that it continues to operate until shareholders and the company’s board decide otherwise.

Woven Finance is backed by Trium, the venture arm of the Coronation Group, which includes companies like Coronation Merchant Bank and Coronation Insurance (formerly WAPIC).

*This is a developing story

The fintech, which was fully licensed by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) in 2022, and has a Payment Solutions Service Provider (PSSP) licence, will transfer its services to Hydrogen, a fintech company owned and run by Access Bank. Becoming part of Hydrogen will help Access Bank compete with GTCO’s fintech, Squad. Kemi Okusanya, a former General Manager at Visa West Africa, leads hydrogen. 

“After a thorough analysis of the current market dynamics and their impact on our business model, Woven Finance has resolved to cease its payment services operations in the first quarter of 2024,” Woven Finance said in an email to customers. 

Woven Finance Origin story

Woven Finance, which set out to “demystify digital payments,” was founded in 2020 by Adedeji Olowe. It sold itself to business owners by offering a virtual account with which they could collect payments, eliminating common problems like reconciliation and settlements.

The company’s founder, Olowe, also ran Trium, the technology venture fund for the Coronation Group. The Coronation Group, which includes companies like Coronation Merchant Bank and Coronation Insurance (formerly WAPIC), became part of Access Bank after the acquisition of Intercontinental Bank. 

But in 2011, a directive from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) forced banks to divest their non-banking businesses or restructure into holding companies. At the time, Access Bank–which adopted a holding company structure in 2022–chose to spin off the Coronation Group. 

While it remains unclear the exact dynamics that led Woven Finance to discontinue operations, one theory is that increasing competition from established fintechs and other bank-led fintechs like Squad, Zest and Hydrogen may have prompted the decision.

*This is a developing story

He is charged with conspiracy, securities fraud and making false filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The three charges carry a maximum sentence of 45 years; prosecutors say Mmobuosi is at large. 

According to the indictment, Mmobuosi “orchestrated a scheme to enrich himself by falsely representing that Nigerian companies he founded, Tingo Mobile and Tingo Foods, were operational, profitable businesses generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, respectively.”

In 2022, Tingo Group reported that it had cash and cash equivalent of $461.7 million for the fiscal year. Investigations showed that its bank accounts held less than $50 in total.

Mmobuosi propped up his businesses in interviews over the years and, in 2021, told one publication that Tingo had 12 million users and a valuation of $6.3 billion. He told several publications about plans to list on the New York Stock Exchange by 2021. 

In reality, Tingo was listed on the Nasdaq after a series of reverse mergers allegedly based on fake financials. Getting listed on the Nasdaq gave Mmobuosi and his companies access to US investors and capital. The U.S. prosecutors say he was able to siphon an estimated $16 million from Tingo Group. 

The house of cards, propped up by grand claims, was short-lived. A report by Hinderburg Research, the infamous American short seller, soon called Tingo’s financials and operations into question, branding it a fraud of massive proportions. 

On December 18, the SEC announced an investigation into the company, suspending trading in Tingo’s shares. Two days later, Dozy Mmobuosi temporarily stepped down. 

Dozy Mmobuosi and all three of Tingo’s subsidiaries are listed as defendants in the case with charges ranging from insider trading, lying to auditors, and failing to disclose the sale of millions of common shares for which he was the ultimate beneficial owner and internal controls violations.

The announcement of the charges comes one month after the SEC formally launched an investigation into Tingo Group. The agency also suspended trading in the shares of the self-described agritech company.

Part of the SEC’s filing said, “Mmobuosi made and caused the entities to make material misrepresentations about their business operations and financial success in press releases, periodic SEC filings.”

One significant misrepresentation, for instance, is that while Tingo Group reported having cash and cash equivalent of $461.7 million for the fiscal year 2022, its bank accounts held less than $50 in total. The SEC also said Mmobuosi “fraudulently obtained hundreds of millions in money or property through these schemes, and that Mmobuosi has siphoned off funds for his personal benefit, including purchases of luxury cars and travel on private jets, as well as an unsuccessful attempt to acquire an English Football Club Premier League team, among other things.”

Tingo Group was the subject of an explosive report published by Hindenburg Group, the famous American short seller. The research firm called Tingo Group an “exceptionally obvious scam with completely fabricated financials” in June 2023.

*This is a developing story