Nick Clegg: Nigeria is Epicenter for Tech Dynamism in Africa
President, Global Affairs at Meta, Nick Clegg, who visited Nigeria last week, spoke about the multinational technology company’s forthcoming monetisation tools that will allow content creators in Nigeria, just like their peers in America, Australia, Canada and South Korea, to make money through advertisement and other features on Facebook and Instagram from June this year. He also spoke about the huge talents in the Nigeria technology ecosystem. Obinna Chima brings the excerpts:
You have been in Nigeria for some days now, what can you say about the country’s tech ecosystem and why are you in Nigeria?
Nigeria and Lagos in particular, is the epicenter for a lot of tech dynamism in the online community and the online economy in Africa. It is also a huge country with 250 million people in a continent which is really going to grow in significance as by the middle of the century. It is estimated that one in four of the workforce across the world will be African. It’s very young population as 70 per cent of the population is below the age of 30 years. I just discovered from countless Nigerian creators, content creators, whether it’s people designing online tools for education, for health, for humor, for cooking for fashion, that our platforms are being used by lots of very inspiring, funny and creative folks particularly here in Lagos, to build their brands and to earn their living. I was very pleased to be able to explain to the creators I met, many of them who got millions of followers, some 10 million, some 12 million, 15 million followers and some even more. These are people who’ve built amazing businesses that soon, in the next few months, they would be able to monetise their work more fully on Facebook and Instagram, which is something they’ve quite rightly been demanding for some time. But look, at the end of the day, we’re a platform, we’re not selling hardware. We’ve augmented virtual reality, but we’re not principally a phone manufacturer. We’re not like a retailer like Amazon that sends sort of box to your front door. We are an online platform and we enable people not only to express themselves, but also to earn a living on online and of course, our advertising system is entirely oriented to small businesses. We’re a big company, but our business is small business and millions of small businesses, including many here in Nigeria, use our tools to run ads online to reach their customers in a way that in the old days, only big companies with big marketing budgets could do. And this is a very small business oriented economy. So, the final reason why I’m here is that we’ve spent many years investing in the underlying infrastructure to improve connectivity of Nigeria, both internally and with the rest of the world, and we’ve landed not far from here (Lagos), two landing points in Nigeria, for the two Africa subsea cables, which by a long way, are the most powerful subsea cable ever laid. It will have more than two times the capacity of all subsea cables put together. By the way, it will add to the resilience of connectivity in Nigeria. You would have seen the news on the disruptions to subsea cables in the Red Sea, off the coast of Ivory Coast. The way we’ve built our subsea cables to Africa is that it’s sunk by 50 per cent more under the seabed, so it’ll be less susceptible to that disruption, which I think will enhance connectivity. Of course, lots of people I spoke to, whether it was the President, Bola Tinubu; the minister whether it was the Governor of Lagos, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, wanted to also talk about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and how AI is going to affect the Nigerian economy and we are a major player globally in the emerging generative AI economy. But we’re unique in terms of supporting Nigerian creators, developers, researchers and businesses, because we uniquely, certainly amongst the big American platforms, we open source our AI technology, we give it away. We allow people to use it to run on their laptop or desktop for free. And that’s something we’re very proud of.
How will the monetisation for creators work and since you talked about the subsea cables, there is this talk that the capacity of the existing subsea cables is not being fully utilised with current capacity utilisation estimated at about 20 per cent. What is your take on that?
There are two questions and I will take them one by one. Firstly, in terms of global reach of creators, Nigerian creators already have global reach. I was speaking with Brother Shaggi, a Nigerian content creator and he said he was in Dubai recently and suddenly some Indian tourists were screaming his name and wanted to take photograph with him. He’s got huge presence in the United States, the United Kingdom, India and several other countries. So, he’s got that reach already. But what he doesn’t have, which he would soon have is the ability to run advertisements on streams, to run advertisements alongside reels and he doesn’t have the ability to use some of the other monetisation tools on Instagram, Instagram stars, Instagram gifts, that creators do elsewhere in the world and that’s what we would now make available to him. So, he has got the international reach. He is obviously a very successful creator. But what he’s not able to do at the moment is to turn that creative reach into advertisements and other monetisation plays that he can do on Instagram and Facebook. He’s having to basically monetise off the platform. I think he’s got the international reach. That won’t change. What he hasn’t and is missing sort of is the mile, if I could put it like that, it is the monetisation tools, which I very much hope will be available to him very soon. Certainly by June this year at the latest he would have that. On the second question, there’s just so many different components to this puzzle. You know, Nigeria is, in one sense, lucky that it’s got a lot of subsea cables. That’s not the case for other countries in Africa. Clearly it depends slightly country by country. We’ve got 19 landing points to Africa or around the circumference of the continent. There are some countries where it is by far the most significant landing whereas in Nigeria, of course, the two landing points are significant because of the extra capacity they bring. But Nigeria compared to other African countries has got quite a diversity of subsea cable provision already.
Look, the issue there is the connectivity from the landing point, inland and between businesses and so on.
The government as I learnt from my meetings with the President and the minister in Abuja, are trying to find different ways of leveraging external expertise and external capital to increase internal connectivity. That will happen over time and I think the combination and obviously the huge changes in the online world and eruption in synthetic content and generative AI content online will increase capacity. I suspect they will more than fulfill the capacity that is there currently with time. So, I see it more as a time lag if I can put it like that.
In specific terms, how would creators benefit from monetisation and how much more money will they be getting?
It depends on how successfully they are. We are providing people with tools they can use and it is up to them to use them intelligently and it is up to them to use them to maximum commercial effect.