Kai Wulff, Executive Vice-President, Balton CP Group, the parent company of Dizengoff Nigeria, in this interview with BusinessDay’s Frank Eleanya opens up on the investment and strategies the company is deploying in connecting millions of Nigerians and institutions via public Wi-Fi.
In your experience, as one of the leading technology and innovation companies, with strong market share in the African market, how do you see the level of tech development on the continent?
I believe Africa can leapfrog the rest of the world in terms of technology and innovation rather than just copying the present and now dated technologies around the world. The ‘hub and spoke’ systems that are replicated in the rest of the world cost a lot of money to maintain and are outdated and no longer relevant.
In Nigeria just about everybody has a smartphone. In fact, today we were out in suburb of Ajegunle in Lagos where surveys show that 70 per cent of the people there have a smartphone. Smartphone owners no longer need a central organizing entity that teaches them how to trade or tells them how to learn or where to learn things; they can get all this information online. If you give people connectivity and a smartphone, people organize themselves in a communal way and you generate natural peer-to-peer connections, much in the same way as the internet is organized. You can have some super nodes that may be your universities or technical colleges, where you have meeting points, testing theories and exchanges with like-minded people. If you organize it more on how society originally organized itself, Nigeria could leapfrog anything, as knowledge transfer through peer-to-peer connectivity, is faster than the traditional ways of information exchange and you will get the best knowledge to the person instead of having a teacher enforcing it, or an institution with a curriculum or someone deciding on a business case to give you the knowledge or the tools to trade products or services. I think the ingenuity and creativity that African people and not unsurprisingly Nigerians have, is one of the key strengths that Africa as a continent has.
Technology solves the problems in a society. You can’t just take knowledge and force fit it on a society. It does not work like that.
Dizengoff is known for its agri-business. But you also have a vibrant technology business. What have you been doing in this space in terms of investment?
I consult for a company called Balton CP, the parent company for Dizengoff WA. Dizengoff has been in the technology business for about 15 years now. We have come from an agricultural, essentially a trading background and when I joined the Company, we were just supplying and integrating technology, ‘moving boxes’ as I call it and I saw the need to think differently and look at solving social problems through technology.
We need to move the needle and be aggressive in our evolving models evolving focusing the business on how we can create systems that are more efficient, more impactful, yet costing customers and consumers, less.
We provide skills transfer through our local staff and have amassed a great deal of experience in networks and communication technologies, from our Motorola days. I brought software development capability to the table. We have now developed software and Artificial Intelligence (AI) globally, but the implementation and customization has to be done locally. We specialise in bringing efficiencies and improving productivity in both the work-place and society as a whole.
The other area we are focusing on is to bring technology to the fields of security: physical security, data and cyber security. We also provide advanced technologies like cyber analytics. The only way you can really protect a network these days is through advanced cyber analytics. Companies need to know what users are doing and if they are staying too long in a specific area of the network on a particular website, you have to know why. Most cyber-attacks happen from within the business’s network and that is why one needs cyber analytics. Businesses, unfortunately, generally only see security as a cost. What we do will not cost you money. There is no company in Africa but us offering this service and solution. What I’m saying is that we can the same analytics software to assist in making business decisions and how to make your business more efficient. If we know who is working on what, we can start writing algorithms that allow businesses to distribute the workload in a different and more efficient way. Instead of costing money just to protect you, we can help businesses save money whilst at the same time providing that essential level of cyber-protection. It is an approach that only Dizengoff provides in Africa at this stage.
What are the problems you have identified in the Nigerian education system that you are using technology to solve?
The Nigerian education system is underfunded, so the general impression is that you are not getting quality educators. Teachers struggle to get a living wage in many instances, so those that could potentially be good educators, rather study for a different vocation where the pay is better. This leaves a shortage in the system which then attracts those that don’t have the natural talent or passion to educate – often those who are not accepted for courses they would like to follow and fall back on education qualification. These individuals then become the educators and have to transfer knowledge to the youth of the country, when it’s the last thing they want to be doing. If one looks at a modern education system, the teacher’s role is to encourage learning and to facilitate collaboration between students. The teacher is no longer the only custodian of knowledge. In Nigeria today everything, including the curriculum is written with the 1960s in mind, there is no idea exchange at all and it is not just Nigeria, many African countries are falling behind the education system of the West. Students are not learning enough and with out-dated curricula, the quality of learning is even worse; more hours, more curricula and less learning.
Modern education systems provide the tools and teach one how to search for the answer and let you find it. Everything we have learnt from 60,000BC to the Enlightenment Period which started in the 1700s is only a single unit of learning. Then from the Enlightenment Period to Industrial Revolution, around roughly 150 years, knowledge doubled. From Industrial Revolution to the 80s we had a ten-fold increase in knowledge. From then till now we have grown our knowledge a further 20 times.
Learning in a society should be peer-to-peer learning. We have to facilitate interaction and collaboration between the students, as in this way we will be transferring mountains of knowledge, way more than the teachers can do on their own. STEM education is an outcome of interest. It is not force-fed. You can’t force someone to learn technology or maths because if they have no interest in the subject, it can’t work. The job of an education system is to show people what they can do and allow them to pick the things they really want to focus on.
We are not too far away from having an AI and brain interface, so why would one want to store knowledge, the way this was done in the past? Nowadays, I learn language, because I want to understand the culture. I don’t really need it for business anymore, as an English speaking person all I have to do is use Google translate or Baidu translate. Society has to change. Education has to change in line with the modern world. This is why it is not right to just speak about the funding of education; it is about a radical change in the education system.
At Dizengoff we have to look for the most efficient way to connect people. Connectivity creates learning energy, engenders efficiencies and it allows society to organize itself better – in a proper societal, peer-to-peer fashion.
Speaking of connectivity, Nigeria has different broadband options including fixed, mobile and satellite broadband, yet we are still only scratching the surface in terms of leveraging the power of the net. What option do you think we should be focusing more on to achieve more and what is Dizengoff doing about this?
It comes down to individual user cases, due to the fact, that operators selling airtime or data, are not really selling the ‘Why’ they are doing this. Until people figure out and understand ‘Why’ they buy data, you won’t have a real reason to get them to pay for data. If they understand that they are getting something way more powerful that just connectivity i.e. they are getting a world of knowledge and information regarding just about anything – then you have a principle for payment. For example: for a rural trader, the more you have to travel to the centre of the city with your product to market it – the less you will make due to the cost of this exercise. In the present environment one is paying for data, but the real issue is that the data is presently not making your business more efficient. The revolution brewing on the business side is how to figure out a way that every person in the village that is producing the goods for the city-market can contribute to an ecosystem of trade and trade information. If those providing this information and who benefit from this information financially, would pay for the data – then you have the birth of a new way of financing data – paid for by those benefiting not consumers of the data.
Think of it this way; could an agribusiness company save thousands of dollars in transport charges if it was able to finance connectivity for the off takers? Nobody looks at it this way.
When we built the Kenya Wi-Fi network in 2005, it was the first metro-fibre solution with blanket coverage. We did not charge for the data. What we did was get organisations like Coca-Cola to sponsor a week’s data, the following weeks we would get the World Health Organization (WHO) involved and the week thereon another institution or organization. We never charged the end-user for any data – it ended up all being sponsored. The norm of the time was to say that the voucher cost would kill the business, but in the end the company made a lot of money, using the above solution. The solution became self-funding, and it turned out to be a win-win situation for all involved.
It is the same model we are trying to convince the operators in Nigeria to adopt. It would include a number of industries, all working together to say how they could benefit out of people being connected. Everyone knows that if you give people access, knowledge goes up, but you can actually monetise this as well as measuring it; then you really are in business. What we are doing is to show our capability as Dizengoff to design, rollout and maintain any size of network and bring creative win-win financing models to the table.
We can build nationwide networks and provide business cases, which approach solutions in a different way. I was personally involved in the business case on Project Loon for Google, so if you are asking me what the right technology is, I can honestly say the above is the route we have to follow. This is because it’s about ‘horses for courses’. In rural areas you can have a floating base station like Project Loon, it’s relatively cheap to do and you don’t need a lot of bandwidth per square km. But this technology will not work in the city it as it is expensive to build and maintain. It will involve a lot of analysis to know where to use which technologies. We won the contract in Kenya with Safaricom to roll out a $45m Ruckus equipment project, high-density Wi-Fi covering, not only in the major cities, but the towns too. We are not yet in the villages, but we are working on this in collaboration with schools. We have asked Safaricom to connect as many schools as possible, where we put in the Wi-Fi transmitters and from there reach the whole surrounding community and step by step cover the whole country. If you analyse and tactically build the business proposition, you do not need to have to sell data to have a profitable business case.
You have approached University of Lagos for collaboration and I understand you are also talking with the Government. From experience, discussions with public institutions never go as planned. Are you anticipating this and how do you plan to manage it?
I think if you push it through the government in the traditional way you will not be successful, because of some of the same challenges you have mentioned. I believe that you have to show government what’s possible by taking on a project such as the government offices of Lagos State, connecting them in a way to make their work more efficient. Once this has been done, productivity has increased and cost savings have been made, they will be more than willing to support other Government initiatives and projects. This is a step by step process, prove the business case, deliver the results and show then the benefits. In essence, grow together.
When it comes to the social impact of Wi-Fi solutions, you have to bring in all the stakeholders who will benefit from the project, show them what is achievable and then provide a one-stop build and execute solution. This is what we are trying to achieve at Dizengoff.
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