Funke Opeke: Nigeria’s cyber revolutionary
Everywhere she looks in Nigeria, Opeke notices missed opportunities. But the founder and CEO of Main One Cable Company also sees ways to address them.
When the 54-year-old returned to Nigeria in 2005, after 20 years and a successful telecoms career in the US, she was shocked by the low level of internet connectivity in her country of birth.
“While the developed world was fully connected, here in Nigeria the average young person didn’t know what the internet was,” she remembers.
One reason was that most of the online communication in Africa’s most populous country ran through satellite networks. There was no stable physical connection to the internet.
The trained electrical engineer realised that the core infrastructure for the internet needed to be fixed. At first, she tried to do this by joining the Nigerian public telecoms company, NITEL. When that didn’t work out, she decided to fix it herself.
“We can’t leave an entire generation of young people without proper access to the internet,” she says.
In 2008, Opeke started Main One Cable Company, which proceeded to lay a 7,000km fibre optic cable across the bottom of the ocean, from Portugal to Nigeria. The project required $240m to be raised.
It was an adventure, but one she isn’t necessarily sure she would embark upon again. Still, she pulled it off, and the result caused nothing short of a cyber-revolution in what is now Africa’s biggest economy.
Since its launch in 2010, the Main One Cable Company has become the provider to the providers, the broadband connection without which they couldn’t exist. Internet banking in Nigeria has taken a giant leap forward because of the possibilities broadband offered, and local e-commerce has blossomed with the emergence of mail order companies like Konga and Jumia, online booking agency hotels.ng, discount site DealDey, and the introduction last year of the Uber app in Lagos.
When Google comes to Nigeria, it is Funke Opeke they talk to, and when the University of Lagos is thinking about a broadband network on campus, it is Main One with whom they partner. In 2012, she received the CNBC All Africa Businesswoman of the Year award.
Yet, when she first heard that we would like to profile her, Opeke was surprised. “What’s so interesting about me?” she wondered.
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