Nigeria's growing video game industry

It's a common enough scenario in Nigeria and across Africa: how to get rid of pesky mosquitoes whose buzzing disturbs sleep and whose bites can carry malaria and other diseases.

Two Nigerian start-ups have tapped this -- and other aspects and quirks of daily life in Africa -- to create online and mobile phone video games that are winning fans around the world.

It's easy to see why "Mosquito Smasher" -- which has earned comparisons to "Angry Birds", the worldwide mobile app success of recent years -- might be a hit.

The graphics are simple, the aim clear and the reward immediate: squash as many of the blood-sucking parasites as possible under your thumb with a satisfying "Splat!"

Another, the highly popular "Okada Ride", has players guide a motorcycle-taxi driver around roadside street vendors, road-blocks and police in the notorious traffic of Lagos, a sprawling metropolis of nearly 20 million people.

"What I like about Nigerian video games, it's one: the local content, because it tends to give you that everyday feel," said Chucks Olloh, 32, a big fan.

"For example the 'Okada' hussle, it tells you how you ride on your bike, trying to avoid so many obstacles on your way home or on your way to work," said the computer programmer from Lagos.

"Two: it's very simple. All you have to do is to gain as much points as possible and avoid the obstacles."

- An African flavour -

The worldwide video games industry, worth more than $63 billion (46 billion euros) in 2012, is expected to reach nearly $87 billion in 2017, PricewaterhouseCoopers said in a recent study.

And while the African market has not figured prominently on the radar of game developers, the founders of Maliyo -- the makers of "Mosquito Smasher" and "Okada Ride" -- and Kuluya are hoping to change that.

Both firms were launched about 18 months ago and draw inspiration from life in Lagos. Kuluya -- "action" in the Igbo language of southern Nigeria -- has already created some 70 games.

It hopes to reach one million mobile telephone users by the end of June and has fans well beyond Nigeria's borders.

"In Africa, we have a lot of downloads from Ghana, Kenya and South Africa," said Lakunle Ogungbamila, who runs Kuluya.

"There was a particular game that a lot of people downloaded in Ethiopia, I'm not sure why. It's called 'Ma Hauchi': it's a hunter who is shooting vultures. A very simple game...

"Also, we get a lot of downloads from China, India, Thailand, Taiwan."

- 'Mobile is massive' -

Adapting the games to the platforms that Africans use is vital, said Ogungbamila and Maliyo founder Hugo Obi.

Unlike in Europe or the United States, sales of games consoles are low in Africa and there is a preference for playing on-line.

Internet access comes rarely via home broadband hubs but instead -- and increasingly -- via smartphones.

"Mobile is massive in this part of the world. It has the highest penetration, especially for Internet users. And we are exporting a lot of our games onto mobiles," Maliyo's Obi told AFP.

Figures clearly show the trend in Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation with 170 million residents and nearly 100 million mobile phone users in 2012.

In 2011, it is estimated that 46 million people used Internet, up from 2008 when there were only 11 million Internet users.

Obi, who invented "Mosquito Smasher", spent 10 years in Britain running a recruitment company before returning home in 2012 to set up his on-line games company.

To share Nigeria's high operating costs, with daily power cuts the norm and investment in diesel-powered generators a must, his five-member firm shares workspace with eight other companies.

From an office in the Lagos suburb of Yaba, Maliyo now offers 10 free on-line games to some 20,000 users across Nigeria but also in Britain and the United States.

It is preparing to launch smartphone versions of its most popular games.

- Expansion plans -

Kuluya, meanwhile, started with an investment of $250,000 but is now worth an estimated $2 million and employs about a dozen people in its Lagos office.

Sitting behind large Apple Mac screens and armed with giant tablets and light pens, the creative team, all Nigerian, find inspiration from what dominates their daily life but also comb the web for information about other African countries.

Along with the typically Nigerian games, their catalogue now nods to Kenyan culture with the game "Masai" and another called "Matatus", which features the minibuses that travel around Nairobi. Their "Zulu" game, meanwhile, has clear references to South Africa.

For the moment, Kuluya, which is seeking new investment, earns little money from advertising. Maliyo, for its part, funds itself by creating games for businesses.

The next stage for Kuluya is to introduce payment by text message for more sophisticated versions of its games.

AFP

Why oil funds are missing

Even in a country where untold oil wealth disappears into the pockets of the elite, the oil corruption scheme he was investigating seemed outsize — and he threatened to lay it bare at a meeting with Nigeria’s top bankers.

The rabble-rouser was none other than the governor of the country’s central bank. Weeks later, however, he was out, fired by Nigeria’s president in an episode that has shaken the Nigerian economy, filled newspapers and airwaves here, and even inspired a rare street demonstration.

The bankers were going to have to open their books, the governor, Lamido Sanusi, warned them at the recent meeting. He wanted to see where the money was going — $20 billion from oil sales that, mysteriously, was not making its way to the treasury, in a country that could soon be declared Africa’s biggest economy and already attracts the most direct foreign investment on the continent, according to the United Nations.

But his suspicions were cutting too close, Mr. Sanusi said — too close to an oil-politics nexus that both feeds the political establishment in Nigeria, in his view and that of analysts, and deprives the country of vital revenue.

The charge of missing oil money is not new in Nigeria. In recent years, government commissions, parliamentary inquiries and civil society groups have all pointed to serious shortfalls in the disbursement of oil revenues. Their findings have been ignored.

This time, the accusations appear not to be going away: Never before has an official at Mr. Sanusi’s level made them.

In interviews here, Mr. Sanusi gave a detailed account of the events that he said led to his ouster on Feb. 20, a dismissal that continues to depress the country’s currency and frighten investors. He said his warning to the bankers had been reported straight back to the threatened seat of power in the country’s capital, Abuja.

It was too much, he said. With his accusations, which outside analysts consider credible, the soft-spoken, bow-tied central banker appeared to have penetrated to the heart of the country’s entrenched corruption problem.

In 2009, Mr. Sanusi took aim at Nigeria’s failing banking sector, shutting down fraudulent banks, uncovering theft that led to an unprecedented conviction, and earning trust in international financial markets. He was named central bank governor of the year by The Banker magazine in 2011, and is a suited-up member of his country’s establishment, as an heir to the position of emir in the ancient northern city of Kano, one of Nigeria’s highest-status designations.

But then he began taking on the government oil agency, which determines whether oil-dependent Nigeria rises or falls. Specifically, he accused the Nigerian National Petroleum C orporation — the agency that buys, sells, regulates and produces the country’s oil — of not turning over earnings to the country’s central bank. The country is Africa’s largest oil exporter, oil prices were steady or rising, yet Nigeria’s financial reserves were falling. It was a mystery. The money was missing. Mr. Sanusi said he feared an eventual collapse of Nigeria’s currency.

Backed by calculations, he presented his findings to a Nigerian Senate committee early in February. “A substantial amount of money has gone,” Mr. Sanusi said in an interview at the mansion reserved for the country’s central banker, which he will soon have to leave. “I wasn’t just talking about numbers. I showed it was a scam.”

At a time when political energy in Africa’s most populous country is focused on next year’s elections — and staying in power is costly for a governing party that functions as a patronage machine — Mr. Sanusi knew exactly which interests he had menaced, he said. He had been warned to “cool down.”

“By making N.N.P.C. an issue now, the source of money for financing elections is threatened,” Mr. Sanusi said, referring to the petroleum corporation. “If this is stopped, there will be no money to finance the elections.”

On the other hand, if it was not stopped, the risk to Nigeria’s economy was grave, the central banker suggested. “It was critical that we stop this hemorrhage,” he said. “Otherwise, we can’t maintain stability. Reserves had gone way down. We would watch the naira collapse,” he said of the nation’s currency.

Alarmed, Mr. Sanusi said, he went in front of Nigeria’s top banking heads for a semimonthly meeting on Feb. 11 and “threatened to open the books of the bankers, to trace the money.” He suspected some were laundering stolen oil money.

“Some of them were not giving information about their accounts,” the central banker said. “I told them I would order a special examination.”

One of the bankers at the meeting said, referring to the Central Bank of Nigeria, “He made it clear to them that the C.B.N. would need to unravel what was going on, and they should cooperate.”

Many of the bankers became angry. “One of us said, ‘What next?’ “ a second banker said. “There was a general heaviness. He spoke tough.” Both bankers requested anonymity.

Panicked, several of the bankers went straight to the government, Mr. Sanusi said. Two of the bankers — he would not identify them — “went and reported to the petroleum minister,” he said. And at that moment, his days were numbered.

“The strategy of the government was to discredit the messenger,” he said. The Nigerian president “doesn’t want me to bring out any more information that would get them into trouble.”

Mr. Sanusi’s account is “untrue,” a spokesman for President Goodluck Jonathan said.

“Mr. Sanusi has been making all kinds of claims to project himself as a victim,” the spokesman, Reuben Abati, said in an email, accusing the former bank governor of “financial recklessness, abuse of mandate, incompetence and criminal acts of negligence.”

Mr. Sanusi has not been charged with any crimes, and the most Mr. Jonathan held him responsible for in a series of counteraccusations that emerged after the bank governor raised an alarm over the oil money was having perhaps “sidestepped civil-service rules.”

Outside analysts appear to be in large agreement that Mr. Sanusi’s claim of vast missing oil revenues is plausible.

Nigeria’s state oil sales “feature undue complexity, extensive discretion and well-documented flaws,” Revenue Watch, a group focused on natural-resource management, wrote in an examination of the central banker’s declarations. “In such a system, the line between mismanagement and corruption is difficult to draw, as shortcomings in process often benefit specific private interests.”

One such “shortcoming” was laid bare by Mr. Sanusi last month to the parliamentary committee: a phony subsidy on kerosene that he determined to be a racket, costing the Nigerian treasury billions of dollars and greatly benefiting what he called a “syndicate” of marketers and unknown others. Mr. Sanusi showed that any official subsidy on kerosene had long since been abolished, that the petroleum corporation was nonetheless selling kerosene to marketers at less than a third of its purchase price on the international market and that the Nigerian marketers were then selling kerosene to the public at prices 300 to 500 percent above what they had paid for it.

“It’s just a big scam,” Mr. Sanusi said in the interview. “The amount is shared by a cabal.”

Though his official term would have ended in June anyway, Mr. Sanusi said, he is challenging his removal in court. In a judiciary that is only lightly insulated from political pressure, the outcome is uncertain, though perhaps not with the wider public. One of the bankers at the Feb. 11 meeting said: “For me personally, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the position he has taken. We are Nigerians. We owe it to this country that things are run properly.”

One of Nigeria’s leading activists, Tunde Bakare, a founder of the pro-democracy organization Save Nigeria Group, said: “This is going to be tried in the court of public opinion. We can’t wish this matter away. Twenty billion dollars is not going to go away overnight.”

NY Times

Related stories:  Video - Finance minister Okonjo-Iweala talks about alleged missing $20 million dollars

Video - Suspended central bank governor Lamido Sanusi saw it coming

Nigeria ranks one of the lowest in rule of law

Nigeria has been ranked as one of the countries with the lowest respect for the rule of law in the world.

The World Justice Project (WJP) in its 2014 Rule of Law Index released last Thursday, ranked 99 countries out of which Nigeria placed 93 close to war ravaged Afghanistan and insurgent-prone Pakistan, which ranked 98 and 96 respectively.
Botswana and Ghana were among African counties ranked better in the index, standing at 25 and 37 respectively.

Apart from the overall ranking where Nigeria placed 93, the country did not fare well under the eight individual factors which were used as parameters for the overall ranking.

These factors, are: constraints on government powers, absence of corruption, open government, fundamental rights, order and security, regulatory enforcement, civil justice and criminal justice.

Under absence of corruption, Nigeria ranked 97 among the 99 countries considered in the report while in fundamental rights, Nigeria placed 88th. In order and security, Nigeria was ranked 98 beaten only Pakistan, ranked 99th, while it came 91st under the criminal justice factor.

WJP is an independent, multi-disciplinary organisation working to advance the rule of law around the world.

The index measures a nation’s adherence to the rule of law from the perspective of how ordinary people experience it.

The report said: “Nigeria ranks 93rd over all and near the bottom half of lower middle income countries in most dimensions. The country ranks 69th for checks on the executive branch and 76th for open government.

“In most of the other dimensions, the country remains one of the poorest performers of the region.

“Corruption is widespread (ranking third to last in the world), the criminal justice system has deficiencies (ranking 91st over and second to last in the region), fundamental rights are poorly protected and a deteriorating security situation continues to raise significant concern.”

This Day

Court in Nigeria orders homosexuals to be whipped

Four young men have beenconvicted of gay sex and whipped publicly as punishment in an Islamic court in northern Nigeria, according to a human rights activist.

The four were sentenced and punished on Thursday to 15 strokes. They also face a year's imprisonment if they cannot pay a fine of $120.

The men, aged between 20 and 22, should not have been convicted because their confessions were forced through beatings, said Dorothy Aken'Ova, the convenor of the Coalition for the Defence of Sexual Rights Network.

She said they had to prostrate themselves on the floor of the court to be whipped on their bottoms.

Aken'Ova said the families refused an offer of legal representation and were embarrassed by the stigma attached to homosexuality, which many highly religious Nigerians consider an evil imported from the West.

The hearings in Bauchi city, the capital of the state of the same name, had been delayed from January, when a crowd tried to stone the accused men outside the court and demanded the judge pass the death sentence.

Security officials had to fire into the air to save the men and disperse the crowd.

Under Islamic law in some north Nigerian states, homosexuals can be sentenced to death by stoning or lethal injection, though that sentence has never been enforced.

The judge said he was lenient because the men had promised that the homosexual acts occurred in the past and that they had since changed their ways, according to Aken'Ova.

The four were among dozens caught in a wave of arrests after Nigeria strengthened its criminal penalties for homosexuality with the new Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act in January.

Aljazeera

Makoko's floating school struggles to stay afloat

A floating school in Nigeria has been nominated for a prestigious Design of the Year award in London, but the Lagos State government has threatened to demolish it and the area to make way for development.

Whanyinna Primay School is kept afloat by 250 empty barrels and is made of bamboo and timber.

It was built as a solution to allow children to attend class during the country's rainy season, when many buildings flood.

Related stories: Video - homeless battle in Makoko 

Video - Building a floating school in Makoko