THE MTN EXPERIENCE
EVERYWHERE YOU GO
THE MTN EXPERIENCE
THE GARDEN CITY ANTHOLOGY
EVERYWHERE YOU GO
PHOTOGRAPHS BY JÖRG HILLEBRAND
T S U R T
S E G A IM
KUMASI, A WEST-AFRICAN CITY IN GHANA THE MTN EXPERIENCE The small kiosk at the roadside in Kumasi, Breman UGC. is a point of sale for MTN products. Breman is a typical residential suburb in the Kumasi Metropolitan Area, KMA. MTN is Ghana´s largest telecom provider. ASHANTI Kumasi is the capital of an ancient West-African empire: Ashanti. At the peak of its power, this Empire occupied large parts of present day Ghana and Ivory Coast. Kumasi is the centre of the Ashanti culture. This culture still plays an important role in everyday life in Kumasi. As the capital of the Ashanti region and with the Asantehene’s palace in the centre of the city, Kumasi has been a powerful alternative locus of political power to Accra and often a focus of political opposition. INFORMAL CITY Petty trading and informal sector businesses form the base of Kumasi’s economy and they probably represent over 70 per cent of employment in Kumasi. Adaptation and the use of public space is therefore a very common feature in Kumasi. Hawking and street vending is present throughout the city. Small kiosks which house little shops, chop bars (places to eat), sewers, barbers and many more are an urban element of every street. ECONOMIC NETWORK Kumasi is often regarded as the commercial capital of Ghana, with its Kejetia market rivalling Onitsha in Nigeria as West Africa’s largest open-air market. Part of Kumasi’s relative prosperity derives from the timber forest of the surrounding region and natural resources such as gold, rubber, cacao and bauxite but it is also renowned for its local enterprise and artisan skills, particularly in the areas of vehicle engineering and furniture-making, which serve clienteles from surrounding countries. CONGESTION, DISCONNECTION AND POLLUTION Traffic congestion is a major issue in Kumasi. Even outside rush hour, it can take a long time to reach a nearby destination. This congestion coincides with a large amount of smog and air pollution, worsened by the bad condition of the old vehicle stock. Congestion, however, is not the only problem for public transport in Kumasi. Many roads are not paved or well maintained; certainly during the rain season, this creates inaccessibility and disconnection for certain areas of the city. EXPLOSIVE POPULATION GROWTH Kumasi has known an enormous explosion in growth over the last decades. Today, Kumasi has a population of about 2 million people. It is the second biggest city in Ghana. With a grow rate of over 3,5 percent per annum, it is today growing much faster than the capital Accra. CLIMATE The Ashanti region is located in a tropical forest zone. The city therefore knows heavy tropical rainfalls alternated with periods of drought. Deforestation, erosion and frequent floods are important issues in Kumasi. Kumasi is located above an increased soil water level. Many small rivers origin in the area around Kumasi. This makes water pollution, also of the subsoil water, a serious environmental problem.
THE MTN EXPERIENCE: EVERYWHERE YOU GO Peter and Hayford- Two men under the same tree The small kiosk at the roadside in Kumasi, Breman UGC is under two avocado trees, which provide shelter from the scorching sun. It is Peter and Hayford´s workplace. Peter is a 72 year old tailor from Tafo, a nearby village. He doesn´t have a phone and doesn´t look too unhappy about it. Hayford sells phone credit in small quantities and likes to complain in general. Together they share the comfort of the two trees by the roadside. Both of them have to kill time most of the time. Occasional customers seem to be more concerned about chatting than actually purchasing something. Time passes slowly, but it passes, and when you remind yourself, you realise that a lot of time has passed already under the trees. During day-time Breman UGC feels like a ghost town. The residents leave early. Nothing much happens on the streets. Either you stay in your house or you are in town. Usually Hayford gets 5 Ghana cedis (1,90$) as salary per day. Recently he received a cook-recipe book from his boss as a delayed payment. His boss runs about 25 kiosks as a franchise taker. His colleagues received the same payment. They all depend on the good-will of their boss since they don´t have any job contracts. Labour is cheap in Ghana. The telecom consumer prices have risen drastically over 50% in 2015. The networks, like the rest of Ghana, suffer from dumsor, the ongoing power crisis, as their quality of service depends on regular power supply. Reliable customer service can´t be provided anymore and more often than not, their lines are weak or out of service. Still telecommunications are among the most profitable industries in Ghana, as they are owned and managed by foreign global players. Ghaneans are obsessed by their mobile phones. They struggle to buy units which range between 50 cent and two dollars. More than 70% of the population work in the informal sector. After a long period of constant economic growth Ghana undergoes a massive depression again. Ghana´s dream of achieving middle-income status by 2020 has collapsed. Especially the younger generation suffers from this economic setback. Having grown up with perspectives of prosperity, they now realise that they move back to poverty. Again, after 23 years, the country has joined the list of HIPC (The World Bank debt initiative for highly indebted poor countries). The World Bank together with the IMF has been asked for financial and technical assistance in 2013 to build an economic environment which, if successfully completed, would be more competitive to the global markets. MTN Group is a South Africa-based multinational mobile telecommunications company, operating in many African, European and Asian countries. Its head office is in Johannesburg. As of 30 September 2015, MTN recorded over 300 million subscribers across its operations. MTN is Ghana´s largest telecom provider. Its market share is at 45,6%. The market penetration for telecommunications in Ghana is at 115,6% in 2015.
Commuters on their way to to town at Crescent Junction on Breman-Tafo road
The Breman- Tafo Road has been paved in 2013
Hilda sells rice in the neighborhood
Lydia talks to her husband in Germany
“Jaylo“ looking for greener pastures in Kursk, a Russian military-town at the Ukrainan border, sent by whatsapp. She tried to enter Europe, but has returned to Kumasi by now. pictures sent by whatsapp
Mz Bell bought some phonecredit from the MTN container across the street and enters “Full Circle Pub�, which is a famous drinking-spot at Breman UGC.
“Call of duty”, sundays after church service at “Full Circle”. “Town girls”, in local language, are semi-professional or amateur prostitutes, who follow their trade over the weekends.
Nasser, a taxi driver, involved in a private matter with Swapo, his best friend
Swapo in trouble over his painting
A transvestite at Suame Roundabout
Promising Stars Hotel, Breman UGC
Paul, the hotel owners son
Malcolm, who belongs to a group of internet scammers in the neighborhood
Mary, a neighborhood girl
DUMSOR on schedule. The ECG announces the power-outages weekly through the media to preinform their customers.
Jonathan sells phone-credit in the evening opposite to the MTN container at Crescent Junction to make his own money. His friends always join him. Trouble is their favorite hobby. They copy what streetlife teaches them and understand early, that laws don´t apply much, as long as you don´t get caught or that you can always bribe your way out. The police is corrupt. Jonathan lives with his grandmother Majolie in their rent-appartment nearby. During daytime another woman sells vegetables at his table. Both have to pay a small monthly rent to the houseowner for using the sidewalk in front of the house.
Isaac sees no future for him in Ghana. He is always looking for ways to leave his country.
Akwasi is the junior bartender at Full Circle Pub in Breman UGC. The show must go on. When the lights are off, the genorator is on.
Abeena, a Tafo girl
This page: “American Bugger”, a notorious drunkard from the neighborhood, while the lights are of and the streets deserted. Next page: Late night at Bantama, one of Kumasi´s red- light districts
Comfort with her friends. Sunday mornings are for church. Sunday nights are for fun and some pocket money.
Archie, Smiler and a town-girl late at night. After a long struggle Archie received some compensation over a business matter and wanted to reward himself. After a night in town, he returned back home with a girl, but things turned out the wrong way...
Next page: A street pastor and his “One Man Church� early in the morning
Full moon at Breman UGC
Owura, a young urban professional, whom i met first in 2008, when he was on his way to boarding school. Today he is a drugstore manager.
Peter and his brother
Teddy with his mother in Ashtown. He is from Brooklyn, N.Y.C. For reasons unknown to me he was forced to leave the United States and return back to Ghana.
Majolie, Jonathan´s grandmother from across the street
Gloria is the owner of the food-parlour adjacent to the MTN container.
Matthew
Next page: Manuel and his friends, so called “area boys�. They claim to be internet scammers. Ghana is infamous for internet fraud.
Inside Breman UGC
“Everywhere you go”
Grab-and-Go Culture Makes Phone Cards Ghana’s New Cash Crop Informal City dialogues “It all started in a very small way,” says Edward Asafugye. A round-faced man with wire-rim glasses and a bluetooth receiver in his right ear, he leans back in his chair amid stacks of his stock, a money counter and sacks of coins. Five years ago, Edward explains, he saw an opportunity. Facing the failure of his transport business, he decided to research new industries. He was intrigued, he recalls, by the burgeoning telecommunications industry. Weeks later, he was selling mobile-phone recharge cards door-to-door in La Paz and Abeka, low-to-middle-income areas on Accra’s northwest fringes. He would wake before dawn and go to bed long after sunset, driven by his own long-term goals and the value of the relationships he was building. Two years later, he’d saved enough money to build the small shop in Lapaz where we are now sitting. Edward’s shop is unassuming, a tiny cement-and-glass storefront on a street just off the newly built George W. Bush Motorway. In the waiting room, three chairs line the wall and a small flat-screen TV is bolted into the corner. Every day, dozens of customers come to his shop while his fifteen employees ride their routes on motorbikes, visiting 100 to 150 customers. Edward is the second-to-last link in the telcom product distribution chain: the point where the relative organization of formal wholesalers meets the chaos of the mostly informal retailers who sell the cards on the streets. Telecommunications products are fairly diverse, but the most conspicuous product is the scratch card you buy to load credit onto your phone. Most people use this pre-paid method as opposed to the post-paid accounts with fixed bills and monthly statements common in much of the West. In Accra, telecommunications companies are everywhere. The yellow of MTN is splashed across billboards along the roads. Vodafone red seems to have a monopoly on umbrellas. The smaller networks — Airtel, Xpresso, Tigo, and the newly entered Nigerian company, Glo — have their colors and logos emblazoned on kiosks. But their most conspicuous advertising materials are in the hands of informal retailers: street hawkers with baseball caps and proprietors of small convenience shops who paint the ads on their shops. “Anyone who is schooled in the distribution of products,” says Samuel Addo of MTN, “will understand that in this market…you do not have an organized supply chain. This market is very clustered, made up of tiny, small, small businessmen. And you need to work with almost all of them if you’re going to have a successful product.” In other words, the telco companies came to Ghana and saw informality as the solution to the challenge of getting their products into the hands of eager consumers. According to Addo, the informal sector has a number of advantages: it often concentrates in high-traffic areas, it accommodates consumers’ increasingly “grab-and-go” shopping habits, and it penetrates every part of the city. Though they have authorized distributors – one for each region of Ghana – with carefully managed franchises, most final sales of prepaid top-up cards are ultimately made by informal sellers on the streets or at roadside kiosks. The growth of the industry was largely spurred by the government’s establishment of the independent National Communications Authority and a range of liberalization policies designed to foster efficiency and competition. Business opportunities – or at least opportunities to earn a little income — have followed the explosion of the industry from a single government entity to six private companies. Though they offer very few formal employment opportunities, especially for those who have little education, by Addo’s rough estimate, over 200,000 people in Greater Accra make some portion of their income through the informal sales of telco products. As one of the largest, fastest-growing domestic industries in Ghana, even the telcos’ huge informal sales force looks sharp. Among the women selling sachets of water and plantain chips and the young men hawking DVDs, the vendors selling telco cards look downright professional in their branded hats and vests. A step up from the street hawkers are the tiny stands of telco kiosks, often with a table, signboard and branded umbrella. It’s possible to make a living off telco-card sales alone — a small retailer, in Edward’s estimation, might sell between 100 and 2,000 Ghana cedis (roughly $50-1000 USD) in top-up cards per day. At the 4-6 percent retail mark-up, that’s between $2 and $60 USD in profits.
Most of the retailers and dealers sell all the telco brands. “We’ve tried exclusivity,” says Tetteh Okasey, a staff member of Izone, MTN’s authorized distributor for Greater Accra. We’re driving through a part of Accra I’ve somehow never been to: Nii Boi Town, tucked between the green estates of Achimota and bustling, crowded Lapaz. “It’s the New York of Accra,” Okasey says. It’s an offhand comment; I can’t tell if he’s joking or not, but the streets are certainly bustling and tiny drinking spots abound. Exclusivity didn’t work, Okasey says, because independent retailers and subdealers simply wouldn’t do it. Customers wanted to be able to buy any of the telco brands from the most convenient retailer. “Look at that man!” he says, pointing out the window at a young man grinning at us, wearing a dayglo-green mesh vest and waving an array of yellow and red cards in front of the window. “He’s wearing a Glo vest and gleefully selling MTN.” Okasey and I stop by one of his franchises and speak briefly with the woman sitting there, then pick up a plastic bag filled of cash. “The risk is high in this business,” says Hyatt Achkar, also of Izone. Theft and armed robberies from their shops and distributors are their biggest problems. “The cards are as good as money,” Addo told me. This is an advantage as well as a liability: if a seller needs cash, unsold stock can be quickly unloaded at very close to face value, but this also makes carrying large stocks of top-up cards nearly as dangerous as carrying a large wad of cash. Back to Edward’s storefront in Lapaz, where I am sitting with the incredibly tall Okasey, his long limbs folded up in the chair next to me. Edward is explaining, and laughing, about attempted robberies at his store. “At times they come through the ceiling. They even came with his gun before.” In his tiny cement shop, he has installed iron gates behind the glass and two sets of gates between the reception area and the back. A small flat-screen TV displays security-camera footage from four different angles. He shows us his panic button and mentions his gun. His employees carry pepper spray. One of Izone’s franchises had a robbery over the weekend, and Edward is advising Okasey. His point: In this business, even a small-time entrepreneur like himself has to invest in security. Just as frankly, Edward explains his concerns about the future of informal businessmen. All the competition is reducing the profit margins of the middle men like him. The voice market is saturated, so the telco sector is diversifying. Increasing demand for data services is one direction. Mobile Money, a sort of informal financial services system, Edward fears, will decrease demand for top-up cards. He’s already noted a 30 percent decrease in card sales since the inception of Mobile Money. In five years, he projects, business in top-up cards will be too low to sustain the current system. And what will he do then? “Then, by the grace of God, He will show us what to do,” he says, before outlining his strategy for every eventuality. Worst-case scenario, he’ll get out of the business and find something else to do. “In Ghana,” he says, “there’s a lot of opportunities here.” Sharon Benzoni