Quoting the former President of South Africa and Nobel Laureate winner for Peace, Madiba Nelson Mandela, “it always seems impossible until it is done,” Mrs Funke Opeke, Founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO), MainOne Cable, said the success story of the digital provider company as seen today only becomes a reality due to the ability to face and overcome series of challenges.
Funke Opeke said the MainOne Cable, which runs from Portugal to West Africa was originally designed to run down the coast to South Africa, but owing to some stiff economic permissions and licensing the cable company could not reach the former apartheid country, but instead of curling up she redesigned the plan and started off from Nigeria with a vision to cover other West African countries.
Speaking on the theme “Fuelling Resilience: Empowering Diversity For Economic Success” at the 2024 annual conference of Women In Successful Career (WISCAR) as the keynote speaker, Funke Opeke said “when I think of this topic we’re contemplating today, resilience, I think of a few situations I had along the way building MainOne which may have caused me to turn back. The cable, the MainOne Cable, which runs from Portugal to West Africa, was originally designed to run down the coast to South Africa. As such, when I started building the business plan, we had the initial designs we were engaging telecoms regulators in various countries to get permission and understand the permitting and licensing process to be able to lay the cable. At the end of the day we could not get into many countries. First, we learned that we could not land in South Africa at that time if the cable ownership was not controlled by South African interests.”
Recalling instances of monumental challenges – securing licenses, funds, partnership and sustainability hurdles, that MainOne had to overcome in becoming the enthralling story that everyone is proud to associate with today, Funke Opeke said, Challenges, do not be fooled, no one achieves great success without challenges along the way. And undoubtedly, we all know times are high here in Nigeria, because even though the statistics suggest improved economic growth, the increasing poverty that we see around us is palpable. Businesses are shrinking and not expanding or hiring, and we have so many of our competitors who continue to leave or pack up because they are in search of greener pastures. So what are the prospects?”
Though accepting the fact she was part of an initial wave of ‘japa’ (a sobriquet for those leaving the country due to economic hardship) in the 80s when she went to school and also pursued a long career in the United States, Funke Opeke still believes that making the system Nigeria to optimally work for the good all Nigerians must prepare to champion the cause in all sincerity and ability.
“From what I would call despite all the progress we have made in building some level of infrastructure and granting access to create the digital divide, our society is still largely pre-industrialized with power, transportation, security, digital transformation challenges. Whereas in advanced economies, we’re talking about smart connected economies driven by artificial intelligence, providing a certain level of prosperity and services and wellbeing to all their citizens. But I look at MainOne journey as a backdrop, and even I think I had the opportunity to vision and achieve the improbable. The improbable is not always a straight road, but with resilience all great that appear improbable can be done.”
She noted that raising money in Nigeria could be a herculean task, but very thankful to two financial institutions in the country for supporting the business concept at its infant stage, “and it was not a compromise that I was able to make to give up on this, give up on the investors and the support I had built to subordinate those interests, because we wanted to land in South Africa, so we had to scale back. And we said, we’ll build to West Africa. Well, that was the first blow, just in terms of the addressable markets, you think of how many people are at the end of this cable that you want to be skilled, that are going to benefit and you’re going to be able to commercialize. And South Africa, obviously, is a big economy. But then we started going to the West African countries, and likewise, it was very difficult to get the access that we required and the licensing, despite different incentives we were trying to provide to allow us access. In the end, we only got licenses in Nigeria and Ghana, which is what we started with in 2010, in 2015 we extended the cable to Cameroon in 2019 we added Senegal and Cot devoir.
“Other coastal countries are now inviting us to come, but we can no longer accommodate their interests because they were not open for business loan rebuilds in 2010 and what they find are that their markets are not large enough for them to fund and build a submarine cable on their own. But I doubt that MainOne would have a story to tell if we gave up because some countries did not grant us access,” she stated.
WISCAR was founded in 2008 by Mrs Amina Oyagbola to advance the course of better working conditions, opportunities and mentorship for women to perform efficiently well without threat or molestation in a patriarchal society like Nigeria.
The 2024 edition of WISAR annual conference, which had the wife of the governor of Kwara State, Prof Olufolake Abdulrasaq in attendance among other dignitaries, also honoured Dolapo Agbede, a leading diversity, equity and inclusion expert and Founder, Will Way Paradigm, with the Professor Grace Alele-Williams Alumni Impact Award.
The highlight of the conference was the unveiling of “The WISCAR Mentoring Book,” a book ladled with exciting topics and well curated by resource persons to make it an un-put-down-able ‘working manual’ wherever women empowerment, inclusion, diversity and gender equality in the workplace is mentioned here in Nigeria and beyond.
