The rise and fall of the Cyber-café Dynasty in Nigeria

Did you know co-working spaces are the new cyber-cafes? Yes! But they didn’t spring up in Nigeria until a couple of years after the demise of cyber-café businesses, so what really happened to our yahoo messenger-AOL enabling businesses that helped us connect with our friends who left for the United States in JSS1? Well let’s jump right to it.

In this report we will analyze the cultural, financial and technological shifts that led to the decline in Cyber-café use and eventual death of the sub-industry in Nigeria.

Background

I’m sure many Gen Z kids will be lost at the concept of a cyber café… The idea of paying for a certain amount of time to access an internet enabled desktop at an overly crowded and mostly air-constrained environment, just to check your email or fill out an application on a portal, that will probably take you 5 minutes to complete on your mobile while laying on the couch in your living room today, would even seem bizarre(typing it right out is kind of funny to me as well so I can’t entirely blame them 😂)

Well… in the early days of the internet, just like any other innovation in human history, access was quite limited, available only to the influential or at the places of work. But as internet adoption increased, so did the demand, and this was the market that being serviced by the cyber cafés — available, affordable internet for the general public for a certain amount, usually allotted in time packages.

The first set of internet/cyber cafés that came into existence around the early 90s (can’t really tell the exact innovator but a South Korean named An San-Soo came up a few times in my research, so let’s give it to him and his Internet Café was founded in front of Hongik University in March 1988)

Entry into the Nigerian Market

Cyber cafés became a thing in Nigeria around the late 90s, just a few years after the NCC licensed 38 internet service providers in 1996. Having sprung up all around the country especially in urban areas with available internet coverage, evolving from mini business centers that serviced civil servants with typing and photocopying services, to a soothing alternative to the decrepit mail delivery service of NIPOST.

Cybercafés Served as an efficient means of communication with fellow Nigerians outside the country.

The Boom

The internet gradually became a part of our lives, with demand rising as adoption increased; we saw this in digitized school & exam registrations, government recruitment portals, banking and lastly social interactions when My Space hit the internet in 2003.

The world gravitated towards the new internet enabled globe and Nigeria followed suit — quite quickly I might add. But it wasn’t until the Facebook era that we saw the peak of internet usage in Nigeria, as this completely rebranded the internet from official tool, to tool for all.

Personally, I believe that what really had the most impact on Nigeria and the world at large was the possibility of earning a living through the internet and without having to go to work for it? 🤯 — this may seem like norm now, but back then people went crazy for it; in the advent of pay to click (PTC) and the likes (trust me it was crazy crazy), and this was some years before bitcoin appeared.

PTC had a lot of people spending the night at cafés, researching new sites and clicking ads for a meager $0.0001 per click, with the hope of accumulating bulk cash and withdrawing into a liberty reserve account 😑 (hard work but it worked). However, this was frowned upon by a business people around the world; PTC was described by Bloomberg as a click fraud 😂 and some even called it a Ponzi so let’s just call it the MMM of the early 2000s (although MMM existed in the early 90s but it wasn’t online yet… I digress)

So we have Facebook, Yahoo Messenger, P2C and last but not least Internet Scams driving the demand for the internet, and with little or no alternatives for internet access, cybercafé usage was at an all time high and cybercafé owners and attendants were “gods” and they acted like it.

GPRS, EDGE & 3G Entry

In 2006/2007 pay as you browse Mobile Browsing was introduced, as GPRS was announced by Network Providers which triggered a demand for WAP enabled phones. Now this was something unexpected — who knew that one day we will be able to carry the internet around in the palm of our hands.

I can still remember vividly when MTN introduced their Mobile Browsing Packages in 2008 (I can’t lie I used to get up to 200kbps back in the day on EDGE and barely get 200kbps on some 4G services, but that’s a story for some other time 😤), this signaled a shift from the dependence on cafes for internet access.

Finally, an affordable alternative to the stuffy and over crowded rooms called cafes where you pay for time and get epileptic speed of browsing, rude café attendants, interruptions by police raids and zero privacy — I could now check my Facebook for just N5 by browsing on my phone? c’mon!

This was also followed by the introduction of USB dongles and the 3G rave that promised a lot more speed and for your PC as well… customers 3, cybercafés

While this eventually led to the decline in the usage of cybercafés, initially it actually boosted internet awareness and pooled in even more people as customers, considering the cost of surfing on PC with mobile plans.

One more benefit to consider was the anonymity that the cafes offered, people who engaged in less than legal acts.

The Cultural Impact

Sadly, as with any thing of knowledge, the power of exploitation is also available to those that seek it — with the first recorded internet fraud in 1997 by Vanguard, it didn’t take long before we earned a world wide reputation of internet scamming; as 15.5% of all internet scams recorded between 2001 and 2002 were Nigerian 419 scams 🤯 and by 2004 cyber cafes were crowded with Nigerians young and middle aged, trying to earn a living by the new gift of the internet and the anonymity that one is blessed with, sitting behind a screen and keyboard.

One scam at a time, the news of their victories and lavish spoils from so called battles against the faceless white man on the other side of the screen, whom they vilified for colonial crimes of their ancestors as a means of justification for their actions, and convincing more people to join their robin hood cause — internet scams or yahoo yahoo found a resting place in Nigeria, adopted by lots of young Nigerians within the country with cybercafé at the center of it all, having had a sizable chunk of their patronage from these yahoo yahoo fraudsters.

Deficiencies and experience gaps

If you have been to Nigeria or lived here, you would understand the upper-hand held by these internet fraudsters considering the identity management gap within the country; with several Nigerians in the early 2000s not properly documented or processed by the government government, without bank accounts and didn’t need to register to purchase a phone line — they were practically invisible. And that invisibility was much more evident in an already quasi-anonymous world called the internet, where no proof whatsoever was needed to verify that your name was indeed Nasthy4Black22(at)yahoo.com or you were a real representative for globalcompanieslimited(at)yahoo.com.

While Nigeria was quick to adopt the internet and its benefits, the government was slow to implement policies to control or curtail abuse of internet features; especially in areas like identity management, traffic monitoring and tracking, piracy and copyrighting, as well as the sensitization of the general populace on the ills of internet scams and the adverse effect on the nation. These gaps created a favorable environment for the wide spread of internet scam as a means of livelihood.

This issue wasn’t peculiar to Nigeria alone, as even till date, world governments are still behind on policies to properly manage the internet, but most of these countries had already existing policies that were eventually modified and adopted for internet related issues, and Nigeria? well… Nigeria was Nigeria — Thankfully some few advancements have been made in this area in today (2021).

Don’t get me wrong, a few years back Zuck was appearing before the US Senate committee and even they didn’t understand the gravity of the situation they found themselves, completely overwhelmed by the scale of impact just one measly website could have on their elections, and while this had no relations to identity management , it does highlight the complexities of the internet that the world is faced with… I mean who would have thought privacy would be an issue in a system such as Facebook that was designed to be public, sorry social — The world is still trying to catch up to the internet, because there is so much to learn and explore. But Nigeria was grossly under-prepared for the internet and today is in the evidence of that (again… I digress)

The decline of Cybercafé usage in Nigeria

Cybercafé businesses serviced the upper lower class and middle class the most; the same class of Nigerians heavily targeted by the Telcos in a bid to expand their subscriber base. With the newly introduced mobile internet and influx of internet enabled phones into the country, cybercafés basically became dinosaurs. And as you could imagine, the next set of years were quite turbulent for cybercafé business owners, with declining patronage, high cost of operations from lack of stable power supply and all the other requirements (better left unmentioned 😉), it became increasingly difficult to run a café business and maintain a reasonable profit margin.

In today, we have faster mobile internet, affordable home internet plans, faster laptops and conducive co-working centers with free internet, all of these within the reach of any Nigerian that be considered a potential market for cybercafés. So now, the word cybercafé is barely mentioned, and only serving as a form nostalgia for those who live through the era.

During the “great cybercafé purge” I saw a lot of business owners try to move with the times, especially the ones I consulted for (for background, I spent my early career days setting up cybercafés and installing internet masts 😊). Some cybercafés created spaces and LAN cable options for people with laptops at cheaper rates, while others supplied neighbouring houses with internet access for a premium, all these just to adjust to the times and increase their profit margins. Sadly, as you can see in the Nigeria of today, they have almost become a thing of the past, with only a few of them serving as internet enabled business centers in a world where paper use is positioned to be eradicated 😥

However, we can say that cybercafés indeed did evolve into co-working spaces as one can even see the many similarities, however, while cybercafés modeled around providing customers computers and internet access in the form of paid time bundles, co-working spaces are centered on selling the conducive working spaces with power and internet as the added features… keyword “conducive” 😌

I believe this concludes my report on the rise and fall of the cybercafé dynasty in Nigeria, and now that cybercafés are out, mobile internet and shared spaces have taken the stage; mobile internet because of the convenience and shared spaces because human beings are social animals. What is next? What will be the next innovation that may change life as we know it? Let me know in the comments and be sure to share this article if you enjoyed it