👨🏿‍🚀TechCabal Daily – South Africa’s $315 billion power plan

Companies

Mobility startup Swvl just flipped the script with the announcement of its first-ever net profit of $2.1 million. The company also posted an operating profit of $13.4 million. 

Compared to H2 2022 when the company posted $56 million in operating losses, this is a huge swerve! 

Swvl’s reversal of fortune from struggling to profitable business is notable, as the company has faced recent struggles such as currency devaluation in Egypt, its biggest market, and reduced appetite from investors to back startups, resulting in its woes on the public market.

So how did Swvl turn the tides? Muktar Oladunmade has the deets in From Bleed to Bloom: Swvl Posts First Ever Profits.

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Energy

So here’s the good news: South Africa has plans to end load-shedding for good. The bad news though, is that it will take a couple of years.

Last week, energy minister Gwede Mantashe published the country’s Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) which is basically South Africa’s plan for stable electricity supply from now till 2024.

Ending power cuts and meeting demands: The IRP sets out two timeframes: 2023–2030 to stabilise South Africa’s power and end load-shedding, and 2031–2050 to generate enough power for the future. The plan involves various energy sources like gas, solar, wind, and batteries to eliminate load-shedding. 

💡 An ironic emoji, but load shedding in South Africa has worsened since 2007. The country suffered at least 4,000 hours of blackouts last year—that’s about half a year without electricity!

To solve this present problem, the IRP may see South Africa add new power sources—6,000MW of gas, 1,500MW solar, 3,000MW wind, and 2,000MW battery storage—by 2027.

All of this is pretty expensive too, with costs ranging from R5.9 trillion ($315 billion) to R8.4 trillion ($449 billion).

Will Eskom survive till then? The plan notes that Eskom will continue to provide energy to the country, but that may not come to fruition as the struggling electricity-generating company is at risk of shutting down for harmful emissions. Its 2023 results showed that the company is emitting more harmful particles in the air with every watt it produces. The company’s former CEO also said several private companies are gearing up to provide whatever electricity Eskom cannot supply.

We can see this happening with energy startups on the continent, last year, raising over $500 million. This includes a $48 million raise by South African solar energy startup Wetility.

Meanwhile, if you’ve got comments on the IRC, you’ve got till February 23, 2024, to accept the minister’s invite for comments or you’ll have to forever hold your peace.

Economy

In more ironic news, Nigeria’s apex bank has confirmed that the country’s stablecoin, the cNGN, will launch on February 27, 2024. 

Why is this ironic? Well, in October 2023, the World Bank listed the naira as one of the worst-performing currencies in Africa, stating that the currency fell by 40% in 2023. Another report states that the naira unexpectedly dropped by 67% in 2023. 

While you’d think that the Zimbabwean dollar would be top of the list for worst-performing currencies—and it is on the list—it’s not atop it because the Zim dollar has been steadily devaluing since 2009. The naira has been devaluing too, but the 40%—67% devaluation happened within such a short period, it brought the naira to everyone’s attention.

So will a stablecoin help? Theoretically, stablecoins help with currency stability because they’re backed by stable assets, but as we’ve noted, the naira has been anything but stable this past year. 

The other promises of stablecoins—lower remittance fees + financial inclusion—might not be enough to help Nigeria’s ailing currency. 

And we know this because Nigeria has already implemented what many consider to be an even better digital currency, a CBDC. In October 2021, after banning banks from providing services to crypto companies, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) launched Africa’s first central bank digital currency (CBDC), the eNaira, for similar uses—increasing remittance inflow and border trade and financial inclusion.

eNaira, e No Gree: Two years after its launch though, the eNaira barely accounts for 0.50% of the currency-in-circulation in Nigeria. In May 2022, the IMF reported 802,000 transactions, fewer than the 919,000 downloaded wallets. By 2023, Bloomberg’s report revealed a rise in wallets to 13 million and a 63% increase in transaction value to ₦22 billion. 

Can the cNGN succeed where the eNaira failed? The CBN’s argument for the cNGN is that since it’s co-created by commercial banks and not controlled by the CBN like the eNaira is, interoperability will be better. But the slow uptake of the eNaira was due to several factors from a few use cases, to an uninformed public and bad tech. We predict that the cNGN will fall into the same echo chamber. What do you think?

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Layoffs

Remember last week when we said Cellulant might have laid staff off in December 2023? 

TechCabal can now confirm that the layoffs did indeed happen; the fintech confirmed that it quietly laid off staff last month. 

Third time’s the harm? This round marks Cellulant’s third round of layoffs in 2023. Early in the year, the company laid off 27 staff members in a bid to restructure its business after it failed to raise $100 million for its Series D round. Cellulant, which raised $54.5 million between 2014 and 2018, effected a second round of layoffs by August 2023, cutting off 20% of its staff.

While it didn’t reveal how many employees were affected in its third round of layoffs, the company did note that its last two rounds of layoffs were part of a recently adopted product-led structure. 

An executive exit: Last week, we learnt Akshay Grover, Group CEO of the company left his position to focus on personal matters. Grover’s exit, however, was premeditated by the exit of four unnamed senior executives at Cellulant, all of whom left between October and December 2023.

So who’s left at Cellulant? The past chief financial officer (CFO) Peter O’Toole has been announced as acting CEO, but the company has noted that it will be strengthening its leadership team within coming months. 

Power is changing hands: In the past thirteen months, we’ve seen a slew of CEOs of notable companies moving on. Other than Cellulant’s Ashkay Grover, we’ve seen Jumia’s co-CEOs Jeremy Hodara and Sacha Poignonnec step down in December 2022, OPay’s Olu Akanmu in July 2023; Bob van Dijk of Naspers/Prosus in September 2023; Noel Doyle of South Africa’s Tiger Brands in October 2023; then Massimiliano Spalazzi, CEO of Jumia Nigeria in December 2023; Peter Njonjo of Twiga Foods in January 2024; and a planned step-down of Airtel Africa CEO Segun Ogunsanya scheduled for July 2024.

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Global News

ChatGPT might be able to predict your next sentence, but it didn’t predict the number of lawsuits coming at it.

Last Friday, the ChatGPT parent company and its investor Microsoft faced a fresh lawsuit when two authors sued the company for allegedly using their books to train the AI service.

In a class action lawsuit, Nicholas Basbanes and Nicholas Gage claim that OpenAI infringed on copyrighted works to build an empire that’s now worth millions of dollars. Now, the authors want the courts to stop OpenAI from using their works without authorisation, and about $2.5 million in damages.

Sounds familiar? That’s because it’s been four months since Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin along with 16 other authors including Grisham and Jodi Picoult sued OpenAI for the same reason, copyright infringement. The first hearing for that case was held in November, and a second hearing date has not been set.

It’s also been two weeks since the New York Times also sued the company for copyright infringement. The lawsuit, which is over 150 pages long in total, accuses OpenAI of “copying and using millions of The Times’s copyrighted [articles].”

A superficial service? Already, OpenAI has admitted to using copyrighted works to train its language models, and this has raised ownership concerns about the content that AI services generate. 

Plus, this might just be the beginning of lawsuits against AI companies/services which gained prominence in 2023. Getty Images, for example, sued StabilityAI, the developer behind the image generation tool Stable Diffusion, in early 2023. Additionally, in October, multiple music publishers including Universal Music filed lawsuits against Anthropic, the creator of Claude.ai for distributing copyrighted lyrics.

In other global news: The US Aviation watchdog is grounding several Boeing 737 planes. This comes after an Alaskan Airlines flight was forced to make an emergency landing after a section of the plane blew out mid-air on Friday. Luckily, none of the 117 passengers was hurt, but the accident did cause one child to lose his shit shirt. 👕

Crypto Tracker

Source:

Coin Name	Current Value	Day	Month
Bitcoin	$43,005	+ 0.74%	+ 2.08%
Ether	$2,236	+ 0.10%	+ 0.07%
Sei	$0.66	– 0.66%	+ 143.89%
Solana	$95.47	– 8.01%	+ 35.51%

* Data as of 12:10 PM WAT, January 7, 2024.

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The US is close to getting bitcoin ETFs approved. CoinDesk reports that the major crypto exchanges that will list the bitcoin exchange-traded funds have filed amended documents, suggesting they expect U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission approval in the coming days. Analysts predict that once ETFs are approved, bitcoin will create trillions of dollars in value, but it could see bitcoin prices drop at first.

Founder of US-based crypto startup Bill Lou has revealed that he lost $125,000 to a crypto scam. In a post on X, Lou said he got scammed after clicking on the wrong website in a bid to claim an LFG Airdrop. In a later post, Lou noted that investigations revealed the scammer had stolen an additional $31,000 from others, and work was being done to apprehend the culprits.

Job openings

• Elite Software Automation – Nocode Developer – Nigeria (remote)
• Moksh Tech – Senior Network Engineer – South Africa(remote)
• HHS Careers – IT cybersecurity specialist – Kenya (on-site)
• Clevertech – Mobile Engineer – Ghana (remote)
• ADS Kenya – Project Manager – Kenya (0n-site)

What else is happening in tech?

• Nigerian equities ride New Year wave as early bets on 2024 drive record highs
• Google broke labor laws when it refused to bargain with YouTube Music contract workers
• Ghana to receive $1.15 billion from World bank and IMF by end of February

Written and Edited by: Timi Odueso

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