MasterCard is investing $100 million in Airtel Mobile Commerce, not long after the telco received $200 million from The Rise Fund, the global impact investing platform of leading alternative investment firm TPG.

The transaction values Airtel Africa’s mobile money business at $2.65bn on a cash and debt free basis.

The proceeds from the transaction will be used to reduce Group debt and invest in network and sales infrastructure in the respective operating countries.

MasterCard will hold a minority stake in Airtel Mobile Commerce, in line with Airtel Africa’s plan to monetize the mobile money business by selling up to a 25% stake in the unit.

Airtel Africa provides digital mobile financial services across the Group’s 14 operating countries including Nigeria where it offers the mobile money services through a a partnership with a local bank. It has however applied for its own mobile banking license in Nigeria.

Besides the investment, the Group and MasterCard have extended commercial agreements and signed a new commercial framework which will deepen their partnerships across numerous geographies and areas including card issuance, payment gateway, payment processing, merchant acceptance and remittance solutions, amongst others.

Airtel Africa is exploring listing Airtel Mobile Commerce within four years. Airtel Mobile Commerce is currently the holding company for many of Airtel Africa’s mobile money operations, which operate under the Airtel Money brand. The subsidiary operates in 13 countries in Africa, offering mobile wallet deposit and withdrawals, merchant and commercial payments, loans and savings, virtual credit cards, and international money transfers.

In the Airtel Africa’s most recent reported results for Q3, the mobile money service segment (corresponding to all the businesses that are intended to be transferred to AMC BV) delivered a strong operational performance:

Generated revenue of $110m ($440m annualized), and underlying EBITDA of $54m ($216m annualized) at a margin of 48.7%.

Year on year revenue growth for the quarter was 41.1% in constant currency, largely driven by 29% growth in the customer base to 21.5m, and 9.7% ARPU growth.

Growth in transaction value was 53.0% to $12.8bn ($51bn annualized).

Airtel Africa is targeting a public listing of Airtel Mobile Commerce BV (AMC BV) within the next four years.

Mobile money has become a giant vehicle in the African booming fintech space which has ignited investment race between digital payment firms.

MasterCard has an existing relationship with Airtel, the new investment in Airtel Mobile Commerce underscores the push among payment companies to grab as much share as possible in the African fintech market.

I’m not quite sure about the choice of title for this post, but the rationale is quite compelling. I have written reasonably extensively on the subject matter of city, nation and/ or place branding covering a range of regions and geographies from Accra (Ghana), to Dundee (Scotland), Gangnam (South Korea), Johannesburg (South Africa), Senegal, Sharjah (united Arab Emirates) to Thailand.

In all of these, one thing that keeps coming to mind is a need for Africa to move away from traditional sectors to celebrating its cultural endowments.

In my most recent article, I did a double take on Jamestown and Sophiatown as male and female cities of culture from an African lens. This has now been accentuated by recent developments, thanks to Chidi Achebe – a LinkedIn contact, highlighting developments in a few African Cities from Enugu, Port Harcourt both in Nigeria to Kisumu (in Kenya).

Now back to Africa, Jamestown (Accra, Ghana), is equally historical. I got wind of the town on my January 2020 trip to the country. Regrettably, however, I missed the opportunity to fit in a trip there into my schedule. Be that as it may, Jamestown, in my view, is much uncelebrated despite its proximity to the capital city of Accra.

As one 2017 UK Guardian article rightly surmises the spirit, “Accra’s Jamestown is electric — it’s like Hackney Wick on steroids…” Although the lighthouse (see image below) wasn’t quite captured in that article, descriptors such as “electric” and “Hackney Wick on steroids” come pretty close.

From the foregoing, I wish to reiterate my point on the need to kickstart the celebration of African Cities of Culture. Perhaps the management of African Universities and those responsible for curriculum development in the region, should embrace factoring this into the curriculum and encourage scholarship in this space.

Conspiracy theories are false assumptions that attempt to explain causes of events or phenomena by insinuating that individuals or groups of persons work secretly to manipulate those events for their personal gains. The conspiracy theories that rocked the whole world recently are those surrounding the causes and spread of COVID-19 as well as the development of its vaccine. Like other conspiracy theories, the ones surrounding COVID-19 found its way into different communities all over the world and caused a lot of controversies. Till date, these conspiracy theories are still preventing many people from going for COVID-19 vaccine.

Conspiracy theories, fortunately, can be beneficial as well. For instance, some of them expose problems in societies that need to be addressed. They also give citizens the opportunities to call the government to order and to curtail the activities of the “powerful” people that were believed to create problems for the people. However, their negative impacts outweigh their positive effects. For instance, religious wars and killings are fuelled by conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories have also led to prejudice, distrust, genocide, witch-hunt, and low participation in politics. This is why it is good to discourage the spread of such theories.

Kindly note that you can be tricked into believing conspiracy theories if you let your guards down. This is because conspiracy theorists manipulate people’s emotions by using special persuasion tricks. They study situations and people’s psychology and use them to fabricate theories that make their lies sound like truth. Since these theories provide illusions of control and safety, those that believe them resist any form of efforts made towards debunking them. This is to say that many of us believe in some conspiracy theories we assumed were the truth. This essay, however, focuses on internal and external factors that make people believe in conspiracy theories.

Factors that Encourage Acceptance of Conspiracies Theories

1. Level of Education: Research has shown that the lower a person’s level of education is, the higher his chances of believing conspiracy theories. This is because those with higher education tend to think more critically and also have more information about concepts.
2. Knowledge: A person that knows little or nothing about a concept or a phenomenon tends to believe whatever he hears about it, so long as it aligns with their ideologies.
3. Information: The quality and quantity of information a person receives influence his susceptibility to conspiracy theories. A person that received little information about an event will believe fallacies about it. On the same hand, if the person is exposed to only negative information, he will also believe conspiracy theories.
4. Thinking Styles: Many people think impulsively while others do theirs analytically. Those that don’t critically evaluate the information they receive tend to believe conspiracy theories easily.
5. Experiences: People that have bad experiences are more likely to believe conspiracy theories than those that haven’t.
6. Attitudes: People with certain attitudes are likely to believe conspiracy theories. For instance, people that never take responsibilities for their actions and those that don’t trust people easily have been discovered to believe conspiracy theories that blame others for their predicaments.
7. Negative Emotions: Some emotions give room for conspiracy theories to thrive. Emotions such as fear, hope, worry, and surprise make people vulnerable and willing to believe whatever makes them feel safe and in control.
8. Religiosity: Religion is a risk factor to conspiracy theory because it encourages unverifiable practices such as prophecies and esotericism. Religious fanatics, therefore, tend to believe religion-related conspiracy theories without verifying the evidence provided by the theorists.
9. Social Class: The poorer a person is, the more he believes conspiracy theories. This is as a result of his economic challenges, poor education, and other external factors that threaten his existence. People at the lower class feel uncertain and unable to control their lives and future; as a result, conspiracy theories give them certainty.