GHexpat

In Ghana, telephone numbers tend to serve two purposes.  Besides their primary function, they're also the means by which most people save and transfer electronic money or "momo" (i.e. mobile money), as it's called in this part of the world. The reason I'm bringing that up is to clarify certain terminology.  When someone speaks of "credit" or "airtime", they're referring to the account set aside for phone calls.  But when they speak of "momo", that's actual electronic cash that can easily be converted into physical money. As of late, MTN Ghana has been siphoning my airtime.  If I purchase credit for phone calls and let it sit for a while, the account will start deducting on its own.  For example, the GH₵1.50 I deposited yesterday has gradually disappeared, even though I haven't made any calls. The logical assumption would be that these funds are being deducted by subscriptions.  But let me state with confidence that I am no...

THE PROBLEM WAS EXPEDITIOUSLY RESOLVED I'll be honest and admit that I thought the internet outage which Ghana and a number of other African countries began experiencing about a month ago was going to take a lot longer to resolve than it actually did.  But still, going approximately a week without connectivity was quite harrowing, especially for those of us who depend on the 'net for our livelihood.  And I can imagine that some residents, i.e. those who work for foreign entities that rely heavily on deadlines, may have even lost their jobs due to being forced offline like that. The ever-colorful Kai Cenat popped up in GH last month .  Unfortunately, he did so at the time when the internet was basically nonfunctional. To give an example of what I mean, Kai Cenat , the A list social media star from NYC, came to Ghana on March 13th, the day before the outage began.  Of course, being an online personality devoid of connectivity, he had to cut his visit short and bounced ...

A couple of articles I came across from locally-based websites over the past couple of days while researching the current internet outage gives the impression that at the source of the problem lies in "cut" undersea cables located in neighboring Ivory Coast , nearby Senegal and to a lesser extent  Portugal .  This apparent half-truthing has been buttressed by innumerable other sites, many of which are international, due to the ambiguity of the information they have provided. From the start of the outage, I was under the impression that the "cut" cables may be an act of terrorism.  That's because in late February, I read  an article on Infowars which stated that Houthi (i.e. Yemenese) rebels severed major internet cables in the Red Sea .  So I thought that perhaps there was some type of global conspiracy going on, i.e. a multinational terrorist organization destroying internet cables, yet those in the know being reluctant to specify who. In a way that presump...

The current internet outage makes it clear how this service has become a standard amenity, akin to electricity, even here in Africa. DUMSOR, INTERNET STYLE Some years ago I worked at an internet cafe.  The situation was such that often, my colleauges and I would use the workplace to hustle for our daily bread. So imagine you wake up in the morning, use your last money to get to the office, hoping and praying that you'll be able to make some dough, and bam, the electricity is off.  Not only that, but it's off for the entire day.  That was something we experienced semi-regularly.  I recently heard a local politician try to argue that dumsor did not began until the NDC years (i.e. the early 2010s), and I was thinking to myself that he must've not been around during the Kufuor era. Of course, many of us continue to depend on electricty for our livlihoods.  For example, there are some welders who live nearby, and when the lights go off during these current days of ...