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Cyber cafés in the country closing at alarming rate

By Stanley Opara

Mr. Ifeanyi Ude, a Lagos cyber café operator spends a lot of time these days brooding over whether he can pay for his office accommodation when the lease expires in June.

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Reason: His once thriving business is now a shadow of itself. Ude who started operations in 2004 with 32 workstations in his café, has barely 11 working, as he finds it difficult fixing the ones that are down due to s drastic cut in cash flow.

This is the fate of most cyber café operators in Lagos and several large cities as many of the operators, who were lured into investing in the business due to its high returns, have started closing shop.

About five years ago, cyber cafes charged between N150 - N200 per hour for browsing. They offered other services such as Internet calls. Some enterprising entrepreneurs offered ”consular” services to the United States Visa Lottery applicant and charged a handsome fee for processing their applications online.

Cyber cafes located on university campuses also became virtual money spinners as they serviced a captive market

However, all of that appears to in the past as a combination of factors including poor power supply, high cost of bandwidth, the association of cyber cafes with advance fee fraudsters and demand for privacy by Internet users have combined to hurt this line of business in the last two years.

Mr. Sunny Imudia, the Country Representative of SkyVision, a global network and Internet service provider, says that the major challenge militating against provision of Internet services, either by corporate organisations or cyber cafés, is the issue of power supply, and the increase in the cost of bandwidth.

Imudia points out that if this remains a challenge to large corporate organisations, the effects on cyber café operators, who are largely small businesses has been pronounced.

The President, Association of Cyber cafe and Telecentre Operators of Nigeria Mr. Layo Omotola, says in 2003, the country had over 15,000 cyber cafes, with over 10,000 of them in Lagos state.

”As at the end 2007, the number had dropped to 1,002, and with a recent statistics taken by us, functional cybercafés are now below 600,”he says.

He attributes this to the recent clampdown on cybercafés by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission as a result of increased cases of cyber crime in the country, coupled with the high involvement of Private Telecommunications Operators in providing Internet services.

He also notes that organisations and individuals are moving away from cyber cafe for Internet access to private sources including services provided by mobile phone companies

The Manager, Infinity Cyber café, Mr. Basil Ini, said the problems are enormous. He notes that the epileptic nature of power supply continue to pose threat to the business.

He says the amount spent on buying fuel, among other costs, continues to lower the profit margin of operators, and any attempt to pass on the cost of operations to the end-users of the service, result in serious protests from customers and reduced patronage.

According to him, the cost of servicing machines used in cyber cafés is another threat to business. He says that computers are delicate machines, and are meant to be handled with utmost care. Owing to the fact the public continue to use these machines, he says there are bound to be problems because some people have the tendency of handling people‘s property carelessly.

He says some patrons only come around to learn how to use PCs, and in the process, could wrongfully activate or deactivate commands that make the machines to malfunction, thereby resulting in frequent maintenance and associated cost.

The Head of Administration, Weblink Consults, a system solutions company, Mr. Anthony Akinade, argues that presently, there are alternatives to having Internet access, and these alternatives in most cases offer users the convenience and satisfaction they anticipate compared to what is obtainable in cyber cafés.

”Privacy is a key factor people consider in the course of sending information over the Internet, and cyber cafes‘ facility does not guarantee this. Some criminally minded people capitalize on the opportunity to spy on what some other people are doing on the Internet in cyber cafés,” he says.

According to him, in situations where a user does not sign out properly from his e-mail account for example, another user could gain access to some of the information in a previous user‘s account, and could use this to the detriment of the legitimate user.

This, he says, is the main reason, why people resolve to get personal Internet connectivity, which gives them access under the comfort of their homes or offices, to the detriment of cyber cafés.

Again laptops are getting cheaper. A used laptop can be obtained for N40,000, which many university students can afford. New ones can be easily acquired through a bank loan, while a Starcomms modem with one month free connectivity cost as low as N13,500.

The Internet access facility provided by some telecommunications company, which makes it possible to access the Internet with the aid of mobile phones and other electronic gadgets, he emphasizes, is another development militating against the continuous existence and survival of public cybercafés.

An IT expert, Mr. Jude Okoro, speaking on the issue, says, the level of cyber crime in the country had made the law enforcement agents to see anybody browsing in a cyber café as a fraudster, unless proven innocent. This, he says, is evident in the manner the cafes are being raided by police, and patrons arrested, notwithstanding their innocence.

This embarrassing situation as well as other forms of disturbances encountered in cyber cafés, he says, are enough to discourage people from patronising them, and in turn make provisions for alternative.