Mogadishu (PP Editorial) — The decision of Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter Inc, to charge users with a large number of followers for the blue badge used to verify Twitter handles has had a different impact on different people. In Somalia where many people have twitter accounts, many people have not been able to pay for their existing verifications issued before the new policy.
You should have a Mastercard or Visa to be able to pay for the verification. Elon Musk took a risk to introduce the new policy that the previous owner was reluctant to adopt for fear of alienating users of the microblogging site. The richest man in the world can afford to put up with temporary backlash resulting from his monetisation scheme.
Somalia has powerful financial institutions in the form of money transfer companies that double as local quasi-banks. Only the Premier Bank reportedly issues Mastercard debit cards but its reach is limited domestically thanks in part to regulatory hurdles imposed by the mobile money systems that control more than 80% of daily transactions in Somalia. Mobile money operators have provided the unbanked with an opportunity to benefit from the services of mobile wallets but the money transfer companies are too staid to introduce debit cards.
Owning a debit card will enable a customer to buy courses or products online. Many customers have worries that their money (mainly in US dollars) kept in local digital banks could disappear if hackers attack the company servers. They do not have guarantees — how much of their savings are protected by a banking law if the financial institutions go bankrupt.
The entrepreneurial zeal of Somalis is becoming a self-congratulatory epithet that puts consumer rights at risk. Mobile money operators in Somalia are the unofficial central bank of Somalia. They control the economy and retain crucial economic data on which they make decisions to deepen their monopolies to quash potential competitors.
Although it takes less than two minutes to send money to Somalia, the mobile money wallet operators’ mindset has not evolved from the late 1990s and early noughties practice of wiring money from a foreign country in the morning and phoning the potential recipient the next morning. We have to thank Elon Musk for showing us the futility of our smug, entrepreneurial self-perception.
© Puntland Post, 2022
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