Africa must develop its own social media platforms – Engineer

Chief Executive Officer of Ghana’s Chamber of Telecommunications Companies, Ken Ashigbey has called for the creation of local social media platforms and applications.

This is in response to the unexpected shut down of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram yesterday for six hours following a faulty configuration change on these platforms.

Mr. Ashigbe said majority of companies in Ghana, depend on these social media platforms to transact business hence, the shutdown had dire consequences on their business operations including financial loss.

He raised concerns about the monopoly on social media, citing Monday’s event as a typical example, adding that local social media platforms would have saved the day.

“I’m hoping that all of us would learn from all of this and this is where it brings to bare the need for a lot more local content, we need to be developing our own social media platforms as a continent so that we have some level of independence so that when these things happen we are not impacted as we were…. once you use these networks then you use data, so definitely it would impact on the usage for those 6 hours that these social media platforms went down,” Mr. Ashigbe stated.

On the ongoing SIM Card re-registration, Mr. Ashigbe said the process is going on smoothly with positive feedback from the Telcos.