In 2007, Ashley Peter and Alan Wolff, two South African computer science students at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, created and launched 2go, a social media platform. At its peak, 2go reached 30 million subscribers across West Africa and was dubbed the Facebook killer, with more subscribers in Nigeria than Facebook had. After a good run of years, 2go dipped and faded into obscurity following a poorly handled hardware upgrade and the arrival of WhatsApp on the chat scene. Back in Nigeria, celebrated Nigerian blogger Linda Ikeji ran the country's biggest entertainment blog. Her site was among the top 15 most visited in Nigeria, and she was hailed as the queen of the web. She figured she could tap into that momentum to launch a social media platform for the massive Nigerian market. Linda Ikeji Social (LIS), a self-styled social media platform, was born and heavily marketed across Nigeria as the next big thing. LIS faded within a year, barely cracking 100,000 users despite massive publicity. The same can be said of 2geda, a Nigerian social media platform unveiled by the Ooni of Ife in May 2025. It has only been downloaded over a thousand times on Google’s Playstore. Regardless of the continent or market, Africans have struggled to build and own their own social media platforms. Platforms launched on the continent die out within a few years and fail to compete with Silicon Valley. What could be the reason why African’s struggle to hack the social media game? A heterogeneous market Aside from the obvious challenge of adequate funding and technological infrastructure, African-founded social media platforms struggle to scale because the market is highly fragmented, said Tage Kene Okafor, a former TechCrunch reporter and Director of Communications at Terra Industries. “Africa is not one market. Social media platforms only scale when millions of people use them consistently over a long period of time, with advertising revenue that makes economic sense,” he told Condia. “While Africa has over a billion people, it isn’t a homogeneous market like China or India, which benefit from huge populations within a single country, fewer language barriers, and vibrant advertising ecosystems.” Aside from language barriers and varying policies within jurisdictions, there is a nagging problem of declining advertising revenue due to diminished purchasing power among Africans. This problem is not faced by Silicon Valley firms in the United States, who enjoy the luxury of the world's largest advertising market, a stable currency, and a vibrant venture capital sector. It took Facebook five years to achieve profitability, having survived its first five years on venture capital funding. An African social media startup may struggle to secure that kind of support. Inferiority complex The challenge facing Africans in building their own platforms extends beyond product development. African platforms are sadly less desirable to end users than their Silicon Valley peers. Chief Emeka Mba, CEO of Afia TV and Former Director-General of the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC), believes colonialism is mainly responsible for how Africans approach ownership to date. “I think there are multiple challenges why Africans find it difficult to create or own our own digital distribution platforms; the first is a hurtful but persisting colonial legacy impact, which limits our perception of ownership, still tethering us to the concept of first world domination,” Mba told Condia. “The second aspect is that our governments are yet to realise the importance of digital sovereignty in a world increasingly ruled by algorithms.” MBA’s thesis points to the challenge of Africans placing foreign platforms on a pedestal and looking down on local platforms that offer the same services. This puts African founders at a disadvantage from a marketing perspective, adding to their existing challenges of limited funding and inadequate technical infrastructure. How Africans can compete and win “The only way I see us owning the distribution channels of our content is by going niche (building apps for vertical communities, like how Nairaland started or how creator monetisation platforms operate) and then expanding from there,” Okafor stated. However, he explained that doing this requires large capital pools and better infrastructure. Mba believes African governments can level the field for builders on the continent by investing in digital infrastructure. “Governments need to invest in building the digital backbone that African platforms must ride on; it is not enough to have platforms that claim they are African but still rely on international digital infrastructure,” he said The media executive had a firsthand experience when Afia TV lost its YouTube Channel out of the blue for no concrete reason. His story resonates with hundreds of creators who lost their hard-earned platforms for flimsy reasons, stressing the need for homegrown content distribution platforms. Meanwhile, Nduka Obaigbena, another Media Mogul and Chairman of Arise Media Group, is launching a new homegrown social media platform called ‘Lekee Lekee’. He dedicates his new platform to freedom, citing the concerning case of overdependency on a foreign-owned platform. The Lekee Lekee project braves the scary odds of succeeding where others have failed. Its success will definitely depend on managing the challenges faced by previous projects. If it fails to do so, it may join the long list of moribund social media projects on the continent.
