The Dirt that is Jumia, and why African Journalists MUST style up

I am writing this article after reading on the Business Daily Africa about M-fanisi, a mobile lending app, purportedly, now targets long-term savings by offering 11% plus interest, 5% above what other banks offer. I downloaded the app and was utterly disappointed. So this, in short, is my call to African journalists to pursue authenticity and not practice what we see in the US and Europe whenever they are writing about their startups and, in the African case, Jumia.

Jumia has been touted as the “Amazon of Africa.” It is not. So much has been invested into its development with the hope that it represents Africa’s growth and potential. It does not.

I am Kenyan. I live in Nairobi, one of Africa’s advanced and innovative cities…a city that, rightly so, is expected to be open to online shopping. Don’t get me wrong: we’re actually open to online shopping. We love the convenience of it. But we’re largely not open to it when it’s done on Jumia. For clarity, I have to explore a number of reasons for which Jumia has failed as an e-commerce platform, especially in Kenya…reasons that make you wonder what American and European investors and journalists actually think they know about Jumia and its operations in Africa:

1. Lack of Trust:

The reality is that the level of thievery on OLX (now Jiji) and Jumia killed Kenyans’ trust of/in shopping on those platforms. The common statement…I think it’s more of a question really, is, “Why not spend an extra $1 or $2, but be sure that whatever I ordered/chose, is what I get?” In other words, we find it a lot easier to travel to shops and vendors than we do dealing with Jumia vendors. Even if they try to change now, the damage they made earlier on is engraved in everyone’s mind, and we are not going back!

And no, if you think that this was just a Kenyan problem, it aint. I remember some years back when people were still actually trying to buy from Jumia then they realized that Jumia is the Wish of Africa…and “What I ordered on Jumia vs What I Got actually started trending. Here is a link of Nigerians engaged the discussion, to mean that this is a Jumia problem.

2. Poor Customer Service:

Jumia, like OLX before it rebranded, ignored the most important elements of business: customer service. In Nairobi, it wasn’t uncommon to get an underwhelming product, mostly because the vendors fished for photos from the internet when, in reality, whatever they had either differed in quality or appearance.

As if that was not all, they often refused to make refunds whenever clients made such discoveries, and often even threatened violence. Who threatens to beat up unsatisfied clients? I know; this relates with the previous point, but you get what I mean, right? Amazon puts clients first, Jumia does not. It is blasphemous to compare the two.

3. Fake Reviews:

Almost all vendors on Jumia have fake reviews. I wont waste your time on this because it is a commonly explored topic that even affects established brands like Amazon and Alibaba.

4. Deliberate Misleading of Clients:

When/if I want to make an online purchase from an overseas vendor, Amazon would be my preferred. It has the avenue, the means, and the reputation. When I want to make an online purchase in Kenya, I cannot go for Amazon…it’s just natural. I will look for something more localized…a vendor with an office I can walk to should I need to…like when my delivery is taking too long.

I am not alone in this mentality. Yet, as we have interestingly and consistently found out, nearly 50% of the vendors on Jumia are actually foreign, mostly based in China. No. Just No. Note that we don’t hate these people, we just know that there is a time for them, it is not every time. That is because we don’t have the patience to wait two weeks for a product I could have bought in a local shop just because it is $10 cheaper. Remember, Jumia has neither the capacity nor the means to offer services like Amazon’s Prime.

Sadly, they have not made the effort to separate their local vendors from international vendors. Buyers need to know the difference, Jumia. We need to know!

5. Misinterpretation of the African Cultures:

Africa is not a country. Even the countries in it do not have singular cultures. Take our Kenya, for instance: we are 42 communities, recently increased to 43 with the granting of citizenship to the Shona community. Interpreting our cultural demands and needs cannot be the equivalent of learning a new language. We’re the same, but different, and proudly so.

Jumia, of all companies, should have understood this. It is, after all, a German company purporting to be African. I brought that up because Walmart failed in Germany because of cultural differences, and Germans were there to witness it and so should have learned from it.

What exactly do I mean? Every country, city, region in Africa has its own culture, trend, and mechanisms for survival. In Nairobi, for instance, when Posta (Kenya’s mail service) proved incapable of adapting to the demands of the new world, there emerged these small but highly effective delivery brands created by Matatu Saccos that guarantee same day deliveries at very low costs. It’s like every region has its own system. Yet they do not guarantee door-to-door deliveries. They only do town-to-town deliveries.

Nairobi is a little bit more advanced: the past five years has seen to the rise of independent delivery guys (errands guys) on bicycles and motorbikes who do door-to-door/office deliveries. Most of them come recommended because there still exists no such platform that has thought of homogenizing their services. Business idea right there.

Do similar systems exist in other African countries? I am not sure…if they do, it is likely that I will find differences.

Jumia did not research on this because they are largely not even African. They don’t understand it. And it is often up to vendors to figure out how deliveries are done…which is not bad, actually. Only that their performances would have been homogenized if they laid out a footprint for their vendors to use. For only then would they know how much the vendors spend on deliveries and, in relation, how much they can take from the vendors as commission fees without harming the vendors’ businesses. Instead, they approached this market with a European mentality.

Pissed on the water for everyone else

Every Kenyan knows that other than advertising their website, Jumia literally does nothing in Kenya. I assume that given Kenya’s potential and rank among Africa’s economic giants, if they cant do anything meaningful here, they are not doing anything meaningful anywhere else.

Their failures, in the above sense, have affected the Kenyan online shopping market that even reputed companies have had to remodel their approaches. For example, Safaricom’s Masoko was launched with pomp and flair before the company quickly changed tact, stopping vendors from using their platform and solely reserving it for the electronics they sell.

If you see Safaricom, Kenya’s most trusted company, recoil from a market, just know that something is wrong. Jumia is definitely lying about something. They have it wrong about the nature of the market and how it is performing…and the fact that their investors have not noticed this shows that they are perhaps cooking figures. I have, after all, read reports about that.

This brings me to my last observation about Jumia, Jiji, and the likes: how people use their platforms.

These platforms should be seen as advertisement platforms, not e-commerce platforms. You know, more like Craigslist. Call them the Craigslists of Africa, not the Amazon of Africa. The level of distrust they have created have effectively stopped them from being anything like Amazon.

What do I mean by this? You see, people don’t actually shop on these platforms. They mostly browse on the platforms for the best deals, get the traders’ numbers, call them…then actually take the time to travel to the vender to verify their claims before making the purchase, effectively cutting off the online shopping platform that sought to be the intermediary…or broker, I suppose.

No, I do not mean that e-commerce does not exist in Kenya. It does. But through interesting avenues, not through mainstream avenues as is the case in Europe and the USA.

Take, for instance, that bookshops (I use the internet mostly when shopping for books hence this example) have Facebook and Instagram pages. Many others are on Telegram and Twitter. And some have websites. They use Jumia and Jiji the same way they use these platforms: to showcase their products. Payments are often made directly to them, not via these platforms.

Makes you wonder what Jumia thinks it is. It has, in the recent past, invested heavily on YouTube adds to try and market their food delivery platform…but this was reactionary: they did it only after seeing Uber Eats thrive. They are already late to the party. Something which shows they are neither innovative nor strategic.

Given all these shortcomings, why then is Jumia touted as a giant?

A trend I observed a while back is that Americans and their Silicon Valley do not actually appreciate innovation and real product development…they invest in the idea of it. Take Tesla, for instance. It is a company that is touted as the future. But is it?

We all know its cars are poorly assembled, with parts you can easily take apart with two fingers. They don’t compare to anything Daimler produces. They don’t sell as much as Daimler does. But it has a much higher Market Cap and its CEO is now among the richest men on earth. That is because Americans invest in ideas and publicity, not reality. They like to build their castles in the air.

No. Wait. It’s not Americans. It is the co-operate world. You see, investors are mostly rich people who’ve lost touch with the real world. Their information comes from news. Many don’t actually take the time to go through financials, and those who do, do not take the time to validate anything…at least not in the ways they need to. Shares, to them, is more about demand and supply…not reality.

“Innovators” have realized this, so they tout things that don’t actually work…and they often cook figures to bridge the gap between reality and the dreamy world in which their investors live. Take, for instance, that Pinterest still presents itself as a company on a path of growth despite every indication that it has peaked. Given the product life cycle, it has completed the first three stages: introduction, growth, maturity. It is now awaiting its decline unless it can re-invent itself or make an acquisition…which it is too small to make.

But the reports it gave in 2019 about the prospects of growth (to two thirds the number of users Facebook has) was enough to keep their shares trading at above $50. Tell me, who actually uses Pinterest and for what? I have an account with them…but I don’t use the platform to the extent that I have to reset my passwords every once a year when I want to download something from it.

There are better, equally free platforms that provide high quality images. I am sorry, but if this is not what Pinterest does (providing images and links), then just know that they have been so ineffective at showcasing what they are that even curious users like me don’t know what it is about.

As is the case with most companies in the Silicon Valley, the idea with it is to keep going for long enough as investors keep making the creators and its board members rich.

This has actually led me to wonder what Americans mean by “Tax the rich.” The rich are not stealing from them. The rich are investing in the rich, making the rich richer…Jeff did not reclaim his spot as the world’s richest because he stole from workers…but because Americans went into a shopping frenzy, creating the idea that Amazon will only continue to grow. The rich invested in the idea of continued growth, not the reality that the pandemic would eventually start killing shoppers’ sources of income and the frenzy of online shopping would eventually peter.

Jumia is no different. They operate the same way.

On a side note, Kenya is modelling our Konza after Silicon Valley…with the now under construction KAIST (Kenya Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) expected to play the roles that KAIST (Korea) and Stanford have played for their economies. I hope that whatever culture that will emerge from Konza will be vastly different from what I have learned of the Silicon Valley with its culture of hollow companies, with large and unreasonable market caps.

Fun fact:

Even if Jumia’s systems were actually coded by an African(s), s/he is in the background because white investors mostly do not think that they can trust an African with their money. I’ve seen it happen. But the white people who replace the original creators are just driven by the money that they can get by going public, so they abandon the actual business, preferring instead to create a façade in its place. What about the original creators? Well, they also easily get drowned in the money.

So, how does that relate to the M-fanisi issue?

I was intrigued by the idea of an app/bank that will give me 11% plus interest on my savings so I downloaded the app. First thing I noticed is that, as of today, the 29th of August, it has been reviewed less than 550 times on Google’s PlayStore. Sio kwa ubaya, but I remembered articles in 2017 claiming that this very app was recording over 2000 loan requests per day. I knew that because I read business news, not because it is a well-marketed app. The reality is that not many people actually know this app, and it is reflected in the low number of reviews…2000 loan requests per day, in four years, could have generated more than 10,000 reviews by today.

Well, I have had the app for the second week, and this is my thirteenth day of trying to sign up, and it won’t even send me the SMS code I need for a sign up. In effect, it is, in my experience, as useless as a placeholder. Yet the articles about it man make it seem glorious!

Now, let’s go even deeper:

M-fanisi is owned by Maisha Microfinance Bank (Maisha MFB). The MFB got its nation-wide license in 2020, to mean that a new and aggressive strategy of providing 11% interest on savings would really help them grow, right?

Well, guess what else the impression of an app that loans a minimum of 2000 people per day would do? It would further improve their value as a company. It would show that they have embraced and are leading Fintech in Kenya. That would make them quite a good fit for investing and I’d look to invest now, if I can…you know, because if I were one its its VCs, I’d profit more…perhaps I’d even get a seat on its board (farfetched and dreamy, I know, but investors can arm string you into doing things like these).

If I can’t do it now, I would patiently wait for the day they go public.

You get what I mean? And do you think I’d be alone in such thoughts? No. The only difference between me and the other rich investors is that I am poor enough to need a bank account that provides good interests on savings…so I have gone to the extent of downloading the app. Many of those rich investors would just be satisfied with the bi-annual and annual reports. So, while I have already observed that investing in Maisha could be risky unless their app is improved and thoroughly marketed, many of them will not be positioned to understand the risk.

Journalistic Sacred Duty

Our journalists have the duty to not just publish those reports as they have been presented. We can’t be Silicon Valley. I am saying this because many Kenyans, rich or not, are now beginning to take the NSE seriously. You have to guide them properly. Dig for the required information. Do experiments. And fact-check those reports. We are not an advanced country so we need working services…not companies that purport to provide services.

Let’s make sure that only the companies that need investments get the financial support they need…not companies that are running get-rich-quick schemes for some foreigners whose sacred duty is to piss on our markets to the extent that actual, functional companies get it hard to venture into the same markets.