What Do We Really Know about these Foreign Powers’ Solo Quest for Africa’s Data, Wealth, Young People, and Digital Influence? You’ll also be surprised to learn who is behind them.
The next time you glance at someone’s smartphone in Africa, chances are two apps will be on their homepage: Opera and OPay.
Opera — an internet browsing alternative to Google Chrome — often comes pre-installed on budget smartphones in Africa and is widely preferred for one key reason: it uses significantly less mobile data than its competitors. Sometimes, you can use it even when you don’t have a data package on your phone. A luxury in Africa.
Meanwhile, OPay — the mobile banking and payments platform — has become ubiquitous across Nigeria. The last time you saw your hairdresser and the last time you called a carpenter or electrician to your home, you likely heard them say, “Please make a transfer,” followed by an OPay account number recited from memory. OPAY is becoming the bank of choice for young, hard-working Nigerians, careful with their money. You may also see more POS device terminals with the OPay label when you pay with your debit card at pharmacies or restaurants across Nigeria.
When I first asked our family pharmacist in Lagos why OPay is so popular, the answer was straightforward: the Opera–OPay ecosystem is fast, efficient, and affordable. From browsing headlines to sports news and making payments, everything moves at lightning speed. The phrase someone who jumped into our chat used was “sharp-sharp”.
Unlike many other internet and banking technology providers, Opera and OPay have built data centres in Nigeria and Kenya. That means user activity isn’t routed through faraway data centres in Europe or North America — it processes locally. The result? When you use their digital platforms, you get instant responses, minimal lag, and lower costs.
But behind that convenience lie more unsettling questions: Who actually owns and controls these tools? What do we really know about them? And what, ultimately, is their intention in Africa?
The Appeal of “Free” or Low-Cost
Opera’s rise in Africa is no accident. Leveraging a practice known as zero-rating, the company partners with local telecom providers (MTN, Glo, Safaricom, etc.) to waive data charges for users accessing its apps. In countries where mobile data can cost more than a day’s meals, a browser that doesn’t deplete your bundle is an instant success. Especially for young people in Nigeria’s working class. By removing that economic barrier — often offering access at low or no cost — Opera has positioned itself as the default gateway to the internet for millions across the continent who want the joys of the internet.
But what looks like a gift carries hidden costs — and deeper risks to users, governments, and the long-term security of Africa’s digital infrastructure.
Who owns it? China owns it
In 1994, Opera was originally founded in Oslo, Norway, by Norwegian nationals Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner and Geir Ivarsøy. However, Opera has not been Norwegian owned for nearly a decade.
In 2016, the company was fully acquired by a Chinese-led consortium, including tech giants Kunlun Tech and Qihoo 360 — both of which have faced scrutiny over data privacy practices. Since the acquisition, Opera’s leadership has remained firmly under Chinese management and control.
CEO Yahui Zhou, a Chinese national, has led the company since the takeover, supported by co-CEO Lin Song and a board dominated by Chinese nationals. Of the seven current members of Opera’s board of directors, five are Chinese. The remaining two — Trond Riiber Knudsen and Lori Wheeler Næss — are Norwegian, though many observers view their presence as largely symbolic, aimed at maintaining Western-facing optics as Opera remains listed on the NASDAQ.
What is particularly striking is the absence of African representation on Opera’s executive team or board — despite Africa being a strategically vital market and a significant source of user data, especially given its large youth population and rapidly growing economies.
A review of public records and LinkedIn profiles reveals that all African employees affiliated with Opera are in junior staff roles in the field in Africa, not in the decision-making ranks, and all are reportedly paid in local currency. Why is a company doing so much in Africa doing so without Africans in its leadership, executive and board ranks? In 2025, it’s absurd.
Can we imagine it the other way around?
Let’s imagine you, my reader, acquire a major Canadian company—let’s call it BlackBerry in Motion. You and a close colleague become co-CEOs of Blackberry in Motion—you are both Nigerian, passionate, and determined to build something meaningful in the global tech space. Your leadership team and board are predominantly Nigerian, with a couple of token Canadian board members included for optics—a nod to the company’s origins.
You then decide to expand into China and adopt a “China-first” strategy focused on young people. But you don’t include a single Chinese young person in your leadership or governance. You hire very junior-staff-level Chinese employees, pay them in yuan (indirectly knowing you are underpaying thems-à-vis the currency stability of other staff), and consider that your bulletproof strategy for building trust and goodwill with Chinese consumers and the Chinese government. China would never allow it. Any executive surprised about any government hostility and backlash in such a scenario is thoughtless.
Now let’s take it a (shocking) step further. Imagine you make no meaningful investment in CSR and social impact in China. It’s all about taking—not giving. You invest little support for local initiatives and partnerships with international or domestic stakeholders contributing to China’s development. You stand out for making an effort to engage with United Nations platforms—which is in an exciting era of “tech for development”—where all major companies in the tech industry are working multilaterally.
Instead, you operate in isolation—going it alone in China, extracting quarterly profits from China, and capturing a share of the value back to Nigeria—on the advice of two Canadian board members who’ve never lived in China. Sounds absurd, doesn’t it? Yet this by all optics is Opera’s game play in Africa.
Meanwhile, recognizing Africa’s strategic importance, Opera’s CEO Yahui Zhou founded OPay — a fintech spin-off — and served as its inaugural CEO. As of my last check with the business trade registry, Opera retains a 7% founding stake in OPay.
OPAY, unlike Opera, has chosen to hire a number of Nigerians because it is, after all, focused entirely on Nigeria. In 2023, Nigerian executive Emmanuel Idogah resigned as CEO. He was succeeded by Dauda Wuritka Gotring, also Nigerian and a former executive at the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN). This choice is strategic, especially given the CBN’s recent freeze of several fintech accounts — including OPay’s — reportedly over concerns related to fraud and compliance issues when banking Nigeria’s young and vulnerable – without giving much back.
Why does ownership matter?
Beyond optics and equity, there are serious implications for privacy and Nigerian national sovereignty. Under China’s National Intelligence Law of 2017, Article 7 mandates that “any organisation or citizen shall support, assist, and cooperate with state intelligence work.” Crucially, this law applies extraterritorially, meaning any Chinese company operating in Africa can be legally compelled to share user data with Chinese intelligence authorities, including the Ministry of State Security, without the knowledge or consent of African regulators or users.
As a result, every Nigerian or African using Opera or OPay is potentially at risk—whether it’s their financial data, browsing history, location patterns, news preferences, or even sports team loyalties—being quietly transmitted to Chinese intelligence services. They would know you better than the Nigerian government or your neighbour.
Indeed, this matter lies at the heart of the ongoing tension between TikTok and the U.S. government—leading to executive orders, bipartisan Congressional scrutiny, and renewed efforts under President Trump to force the sale of TikTok’s U.S. operations to an American company like Oracle. President Biden also supported similar measures during his term, recognising the platform as a national security concern. If you’ve ever used TikTok, you know its power to map not just your preferences, but what your heart, mind, and soul respond to minute by minute.
The U.S. government understands that TikTok could give China deep insights into the habits, behaviours, and preferences of over 170 million American users—many of them young people. So, it is taking defensive action. Already, US government officials cannot use TikTok. And yet, while TikTok remains under intense scrutiny in the USA, Chinese-linked platforms like Opera and OPay continue to operate largely unnoticed in Nigeria, Kenya and across Africa, despite having access to sensitive financial, browsing, gaming, sports, location, and communication data—often in countries with far weaker regulatory oversight. In fact, during my last visit to Abuja, Nigeria, I noticed some staff at a Nigerian government regulator office browsing on Opera! Is this going to China?
If the force of Article 7 is used on TikTok, Opera and OPay China will soon know Nigerians and Kenya’s young people much better than the Nigerian and Kenyan governments know their own citizens.
What exactly is their mission?
Unlike most tech companies, Opera’s website offers no clear mission statement or articulated set of values—nothing about climate change, sustainability, giving back, empowering communities, or investing in society. Nothing even about integrity or earning public trust. Instead, it provides only a vague reference to “innovate and inspire, uncover the unexpected….” On the point of “uncovering the unexpected”, the company was sued by the Kenyan government around 2020—an outcome that some employees, speaking off the record, described as a surprise to Opera’s executives and seen as a fabricated attempt by Kenya to extract money under the guise of regulatory fines. Going back to the earlier Blackberry in Motion metaphor, I would argue it was absolutely expected – unless we are doing business as it was done in the 1950s: take, don’t give back, and expect good.
In June 2023, during a televised interview on Kenya’s K24 Live, Opera’s Vice President for Africa, ostensibly a non-African, by the name of Richard Monday, was asked about the company’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts. His sole example of companywide CSR was a past collaboration with Worldreader, a modest initiative to promote e-books on Opera Mini. But who even reads e-books on mobile browsers today? The programme likely required de minimis investment—perhaps just a few thousand dollars and in-kind promotion. In 2024, the company reported annual revenues of $480.65 million, reflecting a 21.12% year-over-year growth, according to StockAnalysis. The disconnect raises serious questions about Opera’s true commitment to the African markets it claims to prioritise and is gaining business from.
“Africa first” — But in what way? Without Africans?
Opera’s public messaging tells a very different story about its relationship with Africa. In 2018, Opera CFO Frode Jacobsen told Business Insider that Africa was the company’s “top priority”, citing Opera Mini’s dominance and appeal in sub-Saharan Africa. As recently as February 2024, the company reaffirmed its “Africa First” strategy, pledging $100 million to expand internet access and financial tools across the continent. “Africa First means our mobile products and services are developed first and foremost with the African consumer in mind,” the company claimed. The initiative was reportedly fashioned by Jørgen Arnesen, SVP at Opera.
But the disconnect is glaring: Africa is not in the decision-making room. Opera’s Chief Human Resources Officer, David Qi—a Chinese national reporting directly to CEO Yahui Zhou—acts as a gatekeeper, deciding who gets into Opera and who doesn’t. From my LinkedIn scan, there are no African team members on the Opera HR team. Once again, there are no Africans in Opera’s leadership, senior management, or on its board. “Africa First” may exist as a strategy, but certainly not in terms of decision-making. In a continent where the prevailing Zeitgeist is “nothing for us without us”, Opera has failed to read the room after 17 years in Africa.
Compounding this, Opera’s recent legal troubles—including an embarrassing lawsuit in Kenya and OPay’s massive regulatory fines from Nigeria’s central bank—highlight a deeper disconnect between Opera, OPay, and African governments. They are not a social stakeholder, just a business one. According to insiders, the fallout from the Kenyan legal case triggered a strategic pivot: away from Africa and toward growth in Asia and Latin America. Internally, some executives reportedly describe African governments as uniformly corrupt and driven by bribes and extortion—leaving no modicum of imagination for more constructive engagement. For Opera, as a Nasdaq-listed company, disengagement from Africa’s government is seen as the only path forward—not a relationship reset.
In stark contrast to firms like Apple and Microsoft—who rebuilt trust with governments through public-interest programmes and social engagement after legal battles with the US DOJ and the EU Commission—Opera has taken the opposite path: avoiding African governments, retreating from investing in social citizenship, and extracting data and existing revenue with minimal accountability. Profit without partnership.
One staff member I contacted on LinkedIn told me, “Nowhere in Opera leadership’s playbook for Africa is there serious consideration of how to engage African leaders beyond cynical assumptions of corruption. I keep hearing them say, ‘Nasdaq means we can’t bribe,’” the staffer told me, “but being Nasdaq listed also means corporate responsibility, long-term partnerships, and participation in global forums like Chatham House or the Edison Alliance.” There are many principled African government officials ready to engage with us—if Opera’s leadership would merely look and not fixate on corruption.
A quick LinkedIn search shows Opera employs just one person globally that works on government affairs. As a company with 30 years of operations, hundreds of staff, and global ambitions, only one government affairs official (who appears focused on Spain) tells us all we need to know. Astonishing to me, I’ve seen no Chief Sustainability Officer or anyone in the company focused on climate change or social impact in their job titles. In 2025? As a Nasdaq-listed tech company, they are an outlier.
I don’t expect Apple’s level of sustainability sophistication from Opera. But Opera’s carbon footprint is undoubtedly cross-continental and extensive in Africa. As a result, tokenistic programmes they cite on energy-efficient browsing and e-waste reduction won’t cut it in 2025. Not when your revenue is in the hundreds of millions of USD.
Missing from the global tech governance table
Relatedly, just like their omissions on the climate change front, unlike major Western tech firms, Opera is also not visibly engaged in global policy forums. They are absent from key international platforms such as UN conferences on the digital divide, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), where all tech players are members, and World Bank digital governance initiatives.
Despite managing millions of African user journeys each day, they do not participate in multi-stakeholder initiatives focused on responsible technology for Africa and the global south, including AI ethics, digital inclusion, or data protection. Their silence—and their absence—is, in itself, a statement about priorities: global ethics take a back seat to profit.
Consider the Broadband Commission, the Giga initiative, and the UN Partner2Connect programme—platforms where companies like Microsoft, Google, Cisco, Ericsson, Huawei, and even Starlink are actively working to bridge the digital divide. Opera and other names in this article are nowhere to be seen.
Take Mozilla—a tech company and, like Opera, a browser firm. Yet unlike Opera, Mozilla is actively investing in digital empowerment and internet health across Africa, including Nigeria, through its Africa Innovation Mradi. Despite being a non-profit—not a commercial tech giant—it funds local organisations through its In Real Life (IRL) Fund, offering $15,000–$50,000 grants for projects that connect technology with social justice. Mozilla also partners with institutions like AFRALTI to build the capacity of young Africans in open-source software and responsible AI while convening forums and publishing research on AI, human rights, and digital inclusion. That a non-profit can do all this without a profit motive makes Opera’s inaction harder to justify—and its strained relationships with African governments easier to understand.
Think of someone who never shows up at “church”—take that to mean any space the community holds sacred: a venue grounded in values, committed to solving real problems together, and populated by parties who have earned mutual respect through shared purpose. Conspicuous by their absence, this non-attending church person then suddenly appears to you, alone, claiming they deserve your trust and a stake in your most sacred spaces and markets. Naturally, you’d be suspicious.
They have not historically been present in the rooms that shape the agenda. They have not stood shoulder to shoulder with others in the global and regional arenas where technology and development values are earnestly debated and upheld. It’s no surprise that the Kenyan government is not pursuing legal action against major players like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, or Mozilla—there is simply too much meaningful collaboration happening between them, both globally and in even more intimate, values-driven spaces. “In church”.
Notably, Kenya is suing Meta, a company whose abrasive, exploitative and often tone-deaf approach has become widely recognised. When you find yourself with poor company, take note—you have something in common. And it’s not the cliche answer of corrupt Africans, but what you are trying to take from them without giving back: including data mining the details of their young people’s lives.
While I’ve chosen not to detail what Apple, Google or Microsoft are doing in Africa—that’s an article of its own—Opera cannot hide behind limited resources when even a non-profit like Mozilla is showing up, being seen, and building relationships that count. They’re in church—not just loitering outside, waiting to collect from those walking out.
White at the Top, Africans in the Field: The New Face of Value Extraction
In fairness, this pattern extends well beyond Opera. Companies like Ringier (Switzerland), Rocket Internet (Germany), and Moove (Netherlands) continue to operate with boards, senior leadership, and management ranks that are exclusively white while hiring a handful of African and Black staff as envoys to navigate local markets and extract profits. There is no meaningful African inclusion at the leadership, strategy, or board level at any of these companies.
African roles are limited to execution—not to shaping the vision or values of companies whose business models depend heavily on African markets. African governments must demand more. Take Ringier, for example—the Swiss media conglomerate behind platforms like Pulse Nigeria and Pulse Kenya, which present themselves as African voices but are owned, led and controlled entirely from Zurich. Ringier’s senior leadership is entirely white and non-African, yet the company profits from publishing African news and culture through its regional subsidiaries. The result is a media and tech landscape where foreign actors shape African media and tech—without African leadership, executive input, or representation.
Unsurprisingly, Germany’s Rocket Internet has seen many of its Nigerian ventures crash and fail, including EasyTaxi, as white leadership adopt a model of hiring Black faces to execute strategies in and for Africa, which they didn’t shape or envision. Nigerian and Kenyan authorities should take a closer look. Nothing for us, without us.
Final note
The Nigerian and Kenyan governments must demand more from companies like Opera. Opera’s model cannot be about extracting profits and chasing quarterly earnings—taking value from Africa while shifting strategic focus to Asia, all the while building consumer data profiles on young and vulnerable Africans for advertisers with little regard for social good in the very markets they exploit.
Government agencies in both countries must insist on the meaningful inclusion of Africans and young people in boardrooms and leadership roles at Opera, especially when companies operate under an “Africa First” banner – or have done so at any time. If you are in Nigeria, have a Nigerian board member. If you are in Kenya, have a Kenyan executive in leadership. Chinese regulations for businesses are the same. If you are focused on young people, where is their inclusion in strategy? Governments must lead this regulation. Because as you—government officials—read this, so will they. And if no action is taken, business as usual will persist. These companies won’t proactively change course on their own; they’ll simply wait and see if they can get away with doing the bare minimum.
As a woman raising Nigerian children, I wrote this piece to raise fair questions about the companies shaping their current and future digital world. My message to Opera is clear: don’t waste energy being upset that I wrote this or that staff spoke to me. All employees who spoke with me are protected under U.S. laws regulating Nasdaq companies—wherever they may be located, including Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank. Opera and OPAY staff have assured me they’ll inform me if any witch hunt for informants begins. Instead, the challenge to Opera is to ask whether what’s been said is true—and what you’re willing to do to set things right. The same goes for other Western, exploitative and value-extracting companies mentioned earlier. That would be a worthwhile outcome for everyone involved.
It’s no surprise that Opera’s stock price on Nasdaq lingers at around US$16 per share, well below the index average and well below sustainability champions such as Apple, which is at US$198. That gap isn’t just about scale—it’s about trust, corporate citizenship and the resulting public confidence in its stock. Opera can still close its gap if it chooses a path of accountability and correction over denial.
Opera, OPay, and Ringier and Rocket Internet did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Moove declined to respond.
Bernice Lee Edet is married to a Nigerian and lives between the UK and Nigeria. She runs “OpenSecret,” an independent investigative journalism project she manages part-time. The views expressed are solely her own and do not represent the publisher or any organization she is affiliated with.
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