A weekly wrap of the top stories of the week, using data. Subscribe to receive this via email every Friday.
Stack Overflow killed by AI
In the world of computer programming Stack Overflow is a giant. For more than a decade it was the go-to site to ask tech-related questions.
At its peak more than 300,000 questions* were posted on Stack Overflow every month. And many of those questions had dozens or even hundreds of responses.
Stack Overflow was enormous.
Which is why Naspers’ Prosus was happy to spend $1.7-billion to buy the site in August 2021. Many will argue that it was an overly expensive buy, but based on Stack Overflow’s performance it could have worked out.
But it didn’t.
In November 2020 ChatGPT was publicly launched and now new data shows how activity on Stack Overflow plummeted in the following two years from more than 200,000 questions a month to just a few thousand as developers turned to AI for answers. Today most of Prosus’ investment in Stack Overflow has been written off and Stack Overflow is all but dead.
*Note: the question data includes all posts, including deleted posts, as an indicator of activity. The data is from here.
Africa fact
Every week from now on, we’re going to make a chart about our home continent in this Africa Fact section. We think it’s time to turn our attention away from Trump and the tech bros for a moment and look closer at our fellow Africans.
Last week we looked at South Africa’s trade with the United States, China, Germany and India. This week, we’ve looked at who SA trades with in Africa.
Mozambique is South Africa’s biggest African trade partner and exports reached close to R120-billion in 2024. It’s one of the top 5 countries we export to, according to the SA Revenue Service. SA’s other top partners are, not surprisingly, its immediate neighbours, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Zambia.
Nigeria is the African country South Africa imports the most from. In 2024, imports reached R46.7-billion, almost entirely crude petroleum, according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity.
Price of rejection
Africans lost more than $70-million in rejected Schengen visa fees in 2024. Nigerians were hit particularly hard with more than 45% of applications made being rejected, followed by residents of Ghana who saw 44.5% of their applications rejected.
Each Schengen visa application costs €90 (around R1,800) and is non-refundable.
Data from the European Commission shows that there were 111,201 applications by Nigerians for Schengen visas in 2024, and only 58,808 of those were granted. That means that almost $5-million was spent (and lost) by Nigerians who had their visa applications turned down.
South Africans fare a lot better than the rest of the continent when applying for visas. A relatively small 5.6% of the 193,768 visas applied for in 2024 were rejected. This still amounts to more than $1-million in lost fees (ZAR 19.7-million to be exact), even if it is a lot less than the rest of the continent.
The average rejection rate for Schengen visas for all countries is 16.9% while the rejection rate for African applications is 27%.
The ONE campaign did a deeper dive into the data in their excellent Aftershocks newsletter this morning if you want more detail.
Poor performance
South Africa’s eight big metropolitan municipalities serve nearly half of all the households in the country and have both the budget and capacity to hire skilled professionals, says Tsakani Maluleke, the Auditor-General of South Africa (AGSA).
You’d expect them to set the standard when it comes to spending their budgets effectively and keeping track of their finances. Alas, this is not the case, by the looks of the latest auditor-general’s report.
If you look at a map of the country, there are very few municipalities that are bright green – the colour of a good audit.
And when it comes to the metros, Cape Town was the only one to get a clean audit.
Johannesburg has been getting an “unqualified with findings” result for years now and seems unable to take the step into green. Ekurhuleni lost its clean status two audits ago and Tshwane clearly has work to do.
In her report, Maluleke was blunt: metros are “plagued by poor revenue management, debt collection and budgeting practices, coupled with financial losses due to poor-quality spending.”
We shouldn’t really be surprised that the Gauteng metros are in a mess. Since the local government elections three and a half years ago, Johannesburg has had six mayor changes, and Tshwane has had four.
With such instability in the leadership, it’s little wonder that spending is of ‘poor quality’. The water crisis and potholes are evidence of that.
