Technology in Africa comes of age
Africa will soon be in the fast lane of the information superhighway if presentations and deliberations at the recently concluded Highway Africa Conference are anything to go by. Africa can no longer be ignored considering that it is the world’s fastest growing mobile phone market with over 100 million mobile phone users. The African media has particularly come a long way, looking back at the era of typewriters and still cameras. It took a lot of time then to produce news. Not any more. It cannot be gainsaid that the digital revolution is here with us.
That the media is a major beneficiary of this digital revolution is not in doubt. With globalization and the advent of the Internet, the Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) and other digital broadcast standards such as pod casting and web casting are a must use. It therefore did not come as a surprise when the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) announced at the conference that it would switch from analogue to digital broadcasting by 2010 in readiness for the World Cup that South Africa will host. With journalism students in Europe currently using mobile phones to file stories, take pictures and write captions, it is only a matter of time before Africa catches up. The only worry for the print media is that the Internet is becoming a more prominent news source as fewer people are reading newspapers according to the Carnegie Foundation of New York. In order to survive, newspapers will have to change their editorial content especially to suit young readers who are already hooked to the Internet.
Yet the benefits of ICT cannot be understated. In a paper titled ‘Visioning Africa’ Bheki Khumalo, Director of Corporate Affairs at Siemens Southern Africa expressed confidence that Africa can fight poverty and increase access to education and health care using the information infrastructure and remain in the fast lane of the information superhighway. With digital citizenship becoming accessible to all people, it means nothing short of a cultural revolution. But therein lies the dangers. Khumalo cast aspersions at privacy laws in this digital era where software can be bought for purposes of spying on one’s spouse, for instance. A major culprit in this case is Flexispy, the world’s most powerful spy software. But that is a story for another day.
That Africa has matured technologically was evident at the first citizen media and blogging conference held immediately after the Highway Africa Conference. Dubbed the Digital Citizen Indaba (DCI) on blogging, it brought together African citizens, bloggers, mobloggers, pod casters, vloggers, the civil society and new media journalists. What emerged from the conference was that besides being used as research tools by journalists, blogs have been successfully used in political activism and social justice in a number of African countries notably Ethiopia, Egypt and Zimbabwe.
In Kenya, kenyanpundit.com and mzalendo.com, a blog fronted by Ms Ory Okolloh and a partner simply known as M, are doing a commendable job. Those MPs who have been castigating the Institute for Civic Affairs and Development (ICAD) for unfairly rating their performance in parliament now have something else to worry about. For mzalendo.com monitors their performance in terms of Bills and motions tabled, order papers and questions asked. But unlike ICAD, mzalendo.com offers readers an opportunity to make comments, some of which may no be flattering to the politicians. Yet the Kenyan taxpayers deserve to know how their MPs are doing in parliament, given the huge perks they enjoy.
And if MPs thought that they pulled down the parliamentary website so that people would not know that some of them never saw the gates of a secondary school, they will be in for a rude shock. Thanks to new technology, that website is still up and we can read some of their profiles on mzalendo.com. But as Ms Okolloh points out, the blog is not meant to fight MPs and they have always invited them to give their comments. A perfect example of how blogs can be used for political activism is to be found at http://cheranganyvotesin2007.blogspot.com, which carries stories on all the happenings in Cherangany constituency ahead of the 2007 general election as well as alleged corruption cases that have haunted its MP Kipruto arap Kirwa.
Kudos also to kenyaunlimited.com, which brings together Kenyan bloggers and confers awards known as kaybees to the best bloggers. The blogosphere, which is doubling every six months will certainly get a shot in the arm following the advent of web 2.0, a second generation tool that allows easy sharing of information online. Needless to say, citizen journalism is here to stay. Whereas Ethiopia and Zimbabwe have been known to block blogs and websites they consider offensive, they need to be told that they are simply wasting their time for with modern technology, those blogs can still be accessed. They should also stop arresting and detaining bloggers. It is for this reason that most bloggers prefer to remain anonymous.
A key solution to the paranoia of blocking blogs and websites and incarcerating bloggers is to appoint ministers and technocrats who are qualified ICT professionals. Non-technical ministers and technocrats charged with implementing ICT policies are known to exercise excessive control of the cyberspace due to issues they do not know or understand.
What cannot be gainsaid, however, is the fact that the future is digital.