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Al-Ahram Weekly 8 - 14 April 1999 Issue No. 424 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 8 - 14 April 1999 Issue No. 424
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Profile Features Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters The African connection
By Gamal NkrumahCan pre-industrial Africa be catapulted into the post-industrial information age? African telecommunication ministers, transnational corporations and international financial institutions believe that a rally across Africa could be the launching pad for rocketing Africa, the least electronically-connected continent, into the 21st century. "The rally is aimed at building cooperation between ourselves as Africans. It is a clarion call for urgent action. The biggest challenge for us is how to take Africa into the 21st century knowing that the 21st century is about a knowledge economy," South Africa's posts, telecommunications and broadcasting minister, Jay Naidoo, told Al-Ahram Weekly.
Hop on, hop off? On the contrary, Naidoo, a veteran trade unionist and an icon of the anti-apartheid struggle era, said, "This rally is in a sense a mobilisation to action, if we want to be part of the future. We do not intend to forget about our long-term goals the moment we disembark." The youthful minister heads the rally of journalists and technical experts which aims at introducing remote communities in Africa to ultra-sophisticated technology.
Naidoo quit a promising medical career in the late 1970s to devote himself full-time to community politics. "I was an organiser and I was working among the poor, many of whom were illiterate, but from whom I've learnt the most important lessons in my life. Sometimes my trade union comrades say that I've sold out. But we must not let ideology divide us," he said
"I chair a committee of African telecommunications ministers that is looking into developing a strategy for building a modern African telecommunications infrastructure across the African continent. We first met in February last year in Cape Town and have been meeting ever since. With less than 14 million telephones in sub-Saharan Africa, we have fewer telephones in a continent of 750 million than cities such as New York and Tokyo," Naidoo told the Weekly.
Sponsored by German electrical engineering giant Siemens, South Africa's telecommunications companies, Telkom and Vodacom, which specialise in mobile phones, as well as other South African-based transnational corporations and international financial institutions such as the World Bank, the rally will take Naidoo and his team to some of the most remote corners of Africa where people have never even seen a telephone. "But this is the challenge -- to harness sophisticated ultra-modern technology to liberate our people and democratise our societies. Because you are speaking about access to information and information is power, is knowledge," Naidoo explained.
The 21-day trip covering some 16,000 kilometres from Carthage in Tunisia, to Cape Agulhas in South Africa is expected to draw attention to the continent's telecommunications problems. "In the past, the success of any programme or project was measured by access to Western funds and recognition by the international media.
South Africa's Telecommunications Minister Jay Naidoo, a veteran trade unionist and anti-apartheid activist (right), and with Dr Frank Mdlalose, South Africa's ambassador to Egypt and former premier of Kwa-Zulu Natal with the Pyramids in the background
But we are determined to advance our cause in spite of money constraints." Naidoo said. "We are drawing attention to the critical importance of utilising modern telecommunications to accelerate social and economic development, improving educational and health facilities and training and developing Africa's vast human resource potential. We are marketing ideas such as the notion of regional markets, regional projects and regional players. We must create standards and a reliable creditation system and move towards the establishment of a continental data bank and training system. Building a partnership between the private and public sector is necessary."
Naidoo is of the opinion that wholesale finance must be developed and the private sector attracted to fund Africa's social programmes. Also, some leverage is desirable with key financial institutions such as the Development Bank of Southern Africa, the African Development Bank (AFDB), the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and the World Bank among others, who could play an important role in connecting Africa, according to Naidoo. Development finance is another issue. "How do you bring in foreign capital to fund development projects, where the returns are more long-term as opposed to immediate? How do we harness the technology so that we deliver the services to the remotest areas?" Naidoo said that these issues were discussed at the Africa Telecom '98 Conference held in Johannesburg attended by suppliers, vendors and experts which, apart from being very well received, was also posted on the Internet.
Naidoo asked, "How do we create a platform to arrest Africa's brain drain? Many well-educated Africans have settled in the West and refuse to return home. How do we attract these people back into their own countries? Their return is key if we are to develop our human resources, create certain standards and a credible creditation system and build a data bank of technical expertise."
"We've been talking with the World Bank and the AFDB to create leverages of private enterprise. We want African governments to deliver services to the remotest areas. We want to establish a continental policy framework. We want to take these ideas into an institution in Africa that works on a continental basis -- the Pan-African Telecommunications Union (PATU). That is why restructuring PATU -- an organ of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) -- is of critical importance. We, in Africa, have an advantage because we have very little infrastructure and we can install the latest technology more easily without having to dismantle an older system," he added. He expects that, by the end of the year, South Africa will have a digital network connecting the entire country. "Once we have a system we can fulfil the dream of an African renaissance and better understand each other's languages, customs and traditions," he said.
When it comes to the Internet, Africa is the least connected continent. Africa's population of 750 million has only about one million Internet users and 85 to 90 per cent of them live in South Africa, according to Mike Jensen, an independent consultant based in South Africa who specialises in Internet issues in Africa and who accompanies Naidoo on the rally.
Jensen, who heads the rally's technical team, told the Weekly, "Today nearly every institution on the continent, public and private, has some access to electronic mail. However, computers with dial-up access to the Internet are still found only in the president's office or the offices of a handful of academics involved in international projects financed by outside donor organisations." Jensen believes that the elitist nature of Internet access in Africa has to change if the modern technology is to be used satisfactorily for development purposes.
Jensen gave the example of the use of the Internet in institutions of higher learning in Africa to highlight the wider problem of Internet accessibility in Africa. "Many African universities are facing severe financial crises. A survey by the Association of African Universities in 1998 found that 52 of the 232 academic and research institutions surveyed had full Internet connectivity, while the rest had inadequate access. The limited degree of university Internet connectivity mirrors larger trends on a continent where most countries lag far behind much of the world in exploiting the potential of information technology for their people. There is only one Internet user for every 5,000 people in Africa, compared with one user per every 38 people worldwide, and one per every five people in Western countries," Jensen said.
According to Jensen, 49 of the 54 countries and territories in Africa have Internet access in their capital cities. Twelve countries -- Angola, Benin, Botswana, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Morocco, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and Tunisia -- have local Internet-service providers. Seven countries -- Algeria, Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Mauritius, Niger, and Seychelles -- have only one public-access Internet service provider. Four countries without such access now have plans for it -- Cape Verde, Republic of the Congo, Libya and Somalia. One country remains without plans for full Internet service -- Eritrea.
