Mr Charles Onyango-Obbo raises some very interesting ponits. Some old some new.
In the days when Hon Johnson Nkuuhe was active on ugandanet, the issue of being players in the digital economy was discussed thoroughly.
Aspects raised then were, among others, the need to have a reliable elctric power system; the centrality, management and control of telecommunication; the need for a predictable open and stable polical system i.e. no coups civil wars etc...; a revamped educational system with appropriate curricula for Mathematics, Biological and physical sciences, basic aspects of computing and information technology.
In this regard, some work was initiated by the very able Dr Abel Rwendeire. God knows now what Hon Betty Akech is doing in the Ministry of Higher Education.
It was also pointed out that the public sector had a duty to assit enterprising Ugandans nirture venture initiatives in the new economy. What use otherwise in perpetuating foreign control as in the case of The AgaKhan etc.... when we have invested a leg and an arm in the Faculties of Technology, and Schools of Biological sciences, Agricuture, Veterinary science, etc.....
(Some Ugandans were given a contract to design an electronic voting system. Whereas we have big reservations with electronic voting, this was rubbished by the likes of Chege of 'Uganda Confidential' as some scheme to defraud. I doubt whether Chege is qualified for arbitration in these matters ) My take is than a huge amount of money will have to be invested before any fruits are realised. We have to look at India which started powering money in this sector since the days of Prime Minister Indira Ghandi.
There are geographical advantages that we are located in Africa. We have to turn around the appearances of a disadvantage in this regard. It is just appearances.
Property laws can always be changed to suit our advantage.
Obbo says that ........" In nearly all the African countries, even in capital cities, many streets don't have names - or maps. Most Africans therefore don't have physical addresses, neither do they have postal ones."
We urged Mayor Ssebana Kizito to start modernising these aspects of our city. We urged him to start a vigorous property system on the understanding that collection of the monies will force KCC to start moving to address the issues Obbo is addressing. Alas we have been utterly disappointed.
My take on Ssebana now, sad to say is that he is as bankrupt as Museveni and the cabal that is holding us hostage.
We have to open up some democratic space before we can take the leap forward.
Thank you Charles for this article. All along I have had problems with your writings. I hope you have turned a new leaf.
Mitayo Potosi
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From: Owor Kipenji <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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Subject: ugnet_: Ear to The Ground (Charles Onyango-Obbo)-Let's forget maize,beans:Here is the new money
Date: Tue, 16 Sep 2003 22:45:29 +0100 (BST)
Ear to The Ground --------------------------------- By Charles Onyango-Obbo
Let's forget maize, beans: Here is the new money September 17, 2003
Was the collapse of the WTO conference in Cancun, Mexico, on Sunday a victory for the poor countries?
The world trade talks collapsed after a bitter fight between mostly Third World countries and the rich ones. The most emotional issue was the over $330bn in subsidies rich nations hand out to their farmers.
In fact the US, instead of cutting subsidies to farmers as it had promised, is to increase it instead by $175bn over the next 10 years. And the European Union has put off any reductions until 2013.
The "victory" for the Third World countries, however, diminishes if seen against the big picture of the global economy.
This year, I have come hard face to face with the shape of the future - the digital economy. The early lessons tell us that unless we begin to work on being players, in 10 years Africa will be a more bitter and unhappier party at world trade talks than it was at Cancun.
For our team, the challenge has been how to create digital content out of the nation's vast print and broadcast information generated in Kenya, Kampala (The Monitor), and Tanzania. The fact is that innovations have redefined what, for example, The Monitor's market is.
Increasingly, more and more people in the world are getting their information through various platforms - mobile phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), the Internet (and TV, text, Internet, and audio are being converged into one platform as those who followed the Big Brother Africa reality show on DSTv would have experienced).
Technology makes it possible to distribute a Monitor story or photo to everyone in the world who has any of the above devices.
My own impression eight months ago was that the toughest part of this would be getting and working with the technology that would allow us to distribute to many platforms. Surprisingly, we overcame that very quickly.
The killer tasks have turned out to be just two. One, how to write and present information in ways that would fit the new devices and is comprehensible to the totally changed mindset of readers in over 100 countries who consume news via PDAs, for example.
The second has been how to market to millions of people in these countries, whom, unlike the reader who buys her paper along Kampala Road every morning, are consumers you will never see face to face.
Again technology makes it possible for people in this business at an advanced level to overcome this problem.
At the start, the chance of making this work seemed so remote, we thought we were mad to try it. But we did come up with solutions. The money in the digital market is worth the pain.
What some people consider a conservative estimate by PricewaterhouseCoopers puts the value of worldwide market
for digital content at over $178bn in 2001. In the intervening period, the global market is expected to grow at an annual rate of 30 percent, reaching $434bn by 2006.
In other words, within three years, serious players in the media business should have developed the journalism (editing and writing styles), and have in place the technology to deliver content globally.
One remarkable discovery is how immaterial governments and borders have been for our digital media project.
In other words, the kind of rules and regulations that were being fought over in Cancun will be irrelevant for trade in a product that is worth more than $434 billion a year.
If one adds to this the financial instruments and services that are being traded digitally, it represents transactions that will be worth zillions of dollars by 2015 - to which WTO rules will not apply the way they do to textiles or corn.
However, while a company like the Nation Group has invested more money in information technology than many western media houses, it is nowhere near making the kind of money that they are making.
The reason for that, and what has turned out to be the biggest stumbling block, is the fact that we are located in Africa.
The whole of Africa is a black hole when it comes to making complete virtual (online) payments. You can't sell something online from Nairobi or Kampala (say a news story or painting), have someone in Helsinki pay for it with a credit card, and receive the money on your Barclays Bank account on Kampala Road or Standard Chartered Bank on Speke Road within a few minutes of the transaction. Or at all.
While technology makes it possible, property laws in Africa make it impossible. Take one simple illustration. In nearly all the African countries, even in capital cities, many streets don't have names - or maps. Most Africans therefore don't have physical addresses, neither do they have postal ones.
Even more crucially, in most of the countries you can't enforce financial instruments (cheques).
In a digital economy, where you never see customers, the confidence you have in a transaction is that the credit card payment or cheque sent to you is good. And if it isn't, you can recover it from the sender in the courts, or you can send debt collectors to his home address and collect.
Because in most of Africa you can't do these things, the continent has been blacklisted (the exception being South Africa).
So think about it, when will all Ugandan homes, including those in the rural areas, have a physical address that you can find on a map? When will most of our people have a mailing address when post offices are dying? And what is the future of long distance trade in a country where the laws against bouncing cheques are ignored? Or, like in Kenya, where MPs threw such a law out of Parliament?
Until these simple but revolutionary reforms are tackled, no number of victories at WTO talks will bring us the fruits of the global economy.
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© 2003 The Monitor Publications
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