Alex Singleton has been watching the Running Man. I have just been watching a Newsnight report about mobile phones in Kenya. The gist of the report was that mobile phones in Kenya in particular, and Africa generally, are a stunning success. As if by magic, they are transforming the prospects of ordinary people in Africa, and the relationship between ordinary people and their corrupt, aid-gobbling governments.
We watched a deeply impressed BBC reporter, Paul Mason, being told by a black lady, who I rather think may have been one of the authors of this report that indeed, mobile phones are having an impact upon Africa comparable to the switch from dictatorship to democracy – she mentioned other technology as well, like fire, the wheel and the railways – and that the mobile phone industry provided a model for progress in other areas of African life, such as education and healthcare. Her message to the governments of Africa: get out of the way, at let the business people do these things, and the people pay for these things, themselves.
Paul Mason went deep into the Kenyan countryside, braving the chaos of Kenya’s government supplied road system, into Masai territory, to study the difference between places where mobile phone technology was working its magic, and where the wretched of the earth did not have mobile phones. He was, in other words, looking for one of those gaps. But he did not find any gap. The Masai already have their mobiles, and they love them.
Not all the news nowadays is good, to put it mildly, but this Newsnight news was very good news indeed, and not just because of its news about Africa. It was what it said to me and to my fellow countrymen, and (via the BBC’s excellent internet operation) to the entire world, that really pleased me.
But Grauniad readers will still tell you about the evils of mobile phones and the way they exploit poor africans to get the metals needed to make them.
*sighs*
Funny how they never criticise the regimes which are so corrupt that they allow any exploitation and never mention employment (but mining is bad for the environment, we should let the noble savages live as they always did)
There is a veritable explosion of mobile use in many African countries. The obvious reason is that few have fixed-line networks with anything like a national footprint and many have no network at all. The South Africans are pushing through this revolution, with several providers opening up the communications frontier. This goes for satellite TV coverage as well.
best bit i thought, was the facility of keynan phones to pay each other – you just text a “cash” message to the person you want to pay. because hardly anyone has a bank account (or rather, maybe the banks are just too corrupt) this has taken off in a big way.
all in all , it really was a nice change to see the BBC reporting on positive about Africa.
note also: no charities and no U.N. involved. just pure capitalism.
It took a long time for people to ‘get’ mobile phones in the UK.
It’s sometimes hard to remember now, but for some reason, through much of the nineties negative value judgements attached to mobiles: they were viewed as a sign of self-importance, self-indulgence (not unlike some present attitudes to blogging in fact per Keith Watehouse)
If you stop and think, a little echo of this attitude to mobiles persists right to this very day…
Outside of the UK mobile phones were just…. phones that were mobile.
I remember the precise moment that I ‘got’ mobile phones. It was in a bar in Joburg in 1994. Most people had phones but somhow they weren’t the subject of approbation. Someone said to me: ‘the difference is you can a person, previously you could only phone a place’.
Phones took off faster in Africa because..
– no landlines
– no self-imposed negative moral values
put simply: they ‘got’ them more quickly
I just watched, I was appalled and disgusted by Paul Masons tone. The way he found it surprising that something that was ‘just’ a piece of technology could ‘really’ make a significant difference to the everyday persons life, livelihood and prospects demonstrated an ignorance and arrogance I found breathtaking. I was left feeling that he had no understanding of either the past two hundred years, or the society in which he lives.
more interesting I think will be to see how it affect countries differently. I’ve just touched down on holiday in Keny and my feel it that Kenyan are perhaps ideally suited to the medium since they’re kind of chaotic and whellar dealers – which of course makes the mobile the ideal tool. Want a safari – now any old hustler can phone around and more likely than not actually deliver, make sure you get on a full tour etc. i.e ensure a more efficient prices and distribution of rescourses.
goog good all round.