Local Content Will Never Be Generated in Kenya Through Tandaa Events

This is a view which I have held for the longest time and nothing happening in Kenya will convince me otherwise. I strongly see no sense in the never ending but utterly useless events Kenya ICT Board is holding to stir up content generation in Kenya. Many have differed with me on this but I still strongly believe that the opposition is coming from a group benefiting from the mis-action of Kenya ICT Board.

The Tandaa branded events have been held all over Nairobi but never beyond that. The reach of the so called Tandaa events have been limited to few well connected individuals within the circle of individuals at PS Infomation and Communication as well as Kenya ICT Board. Apart from the comradeship and the facts that they are being held in Nairobi, the other undoing of the event organisers is the way they have been marketed. The events have been marketed through the KICTANET mailing list which contain no one but a few leeches whose only sane aspect is that they so consistently swallow every bait thrown to them by Ndemo and Kenya ICT Board no matter the condition of the same.

But I believe that Ndemo (PS Ministry of Information) and Kukubo (Kenya ICT Board CEO) are honest because they surely never want an empowered Kenyan. That would challenge the status quo which favours only the two and their bunch of cohorts. The two would not take Kenyans for a ride were Kenyans so empowered that they could effectively air their disapproval. That is not set to change. If the two were serious, we would have well run digital villages throughout the country because there is funding for that and Kenyans are able to deploy them. The only problem is that the two would consistently sabotage the digital villages project as long as it will empower the bottom of the pyramid.

I so believe that if Ndemo and Kukubo were serious about getting the local content online, we would have to work out few modalities of enabling the population to get that and none of my strategies has conferences and talk shops as a priority. First we should address the issue of rural connectivity beyond the few towns which now have basic connectivity. We want connectivity which can support computing which is superior to the not so effective feature phone computing.

We have a good number of those in the rural or peri-urban areas who can afford a desktop, netbook, used laptop or even to put up. This group of people have not been able to buy a reliable internet connection because none exists. I must commend the Kenyan  government for a strong effort in ensuring supply of electricity to rural areas through the Rural Electrification Program. Through this program, a home or establishment in rural areas needs on Ksh 35,000 (US $385) to get power supplied to their home/establishment as long as they are not more than 600 metres from a Kenya Power step-down transformer.

Those who can afford to buy data connection but are not able to do so because there is no supply should be provided with supply. We cannot talk of mobile data availability because it is almost non-existent. As much as we would want to talk of the availability of Safaricom’s 3G, many of the urban and peri-urban centres cannot enjoy this because the network quality is very very poor immediately you are out of any major town. This must be sorted out. Every time I travel through Kedowa, Kericho, Chemelil, Kapsabet, Kakamega, Mumias, Kisumu, Homa-Bay, Migori, Kisii, Sotik, Narok and Limuru, I get the feeling that the much talked about data penetration is such a farce. It is EMPTY TALK.

The peri-urban and rural areas have perfect condition to stir up innovation. I believe that the government is sabotaging this group of people when we don’t strategise our national investment by rewarding rural investment. We must give incentives to energy and telecommunication firms which come to set up in rural/marginalised areas. We must strive to spread the investment so that we even have other telecomm operators have Eldoret, Nyeri, Marsabit, Lodwar, Wajir, Machakos and Busia as their headquarters. We have enough idle bodies in Nairobi, they would be very much happy working from their rural homes. Having more than 34% of Kenyans stay in Nairobi is simply sick.

Just like China reward for birth control and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi’s reward for family union, we should adopt a policy to reward urban-to-rural migration.

With proper data connection available, we will never have to rely on “local content” workshops to get something few people believe is local content. Kenya produces the highest amount of local content, our more than 1.3 Million population is rivaled by a handful of countries in Africa. That population only produces enough content to make any content dedicated portal jealous. Which other local content are you looking for? Local content or local platforms? How local should a platform be?