ICT for oppresion?

In my last blog yesterday I already mentioned the powers that certain regimes use in order to get their message across (or equaly disturbing, making sure an opponent is not getting a message across)

ICT can be used for many causes, good or bad, and what is good or bad ofcourse depends (at least partially) on what side of the spectrum you are on. However, there are times that almost all will conclude that certain regimes grossly misuse their powers in order to stay in power, after all that is most of the times their goal. My eye fell on an, over a year old, post by Marietje Schaake which found its source in the by then already a year old "Internet freedom Strategy"by the US Foreign Secretary Hillary Clinton.
During this presentation on January 21st Clinton said: "We stand for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas. And we recognize that the world's information infrastructure will become what we and others make of it." It was no more than a week or so later, when the famous Wikileaks site was launched, that the US government took decisive action and closed the wikileaks domain and ordered all financial institutions to ensure no funding to wikileaks would be given.


It was not long before two legislative proposals saw the light, SOPA and PIPA.
Global movements like Bits of Freedom stood up and defended the open internet and mulled the fact that US legislative orders would have judicial rights in Europe or elsewhere.

The pivotal question that emerges is how to deal with the trade of ICT infrastructure and knowledge to governments that continue to massacre their people and have an obvious disregard to democracy. In an ideal world corporations who provide these technologies and services would not want to make deals with an administration like Assads. But as we all know, reality hits us hard in the face. Those deals happen below the radar, and are carried out involving a string of middlemen. And then of course there are companies that do not have a lot of scrupules when it comes to trading knowledge or technology: as long as the offer is attractive enough, everything is available.


So there is only one feasible solution: a political standpoint, a moratorium on the trade, sale or delivery of any knowledge or technology to repressive regimes, that allows them to actively track down their civilians.


The likelihood of such legislation seeing the light and actively being upheld has recently gotten a blow with all fingers pointing to the Israël and the USA for themselves using simmilar guerilla techniques in the distribution of the Stuxnet / Flame virus.
My prediction? Nothing will change, since nobody is really commited. The losers are the innocent children of Syria.

The African Challenge

Through all my travels and projects I have caried out in Africa, there are a few things I have learned. Many ICT projects fail, NOT persé because of the fact that they are not carried out in a propper manner, but because they fall prey to governments or their "sidekicks" who do not have the countries best interest in mind. Personal issues become more important, whatever they may be.
Lets look at Ethiopia. Its capital, Addis Ababa is slowly gaining the status of the political capital of Africa. Its the home of The African Union, And more and more international bodies move their headquarters to the 4th most elevated capital of the world. This is obvious when walking around the businessdistrict, where highrise after highrise appears. Not so visible of course in the poorer districts of the city, where every day people fight for their livelihood.
Telecommunications services in Addis are erratic, at best.
Competition is often one of the best ways to ensure quality increase and lower rates. Well, competition in Ethiopia is non-existant when it comes to Telecoms, since there is only one state-owned Telecom operator: Ethio Telecom. The only other African nation which has a monopoly in Telecoms is........Libya. Even the Failed State of Somalia has several.

Meles Zenawi [Source: Wikipedia]

The key question of course is why? Most African leaders look at telecoms as a welcome cash-cow: Selling of a license and pocketing the license fee (whatever pocket it might go into). I believe the answer is not that hard to find. The recent riots in the middle east, also referred to as the Middle-eastern Spring, that caused governmental changes in states such as Egypt, Tunesia and Libya, actualy had its predecessor in Ethiopia, when in 2005 large groups of people demonstrated against the reign of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi.  As a result, the government ordered the SMS service of its state-owned Operator to be shut down, severely hampering the oppositions ability to quickly mobilize large groups of people. And I believe this is a major factor in the reasons behind why Ethiopia still has its one, state-owned Telco. At no cost, would the government infringe on its ability to control all its inhabitants' communications. Recent Wikileaks documents also substantiate this: " U/S Otero and A/S Carson encouraged Meles to hasten steps to liberalize the telecommunications and banking industries in Ethiopia, and highlighted both the micro- and macroeconomic benefits of liberalization. Meles offered no substantive response to A/S Carson’s query whether any progress had been made toward liberalizing or otherwise improving telecommunications, joking that Americans’ concept of time was much faster than Ethiopians’."


Okay so the Government wants to control Telecoms. Whats the big deal? Even the UK's government wants to start tapping Social Networks nowadays, as highlighted in this article in The Guardian. The difference lies in the fact that a state-owned, and state controlled Telco will never have the same speed of innovation as a competative privately owned Operator that depends on customers using their service for its sheer existance.

M-pesa [Courtesy Afritorial.com]

The Kenyan M-Pesa development is a good example, where Safaricom saw the chance to introduce a new way of binding its customer to its network, by analizing the (prospective) customers' needs and finding a way to cater for it. In Ethiopia even the smallest development and change in service of Ethio Telecom costs a huge amount of time. And if the Government does not approve of it, the change just does not take place. If any daring Ethio telecom Director would on its own try to do so, a long and dark future in Ethiopia's prison cells probably awaits him, since in no time a case of bribary or anything else against him would be somehow produced. With a number of "Government placed" staff that are there without any real contribution in the operator, such a thing would not be hard to do.
The victims of this of course are the inhabitants of this so culturaly rich country, who, in large parts of the country, do not evenm have electricity to charge their phones, let alone coverage.