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.