PUT ICT TO POSITIVE USE IN AFRICA

By Mawutodzi K. Abissath

Daily Graphic February 28, 2005

AN African proverb says, "Where there is the liver, there, too, one finds the bile." It simply implies that good and evil move hand in hand. During the first week of February this year, the entire Information Communication Technology (lCT) world converged in Accra, the capital city of Ghana for the Africa Regional Preparatory Conference for the World Summit on Information Society (SIS).

That event was of such a high profile that it was opened by no less a personality than the President of the Republic of Ghana, John Agyekum Kufuor, and attended by various dignitaries including President Paul Kagame of Rwanda, the Tunisian Prime Minister, Mohamed Ghannouchi, the Secretary General of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), Yoshio Utsumi, the Chief Executive Officer of the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation (CTO), Dr Ekwow Spio-Garbrah, and the Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), Dr K.Y. Amoako, just to mention a few.

As for the general attendance, over 1,000 delegates ranging from media practitioners to educationists right down to legal technicians, NGOs, civil society and the youth did not give way at all. But predominant were ICT gurus with their heavy jackets and flamboyant neck ties to match. And when these ICT engineers mounted the podium, everybody wanted to out-class one another in terms of technological jargon renditions. Some of us ordinary mortals among them could not help but to gape in wonderment.

The WSIS Accra programme was just what someone described as "John the Baptist", for "Jesus the Christ" himself will be in Tunis, Tunisia in November this year. It is hoped that after Tunisia, African lCT gurus will minimize their talking strategies and maximize their efforts towards the implementation of decisions that will help reduce, if not eradicate, poverty on the African continent through technologies.

Anyway, one session of the Accra WSIS which I found very crucial from a layman's point of view was the Workshop on Internet Governance. My imagination was tickled when my eyes inadvertently fell on the topic, Internet Governance.

It was not surprising at all that this was one topic that generated heated debate among the gurus at the conference. One particular bone of contention was who should have authority over the management of the domain name across Africa?

 Consequently, a 22-man working group of experts was set up to convene in August (possibly in Nigeria) to resolve the dispute among feuding lCT sector groups. This strategy was indicative of the importance of' Internet domain name, which Africa cannot afford to toy with if the continent is to move with the times and occupy its right place in the scheme of global information infrastructure so as to be part of the electronic revolution.

It may be of interest to the reader to know that some of the issues raised under this topic included. Internet resource management and technical coordination; Public policy issues and barriers to Internet access; Ensuring Effective Public and Stakeholders Participation, and above all, INTERNET GOVERNANCE AND ITS IMPLTCATIONS TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF E-COMMERCE.

I have placed emphasis on this topic because, even as a layman, it has come to my attention that some African ICT experts who think they are smart are abusing or misusing the tools of ICT for negative purposes for their own selfish interest and to the detriment of the whole continent of Africa.

I was shocked when on Monday, February 21, 2005, an ICT expert who is a lecturer at one of the topmost technology universities in America, sent me an e-mail message and asked me whether I knew that Ghana had been banned from Internet Shopping because of "extremely high credit card fraud originating from Ghana. According to this expert, for more than four years he had predicted that this ban would one day come but some people in the industry thought he was "crazy".

In fact, this ICT tutor warned that if care was not taken Ghana stood a risk of being taken off from the entire web if nothing was done to ensure secure internet connectivity and how to trace an individual on the web.I was alarmed by this revelation and wondered whether Ghanaian ICT gurus knew of this problem. If yes, what advice did they give to the Ghana government? African ICT gurus must be more creative and proactive. It is their duty to advise African governments as to what to do and how. African governments, too, must stop pussy-footing on matters of science and technology, on the continent.

At the Accra WSIS conference, Africans did not hesitate to lament about the continent's lost centuries of Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Age. They did, however, console themselves with the fact that a whole century of knowledge economy brought about by the Information Communication Technology lies ahead of them and vow never to stand and stare.

But what will be the future of ICT in Africa if some of the so-called experts are already using the technology for fraudulent deals instead of developing user friendly programmes for the benefit of the rural poor? It is also a common knowledge that, for a very long time, African youth who patronise the services of Cyber Cafes devote their time to browsing the Internet for negative sites such as pornographic scenes instead of e-libraries for online learning.

As the above-quoted proverb indicates, every good thing has its opposite side and ICT is no exception. Nevertheless, African ICT gurus must endeavour to put the technologies to constructive application for the advancement of the Continent.

The author works with the Information Services Department ISD  abissath@gmail.com

NB: This article was first published by the Daily Graphic on February 28, 2005.