The silly con in the savannah

This is not about giving away trade secrets, but an acknowledgement. A tribute. I want to believe that editors come from a different planet because you can never win arguments against them. As a matter of fact, their word is literally final and you do not have wiggle room for complaints and neither do they accord you the option of a right of reply.

You can spend hours on end crafting your piece, using the choicest words and phrases possible, but the editor will cut, add and rearrange everything — and that is final.

The power of editors extends beyond that and many are the times they aim to ‘control’ your time. Just when you think you have extra time, the editor will always remind you of a new deadline!

It is said that an editor should never be asked why. When they ask you to jump, you ask how high when already in the air — or after you have hit your head on the ceiling! If you are dealing with more than one editor you will hit your head many more times, especially if you make a mistake of asking ‘when’ in addition to the all-familiar ‘how high’ when you are already in the air.

The editors’ answer to ‘when” is always “now” (and I am just referring to delivery of copy). I discovered that some days ago when I received a call from one of my very many editors who wanted a Day Two story — I am not giving any more trade secrets, so I refuse to explain what that is — while I was at Nairobi’s skyscraper slum of Upper Hill.

Of course the piece was wanted “now”, and that meant I had to change my itinerary and head to a coffee house where I could not only mix sugar syrup and iced coffee but also take advantage of the “great strides that Kenya had made in information and communication technology” and send the Day Two story.

How nice it is to live in a Silicon Savannah, I told myself as I sipped on my iced coffee. I can work from anywhere and meet my deadlines whenever my editor has a deadline to meet and “it is that story you are writing which is holding me back.”

One big tumbler of iced coffee later, the Day Two story was done, proof-read, edited (hey, I am also an editor!), and ready to be sent. Happy to have beaten the deadline, I called the editor and told him to ease up and check his inbox in Five, Four, Three, Two. . . .

There seemed to be a problem with the wireless connection at the coffee house. Maybe there was a problem with the Internet settings and configurations of my machine. Maybe I did not have a password…

After trying and failing to connect to the Internet several times, I asked a the wait staff — waiter and waitress is too mainstream — if the coffee house’s wireless Internet had a problem and I was duly informed that it was fine, but he had to confirm. Turns out it had been down for a few days.

Since ours is a Silicon Savannah which, as we are reminded every now and then by some tech-savvy public officials and local and international experts — and nowadays they are a shilling a dozen — has made great strides in ICT, I was not worried. I was cock-sure that wireless Internet was available in a nearby building.

How wrong I was! Forget about another coffee house or restaurant with (free) wireless, I can vouchsafe that there was no cyber café around and one hour later, my editor’s deadline had not been met.

I was left with no choice but to head to Central Business District, and that meant another hour in traffic. As I moved from one building to another, and even when I was inching my way in the gridlock, I could not help but wonder where these great strides we had made in ICT had gone. Probably we had made very monstrous strides which are way above me and which cannot be understood by those of us who are not tech-savvy, but I would want to believe basic Internet connectivity is, well, basic.

Actually, I would want to believe that Nairobi, which also happens to be the ‘nerve centre’ of all the region’s diplomats and houses the head offices of many multinational companies, should enjoy Internet connectivity where locals and foreigners alike can just “plug and play” and meet their deadlines anytime of the day.

But considering how cyber cafés or hot spots are as numerous in Nairobi as oases are in the Kalahari Desert, I shudder to imagine how the rural or the marginalised areas are drowning in Internet connectivity and how ICT has changed the lives there.

Not a day passes without us being told by some foreign expert, supported by tech-savvy public official, about the strides we have made in ICT and how we are changing the lives of “ordinary Kenyans who a few years earlier had no access to Internet”. These statements, made in the numerous ICT-related talk shops held in Kenya almost every hour, confirm the speakers as masters of doublespeak.

They go on and on about how ICT has enabled Kenyans to work from their homes, yet they themselves still drive to their offices. They whine about traffic yet for years on end they have been saying how ICT can be used in management of traffic.

When you ask them how the lives of people (in the rural areas) have been changed by ICT, the answer that comes to their lips is the same old tired one: Mobile money transfer service.

Talk seems to be cheap on these local ICT streets, and since these people in the rural areas whose lives have drastically been changed by the great strides cannot be identified, we should admit that Silicon Savannah makes for a nice sound byte, a buzz word.

In reality we are still in a desert with a few scattered oases and numerous mirages.

Like the IEBC.

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No use bashing foreign media

Yes, it is true that the foreign media does not give Kenya “positive” coverage and they deserve all the brickbats that we can throw at them for calling us what we are not.

Oh, what a wonderful scapegoat the foreign media can be, and have been, so much so that we almost forgot that our problems have never been caused by the foreign media and even when tourism numbers fell after the chaos in 2007/2008, we were fully to blame.

It is us, not them. And isn’t is odd that while we acknowledge the existence of a Global Village, where information travels fast, we still get mad when our “negative” stories are told out there? Oh dear, again, it is us, not them — and when we whine over them, they take notice and write more stories about our whining.

Aren’t we just supplying them with more fodder, more story ideas because we are just displaying our peculiarity, which also includes our inability to move on and stopping the whining and the bashing of foreign media?

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KBC still operating on analog

The elections are over and people can now get back to their humdrum lives after shouting themselves hoarse, calling each other names and analysing every single meaningless political statement.

Of course there are many Kenyans who are going to miss the good old days when they mixed their metaphors, laughed out loud and run around like headless chickens.

The political analysts will now get a chance to change clothes in their houses and not between TV stations. Presenters will probably now let the viewers praise them instead of falling over themselves in praising their teams and themselves on air. And speaking of TV stations, all their studios got make-overs with newfangled mod-cons and all the technological bells and whistles.

The one TV station that missed out on all these sprucing was the National Broadcaster, Kenya Broadcasting Corporation, which also received a lot of flak on social media for its archaism and failure to upgrade when all others were adopting new technology.

You could feel sorry for KBC. It should be a pace-setter, considering that it is run by the country’s biggest and richest employer, the Government of the Republic of Kenya, through the Ministry of Information, whose Permanent Secretary is Bitange Ndemo — one of the most tech-savvy public officials in Africa.

That Mr Ndemo is affable is not in doubt, and he has the ability to talk about almost every subject, except the National Broadcaster which is increasingly turning in to a National Shame.

Thus, KBC is a reflection of the Government’s attitude towards adoption of technology — and whenever you have something to say about KBC (@KBCChannel1) coverage, please tag Mr Ndemo (@bantigito) because it still falls squarely under his docket.