Breaking News: At least 10 feared to have drowned in Makueni river
Note to JKUAT – you can’t build manufacturing on forced purchases
What you need to know:
- Opponents of the directive argue that while the university can make laptops a requirement, it should let parents buy from whichever vendor they please.
- One strategy towards being a light manufacturing hub in the region is to start local assembly and, as local manufacturing improves, gradually scale up into manufacturing.
- The problem arises when the university tries to meet its goal by forcing students to buy the Taifa laptop when numerous other choices exist.
Parents are up in arms over the recent directive by Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology that requires all incoming students to buy its locally assembled Taifa laptops.
Some view the order as an unnecessary financial burden above the already expensive tuition fees.
Others, who claim their sons and daughters already have laptops, do not understand why they must buy another one.
Still others feel the $400 price tag for a Taifa laptop is not good value for the money and better machines can be found elsewhere for that amount.
The university has stood its ground, arguing that in this day and age, a laptop is a basic tool for learning and research, particularly at the university level. As for the requirement to buy from the university, JKUAT argues that we need to buy local to build Kenya.
Opponents of the directive argue that while the university can make laptops a requirement, it should let parents buy from whichever vendor they please.
SHORT-TERM SACRIFICE
Parents’ concerns are valid, but one needs to review them in light of the bigger picture, which, at the national level, is contained in Vision 2030. Among other things, we envision being a newly industrialised nation within the next fifteen years.
Part of the deliberate steps we must take as a country to achieve this goal is to build local capacities in manufacturing, specifically in light manufacturing, where we can spur industries around fabricating simple electronic devices like mobile phones, tablets, laptops and others.
One strategy towards being a light manufacturing hub in the region is to start local assembly and, as local manufacturing improves, gradually scale up into manufacturing. Later on, some of these components could be manufactured locally, and gradually, the full laptop can be fabricated here.
Local assembly is the simplest part and simply involves importing electronic components from China before putting them together at a domestic facility.
Local manufacturing is more difficult and requires world-class technical and infrastructural competencies that span across the energy, transport and education sectors.
Such competencies will not appear overnight. In other words, we cannot sleep through the next fifteen years and hope to wake up one morning in 2030 to an industrialised country.
The advances we want require that sacrifices be made today, in the short term, by nurturing and supporting local initiatives in support of the long-term objective of being industrialised in the not-so-distant future.
True, parents may get a similar laptop, perhaps by paying five to10 per cent less on Biashara Street for imported devices. But it should be remembered that the bulk of such spending goes to enhance the competitiveness of China, not local Kenyan potential.
LESSONS FROM WEZESHA
Five years down the road, when these students graduate as engineers, there will be little or no local manufacturing industry to gainfully engage them. So it may be worthwhile to incur the small extra cost today in order to build and enjoy a brighter future tomorrow.
The problem arises when the university tries to meet its goal by forcing students to buy the Taifa laptops when numerous other choices exist. The government and the university can clearly do a better job of making the Taifa laptop an easier sell.
We do not need to reinvent the wheel, but can learn from a previous initiative from the Ministry of ICT, dubbed the ‘Wezesha Laptop’. In this project, the World Bank subsidised 10 per cent of the cost of a laptop, making it slightly cheaper than its equivalent on Biashara Street.
In other words, the government should meet the cost of "learning and maturing manufacturing capacities" at JKUAT over the short and immediate terms. After five to 10 years, JKUAT would have developed the necessary capacity to deliver globally competitive digital products without further government subsidies.
We would then be exporting Taifa laptops regionally, not just locally, and everyone would have forgotten the acrimonious first steps.
Mr Walubengo is a lecturer at the Multimedia University of Kenya, Faculty of Computing and IT. Email: [email protected], Twitter: @jwalu
