Some early questions for the State House ICT Summit
What you need to know:
- Only in Kenya can you wake up one morning as a government driver on minimum wage, and by evening, be a multi-millionaire
- It's good for the company, but quite risky for a country to bank on one platform for a large majority of its socio-economic transactions.
- It would be helpful if we used the Kenya Open Data portal to report on which primary schools actually have both the power and the laptops.
My feelers indicate that a State House summit to discuss ICT matters has finally been scheduled for Monday next week.
Unlike my fellow columnist Dr David Ndii, nobody from the house on the hill has bothered to extend me an invite to honour or turn down.
Considering that the chances of that State House invite materialising on my desk are close to zero, I have opted to ask some of the questions that have been bothering the ICT community right here.
First of all, lets dispense with the trending topic of corruption. How come the expensive government IFMIS system is implicated in bleeding taxpayer money?
From a technical point of view, IFMIS is a basic Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system that makes transactions transparent, so it should be reducing rather than increasing opportunities for corruption. Unfortunately, recent reports indicate that this very tool has accelerated the rate of corruption to unprecedented levels.
Only in Kenya can you wake up one morning as a government driver on minimum wage and by evening become a multimillionaire, owning several mansions in the leafy suburbs of Nairobi.
Of course the technology is only as good as the personnel who use it, so can we just drop personnel who abuse the system to facilitate corruption?
While, as President, you do not have the right to jail anyone, you do reserve the right to appoint, as well as disappoint, senior personnel in government suspected to be engaging in such mischief.
The next question is on the Universal Service Fund, which telecommunications operators contribute to in order to extend ICT services to underserved areas.
Often remote and sparsely populated, these areas may also include underprivileged communities in urban centres that are unable to afford services.
Telecommunications operators pump in one per cent of their annual revenues into this fund, and it would be interesting to know how much money has come into the fund over the last three years. Where and how have these funds been used?
Last time I checked, this fund was reported to have one and half billion Kenyan shillings and as the elections approach, this kind of money could easily be used in alternative ways.
The next question relates to our most successful company in the region, Safaricom. Whereas we celebrate and adopt its range of products across the country, we must also think about effective alternatives.
In the unlikely event that anything were to happen to it, would Kenya as a nation collapse with it? The preferred answer is no, but the practical reality is different.
The latest reports indicate that 99 per cent of Kenyans access the internet through mobile data connections and pay for government and other services through mobile money.
Talk of supermarket, taxi, water, electricity and other bills – mobile money is at the heart of these transactions and three quarters of them happen to be over the Safaricom M-Pesa platform.
It's good for the company, but quite risky for a country to bank on one platform for a large majority of its socio-economic transactions.
The question is, therefore, to what extent the government or the regulator is trying to ensure that there are effective competition and alternatives within the communication sector.
Finally, we cannot end without a question on the ongoing Laptop Project. This is one project that has hit the ground without a whiff of corruption.
This is indeed commendable, and proof that it is possible to deliver government projects in a fairly clean manner. Power supply to the primary schools remains a concern, however.
Whereas the Ministry of Energy claims over 90 per cent of primary schools have power connections, it is not clear how many of these have actual live power running through the classrooms.
It would be helpful if we used the Kenya Open Data portal to report on which primary schools actually have both the power and the laptops.
That way we enable the public to interrogate and confirm the reports on the extent to which electric power is transforming rural communities.
That’s all for now. I am quite confident that one day we may get to see some answers to some of these questions.
Mr Walubengo is a lecturer at the Multimedia University of Kenya, Faculty of Computing and IT. Email: [email protected], Twitter: @jwalu
