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24| INTERvIEw THE Reporter “effective telecom liberalization As the role of CODIST is to review challenges and issues pertaining to the ICT, Science and Technology and Geo-information of the member states of ECA, what are the challenges you are facing and how far have you gone to bring a solution to these problems? The broader concept of utilizing an effective science and technology, including ICT, geo-information in the content is a challenge by itself. The challenge emanates from the very usefulness of science and technology, which is industrialization through effective governance systems ultimately creating a better opportunities in Africa. However, Africa being the poorest continent in the world is yet to harness its population in terms of skills required to make use of the science and technology. In some cases, African countries are in serious shortage of that. In my view, governments need to make considerable investments in their human capital, since effective implementation of science and technology starts in human brain and that brain is an asset that will stay with people. Hence, these trained human beings have to be in abundance in these countries so that there is a critical mass to utilize. As this stand is not an easy challenge, however, we do offer some solution. The solution that CODIST would like to propose is to simply observe other regions and their development saga. For instance, we can take a look at Asian countries. They have managed fast and sustainable economic build up as they have invested heavily in science and Technology. If science and technology are to bear fruit today, the investment should have been made may be 20 years ago. The benefit from technology is big, however, the investment is also quite sizable and the gestation is also quite long. In a nutshell, this is the issues that we want to address and discuss with policy-makers who are coming to CODIST. We want to get our message across to policy-makers, saying that we as a continent can no longer afford to say we don’t have the resources; we have to make strategic choices. This being said, we also understand that the policymakers do not have the desire to invest heavily on technology. It is just that there is a lot to do, given the content’s level of development. So we have been working and helping the member countries, and as I have told you earlier, it is not because Africa doesn’t want to do this, but there are other priorities and doing all at once is always a challenge. So we are saying to them ‘put policies in place that can be implemented and be strategic’ viewing the issues from national perspective. Asian countries have heavily invested in science and technology and improved their economy. However, many countries in Africa have not adjusted their policies towards a policy that invites investors in such sectors; telecom sector in Ethiopia being a case in point. What is your reaction to this? We have to evaluate countries from their own national context. There is no one size fits all in our work. Countries have different circumstances, different socio-economic context. But by and large what we say to countries is that when you liberalize effectively what happens is that you will be able to create another value adding service sector. Telecommunications is no exception to this. When opening up for investment, variety of services will be available to the market, hence creating new industries as spin-off. Because once you liberalize your telecommunication sector, among some of the advantages is that of gaining new networks hence adding value in the service provision. So you have new networks created as a result of that liberalization. We also would like to say that once you open up your telecom sector you are also able to introduce competition in the industry. When there is completion in the market, prices of services would eventually fall down there by services being affordable. Cheaper telecom services entail easier access for citizens as large scale service provision cuts costs as oppose to monopoly where prices are not determined by competition; hence higher. So we make sure that we share these views with our member countries. On the other hand, liberalization encourages investment (foreign direct investment) to come into the industry. This would create suitable condition for new services to evolve and innovative ideas to be implemented. Safari.Com in Kenya was the result of such competitive mobile market. Recently you have changed the name of your program from CODIST I to CODIST II. What is the reason to do that? Before CODIST we had CODI, which is the Committee on Development Information. CODI or CODIST I was when the UNECA division was only working on ICT, Geo-information and Library. Now CODIST or CODIST II is looking at Geo-information, ICT and Science and Technology. The change came about when the current Executive Secretary of UNECA, Abduolihe Janneh, joined ECA in a 2005, he restructured ECA. Then he put Science and Technology with ICT, so this division was created as a result of that. The basic premise behind the restructure is the fact that every division has its own technical governing body, which is composed of people from the member states of ECA. We have seven divisions in ECA, so CODI or CODIST is one of the seven technical subsidiary bodies of ECA’s governing structure. ECA reports to the finance ministers of www.ethiopianreporter.com The Reporter | Saturday |April 30, 2011 adds value to the industry as a whole” Aida Opoku-Mensah is a director for Information and Communication Technology’s (ICTs) and Science and Technology Division at the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA). Prior to her current position, she was program officer for media, arts and culture in the Ford’s Foundation West Africa office in Lagos, Nigeria, and before then regional director of Panos Southern Africa based in Lusaka, Zambia. Ms Opoku-Mensah, a Ghanaian national, produced an extensive body of research work on media/communication, information society and development issues in Africa. Her publications, to mention only a few include “Signpost on the Superhighway: African environment”, “Up in the Air: the state of broadcasting in Southern Africa”, as well as “Democratizing access to the Information Society” - theme paper for African Development Forum ‘99 on Globalization and the challenges to Africa of the Information Age. Merga Yonas of The Reporter talked to her regarding the current activities in the Committee on Development Information, Science and Technology (CODIST) that she is a member of focusing on challenges they are facing and solutions tabled for ECA member states. - Ms. Aida Opoku-Mensah, director of ICT and Science and Tehchnolog at UNECA Africa, but he divisions of ECA report to their sector. So, after the restructure, what have you achieved in your work in ICT, Science and Technology. Every two years we meet to review the work of ECA in ICT, Science and Technology. The member states evaluate our achievements. They say, well yes we think this is good. Sometimes you will get the member states say, what you are doing in Rwanda, Chad Togo, and other country in the area of Science and Technology is very good, we would like for ECA to come and do it in our country as well. So they review our work as to how it helped their countries individually. As you have stated there are some success stories in Rwanda, Togo and Chad, would you tell me what you are doing in Ethiopia currently? We have been working very closely with the Ethiopian Ministry of Communication and Technology, under the leadership of the Minister Debretsion Gebremichael. We have been looking at how we can help to implement national ICT policy. We are also working very closely with them on how to put the policy in the right place for Ethiopia on e-Commerce. We are also looking into issues of e-Security and strengthening e-Government activities through stronger security process. We have been working also with Addis Ababa University, the department of Mathematics and Computers. We have a project, which is working on mobile health, where patients can access medical services, medical practitioners and health information through mobile communications. At the moment, what is happening is that the department is piloting a project at a clinic located in Butajira, which is 108 kilometers to the South of Addis Ababa. So the outcome will also be presented at CODIST and be reviewed. We are also working very closely and supporting the Ethiopian Leather industry Association, to build a website for them in which they develop an e-Commerce platform. So small-scale leather producers in Ethiopia don’t have to travel to sell their leather, they can make the deal of selling it through e-commerce. In the area of Geo-information, we are currently putting in place a data base of all medical facilities in health centers in the entire Ethiopia. How health centers does Ethiopia has, where are they situated and how many doctors to each, all this are the area we have been working on as we speak right now and it is a very effective tool to promote the health sector of Ethiopia.
The Reporter | Saturday |April 30, 2011 Reporter POLITICS THE Commentary africa’s winds of change return By sanou mBaye How did Ivory Coast come to this? After gaining independence from France in 1960 with Felix Houphouet-Boigny as President, the country became the world’s largest exporter of cocoa beans and a significant exporter of coffee and palm oil. Throughout the 1960’s and 1970’s, sizeable export earnings, combined with easy access to credit, fueled an economic surge dubbed the “Ivorian miracle.” But then, escalating debts and plummeting commodity prices started taking their toll. Africa’s El Dorado was lost. In 1990, Houphouet-Boigny appointed Alassane Ouattara, the governor of the Central Bank of the West African States, as Prime Minister to fix Ivory Coast’s growing economic problems. After Houphouet-Boigny’s death in 1993, Henri Konan Bédié assumed the presidency and revised the electoral code to bar Ouattara from entering the 1995 presidential contest on the grounds that he was not an Ivorian national. Bédié, not surprisingly, was re-elected unopposed. And, not surprisingly, he was soon accused of widespread corruption and toppled in a military coup in 1999. It was in the midst of this militarization of Ivorian politics that Laurent Gbagbo emerged as the main opposition leader. When Robert Guéi, the military leader, organized a flawed presidential election in 2000, of which he declared himself to be the winner, a popular uprising ousted him and elevated Gbagbo to the post. In 2002, Ivory Coast was rocked by a rebel uprising that partitioned the country, with the government led by Gbagbo controlling the south, pro-Ouattara rebels controlling the north, and a French army camped between the two. After a peace conference in 2005, a government of national unity was established, followed by a presidential election in November 2010. The independent electoral commission endorsed by the international community declared Ouattara the winner. Gbagbo refused to acknowledge the result, claiming vote-rigging, and was declared reelected by the Constitutional Court, which nullified 600,000 ballots in several northern constituencies. As a result, Ivory Coast was plunged in a deadly battle among four stakeholders. The first stakeholder is Gbagbo, who sought to break away from French neo-colonial dominance. He had the support of Ivorians who aspired to install genuine Ivorian patriots in place of the French-backed elite. Gbagbo was suspicious of Ouattara, whom he believed to be actively plotting with French support to topple his government. But Gbagbo refused to denounce the tribal/ religious chauvinism that excluded Ouattara and millions of Ivoirian northerners from full citizenship rights. He also tried to avoid confrontation with France, awarding the management of the port of Abidjan, the capital, to a French company. But French President Nicolas Sarkozy maintained his visceral opposition to Gbagbo. The second stakeholder is Ouattara. In his quest for authority, he drew on the Western ties that he had forged as a deputy-managing director of the International Monetary Fund. His claim to fame was his professional reputation as an economic manager, which arose from his implementation of structural adjustment programs that always included the same set of measures: currency devaluation, decontrol of exchange rates, tighter monetary policy, financial deregulation, trade liberalization, wage cuts, fiscal consolidation, and labor-market deregulation. Ivory Coast’s third key stakeholder is France, which under President Charles de Gaulle had granted independence to its former African colonies on the condition that French troops remain stationed on their territories, and that their economies remain tightly linked to France. Indeed, after a half-century of independence, France maintains a stranglehold on Ivorian commerce and holds its foreign-currency reserves. French business, moreover, dominates most of the country’s infrastructure: Bolloré controls the port of Abidjan and the railway; Bouygues oversees Ivorian construction projects; Total holds onequarter of the shares of the country’s oil refinery; France Telecom is the main shareholder of the landline and mobile telephone network; Société Générale and BNP-Paribas control the banking industry; and Air France controls the sky. The convertibility of the country’s currency, the CFA franc, allows these companies to transfer freely all their earnings back to France. The CFA’s fixed exchange rate peg to the euro shields them from any risk of capital loss at a time when countries around the world are battling aU must support... ConT`d and several opposition leaders. In addition, several protesters, including a toddler in her mother’s arms, were shot and killed by security forces armed with automatic weapons. Their only crime was to lead a ‘Walk to Work’ demonstration against the escalating costs of food and transport, which has made life impossible for the vast majority of Ugandans. Uganda, which has never had a peaceful change from one government to another, is steadily moving towards yet another phase political violence. They went to the polls in 1996, 2001 and 2011 hoping to vote out general Museveni, or win enough seats in parliament in order to curb Museveni’s excesses. Sadly, each time the European Union and Commonwealth election as well as local election observers declared that the elections had been rigged because Museveni’s ruling party and state was one and the same thing. They also went to the Supreme Court but the judges, most of whom are card-carrying members of Museveni’s ruling party, made the to maintain competitive exchange rates in order to export their way out of economic trouble. With such a currency regime in place, there is no prospect for proper industrialization in western Africa’s francophone countries, whose economic woes stand in sharp contrast to other reviving African economies. The fourth stakeholder is the Ivorian population, which is under siege, divided along ethnic and religious lines, and incited by venomous politics. Ivorians massacred each other in the 2002 civil war. In 2011, the post-election deadlock led to thousands of civilian deaths. A stream of refugees fled to neighboring countries, especially Liberia. The mayhem began to abate only when Gbagbo was removed from power and taken prisoner after French and UN ground troops, armored vehicles, and helicopters bombarded the presidential palace where he was guarded by forces that remained loyal to him. Elite corruption and incompetence, a population vulnerable to demagogic manipulation, and the ruthlessness of French neo-colonialism have combined to plunge francophone Africa into a deadly cycle of violence, humiliation, and hopelessness. But the entry into Africa of fastgrowing economies such as China, India, South Korea, Turkey, Brazil, and Malaysia reflects a shifting balance of power and the inception of a model of cooperation based on trade, investment, and technology transfer – in sharp contrast to French neo-colonial politics. At the start of the era of decolonization, British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan famously said that “the winds of change” were blowing across Africa. Another such wind is blowing today. Will Francophone Africa at last escape its French enthrallment? Ed’s Note: Sanou Mbaye, a former senior official with the African Development Bank, is the author of L’Afrique au secours de l’Afrique (Africa to the rescue of Africa). The article was provided to The Reporter by Project Syndicate the world’s preeminent source of original op-ed commentaries. With a unique collaboration of distinguished opinion makers from every corner of the globe Project Syndicate provides incisive perspectives by those who are shaping politics, economics, science, and culture. extraordinary ruling that the elections had been rigged, but not rigged enough to alter the final outcome! The opposition petitioned the government to introduce specific constitutional, legal and administrative reforms necessary for free and fair elections; but these and their demands for the reconstitution of a non-partisan electoral commission were ignored. And they have taken to the streets to exercise their constitutional rights to peaceful demonstration, but Museveni has been responding by sending armed soldiers with orders to shoot and kill. Denied all avenues to peacefully exercise their basic human rights to free association and expression, Ugandans seem determined to die on their feet rather than on their knees. This is an invitation for NATO to intervene in Uganda, thanks to its discovery of the “oil curse” which will start flowing in two years’ time! As Foreign Minister Hailemariam Desalegn has rightly said, Ethiopia’s role in causing regime change in Eritrea will not be by invading the country, but by supporting the Eritrean people and groups which want www.ethiopianreporter.com Government starts ... |25 ConT`d from page 4 “Ethiopia has tremendous agricultural potential and it’s doing a lot of the right things,” he said in an interview yesterday. “It’s investing in agriculture in a way that other African countries are not.” A “critical issue” that needs to be addressed in Ethiopia is better training and support for the 60,000 extension workers, according to Steiner. Yields may also be boosted by increasing the number and efficiency of small-scale irrigation works using groundwater or pumps, he said. “It’s a small thing, but boy it can make a difference if your pump lasts 10 years rather than one year,” Steiner said. Ethiopia has the potential to be self-sufficient in grain production and for export development in livestock, flowers, oilseeds, sugar, vegetables and fruit, according to the US State Department’s website. Crops being targeted by the EATA include the mostwidely grown teff, which is currently grown on about 2.5 million hectares of land. The government wants to increase yields to as much as 60 quintals per hectare from 10 quintals currently, Wonderad said. A small improvement in the productivity of teff would “automatically transform” the agriculture industry, he said. About three million of Ethiopia’s 80 million people are in need of emergency food assistance, the government said on April 12. Another 7.8 million people receive food or cash under an aid program, World Food Program (WFP) spokesman Susannah Nicol said. (Bloomberg) A “critical issue” that needs to be addressed in Ethiopia is better training and support for the 60,000 extension workers, according to Steiner. turkish embassy... ConT`d from page 5 According to information from the Turkish Airways, passengers need to fulfill all the requirements when they apply for visa. The Embassy also regulates that those applicants must not be deported or banned to enter Turkey, the US, UK or other Schengen countries. A failure to meet one of these requirements as the Embassy says is losing a legible vantage for visa application. But the formal visa application process is not affected on such requirements. from page 9 to dismantle the regime.” Ugandans and other oppressed African people are asking for nothing less and nothing more. The African Union, which claims that its mission is “an integrated, prosperous and peaceful Africa, driven by its own citizens” is facing a simple choice. It must clean its own house by actively supporting Eritrean and other African people want to dismantle their oppressive regimes, or wait for NATO to come and clean it for them. They will not have to wait very long after Libya. Within ten years, all AU countries could be led by NATO-installed presidents and prime ministers. That is why they must support Ethiopia intervention in Eritrea and recognise a Transitional National Council for Eritrea, based in Addis Ababa. Ed.s Note: The writer is a former independent parliamentary candidate in the UK, May 2010, and is the director of Democratic Institutions for Poverty reduction in Africa (DIPRA) London. He can be reached at sam.akaki@hotmail.com.
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