The potential consequences of the nature and dynamics of the increasing use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for the political economy of Africa deserve considerably more critical attention than they have thus far received. True, there exists a growing body of literature on, for example, the potential of ICTs for democratising political participation and policy formulation; redressing long-standing North-South, regional, rural-urban and gender imbalances; and redefining the parameters of development thinking and practice. Not surprisingly, recent policy attention has tended to focus almost exclusively on why a ‘wired’Africa is an absolute and urgent necessity in the current information age; and on how African countries can formulate e-strategies, among other things, to facilitate their incorporation in the so-called global information society. However, much (but by no means all) of this literature has been celebratory, even, on occasion, proselitysing, particularly in its insistence that ICTs represent ‘a key resource that should be maximised by … African nations in order to achieve competitiveness in the current dynamic world order’ (Shibanda and Musisi-Edebe, 2000:228). In contrast, relatively little sustained attention has been paid to the potential (highly differentiated) impact of ICTs on social relations, even though, as Daly (2000) has observed with reference to the extension of the internet to developing countries with low levels of connectivity, ‘the Mathew principle’ will prevail and ‘those who have most will be given still more’. And yet, ICTs, as an integral part of broader processes of informationalisation and globalisation, have major implications for the choices facing political and economic strategists across Africa in the age of the information society.
Of course, like all technologies, ICTs have no independent, determinative existence: ICTs, as Ishemo argues in this issue, ‘have not risen autonomously'. The key issues, therefore, must be seen as revolving around who uses the technology, how the technology is used, and to what end it is used. Viewed in this way, there is little doubt about who is driving the current prominence of ICTs in global discourse. For although the second half of the 20th century may have coincided with a heightened interest in an expanded role for information technology in economic activity, and in the increased informationalisation of such activity, the emergence of ICT as one of the key issues of our age can be traced directly to the meeting of the G-8 countries at Osaka, Japan, in the year 2000. Indeed, while much of the world waited for, and expected significant initiatives aimed at addressing the debt crisis, the G-8 meeting chose instead to redirect attention to the role of ICTs in global economic restructuring and socio-economic change. There was, the G-8 declared, a real danger of a global digital divide emerging between those countries actively using ICTs and those without access to these technologies. It further expressed its total commitment to preventing the growth and consolidation of such a divide, and initiated the Digital Opportunity Task (DOT) Force, an international coalition of government, industry and civil society organisations, ‘to harness the forces of new technologies in order to narrow social and economic inequalities by making the benefits from these technologies accessible and meaningful for all humanity' (http://info.worldbank.org/ict/assets/docs/mdgComplete.pdf).
Unfortunately, this commitment did not extend to either rethinking development orthodoxy on the privatisation of telephone networks; or preventing new arrangements for the settlement of the cost of international telephone calls, which have highly negative foreign exchange implications for developing countries; or, indeed, encouraging a renegotiation of the prevailing cost structure of the internet, which effectively shifts the cost of expanding a (Northern-based) infrastructural-network to new or late (Southern-based) adopters. Not surprisingly, confirmation of the existence of a digital divide came shortly thereafter, with the international community committing itself this time to narrowing or reducing (and not, as previously promised, to preventing the emergence of) the divide. In the process, this new commitment became the source of a new moral authority for intervening in the affairs of places like Africa, which were considered to be on the ‘wrong’ side of the digital divide. Thus promotional material for the first phase of a UN-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), held in Switzerland in December 2003 to discuss ‘coordination of the practical establishment of the information society around the globe’, claims, for instance, that:
[t]he modern world is undergoing a fundamental transformation as the industrial society that marked the 20th century rapidly gives way to the information society of the 21st century. This dynamic process promises a fundamental change in all aspects of our lives, including knowledge dissemination, social interaction, economic and business practices, political engagement, media, education, health, leisure and entertainment. We are indeed in the midst of a revolution, perhaps the greatest that humanity has ever experienced. To benefit the world community, the successful and continued growth of this new dynamics [sic] requires global discussion and harmonisation in appropriate areas(http://www.itu.int/wsis/docs/brochure/wsis.pdf).
Furthermore, not only does WSIS portray developing countries as economies and polities aspiring to membership of this ‘wired’ or information society, but it neglects to provide, either precise details of the characteristics associated with such a society or incontrovertible proof of its existence (the information society is described as an ‘evolving concept’, which takes different forms in different places, ‘reflecting different stages of development’). Indeed, the summit's Plan of Action promises to pay special attention to the needs of developing countries, peoples and groups (among marginalised ‘others’) in promoting its objective of ‘putting the potential of knowledge and ICTs at the service of development’, even while recommending that, with appropriate outside help, these countries should adopt largely top-down processes in developing national e-strategies, as well as in allocating increased shares of their aid receipts to ICT-related activities (http://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-s/md/03/wsis/doc/S03-WSIS-DOC-0005!!PDF-E.pdf).
Nonetheless, behind the apparent consensus implied in both the WSIS Plan of Action and Declaration of Principles lies, as both Ya'u and Ishemo argue in this issue, the juggernaut of international capitalism, and its need to develop and profit from a globalising economy which is overwhelmingly dependent for its functioning on the ICT it sells. This, then, is the agenda being imposed on Africa, but with the added twist that WSIS appears to be promoting what is effectively a tax on aid budgets to pay for Northern hardware, software and associated services. In this way, the North is to be paid to smooth Africa's insertion into a globalised world order, from which the North will then profit. Little wonder, as Ya’u perceptively concludes, that ICTs need to be seen as reinforcing old international divisions of labour, even as they create brand new ones. Clearly, an Africa locked in as a powerless junior partner in what should, at least according to WSIS, be an ‘inclusive’ Information Society based on relations of ‘partnership’ between ‘key stakeholders’, stands as little chance of prospering now, as it did under previous dispositions or world economic orders. In this connection, it is worth pointing out that while initiatives such as NEPAD's adoption of ICTs as one of its eight priority sectors, and President Wade's (coordinator of NEPAD's ICT sector) call for a Global Digital Solidarity Fund may help in creating some space for Africa-based initiatives, they offer little or no significant challenge to imperialism's overarching strategy, as Ya’u insists in his contribution.
In a similar vein, Ishemo argues, this time with recourse to classical marxism, that the exploitation of Africa is set to intensify. Not only does he see the ICT revolution as another example of the statement in the manifesto of the Communist Party, that the ‘bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production’, but he suggests, too, that, especially in the case of ICT, this revolutionising is being achieved through ‘increased invasion and tearing apart, through commodification of non-market and pre-capitalist structures like the family, community and culture that constitute obstacles to accumulation’. In so doing, however, Ishemo shifts the debate on to a terrain of cultural and ideological struggle, on which the balance of forces is far less lopsided, and one on which, as his frequent references to Cabral remind us, Africa has emerged victorious in the past. Clearly, the heart of the issue is not the technological determinism reflected in many global policy statements, but how men, women and children use and exchange information at work, school and play. In other words, it is, as Thompson's contribution so clearly demonstrates, about who understands, uses and controls information and knowledge. His analysis of the use of ICT in the framing, discussion and practice of development within the World Bank illustrates how and why ‘the conception and use of such technologies itself … becomes an important field of discourse for the analysis of power relations’. With the help of critical discourse methods, Thompson encourages us to think long and hard about the ways in which the World Bank Group attempts to reinforce its pre-eminent position in specific ICT – and broader development-related discourses; and, as a corollary, raises the spectre of an informational revolution, and associated processes of empowerment driven by one of the foremost institutions of global governance, which do not propose to challenge existing power relationships.
At a very different level, Mercer describes the relative failure of initiatives to introduce ICTs into NGOs in Tanzania, with the aim of achieving externally-desired changes to local organisational practices. While the processes she has observed will undoubtedly evolve with time, it is hard not to read her study as providing further support for the mass of ICT studies elsewhere, which suggest that, if they are to work, ICTs must be structured around the needs and perspectives of their users. Indeed, as even the World Bank's Global Information and Communications Technologies Department acknowledges, the value of ICTs will depend largely on the extent to which users are able to take advantage of the opportunities created by the technology (http://info.worldbank.org/ict/assets/docs/mdgComplete.pdf). Such users, as Mercer reminds us, are situated within broader social, cultural and political contexts – an observation to which both Guèye (in ROAPE 98) and Tall (this issue) return in their respective studies of popular appropriation of ICTs. Guèye's piece on the intersection between urbanisation and ICT use in Touba, Senegal's second largest city and the spiritual heartland of Mouridism, and Tall's article on the role of ICTs in maintaining links between long-distance émigrés and their rural home communities, show that where positive uses can be identified, ordinary people will appropriate technologies and adapt them to their needs, sometimes in highly personalised and unexpected ways. When this happens on a large scale, as in the cases under review here, it is often difficult, if not impossible, to predict the new economic and social relations which might emerge, particularly as they relate to age, gender and class relations, among other things. We can confidently assume, however, that these outcomes are frequently not those imagined by the proponents of top-down globalisation and informationalisation.
So where does this leave us? Many stakeholders (in government, NGOs and other sectors of civil society, the private sector, and institutions like universities) will continue to consult each other, and to make practical choices, faced with the options available to them. National e-strategies will be developed, and funding proposals formulated, not only in full awareness of the prejudices and preferences of potential donors, but often, too, in collaboration with these same development partners. As always, those preparing these strategies and proposals will seek to create (and preserve) as much space as possible for their own priorities and preferences to have a chance to take root and grow. Against such a background, therefore, we invited Tim Unwin, currently on secondment to the UK Department for International Development from the University of London, to describe the thinking behind, and evolution of the British Government's Imfundo initiative, which seeks to support education in Africa through the use of ICT. We had initially planned to generate a range of opinions on his contribution. Considerations of space have led us to change these plans, but we still think that close examination of such a programme could offer insights into the possible advantages and disadvantages of interacting with the staff of donor agencies involved in promoting the development of an information society.
For one thing, and despite its origin as a joint initiative of the British Prime Minister and a private sector chief executive, the programme aims to acknowledge local cultural priorities, to create long-term opportunities for local business, and to offer the potential for the development of open source (that is to say non-proprietary) software. Time will tell whether it does deliver these benefits, or whether the complexity of the process, the involvement of multiple partners, and the need to attract funds from elsewhere in the British aid budget renders it of less value than hoped. Imfundo does, however, provide a good example, both of the public/private partnership initiatives favoured by WSIS, and of some of the issues which need to be considered if ICTs are to be introduced into daily life through such planned and supervised development interventions at the local, national and international levels. In this, it is reminiscent, even if only in part, of Wheeler's analysis of Egypt's well-supported and carefully-formulated national e-strategy in ROAPE 98, particularly her emphasis on the economic, political and cultural barriers to the successful implementation of the strategy. Indeed, the continuing difficulty in overcoming these barriers in one of the continent's richest countries (and its second most wired economy) raises serious doubts concerning the chances of success of similar strategies elsewhere in Africa, and serves as a timely reminder of the need for interrogating firsthand experiences of the kind Unwin and some of Wheeler's respondents provide.
What sort of society will emerge from the economic and social forces generated by the tensions characterising information-, knowledge- and technology-related change? Although no immediate alternatives to the development of these processes within capitalism seem to exist, the precise form they will take is as yet unclear. There are two fundamentally opposing visions of an information or knowledge society. Put crudely, the first conceives of knowledge as something which can be objectified and controlled, and to which citizens or customers can then be given or sold access, so that they can gain benefit from the commodity. The other sees knowledge as essentially common property from which people and social groups gain value as they create it, exchange it, interpret it and adapt it. These visions demand significantly different optimum conditions to flourish, and represent very different answers to the question ‘what should an information society consist of?’ Because they require different social and organisational structures in order to perform effectively, these models are in direct competition; and, as always, the field of competition is not a level playing field.
For a start, the interests of larger monopoly-seeking corporations, planning on future control of intellectual property rights, were already strengthened by the election of George W. Bush, even before heightened security measures in the wake of September 11th restricted the activities of some of the more informal financial networks, which were a feature of both the Senegalese and Somali diasporas, for instance. Furthermore, future freedom of choice is unlikely to be reinforced by strategic and exclusive public-private partnerships of the kind announced between Microsoft, a dominant ICT supplier, and the government of Angola, as part of which Microsoft was to provide support for Angola in the formulation of its national e-strategy, in addition to selecting the Angolan firms which were to be that country's official representatives at WSIS (http://www.digitalopportunity.org/article/country/950). Or, alternatively, by Microsoft's partnership with the United Nations Development Programme, under which Microsoft will provide products and technical expertise to support the development of ‘community’ information centres in developing countries (http://www.digitalopportunity.org/article/country/950/), although it is unclear how much choice, either in strategic terms, or in choice of equipment, beneficiary communities will have.
Martin Hall (1999) has likened the recent expansion of the internet (which he describes as ‘virtual colonisation’) to early European colonisation of the world, starting in the 15th century, and wondered whether new forms of electronic communication represent a simple continuation of capitalism's inexorable advance, or are indeed symptomatic of a qualitatively distinct new ‘media age’. As responses to an ongoing debate initiated by Mike Powell in ROAPE 88, and continued by Wheeler and Guèye in ROAPE 98, the contributions in this Special Issue speak collectively, but variously, to Hall's continuing concerns. Indeed, this issue does not just address the complex links between ICTs and their seeming virtual colonisation of Africa's political economies. It also, in true ROAPE tradition, broaches the equally important subject of subversion and alternative agenda-setting. As an ongoing process, such alternative agenda-setting will, in future issues, involve the critical examination of ‘knowledge’ economies and societies, with particular reference to questions of whose knowledge, the locations of knowledge production and reproduction, and the social relations implicit in knowledge valuation and use.