Politics gets in way of African ICT Achievers Awards

On Saturday evening I attended the African ICT Achievers Awards and for the most part was quite glad that we were congratulating ‘Africans’ for putting every effort in to develop the sector. This is especially so when many states have only recently realised the need to provide cheap and accessible telecommunications, which means many of the tools required to create a successful ICT sector are not in place yet.

So seeing Glory Mushinge, a journalist from Zambia dedicated to ensuring more people understood what ICT was about, even if they didn’t necessarily have access, win an award for Excellence in ICT Journalism in Africa was an absolute pleasure. However, I had to grit my teeth when the award for Top Public Sector CIO in Africa went to Kgabo Hlahla of the South Africa Department of Home Affairs (DHA). A website that isn’t exactly user-friendly is a common feature with government sites, however, the reason for the teeth gritting stems from a small device called the telephone; a device quite fundamental to ICT development.

Last week I called several DHA offices. Calls were either not answered, or when they were, were ‘transferred’ to someone who then didn’t answer. Although, auto-answering services and voicemail worked beautifully. This is a serious problem. How can a gentleman who heads a department that can’t even answer phones, quite a basic element to the ICT sector, win the accolade of being Africa’s best chief information officer? ICT use doesn’t appear to be particularly stretched either on the website, which could be used to allow people to make ‘free’ phonecalls to the department over the Internet using VoIP, not to mention providing addresses (with maps) of all the offices in a particular region.

I don’t for a second think that the rest of Africa’s CIO’s have faired this poorly, which brings me to a further problem I had with the African ICT Awards: Only a few countries outside South Africa were represented. If we are going to congratulate ‘Africa’, then we need to make sure that we know what the whole of Africa is up to.

Sticking with the trend of acknowledging South African companies, Sentech and Arivia.com both won awards. The South African signal distributor’s CEO Sebiletso Mokane-Matabane was named Top ICT Business Woman in Africa 2006. While she may have done many other things to deserve the accolade, Sentech reported a net loss of R74mn ($10.3mn) for the year to March from a loss of R68.8mn the previous period, partly because of the company's inability to win market share from competitors in the wireless broadband market. There is nothing notable about this.

Arivia.com won the award for Top ICT Company in Africa, yet their website doesn’t work properly in Firefox, a free webbrowser and Internet Explorer’s biggest challenger. Given that part of the difficulty of developing a vibrant ICT sector in Africa is the cost of software licenses, surely the top company would make sure that its website was at least compatible with open source alternatives?

The final insult, to those who deserved awards, came when South Africa’s Minister of Communications, Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri, won a Nepad special mention award for her work in driving ICT development on the continent. The gentleman sitting next to me was equally bemused by the prospect of this saying: “That’s politics, but perhaps she got it for driving Africa backwards.” There are countries much poorer than South Africa that have made regulatory changes far quicker and more effectively than Matsepe-Cassiburu. Just take a look at Uganda and bear in mind that it took the minister's department 4 years longer than necessary to license the country's Second National Operator (SNO).

As long as we continue to stroke the egos of those who don’t perform, we undermine the effort to congratulate and recognise those who do, which is sad given that there are people out there fully deserving of an African ICT Achievers Award.