The United Nations will host a World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Geneva this December. The preparatory committees started last year and Africa held one in Bamako, Mali. But why should we take any notice? UN summits are notorious for being expensive talk shops where the final declarations are contested to the concluding full-stop and vacuous compromises reached at the last second.
Anyway, does anyone remember what the World Summit on Sustainable Development agreed on in Johannesburg last year? For those few that do,
there’s another issue faced by the WSIS: the global cynicism attached to
phrases like ‘information society’ post the burst of the dotcom bubble. The new economy appears to be faltering in its attempts to replace the old economy and the average profile of CEOs has corrected itself against the twenty-something university dropouts of a few years ago.
But despite these obstacles, the fact remains that access to information is currently as important to Africa as the democratisation process that began in the late 1980s. Information and communication technologies, where they exist, have become critical means of exchanging information, organising democratic activists and bypassing the censorship of print and broadcast media.
So, to date, what have Africans done to take advantage of the potential of the ‘information age’? The biggest programme at the continental level is the Africa Information Society Initiative (AISI), aimed at harnessing information and communication technologies for Africas development in the shortest possible time. At a conference held in Addis Ababa in 1999 delegates brought the strategy down to the national level through the National Information Communication Infrastructure (NICI). Critical to both the continental and national initiatives is reforming telecommunications through the creation of regulatory frameworks that create an enabling environment for new players.
Noble goals indeed, but for a variety of reasons not much progress has been made since 1999.
While many African countries are opening up their telecommunication sectors, they are doing so reluctantly, sometimes under duress from the trio of the IMF, World Bank and the WTO. As a number of critics have noted, the motives of this famous trio and the donor bunch are not always altruistic. The shout “privatisation of telecommunications will set you free” seems to be more for the benefit of US or European based telecommunication providers than the African countries themselves.
It appears that to grasp these issues and come fully prepared, Africans in government, business, the academic and research community and civil society need their own summit before the WSIS in Geneva. The AU and NEPAD, despite some strong reservations about their direction, should be the vehicles for driving such a summit. The outcome should be a charter similar to the Windhoek Declaration on a Free and Pluralistic Press of 1991 (which gave birth to May 3, the United Nations World Press Freedom Day) or the African Broadcasting Charter of 2001. African delegates can then take the charter to the WSIS and use it as framework for creating policies and programmes that indeed count for something.
As importantly, African media needs to systematically inform the African public about the Geneva summit. The defeaning silence is perhaps a manifestation of the digital divide and its near incurability in Africa. But just in case the journos do not take this issue up, I will be back next month with an overview of the issues on the WSIS agenda and the agendas of those Africans who want the continent’s voice to be heard.
Dr. Tawana Kupe is head of media studies at Wits University’s School of Literature and Language Studies.