Charles Onyango - Obbo
14 July 2008
column
If you want to know what is going to in the East African telecommunications market in the near future, look no further than Kenya.
Kenya's red-hot mobile phone market has conferred unparalled fortune on the companies, especially Safaricom that for two years in a row has posted the highest profit of any company in the history of the wider East Africa.
With the intense competition, and the impending entrance of two more firms in the next few weeks, prices for calls have been tumbling remarkably. Apart from the free evening calls, a minute of yow yow is now averaging Ksh3.
In two years, talk will not just be cheap, it could be free. The mobile phone business will become like pubs, where entrance is free and operators make money from the mark-up on the drinks and eats.
If talk is going to be free, where will the money come from? From commissions operators make from value added services like the digital money transfer M-Pesa; Internet services (Safaricom has turned Nairobi into a vast hot spot); and soon they could be offering their own news, which might well deal a quick death blow to traditional media companies.
THE MORE INTERESTING THING IS HOW our economies and politics will be re-organised. Today, if you forget the shopping list at home, you have someone at the house SMS it to you.
However, that is not necessary. Supermarket chains like Nakumatt that have a well-developed loyalty card system, already have your shopping list in their databases.
At this point, such supermarkets are probably already at a point where you can order your groceries by SMSing a number, and the goods that you regularly buy and entered in your loyalty card will be delivered to your house. The M-Pesa type solutions have provided the last remaining link - how to pay.
Therefore, even in East Africa, I see a future around the corner when the biggest companies will be those that aggregate various products, like Amazon.com does, and deliver them to us with a simple SMS order.
This means that the quality of the infrastructure for the distribution of goods and services will touch us less, and so we will be less angry that "things don't work in Africa" because we will be less aware that they don't.
If we are less exercised about the state of infrastructure, to give one example, it means we could become less political, and become unbothered by the mischief the politicians get up to because it will inconvenience us marginally.
Logically, it follows that we shall less reason to vote, so turnout at the polls is likely to be drop. Yet, this doesn't mean that because we are less bothered about how the government is running things, everything will go to rot.
Because the burdens we face in sorting out our daily lives will be taken over by the Nakumatts of this world, they will grow into behemoths.
WHERE IN THE PAST A POLITICIAN could seduce voters with a glass of kumi kumi, now they wouldn't do that with a Safaricom that's perhaps making twice the money its bagging today.
At this point we could see a shift of power, to a point where the few corporate giants buy up the politicians and own governments, and thus are able to get them to fix infrastructure that would allow them operate efficiently at low cost.
We could see a massive improvement in public administration and government, but a total collapse of democracy, as we know it today.
If this is the future, then this columnist needs to make peace with Madhivani Sugar at Kakira.
Last week, we mistakenly reported that Kakira is the sugar company angling to gobble up the Mabira forest. That was the Mehta-owned Sugar Corporation of Uganda at Lugazi.
Charles Onyango-Obbo is Nation Media Group's managing editor for convergence and new products.
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