Focus Media (Kigali)
12 October 2008
editorial
"Why are they digging up the road again?" quizzes a young man in Jeans and a red T-shirt. He is referring to the current laying down of optic fibre in and around Kigali.
These people who are digging up the road, one could inform the young man, are engaged in nothing less than laying down the very foundation for the future. This may sound a bit melodramatic. But we do not exaggerate the importance of that exercise.
From the time humanity started living in communities, societies with an edge in technology have controlled nature as well as those communities that had inferior technology. Thus societies from Europe and the West have continually exploited the South - until of course some societies there began matching the West in technological prowess.
Societies with a technological edge, it is not surprising to learn, have always found ways to harness the world's resources to accumulate wealth and power and this power base is the tool with which they control planetary affairs.
The ideology of the powerful is the ideology of the masses and those technologically powerful nations have proscribed values, and roles that they use to control other societies.
We observe that the current cutting edge technology is Information and Communication Technology, just like the 19th century was characterised by the steam engine or the century before that by the mechanical systems that heralded the birth of the industrial revolution.
The most sought after skills now are in information and knowledge management. A fast changing world environment dictates that we embrace the prevailing technology if we are to compete.
The Rwanda Information and Technology Agency, RITA, (who are laying the fibre optic cable across Kigali and later all over the country) are spearheading the effort to catapult us into the information age. They have achieved much, by the country's modest means.
RITA promises that when they are done laying the cable we shall have one of the fastest Internet connections in the region which in turn speeds up our efforts in turning this into an IT-based economy in the future. More power to them then.
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