Two weeks ago President Uhuru Kenyatta launched the Digital Economy Blueprint for Kenya at an African Tech summit in Kigali, Rwanda.
The Blueprint is a very well written document that identifies five key pillars and their corresponding objectives and strategies for achieving a vibrant digital economy.
They include having a government that has digitised its services, businesses and enterprises that have done the same, reliable and affordable communications infrastructure, a vibrant innovation, research and development sector that reflects an education sector that focuses on producing highly skilled manpower. Branded respectively as Digital Government, Digital Business, Infrastructure, Innovation & Digital skills pillars, the blueprint lays out a clear roadmap on how Kenya, and possibly other African countries, can effectively grow and participate in the global digital economy.
Several previous documents, including the 2014-2017 ICT Masterplan, the 2012 Broadband strategy and the 2006 ICT policy – both currently under review - have to some extend said at least 70 percent of what the Digital Economy Blueprint is articulating so well.
Perhaps the only critical difference is the proposal to have an institutional implementation framework known as the Digital Economy secretariat to keep track on the achievement of the targets identified within each of the five pillars.
It remains to be seen if a secretariat would be better placed than the ICT Authority, a state agency charged with achieving most of these targets, to achieve the goals.
Perhaps the starting point would be to find out the extent to which ICT Authority has contributed to the Digitized Government Agenda. The truth is that it is a mixed bag of results.
Many digital initiatives in government for better or worse, such as eCitizen, Huduma Centers and the Laptop Project have had their genesis traced back to ICT Authority or its predecessor eGovernment Secretariat.
However, equally important digital initiatives such as Lands Registry, Single Digital Identity or Huduma Namba have continued to be tightly guarded and perhaps out of scope of the ICT Authority, defeating the whole concept for ‘Shared Infrastructure’ for government services.
The crux of the matter is that sharing infrastructure, be it Data Center or Software Infrastructure implies losing out on big ICT budgets that are scattered across the various ministries and counties.
So whereas sharing infrastructure is cost-effective and makes for efficiency gains, it does cut into rent seeking bureaucrats who are used to getting kick backs through buying capital intensive ICT equipment or annual renewal of expensive licenses.
They will definitely fight tooth and nail to ensure that such kickbacks are retained across different ministries and counties rather than presumably risk having them consumed solely at the ICT ministry or ICT Authority.
Unless and until this corruption challenge - real or perceived - is resolved, Digital Government will remain a good idea that can be implement marginally but never optimised.
SAME THING, BETTER ENGLISH
The other pillars face similar challenges. Take the question of Research, Innovation and Digital Skill development for instance. We talked of identifying and equipping regional ICT Centres of Excellence at University level in the 2006 ICT Policy, but well over ten years later, there seems to be very little motion towards achieving this target.
Instead we have new documents reiterating the same thing using better English than the previous documents.
It is time we walked the talk within our current and previous ICT documents because if we do not, other emerging economies such as Rwanda will grab the documents and implement them before us.
Then ten years from today, we shall be sending without much shame, multiple government delegations for benchmarking trips to Kigali to learn how to implement a digital economy.
Mr Walubengo is a lecturer at Multimedia University of Kenya, Faculty of Computing and IT.
