Yesterday, an international summit on Information and Communication Technology in Africa officially opened in Kigali. For the next few days African leaders, ICT experts and policy makers will discuss ways of using ICTs for socio-economic transformation in Africa.

There is no question about the role of ICT in today’s life. That is now a given. The real issue is how to turn its numerous possibilities to our advantage to spur further improvement in our lives.  That’s what the summit in Kigali will be talking about.

Even before this summit got underway, we were already being shown the benefits of ICT across borders. The application of ICT to ease customs procedures and the movement of goods in the operation of a single customs territory was demonstrated to East African Heads of State at a separate Tripartite Summit of East African leaders yesterday.  It was evident there was a lot of time to be saved and less or no paper was required. That should please tree lovers.

It can be said that the digital revolution has been the most phenomenal development of our time, changing lives and the way we do things in the most profound ways. It is difficult to imagine how life was before mobile telephones became such familiar and commonplace appliances, or before the coming of the internet and social media.

For today’s generation, that period – when the only telephone was at the post office in the major towns – must appear like the Stone Age, yet it was not so long ago. That tells you how fast the IT revolution has been.

Those of us who have been around for quite a while can appreciate the tremendous changes that IT has brought about, which today are taken for granted.

A brief historical view will illustrate this. Six years ago mobile telephone penetration in Rwanda was only 6 per cent. Today it is close to 65 per cent. The entire East African coast had no undersea fibre cable. Now there are six. Rwanda has installed a countrywide fibre optic cable. The broadband revolution has come to our region and all we have to do is tap into it to transform our countries.

In these six years, no single thing has changed the way things are done as the mobile phone. .

Once upon a time (it does feel like that, although it is less than two decades) if you wanted to reach someone far away you did one of two things. You sent a letter by post which took ages to get to its destination because the nearest post office was often tens of kilometres away. Or you waited for someone going where you wanted a message sent and gave them a letter or verbal message to carry. You could also go to the nearest bus station and give the conductor a letter to drop at a trading centre closest to where you intended it to get.

Now all that is distant history. The mobile phone has made communication instant and done away with various types of messengers and modes of delivering messages.

But the mobile phone does more than that and perhaps the most economically revolutionary change (for ordinary Rwandans) has been in the transfer of money. In the stone age of my youth, that used to be the preserve of the post office. Can anyone remember the money order? Well, it is now a relic of a by-gone era. Mobile money transfer has seen to that.

And the amounts that pass through the system are simply staggering. One mobile money outlet in Kigali handles approximately four million francs a day. There are tens of these in the city, which means transactions of up to half a billion francs a day. Spread that across the whole country and you can get a picture of the volume of transfers involved.

IT has even affected the way we gossip. Now, gossip is a uniquely, and apparently enjoyable, human pastime. Human beings enjoy revealing scandals, creating them where they do not exist and adding juice to ordinary tales. A good dose of malice and clever invention makes for the best gossip. It is even better when reputations and careers are ruined.

For long gossip has been private and secret and anonymous, with only bits selectively let out to carry out its malicious intent.

With IT, that is changing. Of course, people still gossip, but in public – on Facebook, WhatsApp and other social media. The narrow circle of anonymous gossipers now extends to publicly known individuals across literally the whole world. The real essence of gossip has been lost – damage to reputations is probably much less and the really juicy bits have lost much of their flavour.

Even in the shadowy world of espionage, there have been profound changes. Spies can snoop on anyone without leaving the comfort of their home or office. Of course the glamour and adventure has been lost. The modern spy does not have to be the daredevil, who flies through blazing gunfire and real fire and comes out without a scratch. He is not the outrageously handsome bloke who has all the gorgeous women swooning at his very sight.

The James Bond sort is gone, replaced by a faceless, nameless and colourless creature manipulating drones from thousands of miles away, or sitting behind a computer listening to the world’s conversations and deciding which is a security risk.

Digital technology has made spying thoroughly boring. But in a strange way it also makes it easy to leak secrets and bring the mysterious world of espionage into the open. It breeds subversives like Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and Julian Assange who add a little colour to modern spying. Thanks to them one can imagine the usually unexpressive Angela Merkel fuming and swearing at Barack Obama for allowing the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on her private conversations for over ten year.

The Transform Africa Summit will, of course, not be talking about espionage or gossiping. Delegates will be talking about investment in ICT infrastructure, how to get it to more people and how they can use it to better their lives – do business among themselves and between nations. They will be seeking partners in this endeavour.

However, real transformation involves more than technology. It requires a new mindset that makes this technology a way of life. That’s when a real revolution will be said to have taken place.

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