The fourth industrial revolution: Is Africa getting it wrong?

Matsiko Kahunga I had just tapped the last full-stop on a deadlined document, when a bleep on my phone sent me to a log-in on the laptop. And for the next 30 or so minutes, I was engaged by four ‘trending’ stories of the day (according to me). In the wake of the World Economic Forum focus on the Fourth Industrial Revolution, my fellow Panda, John Ssenkumba, a PhD Fellow at Makerere Institute of Social Research, in Kampala, sent me a special edition of Foreign Affairs magazine, dedicated to the Fourth Industrial Revolution. On the Uganda presidential campaign trail, Dr Kizza Besigye was pictured in Butambala admiring a wooden machine gun made by a group of young people there. And the leading story in Rwanda’s Imvaho Nshya, was the spirited fight by a taxi moto co-operative in Rusizi town in the Western Province to fend off a pending auction of their three-storey building by the bank that financed its construction. The East African had Charles Onyango-Obbo predicting the demise of jua-kali, thanks to 3D printing, which he says, is slowly making in-roads into Kenya. And as expected, of all the media comments and reactions over the next week, not a single one was on either the taxi moto story in Rusizi or the Butambala one. We all focused on the Fourth Industrial Revolution, including wild arguments that Africa is actually into it, by merely living in the dotcom era! What is common in these apparently unrelated stories? Delinked as they are, the common thread running through these stories is the destiny (or is it fate?) of an ordinary African youth of this century. I say ordinary youth advisedly, because even in the second poorest country on earth (Burundi), there are young people whose destiny has the same degree of certainty as that of children born to Bill Gates. The Fourth Industrial Revolution, now attracting our total attention, is a logical, sequential stage in man’s quest at taming nature to his advantage and service. And as the case of 3D printing in Nairobi testifies, we can have pockets of defiance against Rostow, thus deceptively ‘jumping’ his stages of development. But even these deceptive cases remain isolated pockets, with the larger economy still at the very rudimentary stage, the jua-kali stage of Uganda’s Butambala machine gun. Yet it is here that we should instead turn our attention. Innovation and invention are fruits of man’s innate curiosity. Both the 3D printing of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Butambala machine gun are fruits of curious minds. Experts in demography tell us that geniuses are universally evenly distributed. So the Butambala gun-makers could as well be our Mikhail Kalashnikovs (the creator of the AK-47 riffle that has instead turned our young energies into killers instead of innovators). The Bill Gates, Mark Shuttleworths are spread all over Butambala if not languishing, starving in refugee camps chased from their homes by their age-mates wielding the AK-47. Self-deception and self-destruction in equal measure. The reality is that we are simply at the receiving, consumption end of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. So, instead of the self-deception, we must stop and wonder how the developed world ‘discovers’ its geniuses. The secret is simple: they obeyed the Law of Maslow. Unlike the stages of Rostow which can be defied, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs means that one must first meet the lowest needs on the rung before aspiring for the rung above. This is what developed economies obeyed. They liberated their populations from the basic physiological needs (the lowest rung on Maslow’s ladder), thus fleeing the creative minds of their geniuses to focus on inventions and innovations. The inspiring Rusizi story of the taxi moto co-operative tells us that ordinary people are capable of great things, with the right leadership. And leadership is what Rusizi District provided. They intervened and led the co-operative into sorting out internal governance issues, which had been the cause of failure to amortise their loan. And it for them, not even the sky will be the limit. Herein lies the secret. We must start from the first rung. President Museveni recognised this when he argued that Ugandan singers and artists would be billionaires if they were in the developed world. It is the economy that is capable of paying for the artists’ creativity that renders them billionaires. The same with soccer players and other talents. So, as we plan ‘talks and debates’, summits, conferences and conventions about the Fourth Industrial Revolution, we may need first to establish how far we are from Maslow’s lowest rung on the needs ladder. Africa must first build a strong ‘brick-and-mortar’ foundation onto which to build the virtual economy of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This is what the developed world did. The author is a partner at Peers Consult Kampala and CET Consulting, Kigali. bukanga@yahoo.com

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The fourth industrial revolution: Is Africa getting it wrong?