The information revolution goes into phase two

The other day I saw something terrible and ominous. I was in the bus park and all its hustle and bustle but when I looked around me there wasn’t a single Rwanda reading anything. Compare Nyabugogo to Nairobi, or Dar and you’ll see locals gleaning information from magazines, books newspapers, but Rwandans were listening to people reading on the radio. We have focused on the infrastructural challenges like the logistics of laying fibre optics but we are yet to determine what information will flow through these fibre optic cables. The industrial age was led by those who could manipulate machinery, and in this post-industrial information age we will be judged by how we access, process, store and retrieve data. Information today is the most powerful tool, it is a weapon, it is a shield, it is more dangerous than a bomb. What undeveloped countries are suffering from is lack of data, and lack of knowledge to use that data. This is the most important time for East Africa since the railway over 120 years ago, the British did the right thing but didn’t think about the ways it would be used, so it didn’t benefit Africans. Let us look forward past the time when our entire fibre optic network is complete, what will we do then? What structure will our network take? I am not talking about servers, switches and mast towers I am talking about the human and knowledge side of the network. Normally these networks are a response to the demands of the people, but in Rwanda the government foresaw the needs of the public before the critical mass of demand was there. We are trying to adapt this infrastructure to suit people’s needs, like buying cash-power online, having the latest crop prices online for farmers but we are yet to make that breakthrough. We have to value information as a product and a tool in development, in this information age our information ministry should be one of the best funded and highly valued ministries. We need to link our information ministry to the ICT revolution taking place in our country. After all the fibres are laid it should be left to the ministry of information to manage the information revolution. We can now see the need to prepare the ground for this transition, away from focussing exclusively on the media aspect of Mininfor, to the ICT aspect of it. We need to restructure our communication processes, institutions and operations to be prepared for the media war we are fighting at the moment. To be ahead of our detractors and actually set the agenda, as well as deliver our message on time to our target audience. The concept of knowledge and intelligence has changed in definition. Now it is about how quickly you process and respond not about how much you know but. The same way a good computer is measured by its processing speed not just data storage. This is now phase two, are we Africans ready? ramaisibo@hotmail.com Rama Isibo is a social commentator