From Matatu to the Masai via mobile
By Paul Mason - BBC Newsnight business correspondent
Newsnight correspondent Paul Mason travels through Kenya using a map of the country's mobile phone networks as his guide. Part two of this story appears tomorrow.
"How big a change have cellphones made to Africa?" I shout the question at Isis Nyong'o, over the throbbing bassline of a Kenyan ragga track. She tells me calmly: "It's had about the same effect as a democratic change of leadership."
I'd expected hype from a Kenyan-American executive at MTV Networks Africa but by now I believed the hype myself. It was not the bling, the fashion models with candy-floss hair - it was the Nairobi teenagers mobbing the entrance to the city's Carnivore club and overwhelming the Motorola stall.
If this was just an event for the elite then neither MTV nor Motorola would be there. Kenyans have been voting via SMS for their favourite rap stars, and the whole event has been promoted via mobiles.
With one in three adults carrying a cellphone in Kenya, mobile telephony is having an economic and social impact whose is hard to grasp if you are used to living in a country with good roads, democracy and the internet.
In five years the number of mobiles in Kenya has grown from one million to 6.5 million - while the number of landlines remains at about 300,000, mostly in government offices.
Big change
I decided to make a journey through Kenya to gauge the impact on the ground: the plan was to go from Mombasa via Nairobi to Lake Victoria following the mobile network map - contrasting life on the network to life off it.
"Hard luck," said my driver, Daniel Wambugu. About 80% of Kenyans are covered by mobile networks and while it would be easy to find a place off the network, finding people there would be difficult.
He suggested dropping Lake Victoria for somewhere in the Rift Valley to see if we could find a remote Masai village. Right, I said.
But first there was Mombasa to take in. It's a city with a sleepy, post-colonial feel where the most dynamic people are the Matatu drivers who zip between the traffic, shouting and bawling and getting themselves arrested, breaking down and (they allege) bribing the cops to let them earn their daily bread.
These manic minibuses drive their owners mad. "Sometimes you don't sleep," said Abdul Khan, who owns three. The two big problems are repairs and bribing the police, he tells me.
As it turns out the whole Matatu industry has been revolutionised by the mobile phone. It's not rocket science, it's just that if you need a new brake block, you don't have to walk to the shop, find the owner, do lots of face to face business, walk back, have lunch etc. Likewise with getting your driver out of the police station. Business happens faster.
Cash culture
Soon you will even be able to pay for a trip by Matutu by mobile phone. To find out how I zipped across Mombasa to the offices of Safaricom, one of the two network providers in Kenya, part owned by Vodafone. It let me film the launch of a project called M-Pesa - and, read my lips, I said "launch" not "trial".
M-Pesa does not look spectacular.
It is simply an extra line on your mobile phone menu that says: "Send Money". You go to an office, transfer funds onto your phone account, and then send them to your friends, or family, or anybody else with a mobile. Then, they go to an office, show the code on the mobile and some ID, and collect the cash.
Even just working in Kenya it's going to revolutionise things - because plastic money and bank accounts are not greatly in evidence in this country as more than 50% of its people are classed as living in abject poverty.
But once it goes global - and Vodafone says it will - then the $93bn of remittance money sent by migrants to developing countries each year could start flowing this way. Basically mobiles could be about to make Africa a very much more liquid economy.
After this I set off on my journey from Mombasa to Nairobi up the single highway that links East Africa's main port with the interior: it was a case study in what's been wrong in countries like Kenya.
Despite millions of dollars in aid money, the Kenyan government never quite got round to finishing the road. This key piece of infrastructure is now being upgraded by Chinese engineers in return for an oil deal. It is testimony to the kleptocratic elite's inability to do the simplest things.
Even the railway that runs alongside the road is, say locals, similarly shambolic. Contrast that to the mobile network which it is excellent all the way along this main artery.
It was built in four years, by Celtel and Safaricom. Admitted, building a network of generators and masts is easier than laying mile after mile of tarmac in an area known for man eating predators - but to many Kenyans the contrast is telling.
June Arunga, a neo-liberal Kenyan academic and writer, hits me with the argument when I arrive to meet her at a Nairobi food market: "Why are we still trying to work out how government can provide water and health; why are we still reliant on aid - when we have a model of private sector, market-led development in the mobile industry?"
The answer of course is politics. But June tells me mobile phones are having an amazing impact at a local level, even here. She says it's not obvious to visitors but there is a great deal of small-scale deference in Kenyan society.
"But," she says, "the mobile allows you to walk away, it allows you to own yourself."
Local hero
I found out how accurate this perception was in Kibera. It's Africa's biggest slum, with about 800,000 people living in streets that are effectively composed of sewage and old shoes.
I should not call it a slum, says Marcy Kadenyeka, a community organiser in Kibera for the Nairobi People's Settlement Network. When the residents of Kibera came together last year, it was the first time people from shanty-towns around Nairobi had properly linked up beyond their local issues.
They came together to fight evictions. The street theatre Marcy took me to in Kibera tells the story of what usually happens. A rich guy in a white cap comes along and buys the land, then he goes to the local chief and "gives him something for his breakfast".
At this point the crowd of about a thousand Kibera people watching the play burst out laughing. "And my dinner, and my supper!" says the man playing the local chief - and the laughter of the audience gets raucous.
A brown envelope is slipped into the pocket of the chief, and now he calls for his askari - a big security guard with a stick. "They come at night with bulldozers," says Marcy. "They take off your door, your window frame or your roof and throw your things into the streets. That's eviction".
So what the Nairobi People's Settlement Network did was use mobiles and the internet to get organised against evictions. They used what we would call flashmobbing to call people from across the many different and rival settlements together where big evictions were planned, and threatened to sit down in front of the bulldozers.
It has not been completely effective, since the bulldozers simply wait a few days - but it is starting to change the dynamics of grassroots politics. In Kibera most ordinary people can't afford mobiles instead they use the community mobile service, Simu Ya Jamii, which has been partly developed by the GSM Association, the world industry body for mobiles.
Most of the activists do have mobiles and they use texting when they are out of talktime. And, says Marcy, it's breaking down the usual arrangement between movements like this and the political elite.
Normally a politician arrives, promises stuff, fails to deliver and if you ask questions "you are seeing him face to face, backed by his goons," she shrugs.
"Now we have information we don't have to be dependent on patronage of the politicians - we can question them and be more independent," she says.
Valley pearl
The final leg of my journey was into the Great Rift Valley where, according to my network map, the service peters out. But when we got there it didn't. The first person I met as I jumped out of the 4x4 was Lucy Ndilai, a teacher in a Masai village.
Had she got a mobile? Yes.
Had it made a difference to Masai society? A massive one. To hear her full tale you'll have to tune into my Newsnight report but, basically, Masai husbands have discovered the secrets of the "incoming calls" list - and there's been tears before bedtime.
Making the journey along the mobile network was like travelling through a corridor of progress: and yes, it's facile to say mobiles are causing it all - but I don't think either economists or sociologists have yet begun to measure the massive impact they are having.
The mobile phone industry worldwide is faced with the challenge of bringing the next two billion people onto the network: once that happens, and it will happen this century, the balance of world development will have tipped decisively. It will be a sign of progress but, I think now, a big contributor to it as well.
The Masai kids who waved me off from their village are part of Africa's first digital generation. To the north lies the old Africa of war, poverty, flood and famine - and one technology alone will not eradicate that. But giving ordinary African people more power, and a bigger voice will - and my journey left me in no doubt about the power of the cellphone to do that.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/technology/6242305.stm
