The events last Tuesday evening would have
been hilarious, had their import not been so serious. The Daily Nation’s
Parliamentary Editor, John Ngirachu, was ‘accompanied’ by the police to the
headquarters of the Directorate of Criminal Investigations to record a
statement. (He was not under arrest, came the helpful clarification from the
police, though his abduction, being sandwiched between stern-looking men and
threats of handcuffs could have been misunderstood by someone who was not as
discerning of police operational protocols). The reason he came to the
attention of the police is an article he had written about spending by the
Interior Ministry. His reporting (and that of the Standard’s Alphonce Shiundu
and the Star’s James Mbaka) was so explosive that Interior Cabinet Secretary
Joseph Nkaissery felt sufficiently exercised to threaten the trio that they
would ‘fry alone’ if they didn’t reveal their sources (which turned out to be a
public document).
The key economic point to take away from
this is not whether Mr. Nkaissery acted on his own (he, at the very least,
seems to have overreached, seeing how quickly he walked back his comments, and
the pains he was at to paint himself as a friend of the media). It is that his
actions are a direct contradiction of Kenya’s stated economic aims. The desire
to retain backward political practices clashes head-on with the desire to have
a forward-looking economy. The arrest doesn’t just reveal a clash of
civilisations, but it directly sabotages economic growth. To put it simply, the
government cannot claim to want to build an information-based economy, yet seek
to stifle free flow of information.
Kenya has boasted about being the site of
the silicon savannah for so long that the term turned into a cliché before it
even became reality. Riding the back of the success of Safaricom’s M-Pesa, and
the presence of collectives such as the Nailab and the iHub, we have claimed
leadership of Africa’s tech scene to the point of distraction. We have been
feted at international conferences, and been the topic of endless hagiographies
on television and on print. Setting aside whether we actually deserve this
attention – which includes a casually-dressed President Kenyatta turning up
unannounced at the Ngong’ Road-based incubators – the fact is that a country
that tries to control thought and information cannot develop an innovative, creatively
disruptive economy that would help it compete in the world.
The young people who smash old ways of
doing business to smithereens and create new businesses, technologies and
industries are not conformists, and they cannot thrive in an environment in
which there are gatekeepers to information, and especially when these
gatekeepers overreact to any challenge to their authority. The disruptive
innovators seek to break up fiefdoms and entrenched monopolies, especially when
it is monopoly to information.
Other countries have tried to graft the
revivifying limbs of an innovative culture on the stultifying carcass of an
authoritarian political environment, and failed. Russia, during the
far-too-brief presidency of the liberalising Dmitry Medvedev, tried building a
wannabe-Konza City named Skolkovo. After the dictatorial Vladimir Putin grabbed
the Presidency back, Skolkovo sank without a trace. Kenya is trying to turn
back the clock to the dictatorial Moi years, while asking for innovation from
young people who were not even born in the worst of the years of misrule.
Innovation, especially information-based
creativity, is not something that can be ordered up to fit into an economy that
needs it. It grows out of an environment that allows contrarian thought, and is
brave enough to allow the messy intellectual, technological and political
arguments that throw up the very best ideas and the very best people. That is
why countries like the United States and Israel, with their very febrile and
raucous political environments, and loud disregard for hierarchy and tradition,
do particularly well in creating technological winners.
Mr. Nkaissery’s clumsy attempt, then, to
take us back to an antediluvian past is not just about freedom of the press and
of information (though those are obviously worth protecting), but about whether
Kenya – and its government – is brave enough to live with the discomfort brought
about by a necessary loosening of control. It is about whether all our talk of
the brave new economy full of creative technologists will come up against a
restraining wall of intolerant old men.
Also published in the Daily Nation on 17 November 2015
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