The Importance of Being Earnest

I loved the movie title - the argument is actually the opposite (shows you how I'd suck at being a headline writer). Anyway, published in the Business Daily on 26 November 2013 at http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/Opinion-and-Analysis/Tell-army-of-developers-to-let-loose-and-give-market/-/539548/2087976/-/idon7dz/-/index.html

If you have ever been bored on a dark plane or a bus, or even been insomniac next to a sleeping spouse, and you were disinclined to switch on the lights, chances are that you took out your mobile phone and began to interact with it. After the obligatory trolling of the social media sites (which are usually boring in the dead of night as everyone’s asleep), you likely started playing the rather addictive game Angry Birds, or the new game on the block – Candy Crush.

These games add very little to your life, except to waste a few minutes of your time. But Angry Birds’ parent – Finnish company Rovio – has made revenues of US$ 195.6 million in 2012, and according to a report, its games, including Angry Birds, had been downloaded 1.7 billion times. The company, which is headquartered in Espoo, the same home as mobile phone giant Nokia, does nothing but make (time-wasting) games for mobile phones, giving bored or antsy mobile phone users something to do with their thumbs all day (and half the night).

There’s a reason I’m telling you all this, and it has all to do with Kenya’s positioning as a hub for the development of mobile phone applications. Earnest young people are busy toiling away in metaphorical garages and basements, or in collectives in Nairobi that garner global attention. There’s something missing though, and it has to do with my staying up at night glued to my mobile telephone throwing birds at fortified pigs.

The missing element is typified by the earnestness of the developers at the iHub and the Nailab. They will change the world one day, or at least the continent of Africa. Whenever they are in the news – locally and internationally – it has to do with the many do-gooder apps they are creating. They are trying to bring farmers closer to their markets, or at least to disambiguate the relationship between farmers, middlemen and their customers. The developers are busy trying to create the killer app that will take away Nairobi’s traffic woes. They salivated at the prospect of being given access to government data when Bitange Ndemo opened up the dungeons of the governments servers, and got busy designing apps to track CDF spending, population statistics such as density of toilets and schools, and reporting mechanisms for countering corruption.

What very few are doing is creating applications that have nothing to do with changing society, or governance, or ease of business. Very few of our army of developers is keen on spending precious programming time creating a game that will capture the attention of millions, and be installed in the vast majority of phones worldwide.

The reason for this is also why we have such a listless literary scene in Kenya. Actually, scratch that – it is the reason why so much of our entertainment was so dull for so long. Anything developed here had to have redemptive value – books had to have a moral lesson, and films had to hew close to African values. Entertainment for its own sake was – and still is – frowned upon, as it is seen to be adding little, and taking lots, from innocent young minds.

Our films had to have high production values and be authentically ‘African’, in order to have them appreciated as such by any global market. Authors wrote books that were so chock-full of moral fibre that their eventual destination had to be as set books in high school literature classes. And so we forgot how to have fun. The Nigerians, in the meantime, with their terrible, straight-to-video fables full of ghosts and starkly-drawn characters, captured the imagination of millions of Africans and made their actors and actresses into superstars.

We’ve been reduced to trying to re-create these success stories – trying to formalise the video productions on River Road and give them a nice sheen, forgetting the fact that they were doing pretty well without the gimlet eye of officialdom bearing down on them.

I have a suggestion. Stand at the ground floor of Bishop Magua Centre on Ngong Road and shout up to the denizens of the Nailab and the iHub to let loose for once. The farmers will be fine. Traffic in Nairobi will continue to annoy, but we’ll live with it. The challenge for them is, instead of creating an i-Pig app that predicts meat prices and pleases kind-hearted CNN viewers, create an app that lets me, and millions of others, throw pixelated pigs around our mobile phone screens for no reason whatsoever, and help us waste our time more effectively.