Icts, 'Virtual Colonisation' & Political Economy

Review of African Political Economy No.99:5-9 © ROAPE Publications Ltd., 2004 ISSN 0305-6244 ICTs, ‘Virtual Colonisation’ & Political Economy Reginald Cline-Cole & Mike Powell The potential consequences of the nature and dynamics of the increasing use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for the political economy of Africa deserve considerably more critical attention than they have thus far received. True, there exists a growing body of literature on, for example, the potential of ICTs for democratising political participation and policy formulation; redressing long- standing North-South, regional, rural-urban and gender imbalances; and redefining the parameters of development thinking and practice. Not surprisingly, recent policy attention has tended to focus almost exclusively on why a ‘wired’Africa is an absolute and urgent necessity in the current information age; and on how African countries can formulate e-strategies, among other things, to facilitate their incorporation in the so- called global information society. However, much (but by no means all) of this literature has been celebratory, even, on occasion, proselitysing, particularly in its insistence that ICTs represent ‘a key resource that should be maximised by … African nations in order to achieve competitiveness in the current dynamic world order’ (Shibanda and Musisi-Edebe, 2000:228). In contrast, relatively little sustained attention has been paid to the potential (highly differentiated) impact of ICTs on social relations, even though, as Daly (2000) has observed with reference to the extension of the internet to developing countries with low levels of connectivity, ‘the Mathew principle’ will prevail and ‘those who have most will be given still more’. And yet, ICTs, as an integral part of broader processes of informationalisation and globalisation, have major implications for the choices facing political and economic strategists across Africa in the age of the information society. Of course, like all technologies, ICTs have no independent, determinative existence: ICTs, as Ishemo argues in this issue, ‘have not risen autonomously’. The key issues, therefore, must be seen as revolving around who uses the technology, how the technology is used, and to what end it is used. Viewed in this way, there is little doubt about who is driving the current prominence of ICTs in global discourse. For although the second half of the 20th century may have coincided with a heightened interest in an expanded role for information technology in economic activity, and in the increased informationalisation of such activity, the emergence of ICT as one of the key issues of our age can be traced directly to the meeting of the G-8 countries at Osaka, Japan, in the year 2000. Indeed, while much of the world waited for, and expected significant initiatives aimed at addressing the debt crisis, the G-8 meeting chose instead to redirect attention to the role of ICTs in global economic restructuring and socio-economic change. There was, the G-8 declared, a real danger of a global digital divide emerging between those countries actively using ICTs and those without access to these technologies. It further expressed its total commitment to preventing the growth and consolidation of such a divide, and initiated the Digital Opportunity Task (DOT) Force, an international coalition of government, industry and civil society organisations, ‘to harness the forces of new technologies in order to 6 Review of African Political Economy narrow social and economic inequalities by making the benefits from these technologies accessible and meaningful for all humanity’ (http://info.worldbank.org/ ict/assets/docs/ mdgComplete.pdf). Unfortunately, this commitment did not extend to either rethinking development orthodoxy on the privatisation of telephone networks; or preventing new arrange- ments for the settlement of the cost of international telephone calls, which have highly negative foreign exchange implications for developing countries; or, indeed, encouraging a renegotiation of the prevailing cost structure of the internet, which effectively shifts the cost of expanding a (Northern-based) infrastructural-network to new or late (Southern-based) adopters. Not surprisingly, confirmation of the existence of a digital divide came shortly thereafter, with the international community committing itself this time to narrowing or reducing (and not, as previously promised, to preventing the emergence of) the divide. In the process, this new commitment became the source of a new moral authority for intervening in the affairs of places like Africa, which were considered to be on the ‘wrong’ side of the digital divide. Thus promotional material for the first phase of a UN-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), held in Switzerland in December 2003 to discuss ‘coordination of the practical establishment of the information society around the globe’, claims, for instance, that: [t]he modern world is undergoing a fundamental transformation as the industrial society that marked the 20th century rapidly gives way to the information society of the 21st century. This dynamic process promises a fundamental change in all aspects of our lives, including knowledge dissemination, social interaction, economic and business practices, political engagement, media, education, health, leisure and entertainment. We are indeed in the midst of a revolution, perhaps the greatest that humanity has ever experienced. To benefit the world community, the successful and continued growth of this new dynamics [sic] requires global discussion and harmonisation in appropriate areas (http://www.itu.int/ wsis/docs/brochure/wsis.pdf). Furthermore, not only does WSIS portray developing countries as economies and polities aspiring to membership of this ‘wired’ or information society, but it neglects to provide, either precise details of the characteristics associated with such a society or incontrovertible proof of its existence (the information society is described as an ‘evolving concept’, which takes different forms in different places, ‘reflecting different stages of development’). Indeed, the summit’s Plan of Action promises to pay special attention to the needs of developing countries, peoples and groups (among marginalised ‘others’) in promoting its objective of ‘putting the potential of knowledge and ICTs at the service of development’, even while recommending that, with appropriate outside help, these countries should adopt largely top-down processes in developing national e-strategies, as well as in allocating increased shares of their aid receipts to ICT-related activities (http://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-s/ md/03/wsis/doc/S03-WSIS-DOC-0005!!PDF-E.pdf). Nonetheless, behind the apparent consensus implied in both the WSIS Plan of Action and Declaration of Principles lies, as both Ya’u and Ishemo argue in this issue, the juggernaut of international capitalism, and its need to develop and profit from a globalising economy which is overwhelmingly dependent for its functioning on the ICT it sells. This, then, is the agenda being imposed on Africa, but with the added twist that WSIS appears to be promoting what is effectively a tax on aid budgets to pay for Northern hardware, software and associated services. In this way, the North is to be paid to smooth Africa’s insertion into a globalised world Editorial: ICTs, ‘Virtual Colonisation’ & Political Economy 7 order, from which the North will then profit. Little wonder, as Ya’u perceptively concludes, that ICTs need to be seen as reinforcing old international divisions of labour, even as they create brand new ones. Clearly, an Africa locked in as a powerless junior partner in what should, at least according to WSIS, be an ‘inclusive’ Information Society based on relations of ‘partnership’ between ‘key stakeholders’, stands as little chance of prospering now, as it did under previous dispositions or world economic orders. In this connection, it is worth pointing out that while initiatives such as NEPAD’s adoption of ICTs as one of its eight priority sectors, and President Wade’s (coordinator of NEPAD’s ICT sector) call for a Global Digital Solidarity Fund may help in creating some space for Africa-based initiatives, they offer little or no significant challenge to imperialism’s overarching strategy, as Ya’u insists in his contribution. In a similar vein, Ishemo argues, this time with recourse to classical marxism, that the exploitation of Africa is set to intensify. Not only does he see the ICT revolution as another example of the statement in the manifesto of the Communist Party, that the ‘bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production’, but he suggests, too, that, especially in the case of ICT, this revolutionising is being achieved through ‘increased invasion and tearing apart, through commodification of non-market and pre-capitalist structures like the family, community and culture that constitute obstacles to accumulation’. In so doing, however, Ishemo shifts the debate on to a terrain of cultural and ideological struggle, on which the balance of forces is far less lopsided, and one on which, as his frequent references to Cabral remind us, Africa has emerged victorious in the past. Clearly, the heart of the issue is not the technological determinism reflected in many global policy statements, but how men, women and children use and exchange information at work, school and play. In other words, it is, as Thompson’s contribution

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