An Industry’s 30-Year Lamentation

What is a man to do when he realises 30 years later, the more things stay the same, the less they change?

I have gotten to that age you call it as it is. That is actually a lie. I have always called it as I saw it since I was a toddler, but it was not looked favourably. Now, with age, society will give me leeway to reduce issues to their bare minimum.

Let me explain with an example or two if ink permits. Years back, when Mwai Kibaki was President of the republic of Kenya, he was at a public event that was taking place in the open when suddenly, his driver started manoeuvring the car to turn. But the President was not done with his off the cuff remarks.

He responded by saying “huyo ni mavi ya kuku” which extremely loosely translates to “chicken poop.” Naturally, it raised a stink across social media as many felt it was beneath him as president to make such a remark in public. Which implies it would have been fine if he did it in private.

Let us remember that President Kibaki was in his 80’s at that point, making him an old African man. He responded like any other old man of his age anywhere in the country. I don’t know if the elderly in the West have the same leeway we do. But that is their own goose chase.

To explain away his reaction, the actions of the person required such a basic level of reasoning that not doing it raised major issues about his level of intelligence which the president reduced to the usefulness of chicken poop aka fertiliser.

Now that I have put myself in the same category as a president, let me get to the main jist of this lamentation. A few weeks prior to writing this article, I found myself accidentally invited into a forum. Very few people dare to intentionally invite me to events anymore based on my tendency to call issues as they are with little regard for decorum.

During the event, many senior government and industry executives made speeches, which even though being read off modern digital tablets sounded a lot like speeches I have heard multiple times over the past 30 years with only the voices changing.

The narrative is about cutting fibre and paying for wayleaves to lay cable by multiple providers adjacent to each other in 15mm conduits. Yet there already exist six ducts of 150 mm each that were buried in the ground centuries ago to carry 100 pairs of telephone cable.

So, when a former well know PS raised the same issue light years ago in the realm of analogue modems, I asked why he did not draft an amendment to the existing infrastructure law to have data communication carried over fibre cable as light classified as a utility and that would solve the problem?

*Robert Yawe is the CEO of Synaptech Solutions Limited and an IT industry veteran.