RESTRICTION OF INFORMATION FLOW IS FOR THE WORSE

A pair of hooded gunmen on Wednesday attacked the offices of a French magazine, opened fire and killed at least 12 people.

The publication, Charlie Hebdo is a satirical weekly publication renowned for commentary and cartoons ridiculing politicians, celebrities and has published numerous cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad.

The magazine has received numerous threats in this regard and there is a strong suspicion that the gunmen were Muslim radicals, even though no one has claimed credit for the attack by the time of writing this article.

The attack speaks to the larger question of freedom of speech; what is it? Should it be absolute or take into context the cultural situation in which it is being exercised?

That debate can go on till the cows come home.

I admit to a bias. My livelihood depends on the free movement of ideas. I therefore look on any restrictions of the flow of information with a jaundiced eye.

Essentially the gunmen and their promoters did not like some of the things Charlie published and took the law into their own hands to express their displeasure.

We will save judgement for the courts and God, but we should see this for what it really is an attempt to stifle the free flow of information. This has far reaching repercussions not only for Charlie or media practitioners but also for human development.

"If you chart the course of human progress it has been at its fastest when and where the flow of information has been unrestricted, either because free expression is institutionalised or the infrastructure speeds up information dissemination...

In our very own society the improvement in telecommunication and transport networks means we can access our bank accounts anywhere in the country, farmers are less beholden to crafty middlemen who had a monopoly on price information and access to information is not the preserve of the “first-world” schools anymore.

We are more productive than we were a decade or two ago and our productivity is improved with every passing day.

Furturistic author Alvin Toffler has illustrated in his various writings how power has shifted over time from the most muscular man in the village to the richest and now to the man with access to the most information.

In fact people have argued that the real scandal is not the sharp economic inequality between the more developed northern hemisphere and the south, but the vastness of the digital divide between the two, a gap which is less likely to be bridged than the wealth divide.

The key difference between you and your richer or poorer neighbour is not the millions on your payslip but the difference in access to information between the two of you. He is richer than you because he knows something you do not.

As a principle any attempt to restrict information flow should be opposed because it has a negative effect on human progress.

Of course, there is the argument that in exercising this freedom we should not do it at the expense of other people’s freedoms or rights like the right to privacy. And I agree. And I believe every society has right to place some limitations on freedoms of whatever sort, but we have to be careful not to do this at the cost of progress....

Even at the family level isn’t it interesting how the brightest kids seem to come from those families where kids speak their minds freely – within reason of course, than from those families where kids are to be seen but not heard?

So the Parisian gunmen are threatening more than journalists. We better recognise this regressive tendency wherever it manifests for what it really is – an attack on human progress, which serves no one.

2014: WHAT A YEAR …. SORT OF!

It’s amazing how in hindsight things look different, assume added or less importance and sometimes seem to have happened much further in the past than one actually thought.

A review of this column in 2014 makes for interesting read. I take little credit for that, as the events that I commented on last year provided threw up (forgive the pun) some interesting, oftentimes frustrating and sometimes hilarious to the point of bizarre, subjects.

The more things change the more they stay the same.

Clearly economic growth is second nature to us. For the last three decades we have had a chain of unbroken years when the economy grew, to the point that the economy has grown almost tenfold in size since 1986.

Unfortunately we continue to grapple with how to distribute this wealth, which prompted me to write in January that,

“The truth is to the extent that there are wealth and income inequalities in an economy, is the extent to which the government is not doing its job ... Either the government is not facilitating economic growth or if it is, it is failing to ensure that the benefits are more equitably shared...”

It’s not rocket science. And the way to do it for us is by improving agricultural productivity.

In the same month I took time to celebrate the ascension of Finance Trust to a fully-fledged commercial bank.

It has been a long and arduous journey but the bank, which begun as a credit institution for women had rode the challenges and gritted through its darkest moments.

“The major challenge of our economy is that there is not enough indigenous capital, local business of a credible enough size. Part of the reason is that our businesses have failed to transcend a generation, that our indigenous businesses when taken over by the children find it hard to replicate or surpass the success of their parents or founders. This failure means that our biggest indigenous businesses are few and small. To create size takes time as Trust Finance has shown,” I wrote at the time.

Which dovetailed very well with a theme that run through this column last year – the need for our businesses to be more formal, more corporate, which is imperative for them to grow and if for nothing else, so they can stay afloat.

I argued for a minimum wage. That without a minimum wage there was no incentive to mechanise and increase the efficiency of our businesses holding back our plans for industrialisation, launching into the whole argument about worker laziness with,

"Uganda workers are the least productive in the region and it’s not because they are lazy, it's because the capital injected into their work process does not match regional standards.”

I weighed in on Robert Mugabe’s abysmal economic record in Zimbabwe,

“The situation got so bad that the country was forced to abandon the Zimbabwe dollar and adopted a basket of currencies including the South African Rand, US dollar and Chinese Yuan as legal tender in the country, which was ironic because President Robert Mugabe always want to make out that his country is the last bastion of anti-colonial resistance.”

Adding that when you subvert the laws of supply and demand you do so at great cost to the economy and the story never ends well.

And then I was obviously tearing my hair out with the corruption scams that continued to rain down on us from the front pages.

First there was the Mukono-Katosi scam that was intricate in its detail, amazing in the actors roped in and mind boggling in the greed of our public servants.

Then there is the standard gauge railway. An 850-km ribbon of railway that will snake its way from Malaba to Kampala with branches north to Pakwach leading to Nimule in Southern Sudan.

Officials trying to ram it through the government procurement process stand to share among themselves at least $7m per kilometre or about $6b (sh16,200b).

It looks like an exercise in futility to try and roll back the corrupt and their evil schemes but I thought different,

"For every scam exposed, even if the deal masters are not brought to book, causes pause for them and their contemporaries in the industry. Exposure chips away at impunity, ever so slowly but surely.”

But what really got my goat was calls by the works ministry for the creation of a national airline. 

Calls, which got louder with the orchestrated demise of Air Uganda in mid-year.

My argument was that the government does not have the capacity nor the money lying around for such a misadventure.

"My opposition to a state owned airline is against the background of the inability of the government to run even a kiosk. An airline is an expensive proposition – by the time of the closure of Uganda Airlines it was gobbling sh10b or about $5m a month and it was only flying one route. Such monies would be better spent equipping our health centers and schools and opening up murram roads.”

In many instances it was easy to feel down about this country’s prospects. But we continue to muster some flashes of …. Not brilliance, but some level of success in things like the innovations of our university students and a capital city that is becoming increasingly functional, enough that we can retain a level of hope for a brighter future.

So it would be wise to fasten your seatbelts and prepare for another year of drama, disappointment and success that will literally take your breath away.

IT’S EASY TO PREDICT THE FUTURE, WATCH THE INTERNET

It is that time of the year again when we try to peer into the future to make out what is coming and to plan for it. An exercise in futility. But fun nevertheless, especially when at the end of the year you realise how off the mark you were.

But a useful trend to monitor in attempting to understand coming events has to be the development of the internet.

I am no internet expert, my use of it being restricted to how it helps in my everyday life – my work and my leisure.

Fortunately or unfortunately, I am old enough to have seen it develop from the early days when its symbol was the noisy, screeching sound of a table top modem, to the much higher speed of satellite connectivity, to the current optic fibre cable enabled internet. All in the space 20 years.

But the internet first came into my consciousness much earlier.

My father returned from Canada with tales of a computer system, which could make computers distances apart communicate with each other. Exchanging volumes of information in hours even minutes (well the alternative was the postal service!).

This was 1984.

We still had a black-and-white TV. Video decks were a novelty. Computer games were run off cassette tapes. And mobile phones were restricted to sci-fi cartoons.

The story goes that the internet was developed by the US millitary as a secure means of communicating internally. Academia found some use for it and it really gained traction in the wider community with the creation 25 years ago of the Wide World Web --- what we know as WWW, a system for cataloguing information, making the internet easier to navigate.

At this time there were a few hundred computers connected to the internet, but barely a decade later 16 million people were online. Today almost three billion or half of the world population are on line.

"The internet long hit its tipping point. It is now riding on the rapid uptake of mobile phones in the underdeveloped world. At the rate at which internet connectivity is increasing it will not be stretching the imagination to say that with a decade we will all be connected as the cost of mobile technology and connectivity plummets...

The power of networks is that, the sum of the whole is much greater than the sum of the individual parts. In a functioning network one plus one is not two, it is eleven.

That has been the story of the internet. The more people that log on annually, improves efficiency, reduces the cost of doing business and is unlocking value in places that were previously written off as god forsaken wastelands.

And just when we think it has reached the outer limits of its innovation than another leap of faith is made.

A few years ago a thing called the cloud was the rage.

Essentially, that as long as you have connectivity you can shift all your data off site. So for instance instead of managing servers in your office with all the attendant costs you outsource that function and only need internet connectivity to the site where your data is stored. It is actually more involving than that.

But a spinoff from this what is being called the internet of things (IOT). That increasingly machines are talking to each other. That from my desk at the office or from my phone in the car I will be able to turn on my security lights, regulate the temperature in my fridge or open the door to an expected guest.

That is at a very basic level.

Google already has a driverless car. In advanced stages of development are devices so small that they can be injected into your body to zap cancerous cells or roam around monitoring the state of your health and beam back the results to your computer, phone or watch. Maybe even diagnose your condition if you are sick.

How do we adapt to this brave new world?

The challenge is that we are operating with incomplete information. Our best guestimates of how the world will change from year-to-year or decade-to-decade is guaranteed to be wildly off the mark.

We were the first class to use calculators in O-level. Previous generations thought this would hurt mathematics. Now it’s normal for primary school kids to use calculators. Maybe that’s why As are going out fashion at every level of education.

We have to embrace these changes. You think you are already with the program? Believe me you can embrace it even more. If you won’t you will be found obsolete faster than you can reach for a dictionary to see what that means.

Look around our offices, the number functions whose importance has been reduced or removed altogether.

Where are the typing pools? The typesetters?  The proof readers? The bookkeepers?

"It is clear that manual labour is being taken over by the machines and the internet is at the center of this creeping revolution...

Just like I could not wrap my little mind around the concept of the internet 30 years ago, it is that much harder to try and conceive how the internet will have changed the world in the next three decades.

So in 2015 I will be joining my sons as they watch sci-fi cartoons, I hope you do so too.