Are African Governments Really Ready to Embrace “E-“?

On tuesday 28th August,I had the pleasure of attending another skunkworks meeting, I was actually very excited about it since there was going to be a presentation by one of the team members behind PloneGOV an open source e-government suite of applications that has gained a lot of traction Europe and is slowly gaining acceptance in Africa and South America. PloneGOV is highly customizable and extendable due to its open source nature, it’s actually built using Plone (hence the name PloneGOV) a python based content management system that is freely available for download, PloneGOV contains several applications which the user is able to select either as a whole or individually, one such application is college which is used for town meetings, and even allows for towns/cities to put up a website in a matter of minutes (15 minutes was the time frame specified). Later on Ashok of parliaments.info did a quick presentation on Bungeni 2.0 and Akoma Ntoso ,a Parliamentary and Legislative Information System and the latter being ("Architecture for Knowledge-Oriented Management of African Normative Texts using Open Standards and Ontologies") which is a standard that defines a “machine readable” set of simple technology-neutral representations (XML) of Parliamentary and legislative documents in order to enable easy and effective search, retrieval and exchange of such documents. Bungeni 2.0 really looks promising, a beta version should be out by November 2007.

As the meeting drew to a close there was a discussion of usage and adoption of e-government tools with very many varying view points, the question I kept asking myself is “Are African Governments Really Ready to Embrace “E-“?” E in this is case is electronic-, and includes such aspects as e-government,e-commerce, e-procurement among other activities. Over the last couple of years many African governments have embraced ICT in their day-to-day operation wholeheartedly, Rwanda for me is one the best examples, but the overall adoption has been slow despite the efforts put into it. An overall survey of parliamentarians in Sub-Saharan Africa is bound to reveal that most of them barely use ICT unless it’s for checking email, for the few that have email addresses, what this means is that ICT is yet to play an important part in their day to day lives, and directly the people they represent are unable to access ICT services due to the myopic nature of their representatives.

What this means is that even before we begin to push for e-government applications/software we must first take the time to educate our government representatives on the benefits of using ICT to run and manage government, a radical suggestion was that we should even work on getting a techie elected into office so that they can articulate our views better. Engaging our government reps in discussion about current and future ICT initiatives and the role government plays will go a long way towards preparing them for the age of e-government. “E-“ must be made an integral part of the government’s existence and operations and not a reason to spend money, our representatives must first think and embrace and the “E-“ way of life.

The private sector could set in motion training programmes for key government ministries that will focus on educating personnel on the important role that ICT plays, what this dies is it lays the groundwork towards quick and committed adoption of all things "E-".

“Embrace E- or face Extinction”, may be that should be the slogan we should use as we march to the government offices with our proposals for e-government, it might achieve the desired effect, that idea aside, educating and informing the government should be used as the first step towards getting Africa truly ready to embracing “E-“ and all its variations.

To learn more about this author, visit John Wesonga's Website.

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