"Africans have what it takes to build a globally competitive information and telecoms industry," says Dr Joseph O. Okpaku Sr. But for that to happen, Africa will have to find the courage to take its destiny in its own hands and execute strategies for success. In this special report, Dr Okpaku looks at all the odds and puts forward some controversial ideas about telecoms in Africa.

Dr Joseph O. Okpaku Sr is the President and CEO of Okpaku Communications, the parent company of Telecom Africa Corporation, a continental African initiative designed to effect telecoms industrialisation in Africa. A Nigerian by birth, he is based in New Rochelle, New York. He holds a BSc in Civil Engineering from Northwestern University, an MSc in Structural Engineering and a PhD in Dramatic Literature and Theatre History from Stanford University.

Telecoms and information technology offers tremendous opportunities for the creation of unprecedented wealth for Africa, and the promise of a better quality of life for all. For Africa, for which the last cycle of global development has been a wholesale badgering of its self-confidence, the implications are compelling.

There comes a time in the lives of a people when they must take their destiny in their own hands, and deploy their genius for the pursuit of a better future. The explosion in telecoms and information technology, which is reflected in the new scramble for Africa as one of the last emerging markets, does not bequeath to Africa any of the benefits the technology has created for the industrialised and intermediate economies. Africa's function in the telecoms industry merely as a buyer and end-user, with little value added and no industrial capacity, merely supports job opportunities in the industrialised economies while further impoverishing itself.

Similarly, in the formulation of rules that govern the industry, Africa cannot abide by global policies to which it has made no significant contributions and which, in their intent and execution, threaten the continent with instability and further impoverishment.

The argument for globalisation and liberalisation, to the extent that they are built on the exclusive capacity of the industrialised world to invent, produce and sell science and technology, and the compulsion, by whatever means, for Africa to only applaud and buy, and marvel at the ingenuity of others, would be to commit suicide, without even the respectable effort at self-preservation and dignity.

Liberalisation is a concept which has been bandied around the world with a remarkable presumption that it has universal meaning. In the industrialised world where wealth is essentially in private hands, whether individual or corporate, liberalisation, or the freeing up of sectors of the economy to allow competition and thus, presumably, offer the consumer more and better services for less, liberalisation has had no important strategic implications within those economies because the ownership pattern has not been significantly altered.

When applied to Africa, however, given the absence of any significant private capital, liberalisation has meant the selling off of national telecom networks (or PTTs) to foreign ownership, significantly altering the strategic independence of these economies.

These PTTs have not only been the recipient of much national investment, but are often a major source of revenue for the nation. The argument that the objective has been to get government out of the business of running PTTs has been belied in at least one case in which the African government was pressured to sell its PTT only to have it bought by a telecoms company of an industrial country which company itself was government owned.

Given the extent to which telecoms and information technology has permeated practically every sector of society and economy, we must consider a nation's telecoms network as a strategic asset.

By the throw of a switch, you can shut down a country's telecoms system in a split second. In so doing, you can shut down its communications, national security and defence, banking, trade, education, environmental monitoring systems, health delivery services, emergency systems, land, sea and air traffic, tourism and, given the extensive use of cellular phones between spouses, family systems.

Any system on which so much of a nation's lifeline depends, is a strategic asset. And as such, there are fundamental issues of sovereignty in the management and control of these strategic assets.

For countless years in the industrialised world, telecoms, broadcasting and other utilities were protected by governments out of the recognition of their strategic and national security concerns. The current liberalisation in industrialised countries does not significantly alter this consideration, because governments on the one hand, have devised more sophisticated technologies for national security, and, on the other hand, the coalition of common objectives between government and industry has created a public/private shared responsibility for safeguarding these interests.

In fact, the push for globalisation by industrialised nations is a public/private joint effort to free up foreign markets for domestic interests. Any language suggesting a grander objective is transparently disingenuous, and an unconvincing exercise in economic cosmetics.

Africa must take its time to examine these issues from the point of view of its own sovereignty, security and vested interests, and have the courage to differ politely, when such interests are in jeopardy.

This, of course, means that there may be short-term consequences of punitive threats. But such threats, where they arise, must serve as an incentive to build greater indigenous long-term strategic capacity for self-sustaining development.

How Africans, on the continent and throughout the Diaspora, see this challenge, and what might be concretely done about it, is the focus of the ideas I wish to share with you.

As is endemic in societies which are tied to short-term defensive approaches to economic growth, Africa has shied away from bold initiatives to eliminate poverty through an aggressive offensive to capture and retain a share of the global economy, and from insisting on the right and obligation to contribute to the policies and programmes which shape and govern it.

Where African leaders in the past have dared to dream of global competitiveness, such as in Nigeria during the period when Olusegun Obasanjo was head of state in the 70s or when Kwame Nkrumah was president of Ghana, the intensity of the resistance from the industrialised world has been so swift and relentless that the ideas which might have transformed Africa were not allowed to germinate.

The cruel irony of lessons learned has been that a good number of statesmen who could have provided inspired leadership for Africa have now chosen to play it safe by relinquishing their responsibility to global institutions.

Perhaps of more serious consequences for Africa, with long-lasting potential damage, is the imposition of foreign managers on these privatised national telecom networks, effectively wiping out the process of indigenous executive management capacity building in the world's most important and most competitive economic sector.

Substituting foreign managers for African managers in the running of the PTTs does not make sense. Africans have to learn to manage their own institutions if the people are to achieve significant development. Postponing the process, especially one in which experience counts, merely extends the real period of sleepwalking through development.

For Africans, the reciprocal capacity to buy networks in industrial economies is presently non-existent. Equity and reciprocity in the selling-off of the African PTTs should consider the following:

- Equity swap allowing the African PTTs to have shares of the foreign company and therefore a piece of the benefits of the expanded global network made possible by the new partnership.

- Directorship swap allowing a position or two for officials of the African PTTs on the boards of directors of the foreign companies. For example, given the number of Telkom Malaysia seats on the boards of African PTTs from South Africa and Ghana to Guinea, one or two Africans should be on the board of directors of Telkom Malaysia. This will not only promote mutual understanding and trust, but is standard practice outside Africa.

- Executive swap, which would allow one or two executives from the African PTTs to head a division of the foreign company, providing executive experience which would hasten the return of management authority to Africans in the PTTs. Apprenticeship is a major tool for capacity-building.

- Establishment of research and development capacity in the African PTTs to facilitate the development of dedicated solutions to unique local needs.

The big question, and one which is the main focus of this piece, is: Even with the best PTTs in Africa, are these new strategies bringing African networks anywhere close to global standards? Are they helping to bridge the gorge between African networks and their global counterparts?

The simple truth is that the technology gap between Africa and the industrial world in the information and telecoms field is getting wider by the day.

This is the reality which Africans in the industry must address. To do so, they must first take responsibility for the condition of telecoms in Africa, and then find the resolve to take charge of devising a bold development initiative in this strategic and critical sector.

They must find the political will amongst the leadership to provide the fullest support for an innovative, long-term strategy for building global competitiveness.

To expect that any foreign company or nation with tremendous advantage in the present African telecoms disposition will voluntarily undertake to eliminate the gap (and thus eliminate the advantage) is not to understand the rules of the economic game.

It was Benjamin Franklin who said that "trade amongst nations must be fair and equitable". Trade cannot be said to be equitable if one side sets the rules, and the other side is compelled to obey them, or risk alienation.

Trade cannot be said to be equitable, if one side sells, and the other side only buys. At some point, the buyer will run out of the means to pay for its purchases. The resulting endemic indebtedness further weakens the buyer's economy and creates insolvency, breeding political and social instability, which, in turn, further depresses the economy.

Which brings in globalisation. Implicit in the justification for the push for globalisation is the assumption of reciprocity or mutuality of access to each other's market. But in a stratified trade environment in which one side considers itself to have all the answers, while insisting that it has no use for the products, services and talents of the other, "openness" translates into "exclusion".

There must be what I call a comprehensive, coherent and practical Telecommunications Affirmative Action Policy for Africa (TAAPA). This call for affirmative action policies to build global competitiveness is precisely what obtained in industrialised economies, in some cases for countless decades, until such a time as the vulnerability of these industries was considered infinitesimal, if not outright inconceivable. TAAPA, which I propose Africa must develop and table for debate at the World Trade Organisation (WTO), must contain the basic provision that every major undertaking in telecoms in Africa must demonstrate a serious component aimed at enhancing Africa's ability to develop the ability to compete at a future date, in a conceivable time frame.

It should also include, with respect to the privatisation of national telecoms assets, the provision that the African PTTs must have, as part of the package, an equity position in, and a seat on the board of, the parent companies buying into the PTTs, in order to have mutual benefit from the partnership.

The African governments, as a means of developing competitive capacity, should also consider insisting on concrete commitments to appropriate human resource and research capacity training.

Essentially, the danger to Africa of not sustaining an environment in which people, especially our children, can think and dream, is that it precludes the possibility of the capacity for creative thinking and innovation, the driving mechanism for technology and development.

If you cannot dream it, and you cannot think it, you cannot do it. What is not dreamed, what is not thought, never will be, and society will be condemned for marking time in a rapidly changing world. The implications for the African leadership - political, intellectual, business, social or cultural - are clear and compelling.

African governments should seriously consider exactly what goals they truly mean to achieve. If the delivery of excellent telecoms services to the public at affordable prices and providing maximum access for all is their goal, then they need to develop the capacity to design networks for easy upgradeability, build them cheaply, manage them skilfully, maintain them in continuous good condition, and use research and development to reach and remain at the global competitive edge.

The harsh reality of the state of most PTTs in Africa today is that they are embattled. They tend to be cash-strapped and unable to maintain or expand and improve their networks. For years, many of them failed to promote telecoms access as a utility, something everyone needs.

Instead, they saw access as a privilege of the elite. Part of the problem, of course, was that most PTTs had enormous account receivables, consisting mostly of long-overdue bills by government ministries whose lines could not be tossed by the PTTs because they wielded enormous power.

The issue of cash problems would disappear overnight if the PTTs convert their long waiting lists into subscriber lists through the systematic provision of connections. Waiting lists for telephone lines are simply money begging to be collected.

Perhaps the greatest challenge facing PTTs in Africa is coping with rapid technological changes. For African operators, they must make certain drastic changes in order to be competitive. Only a few years ago, the villain of African networks was copper wire. So fibre optics became the new way to go. Voice networks needed to be expanded and improved upon. In fact, that is why the Africans had to sell stakes in the PTTs to get money to finance such expansion.

Then, suddenly, the industry prophets announced that voice networks were moribund. Data networks were the things of the future. African PTTs that did not realise this and adjust, they said, would find themselves marginalised.

That left the big question still unanswered. Which is, can African PTTs compete? The simple truth is that African PTTs are not in the same league as their Western counterparts. They are mainly domestic operations, with no strategies for expanding into global markets. They do not create new services and applications because of a lack of research and development capacities.

African PTTs operate alone, at a time when their much bigger industrial counterparts are forming major networks to pool their resources for an even bigger share of the global market, especially of the African market.

The courage of painting the above stark picture derives from a deep and solid conviction that Africa and Africans have, today, what it takes to build a globally competitive information and telecoms industry using the skills and talents of their engineers, managers, strategic planners, researchers, designers, marketing experts and more.

The only solution to the challenge of a globalised economy to African telecoms is to aggressively go after its fair share of that market. To accomplish this, Africa must build globally competitive networks with cutting edge technology able to withstand the innovations of the future.

There is an African saying that "those who have little, have less to lose". Africa can, therefore, afford to use the best technologies of today and tomorrow to build cutting-edge networks because it has little up-to-date capacity to protect and can leapfrog ahead.

This is what we are trying to do at Telecom Africa. We have created, in collaboration with strategic partners, the Telecom Africa Continental Telecommunications network to connect African countries directly with each other. We aim to provide affordable digital rural access, deliver state-of-the-art internet and high-speed data access and multimedia applications.

Our Network consists of two phases: The construction of a Satellite-based network in phase one, to be completed before the end of 2000; and a Terrestial network will be designed and constructed in phase two.

The Network is the product of a strategic partnership between Telecom Africa, and the US-based Hughes Network Systems and IBM. A satellite-based network can provide rapid deployment while staying at the cutting edge of technology. It is also the least expensive way to deploy a wide range of capacities, including global internet access.

The main objective of our Network is to provide the continent with a direct connectivity between African countries. This will eliminate the current need to transit intra-African calls through European or other hubs outside the continent.

In short, there will be no need for a call from, say, Lagos in Nigeria to Abidjan in Cote d'Ivoire, to be transited through hubs in London and Paris before reaching the receiver in Abidjan. This is what is happening at the moment. And it is why phone calls in Africa are more expensive than other continents. It is simply because, in the above example, every hub operator on the way from Lagos (Nitel) to London (BT) to Paris (France Telecom) to Abidjan (Ivorian Telecom), takes its cut - from that single call emanating from Lagos. The more the operators that handle the call, the higher the cost to the caller.

When Telecom Africa's network is fully operational, it will eliminate the middle-operators' cost, currently amounting to $400m a year which Africa pays to European countries in transit fees. This will greatly reduce the cost to the African consumer of connectivity to other Africans.

And also about the internet, the present efforts at building a node in a African country and connecting such a country via a pipe directly to the US or Europe, and thence to the rest of the industrialised world, only addresses a portion of the market. Africa needs more than that.