In Kenya, the late Lee Kuan Yew, founding Prime Minister of Singapore, is regarded as something of a secular saint.
Barely a month passes but some media commentator laments the fact that Kenya has remained a third world country 50 years after Independence, while – under the visionary leadership of Lee Kuan Yew – Singapore evolved into a first world nation in just 30 years or so.
When Lee died in March 2015, there was an outpouring of flattering articles about his life and work. But that is when I also saw one analyst take a cold, hard look at his achievements.
This writer took the perspective that Lee Kuan Yew was a man of extraordinary intellect, and that this is really what made for his immense impact and influence all over the world. But as for his many years as the Prime Minister of Singapore, the writer argued that it was no more challenging than being “a mayor of a mid-sized American city”.
His point being that given Singapore’s geographical size (roughly 700 square miles) and its population (about five million people) managing its affairs could not in any way be compared with trying to govern, say, China or India with their billions of rural poor, or – closer to home – Nigeria or South Africa, with their unique demographic, historic and economic challenges.
That being said, the fact remains that it is these smaller nations, which often lead the rest of the world in innovation; in coming up with new ways in which economic advancement can be achieved, or a necessary political consensus hammered out that might enable diverse peoples to live together peacefully.
Within Africa, we have the fine examples of Mauritius (population 1.3 million), which is one of the continent’s most prosperous nations, and an exemplar in the transformation of a national economy from the standard third world agriculture and tourism, to a middle-income economy built on manufacturing and services. And then there is Botswana (population 2.2 million), which is perhaps Africa’s most successful example of a resource-based economy, and, which has risen beyond the poverty of the 1960s Independence era, to current middle-income prosperity.
It is in this context, then, that Estonia’s leadership in e-governance can best be understood. For the past 10 years or so, this small Northern European nation of just 1.2 million people has systematically created an advanced digital infrastructure that serves both the public and the private sectors. And has thus been successful in bending the promise of digital technologies and the internet towards making government more effective and responsive to the needs of the citizens.
In practice, it means that standard government services are to a large extent built around digital technologies (which Estonians are taught to use from their youngest days) and the internet (of which Estonia has almost 100 per cent national coverage).
And it all makes for a level of efficiency and inclusivity that would otherwise be impossible to attain.
I suppose Kenyans can best understand the Estonian e-governance model by considering what M-Pesa has done for our financial sector. Unlike in the West where most financial transactions are with impersonal financial institutions or service providers, Kenyans have always been a nation of extended family values, and our people have always sent each other money. What M-Pesa did for us was to end the need for long queues at the Post Office ‘money order’ counter, and to make such transfers instantaneous and secure.
Well Estonia has come up with ways to make it possible to use your various mobile devices to vote, to get a medical prescription renewed, and to exercise very many other functions of citizenship.
They even have an e-Cabinet system, which enables the ministers to review the agenda for the next meeting, post their remarks and comments as may be needed, and to even cast their vote on some of the issues that may not require elaborate discussion.
As a result, Estonian Cabinet meetings which used to take between four and five hours, now take just 30 minutes.
All in all, I left Estonia convinced that it can only be a matter of time before Kenya too embraces e-governance. Although we perhaps did not fully realise it then, the day when Safaricom successfully launched M-Pesa, and thus brought millions of previously ‘unbanked’ Kenyans into the formal banking system, we functionally took the first step towards a full e-governance system of the Estonian model.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Wycliffe Muga
Quelle/Source: The Star, 14.01.2016
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