Daktari, This response is a clear sign of top notch leadership. Thx for clarifying for those of us who were in the dark. On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 8:07 PM, <[email protected]> wrote:
Dear All, I am in Malaysia. This country's development is awesome. Their e-applications are indeed something we all aught to learn from. You can see the positive energy to move their country out of poverty in their eyes. We must find ways to emulate these people and move away from self interest that is tearing our country apart.
Prior to my travel here, I made some statements regarding local ownership of ICT investments with the aim of reviewing our policy. This is what I am employed to do and I am still consulting with stakeholders to see how to advance the policy change. Specifically, I argued as follows: • The drop in Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in our sector is as a result of rigid policy on ownership of investments; • We must work toward attracting FDI if we have to sort out unemployment of our youth which has reached crisis levels; • Large ICT multinationals have requested exemptions to this policy and would rather have the local ownership through the stock market; • That those who have in the past purported to have the capacity to raise sufficient local capital have failed and cannot raise new capital thus compromising the competitiveness of these firms; • Protectionism leads to poor service and uncompetitive environment; • The problem of local equity participation can be summarized by the experience we went through during the search for the SNO – promises of non-existent funds and extortionism; • The absence of local equity participation in some foreign banks did not stop Equity Bank from growing phenomenally; • There is no threat to domination from foreigners since local firms have made great strides to eventually partner with multinationals from points of strength (read KDN/Altech; Safaricom/Onecom partnerships) and it is encouraging to see other local firms such as Access, Jamii, Wananchi etc coming up strongly that we don't need to require multinationals to seek for partners up front at the expense of our unemployed youths; and • My liberalist economic approach is what in my view would make our country considering that some decisions we made along the same lines have greatly impacted all our lives. Take for example the liberalization of International Gateways. There were threats to our lives that we could not survive to see the benefits. These were threats made by those who benefited from illegal terminations of calls through Telkom Network leading to losses in excess of one billion shillings per year. I am surprised that this move pains some people to date when we are enjoying lower tariffs with a more efficient Telkom. I have no regrets on Telkom reforms at all and I am sure you all know that I never run from any responsibility.
The Libyan matter has never been an issue before considering the fact that this are standard MOUs that we sign regularly whenever we market Kenya out there as an investment destination. Yes I signed the MOU and the two ICT items in the MOU, that is, Telkom Kenya and Teams never went to Libyans since they lost in the bid process and rejected by local investors respectively. In the same MOU were Energy items and of course Grand Regency but MOUs are not sale agreements. We sign lots of these MOUs and even today here in Malaysia I have had to sign two. These are public documents accessible to any Kenyan and there is nothing to hide in the course of serving our country.
I have never in my life met Moi and as far as I am concerned I have never crossed his path either in his business or himself as a person. The decision to extricate the Government from the Econet saga in my view saved the tax payers a great deal of money. I was not there when this matter started and I still do not understand the whole transaction but it makes great sense to remove the Government from any liability. If such a decision did not favour anybody, then the courts can settle and in any case, this matter is still sub judice.
Back to policy. If you have noted, we are launching an average of two ICT firms per a week. Large BPO multinationals have told me to my face that until we sort out the local ownership issue, they are going elsewhere. These are firms that employ in excess of 30,000 BPO agents. Investment in the sector runs into billions of shillings which people like myself cannot even dream of raising even 1% (and this is true for many of us in Kenya). Do we let such opportunities slip by because we want to be nationalists?
Regards
Ndemo.
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