What Kenya TV fiasco tells us about doing business in Africa

On Monday the Supreme Court of Kenya ruled that media houses and the Communications Authority of Kenya (KCA) should go, sit down over coffee, and agree on a date for the complete switch over to digital TV within 90 days.

On this matter I eat on both sides. I kind of run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. I think the media houses should be given a distribution licence, and their views in the migration issue should be heard, but as a technophile I think the age of analogue is over (I barely watch analogue channels unless the programme is spectacularly brilliant, which few are), but also I believe KCA is right to want to get on with it and open up the new opportunities in digital broadcasting.

However, Kenya is not alone in this, so I checked out how the rest of Africa is doing with digital migration. It is shocking. One intelligent evaluation projected, based on current progress, that 43 African countries will not meet the June 2015 deadline for switch over.

Many countries claim to be on schedule, and reports and experts have said the East African Community (EAC) are on target, but less sentimental evaluations say only two countries in Africa have taken serious enough steps to migrate – Tanzania and Mauritius. Tanzania has stumbled a little, but Mauritius soldiered on, and is now considered the only country to have completed the digital migration – well ahead of deadline.

And that is why, digital migration matters. It is a good indicator of a nation’s capacities, and the ability to deliver. Mauritius is ahead of the rest of Africa on achieving the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), providing sanitation, education, kicking out malaria, it has the lowest levels of corruption on the continent, one of its most competitive economies, it is way up when it comes to democracy (in the terrible 1980s it was the only African country where a free election was held and the incumbent lost power), and so on.

The digital migration debacle in Kenya, therefore speaks to a bigger problem…and to a solution. Why did the Chinese firm Star Times beat the local competition? Was it hostility against the local media by someone in government and an attempt to “fix” them? Did kola nut change hands?

We don’t know, but there are lessons that Kenyan media and private businesses need to take away from this episode. In the world today, disinterested, purely public-good driven policy by governments is rare.

Kenya media are where their peers in the USA and the west in general were decades ago. There, to deal with the problem, firms turn to lobbyists. Big firms like Google, Facebook, Apple, Boeing, BP and so forth essentially buy policy – through their lobbyists they water down policies that could interfere with their profits, or they initiate laws that advance their interests.

The Chinese are doing what the west perfected years ago. There is a tender to supply computers to schools? Well, you fly the education minister to your headquarters first class, check him into a six star hotel, arrange a private geisha show for him and his entourage, and thank him with a gold Rolex watch. When you think of it, though there is a whiff of conflict of interest about it, there is nothing criminal. The Chinese firm has just gone the extra kilometre to present its argument.

So, the minister comes back home, the local competitor sends a sweaty manager with an ill-fitting suit empty-handed to him to make its case, and all he is armed with is a good nationalist argument for why the deal should go to a Kenyan company. Good luck.

If there are lobbyists in Nairobi, it is time for the media houses to give them a call, for this is just the beginning. I was looking at the numbers of a NTV current affairs video that was put on the Daily Nation site. It has been viewed over 2.5 million times!

This digital migration is small beer. The really big battle (and future money) for media is going to happen online. If you have a video with millions of views, you can be sure many people will want a piece of it.

The media is right to ask for an even playing field. But an even playing field just doesn’t fall from heaven like manna anymore. These days, you have to pay for that too.

The author is editor of Mail & Guardian Africa (mgafrica.com). Twitter:@cobbo3