Be seen, be heard, be celebrated.
The driving force behind the invigorated pan-African telecoms body talks to Munyiwa Moyela about the role modern communications has to play in the African Renaissance of the 21st century.
Africa Today :Can you give us a brief on the conditions that led to the birth of the African Telecommunications Union?

Mutai: The ATU was launced in December 1999 as a successor to the Pan African Telecommunications Union (PATU) at a meeting in Cape Town, South Africa. It was an extraordinary meeting , called by the conference of ministers plenipotentiary to do essentially two things: to adopt a new strategy for the union and to conduct elections. I was elected as secretary general for a term of four years starting December and ending in 2003. I was elected by over two-thirds majority. So it seemed I had used the platform I was campaigning from to unlock the potential in Africa, and I took the view that , unlike what has been going on in the past, where we see a half glass and we say it is half-full or half-empty, I have been seeing the potential in Africa as half-full, therefore what we want to do is to fill up the cup rather than to be depressedabout the lack of capacity in Africa.
So my position was that with a new restructured ATU we can actually unlock the potential in Africa and acheive the ideals of the African Renaissance where we are seeing that the 21st century is the century where Africa is going to play a role in the affairs of the globe.
Africa for the past century has been a spectator. Africa used to be the leader in the past when it had the pyramids, when we had the old civilisation and then it gradually lost out to be a spectator. The 21st century is seen as the century of the African Renaissance but this won't happen unless structures are put in place, unless vision is linked with institutions to implement it. In our continent our heads of state have been very far-sighted, he rest of the world was not talking about continental unity. In 1963 we were talking about continental unity and at that time of course we needed continental unity in order to prosecutethe liberation struggle, and by the 1990's most of Africa was free, by the time Mandela was released from jail there was an epoch-making meeting in Abuja. The heads of state then commited themselves to the African Economic Community (AEC) so today the OAU is both OAU and AEC. And that process has been goung on. In a special meeting of the heads of state some time ago they insisted along with Libya's sister declaration to create the African Union. Now two weeks ago when I was in a meeting in Addis Ababa, of the council of ministers, the ATU strategy was adopted by the council and it will go before the heads of state in July. So what we are now doing in the ATU has been endorsed within the council of ministers.

So ATU as we are starting off and transitioning from PATU has some very specific objectives. One objective is to harmonise the policy and regulatory platform. Second objective is to harmonise the education and human resource development. The third is to have a more active participation in the global scene, so you are going to see more initiatives from ATU to create consensus for the African position on important issues like world radio spectrum and frequency utilisation and allocation. So that is very , very important.

ATU is seeking to get commitment on specific goals , particularly on how we measure and how we monitor our progress in acheiving connectivity to Africa. In the past, we have using things like teledensity, but we need much more than talking about teledensity , which is a very average way of looking at the scene. We would like to adopt new measures for assessing universal service obligations, we would like to get new measures for assessing our inter-country connectivity. We've floated a number of measures. One of them is the installation of facilities for tele-centres in every school and in future we shall measure to what extent we are putting a tele-cetre in every school.

The second policy target is public Internet services. The third is video conference lecture theatres in every university. The fourth is full inter-country connectivity, that is the backbone of connections.These are a number of policy targets which each country needs to take and use the systems in their own individual countries to acheive . At ATU we can't prescribe how each state should carry out its objectives , but what we would like to do is to work on the basis of agreed policy targets, which will translate into actions by the private sector to acheive more targets. And what the public sector wants is this kind of targeting in order for them to implement. So its not the governments per-se, that will install the phone lines but create the policy environment for these targets to be acheived.

Africa Today : Can you break these into ATU's short and medium term goals?

Mutai :The number one medium-term goal is the tele-centre in every school. Second is the public Internet access in every post office. The third is the video conference lecture theatres in every university. The fourth is the backbone interconnection of the 54 countries, and the capacity will be determined by the traffic. The fifth is the certification and accreditation entities in every country so that we can produce the manpower that the ICT (information-computing-telecommunications) environment requires. So this set of goals should get us closer to where the globe is and also make us more participative.

Africa Today : Where does and where will ATU's funding come from?

Mutai : ATU's funding will come from a number of sources. First and foremost, the membership of ATU will obviously carry the big chunk of it, so the member states will contribute . We have a new category of associate members which is the private sector, ICT companies. So those are the two funding streams. We also have a mandate to provide services to members , and there are things like conference services, directories, newsletters and magazines,and websites ,dynamic websites. So we are going to have a multiplicity of revenue streams so that we reduce the burden on member states. We would expect that with the active participation sector the funding of the union will be much more sound and we will be able to provide a wide variety of services which the member states will be able to pay for. Of course we will be able to offer those services to anybody else. For instance, when we are successful on the Internet platform, we will be able to create an ATU portal which would be a revenue-earning activity. I would also like to create an ATU consulting group. We'd like the consultants and contractors in Africa to be registered with us and to be prequalified so that they are available to work and provide services to our members. We'd also like to use, for example, African talent when we are designing our website. There is plenty of talent in Africa. So these are the kind of issues we are addressing in order to be a significant player.

Africa Today : What background do you bring to this job?

Mutai : I have been in telecoms for a number of years, having been very involved in the liberalisation and privatisation strategy for Kenya. I was head-hunted from Shell in 1995, where I had been for the previous 23 years doing various things. I started of as a mechanical engineer and did engineering for about 10 years, then I moved into marketing of petroleum products and lubricants, and in my last three years in Shell I was a director of human resource and public affairs, and also contributing to capacity development in the region

Now when I came to KPTC (Kenya Post and Telecommunications) I found I had an organisation of 23,000 people which was in dire need of change. The customers and shareholders were very unhappy because nothing, no reforms, were taking place, employees were unhappy because salaries weren't being paid.So I put into strategy which we called then an "outreach strategy" to address the needs of stakeholders. We were able to evolve what our shareholders, the government, wanted, that is the sector policy statement. We were able to move from the statement published in 1997 to a law which came into effect in 1998, and so from the government and shareholder perspective we had satisfied them.

From the customer perspective we introduced new products. We had practically nothing new in Kenya then. We had no GSM, no Internet access, no wireless and satellite technology, all of which we produced. So as a result of that experience, I might say I have a broad set of tools for intervening in organisations to make them work. What is interesting is that KPTC was created in 1977 and I transformed it , put in a new law and the organisation was split to the extent you now have an independent postal entity as an operator, a telecom network operator, the Communications Commission of Kenya which is a regulator, and in the ministry we have a policy research unit.The policy research unit is probably unique in Africa, its the only one that we sat with the IMF and World Bank to create, because they thought that a regulator can manage all the affairs but we were able to define that there is a unique role for a policy unit to advise the minister in our continent because of the vast changing technology.So in that respect, that is the history I bring to ATU. The platforms of business, directorship and public sector reform.

Africa Today :Finally, let me use this opportunity to ask you to give us a brief status report on the telecoms scene in Kenya and the rest of the East African region.

Mutai :I was very delighted when MTN lauded the process which we used in Kenya for selecting the second GSM, where it was a mix of the auction price and technology solution. So it was this approach that actually created that success.

The market in Kenya has been structured so that you have regional, national and international operators, and mobile operators. At the moment, 8 regional licences are being bid for, which will provide services in the rural ares. The market structure was deliberately designed so that entities had geographical responsibilities, especially in rural ares.Because Africa is 55% rural and Kenya is at least 70% rural. So that structuring of the market will give choice to the guy in the village. He'll have two mobile and two fixed- line operators to choose from.

Now when you look at the East African scene, most of the countries have two mobile operators. Uganda and Tanzania probably have three. We chose the duopoly in Kenya. All have stategic investor relationships. What was unique in Kenya was that we also put the Internet backbone.The future is in the Internet . The traditional telephony is going to disappear and networks will be by definition multi-media, and its my view that tha basic network of the future is going to be basically wireless and the fixed network is going to be multi-media. So in Kenya ,we put in the backbone, which we call JumboNet. Our aim was to distribute from the capital to every district so that there is a point of presence (POPs) close to the people. I know Uganda and Tanzania are working towards joining the backbone. I might add that part of the strategy I have for Africa is to have an African Backbone Network. When I talked about connecting countries earlier, what we are really connecting is the Internet backbone of each country but it will not just be servicing the Internet , it will also be multi-media, so that we give service to broadcast media. If you have talented broadcasting companies in Nigeria producing alot of good content they can use the backbone to distibute their content country-wide. I have mentioned this idea to some of our broadcasting firms in Kenya, they are very excited about it. I was mentioning the example of BBC who are distibuting their signals in our continent but we are not distibuting our African signals in Europe, but we can't distributing in Europe if we are not distributing in Africa. And its my view that if we want to be global we must first be continental. To be continental we must have continental backbones.

Africa Today : You must be envisaging some socio-cultural and political hiccups in all these continental plans?

Mutai :The hiccups are thre by nature because our continet is multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-politically inclined. We have alot of historical baggage that we must get rid of. In our continent, we don't celebrate what brings us together often enough. We celebrate what divides us, we emphasise what makes us different. One of the things I will be starting is a celebration of acheivers. We would like occassionally to be able to celebrate an acheiver. If somebody has a great play, we should celebrate. If , for example, in telecoms, in the ICT industry, if there is a company ,and maybe you should do it in your paper. Highlight the fastest growing IT companies in the continent, the fastest growing communications companies, broadcast companies. So that our readers, our citizens in this continent can see that Africans are acheivers. The acheivers that we see very often arethose on CNN. We see all the Bill Gates, Michael Dell and Michael Jordan. We've got great athletes here, great artistes, great acheivers in technology.

So one thing we have been discussing with the media in Kenya - and I'm glad the editors are responding- is take time to look at the young people who have started a business, people under 40 running their own business. Because Africa is young, our youth need to see they can also participate. I think the role you can play as a magazine is that having highlighted the difficulties, turn the coin the other side and highlight the acheivers.That way we will grow the confidence. Our youths grow up seeing that the best is only in the Notrh, whether its in art, sciences or in technology, but we can reverse that. It comes from celebrating our youth, our acheivers and focusing and agreeing that we are also participants on this globe. We have as much right as anybody on this planet to be heard, seen and to contribute.