This book considers the evolution of information communication technology (or ICT) on the African continent. Its main ambition is to understand the rate and manner of ICT adoption in Africa, using the example of Ethiopia as a case study. ICTs are often marketed as benign forces that encourage development, democratization, and globalization. By contrast, Gagliardone argues that ICTs in Africa are not neutral players in development, but rather that they have been appropriated and tailored to serve political goals. This politicization has resulted in compromises on the quality of ICTs, restrictions on their access, and a slowing of the pace of technological breakthroughs and innovations. Such outcomes differ significantly from the imaginings and claims made by the international community about the promises of ICTs. In effect, Gagliardone argues that understanding ICTs on the continent requires apprehending the local meanings that they accrue as they engage processes of democracy, modernization, and globalization.
The book moves from the premise that ICTs — that is, the basics of Internet connectivity and the myriad platforms that internet bandwidth enables, from social media to mobile telecommunications and conferencing — are not original to the African continent. They were invented elsewhere and imported to the continent to support development and democratization, particularly by the United Nations Economic Commission on Africa (UNECA) (80–81). UNECA argued that the continent should embrace ICTs to leapfrog other stages of development and create in Africa information societies and knowledge-based economies (25-6). Gagliardone persuasively problematizes the international community's discourse, noting that this thinking failed to appreciate the idiosyncratic nature of power and politics on the African continent. To that point, ICTs took root in the continent only after local actors found a way to make ICTs work on their own terms and ensure that they would not be used by opposition forces. In effect, political leaders on the continent dedicated themselves to figuring out how ICTs could serve to fortify their power and perpetuate their ideologies.
Key to this analysis is the point that technology generally, and ICTs specifically, cannot be depoliticised. The author thus contributes to scholarship that challenges the idea that development is simply a technical process that requires technical solutions. Like development, technology operates in a space that is constituted by power and politics and, moreover, technology, power, and politics are forces that can be configured to reinforce each other. In making this argument, the author mobilizes and extends Garbielle Hecht's term, ‘technopolitics’, to analyze ICTs on the continent. Gagliardone tells us that a ‘technopolitical regime is not a construct “discovered” by an observer, but is rather the result of layers of decisions made by actors tied to denser or looser networks, and employing technology to achieve political goals in ways that politics could not allow’ (14). Indeed, he continues, a technopolitical regime ‘is not the benign result of any combination of technologies or discourses, and actors. It is a space occupied by the powerful. It requires a legitimate space from which it can operate and capitalize on its growth’ (21, emphasis added). The explicit reference to Foucauldian workings of power brings to life the contests between the internal and external, the local and the global, all of which compete to shape ICTs and their specific uses and interests in Africa.
Ethiopia helps to illustrate how ruling elites use ICTs to serve political purposes. Inspired by notions of ethnic federalism, and the need to deliver services to people as a way of legitimating their hold onto power, Gagliardone shows how the state, led by the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), embraced ICTs through the twin projects of Woredanet and Schoolnet, which were rolled out around 2003. Woredanet, which means ‘network of districts’ was designed to enable direct communication between the central government and the federal governments in real time. Woredanet would enable the prime minister to communicate a singular message to all federal branches without distortion. Schoolnet, for its part, was devised to enable students to learn through recorded lessons that were transmitted via the Internet to plasma screens, with the aim of delivering high quality, standardized education to classrooms across the country. The emphasis of Woredanet on direct communication and Schoolnet on uniformity in education were tailored to serve the EPRDF's political agenda. That is, an ideology and practice of ethnic federalism inspired the EPRDF intelligentsia and underpinned these programs.
As Gagliardone explains, this ethnic federalism worked in opposition to the Amhara hegemony espoused by Haile Selassie (1916–74), which the Derg regime of Haile Mariam Mengistu continued (1974–91). By contrast, the EPRDF argued that Ethiopia could only develop by giving major ethnic groups autonomous power to develop themselves. When the EPRDF took power in 1991, ethnic federalism became the practice: major ethnic groups were given the right to promote their own language, culture, and history; to elect their own local government; and to obtain equitable representation in the federal government (54). However, a decade on, the EPRDF dream of ethnic federalism had achieved limited success and drew growing opposition. By the early 2000s, the country had become more ethnically divided and developmentally unequal (54–9). By promoting uniformity in governance and education, Woredanet and Schoolnet offered what the government considered to be a well-balanced response to those disparities.
From reading Gagliardone's extended analysis of the uneven outcomes of these projects, it becomes clear that these ambitious ventures turned out the way they did because of the conditions in which they operated. These projects faced numerous challenges, ranging from technical problems around bandwidth, which hampered transmission, to ensuring the quality of lessons delivered by Schoolnet. Unfortunately, Gagliardone spends a great deal of time investigating those problems, often with insufficient attention to the larger context. He also takes issue with what he describes as ‘controlled decentralisation’. Gagliardone notes that the government's effort to ensure ‘that all [states] receive the same message and can act accordingly contrasts with the principles that should inspire a decentralised state, where those working in the localities are able to make decisions autonomously on the basis of their knowledge of local context’ (64). In the above quote, the author's misgivings about the mode of decentralisation of the Ethiopian state are unmistakable. It is also evident that Gagliardone's ideas about how ICT implementation should operate, and how decentralised governments work, are also imported from elsewhere.
Although not explicitly stated, Gagliardone subtly sides with an internationalist interpretation of ICTs and their integration — an approach that emphasizes liberalization and accessibility — and seems to critique the EPRDF for failing to attain that standard. This perspective is quite ironic, given that this study takes as its starting point a disapproval of the depoliticized, internationalist use of ICTs on the African continent. Besides, under ‘controlled decentralisation’ the author does not tell us how integrated Woredanet and Schoolnet were within all sectors of the decentralised administration, especially if they helped bring those sectors under the tight control of the federal state. Gagliardone furthermore suggests that controlled decentralization took place fully, and that it exercised a totalizing effect on the functioning of local administrations (64). But such a claim is questionable — not only would such a transformation be difficult to verify, but it would be practically impossible to achieve. In short, the two projects in question do not provide enough information about how the reach of the central government affected the operations of local governments. It is not clear, and therefore problematic to argue, that these systems touched and altered every aspect of governance (90). In effect, the author collapses his critique of the state with a critique of the implementation of the ICT software and hardware. But it is not necessary to use ICTs to question the government's approach to decentralization. My sense is that ICTs were simply an appendage to a juggernaut of control already well in place.
At different points, the author emphasises the suitability of the ‘technopolitics’ conceptual framework. States have long deployed technology in the service of politics and power: weapons of all forms, drugs, and now cyberspace and the Internet. One is hard pressed to understand the specificity of ICT technopolitical regimes to the African continent. Indeed, the author rightly notes that technopolitical regimes are certainly not unique to Africa as technology is often used as a tool of control across the world. On this point Keith Breckenridge's Biometric State: The Global Politics of Identification and Surveillance in South Africa, 1850 to the Present (2014) could have been productively referenced to fortify the point that people in Africa and elsewhere have lived under technopolitical regimes that use digital identification, such as fingerprinting, to produce identity and voter cards to facilitate regimes of power and control (and more recently, the workings of capital markets).
Besides these minor theoretical drawbacks, the book is well-researched and critically insightful about the arrival and evolution of ICTs in Ethiopia. Clearly, ‘ICTs for development’ cannot be decoupled from politics. This book is an important one, not simply as a critical historical record of recent Ethiopian history, but also because it signals similar patterns in ICTs and their uses in other parts of the continent and, indeed, the world.
