Computer-for-All Project kicks-off with 500,000 units
July 7, 2006 by muyiwa
According to an article appearing in ThisDay online July 7, 2006 edition — http://odili.net/news/source/2006/jul/6/213.html — Nigeria's President Olusegun Obasanjo is expected to kick-start an "... ambitious programme of bringing computer application to the door-steps of every Nigerian, with the distribution of 500,000 computers at 50 per cent discount rate of the current market price under the Computer for All Nigerian Initiative (CANI)."
The so-called 50 percent discount begs the question of whether or not computers in Nigeria are overpriced to start with. By starting from the assumption that there is a saving to be made, this project is likely to be another avenue to further loot Nigeria's treasury. To put things in perspective, if the promoters of this scheme claim to be saving US$100 per computer, that represents a cool US$50,000,000 to be "saved", and therefore, it should not be too difficult to justify paying fees of US$10,000,000 to achieve these savings.
In a curious move reminiscent of asking your oppressor to supply the antidote to your pains, the project involves "... two giant computer manufacturing companies, Microsoft and INTEL."
Anybody who knows anything about the cost structure of computers, knows that the most expensive components, and therefore the first places to look for cost-saving alternatives, are the processor (made by Intel), and Microsoft's operating systems and applications software.
It's really difficult to understand that the president's IT advisers seem to be totally unaware of cheaper alternatives available through the use of open source operating systems and applications software, and low-power and low-cost processors. Intel's expensive and power-hungry processors are made necessary by Microsoft's poorly-written, bloated and insecure software, and it is mind-boggling that Nigeria's government will tie itself and its citizens into such an arrangement as the one being proposed.
Furthermore, the Wintel combination is a closed system that offers no benefits whatsoever in terms of skill acquisition to Nigerians. On the contrary, an open-source based solution gives young and enterprising Nigerians access to the source code of their software, and this gives them the opportunity not only to examine and learn how these programs are written, but to modify them for their specific needs.
In what must qualify as one of the most moronic government policies in this millennium, "... participating companies are to enjoy some tax waivers for computers imported for the programme". In other words, the Nigerian government is set to give Intel and Microsoft tax breaks to foist expensive, inefficient, and closed computer systems on it's citizens, creating a situation in which they, the government and the citizens, will be at the mercy of these corporations far into the future. The government is set to mortgage the future of its IT sector while improving the bottom lines of these companies.
There is so much information available in the public domain explaining why this approach is bad for the IT sector of developing economies, and the fact that no one in Abuja seems to be aware of any of it makes one marvel at the quality of intellectual capital available within NITDA and the Nigerian presidency.
