On August 28 professor of practice at the University of Johannesburg Eldrid Jordaan launched his book The Silicon Empire vs Social Impact — The David and Goliath Battle. He invited me to be one of the discussants.
I had to dig deep, because not only did his book invoke emotions but it provided a path that gives me hope that the resolutions we took in Gabon on the concerns about Africans becoming the breakfast, lunch and supper of the Silicon Valley Empire now resonate with a leader. I throw in my lot with David.
In November 2011 I opened the 11th Session of the African Symposium for Statistical Development and my address which captured the scientific discoveries that left the world amazed by the history of Gabon can only strengthen the rediscovery of Africa.
Gabon is a land of many contradictions which owes its name to the estuary of the Komo River. This is a country that has witnessed slavery and the behaviour of imperial powers that sought to pit one ethnic group against the other. Ethnicity was used to entrench a negative connotation of identity.
On matters science, Gabon stakes her own claim. The natural nuclear fission reactors discovered in 1972 in the Franceville basin of Oklo and Bangombé existed about two-billion years before human beings could learn to harness uranium for commercial use. These reactors have puzzled scientists — how water had been able to percolate through sandstone rich in uranium deposits and that these reactors could regulate themselves by switching on and off on a regular timescale of a few hours over thousands of years.
The nuclear fission was moderated by water. As such, they would have behaved like geysers, with water heating up and gushing out at regular intervals. This would imply that the Gabonese nuclear reactors were stable.
For those of us who deal with measurement on the African continent the critical question is: what sort of stability do we need and which vehicles will help us achieve stability? We measure so we know how to differentiate across space and time trends and levels in performance. Do we also know and understand the environment in which we handle our toil?
Growing up in Lesotho, herding cattle, spanning oxen and planting seasonal crops, harvesting the sorghum and maize, mowing the wheat with women ululating and bundling the harvest in bushels and watching the elderly thresh sorghum enjoying the brew, and children indulging in sour porridge, taught me the value chain and cycles of production to consumption. It would be my father, a teacher, who would wake us up at ungodly hours to contribute our share in this value chain before we went to school. Quoting from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow he would implore us: “The heights by great men reached and kept were not attained in sudden flight but they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night.”
Jordaan awakens us with his book. His is a bold contribution that strikes at the heart of the empire in a toxic geopolitical environment that long departed from characterisations of Marxism or capitalism. He chose to define this as the Silicon Empire. This marks his commitment to multipolarity. The book gives content and new meaning to the report we prepared for Ban Ki-moon in 2014 titled The World That Counts in which we cautioned against the corrupting tendency of money, politics and technology.
That the book germinates from a Capetonian where as statistician-general I hosted the first UN World Data Forum is serendipitous and invokes a positive vibe. But it is the boldness of Jordaan that inspires. Africa was on the verge of losing all with the marauding would-be Goliaths who have captured civil registration and vital statistics in Africa.
Africa is the only continent which has something called ID4Africa. There is no ID4Europe, there is no ID4America, there is no ID4Asia — there is only ID4Africa. This comes on the back of Africa fighting the scandal of invisibility and launching a movement for making Africans visible to themselves and making them count.
To this end in 2009 we launched a successful Africa-wide movement for recording African lives. Little did we know that danger was lurking and today that ambitious movement has been overtaken by ID4Africa. This is the tragedy of Africa. Yet Jordaan shows that an African path is possible and more than ever the African must focus on purpose — a metaphor for ubuntu.
The book not only decorates the continent, is a must read for every African president past and present. The worst form of slavery will be digital colonisation. Jordaan’s book is a fight book, a leadership companion for a free African.
Dr Pali Lehohla is a professor of practice at the University of Johannesburg, a research associate at Oxford University, a board member of Institute for Economic Justice at Wits and a distinguished alumni of the University of Ghana. He is the former statistician-general of South Africa.
For opinion and analysis consideration, email Opinions@timeslive.co.za
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