1 min read
ByStephen Pollard, Stephen Pollard
I have a piece in today's Times on mobile phones in Kenya. Here's an extract, which explains why it's about far more than mobile phones in Kenya:The single most fascinating thing I read last year was about the rise of mobile phones in Kenya. Not, you might think, the most thrilling of topics. In which case you'd be wrong, because it also helps to explain the murder of Benazir Bhutto, the reaction to Gordon Brown's refusal to call an election last autumn, the growth of the EU and the past few days' riots in Kenya.
The Cell Phone Revolution in Kenya, by June Arunga, tells a simple story: how, after the State had failed dismally to provide communications across Kenya, five years of private provision increased the number of mobile phones from one million to 6.5 million, so that more than a third of all Kenyan adults now own one.
...Granting property rights to the phone providers, coupled with what looked like political stability, enabled firms to invest and the Kenyan phone revolution to take hold.
But the past few days' events in Kenya demonstrate how tenuous is the basic foundation on which prosperity and freedom depends: the acceptance of the rule of law. We take for granted peaceful acquiescence in our own democratic processes.
...As for Benazir Bhutto's murder: the key question is whether Pakistan's future will always be shaped by violence, or if it can copy India and transform its fortunes through democratic consent. And that raises an even bigger question: whether Islamic states are inherently unable to embrace the basis of prosperity. On that hangs the shape of the 21st century.