The ICT Policy that You Deserve

• Free Internet
• Free Skills Training
• Command IT

The policy is anchored on free, uncapped, unshaped internet to every household in Zimbabwe and free skills training in regards to new technologies. The implementation is state-driven with the goal of training a million Zimbabweans within a decade in 10 DecaTech centers scattered across the country.

Standpoint

We should not view internet access as a luxury.

• Internet access is a utility, it’s a basic need in a digitalized world.
• In the new world, everything will be connected to the internet. It is the foundation of the 21st-century economy.
• If the internet is the platform for the next economy, then it makes sense that the government should ensure that everyone gets on board.

Zimbabwe is already notorious for having one of the most expensive internet connectivity prices in the world. Some sort of government intervention could be warranted in the glaring face of market failure, though it can as well be argued that the market failure is already due to disastrous government intervention.

The Free Internet part of the policy is downright populist, but that should not blinker us from noticing that it is fundamentally developmental. In the information age, it can be argued that it is more developmental than any other policy that can be tabled.

Free Internet

Throughout history, there have been a lot of remarkable projects undertaken by man. Some of them appear dubious and some are wonderous. Wtf were pharaohs thinking when they build those giant pyramids? And the people of Great Zimbabwe building a giant stone city? What about Mao trying to build a wall around the entire country, as if it's a private yard?

Isn't putting the whole country under wifi similar to these grandiose vanity projects? We have not even achieved universal healthcare and universal education. Why should we give people free internet?

We should give people free internet because it's a powerful enabler of collective economic efficiencies. Giving society free internet is like giving society a fishing road that will help society help itself, from a macro standpoint.

There are several ways we could get this done. Technicians and accountants can work out the cheapest and most feasible way to get this done.

It could be done via a massive state-driven fiber-laying exercise using the cheap labor we already have (i.e South Africa is already using thousands of migrant Zim workers to dig trenches and deliver fiber to millions of South African homes). Communities could be organized to dig the trenches to bring fiber to their areas, just like how the villagers rallied together to build schools in the 80s.

Choosing the satellite route could totally avoid dealing with a lot of fiber optic cables. Starlink will offer internet to any part of the world for $100 per month. This fee will gradually get lower with time. If we make a bulk order as a country, in the magnitude of millions, we could negotiate a 50% reduction in price, thus getting internet access via satellite for $50 per subscription per month.

We have a population of 15 million people with an average of 5 persons per family, translating to 3 million families. In dense urban areas, and in some villages you have more than one family sharing a house. These families could be bundled to share one satellite receiver and subscription. We could thus reduce the number of subscriptions needed from 3 million to 2 million, whilst still ensuring everyone has access.

Thus at a cost of (2m x $ 50) = $100m per month, we could ensure that every living Zimbabwean in Zimbabwe has internet. This figure annualizes to $1.2 billion. There is also a once-off cost of $800m of buying the equipment needed to have connectivity. This is costly but speedy. It can be the benchmark cost for now, for illustrative purposes.

Free Skills Training

Free internet has to be followed by free skills training. The reason why it has to be free is to give a leg-up to millions of people. If education and skills training is not free, the outcome would be reflective of the number of people that can afford to be educated and trained, which is not that much.

For a huge transformation to occur, we have to train hordes of people, literally shifting the entire economic base from analog to digital.

My idea would be to create 10 DecaTech centers that have a capacity to accommodate 5,000 persons inside each center at any given point in time. Each center would be fully equipped with the necessary computer equipment. Each center would be energy-self sufficient with a solar roof essentially acting as a solar farm. Batteries will power the night.

Each DecaTech would have teachers/lectures on the state’s payroll. The centers will be open day and night, with a hot-seating schedule of some sort. This will give each center the capacity to enroll 10,000 students. 10 DecaTech’s will give the country a capacity of 100,000 trainees per year, which accumulates to a million in a decade. This could be around 10% of our workforce after a decade, so it's not huge but it's nonetheless significant. It's the trend that it sets in motion that is more important. We, at this point in time, cannot afford a project larger than the 100,000 trainees per year level.

The curriculum focus will be hands-on training for at least a year for each student. The student should be equipped with useful skills. High-intensity specialized programs will quickly create highly-specialized trainees in various focal areas. The one-year specialty in a chosen area could be more useful than a 4-year college degree that seeks to teach a student everything regarding a particular field.

Noteworthy points of the DecaTech Free Skills Training plan are as follows:

• Absolutely free training for students.
• Focus on skills that are in line with the 4th industrial revolution.
• Absorb graduates into the global talent pool as soon as they embark on the training program.
• Establish Incubators for those who want to go the entrepreneurship route.
• Each DecaTech to specialize in specific emerging technologies.
• Absolutely free training for students.

Major Costs are as follows: Hub Construction Costs, Course Facilitator Costs, Computer Equipment Costs, Internet Costs, and other operating expenses.

Areas of Study could include the following: Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain Technology, Machine Learning, Biogenetics, Big Data Analytics, Cybersecurity, 3D printing, and many others. One DecaTech could focus on the Blockchain, while another could focus on Al and ML, and so on and so forth.

Free ICT Skills Training from the 10 DecaTech’s is a low-hanging fruit that can be easily harvested, yet it has the potential to change lives. It is a life-changing plan for individuals and for the country. It has the potential to do what our colleges, polytechnics, and universities have failed to do: that is to rise up to the occasion and find a way around the chronic economic mismanagement by generating skills that shift our labor base from a domestic level to an international level without necessarily relocating the colleges and the students.

The DecaTech Plan has the potential to create new industries that thrive even when the rest of the local economy is not doing well because the industry itself is serving the international market. The same goes for individuals with skills that are demanded globally. Workers can work remotely from Zimbabwe for their international companies.

The DecaTech Plan is a silver bullet to unemployment. DecaTech graduates will be integrated into the global labor pools and not limited by geography. Thus, we could take our unemployed ghetto youths, train them and dump them into the global workforce since we cannot generate meaningful work for them domestically. The same goes for villagers who earn less than a dollar per day. They could earn more than a dollar per day doing simple click-work online, a skill that does not even require months of training.

Command IT

Having free internet and free skills training program in place is great. But that might not be enough to achieve the desired outcomes.

These high-level, state-driven initiatives are essentially commandeering the economy. The commandeering is warranted to kick-start the economy. Bad governance and bad commandeering killed the economy. Good governance and good commandeering are needed to jump-start the economy. Once the economy starts to travel in the right direction (the 4IR direction), the government and its bureaucrats can step out of the way and allow the free market to flourish.

One aspect of commandeering the economy would require the central government to step in with incentives and punishments (carrot and stick approach) engineered towards maximization of enrollment numbers.

Can we get 100,000 persons that need to be freely trained in Zimbabwe? yes, it's possible, but in reality, we have been lagging behind for so long that most of our people fear ICT. They have a phobia of some sort. They don't think they can do it, just like the Americans, the Koreans, the Japanese, and the Chinese. They feel they are not smart enough. Some actually believe black people have inferior intelligence, which is not the case.

The state has to step in and make people believe, help them choose what is right for them, but without necessarily violating human rights and freedom of choice. Over time, people would choose what's right for themselves, but that would take years of observing other graduates getting well-paying jobs. We don't have time. The 4IR is a race and we, as a nation-state, cannot afford to be left behind.

At the initial stages, the state has to commandeer involvement. It has to be the “Big Brother”. In the most extreme scenario, the state could require all persons from the age of 16 to 20 to spend a minimum of 6 months of study at a DecaTech center. The studying and skills training would be a matter of mandatory national service.

Instead of punishments, incentives can do better. The state could bankroll a lending facility in which anyone who completes a course at the DecaTech is given a loan to purchase computer equipment up to a specific amount. This would allow graduates to have the necessary tools to venture into the world.

Another incentive could be free high-tech computer equipment for those that pass with flying colors. The state could also built-incentives around its hiring policy being structured in-favor of those passing specific ICT skill sets, of which the skills sets would be acquired from the DecaTech’s.

Pareto-style Analysis of Impact and Return on Investment

The rewards are humungous. They are transformative. Society and the economy will be fundamentally changed forever.

Negative Nancies will be quick to say there is no objective, quantitative cost-to-benefit analysis done and that this has never been done anywhere else. The fact that it has not been done anywhere else is not a shred of evidence that it is impossible to execute. A cost-to-benefit analysis can actually be done using a different framework that encompasses all benefits (monetary and non-monetary)

Using an 80–20 Pareto type of introspection adjusted to a tighter 95–5 criterion, a possible result set could be as follows:

• 95% of the free internet recipients will not use it creatively (i.e., to generate any business value of some sort, any sort).
• 5% will use it creatively (0.05*15m=750,000 people) The creative ones include your comedians, merchants, e-learning providers, advertisers, marketplace people, online traders, click-workers, writers, etc.), earning some part-time or full-time income.
• 5% of those who use it creatively will be successful at their endeavors (0.05*750,000 = 37,500 people) and make a living out of that internet-enabled business they do. That is 37,500 jobs created right there (online-based assistants, remote programmers, cloud accountants, etc).
• 5% of those who are successful will be reasonably successful (that is, they will create internet-enabled entities that will employ at least 5 people). This is 5% of the reasonably successful is (0.05*37,500 = 1,875). These 1,875 reasonably successful people will employ at least 9,375 people giving us a total of 46,875 jobs created.
• 5% of the 5% that is reasonably successful will become very successful. They would create businesses generating in excess of $10 m in revenue per business per year. This is 0.05*1,875 = 93 entrepreneurs. This would translate to 93*10m = $930m in revenue per year, immensely contributing to GDP.
• 5% of these 93 could be extremely successful, that is, creating unicorns, a business valued at above a billion dollars. That is 0.05*93= 4 people for a total of 4*1 billion of 4 billion valuations of companies

Whilst the above modified Pareto observation focuses on the market type of outcomes that lead to a positive assessment of the return on investment. It suffers from a major faultline in the analysis. It does not take into account non-market-based outcomes. A case in point is the 95% that will not use the internet creatively. The above assessment assumes that this is a waste of resources because it's not generating income or contributing to GDP.

That is a very wrong assumption. It is too moralistic. The 95% will use the internet to watch cat videos, to watch Mai TT, Madam Boss, and Passion Java, to consume rumors and gossip all day. They could also use it for buying stuff on e-commerce sites and that’s it.

Watching Comic Pastor makes people laugh and makes them happy. How much value would you attach to that happiness? The market economy has no means to measure that happiness and price it.

Let's suppose, for argument’s sake, having access to the internet brings a utility of USD 1 per day to each person from all the jokes, memes, music videos, gospel sermons, porn, news, and viral stuff they watch. The $1 per person translates to $14m per day worth of utility for the non-creative 95% of the population. This annualizes into $5.1 billion per year. This is huge.

The market economy ignores these apparent benefits because it has no way of pricing it, after all, happiness, laughter, and humor are not for sale.

If you cannot use the nation’s resources to develop the country, to help us catch up with the rest of the world, and to make us happy, what else are you using the resources for? Is there any better cause than that which makes us happy?

Impact on GDP

With every 10% increase in internet access, GDP rises by 1%. Currently, the share of the population that has internet access is 27%. By ensuring everyone has access, our GDP could rise by 7%. Our GDP is around $21 billion. Thus immediately we could boost our GDP by $1.5 billion.

That growth compounds over time. The return from the investment in widespread internet access is so large that it can pay for itself (as in being more than 2X the initial investment, at minimum).

At the micro-level, if we bring the internet to everyone, the entire entertainment sector could change dramatically. More views, more likes, more content, more clicks will lead to more popularity for our entertainers which would easily convert to more advertising dollars and sponsorship gigs to a level where the industry can sustain several artists and can grow into the rest of Africa by crowding the recommendation algorithms.

Make Zimbabwe just one big marketplace. Having the internet everywhere will fundamentally change how consumers search and access goods.

We need to connect Zimbabwe to the world. Zimbabweans need to have access to the global marketplace. Sooner or later logistics companies will start to fill in the gaps, once the demand to send goods abroad picks up.

The scale and magnitude of the impact are 100X better than the investment in education in the late 80s and 90s during Mugabe’s early years. The internet is one giant classroom with plenty of online courses and an unlimited supply of books.

Just the education part of the internet and its Coursera’s, Udemy’s, and Khan Academies is 10X better than our education system (primary, secondary and tertiary). With tertiary education, our students in the most remote of areas could take degrees offered by universities across the world. Education is in the process of being dematerialized. It's no longer about school buildings but about access to the internet, access to bodies of knowledge, the ability to playback the teacher’s voice, and engage in live interaction via cameras that cut across the barriers of geographical distance.

Sounds like a good deal but how are we going to fund this?

We are heavily indebted. Mthuli’s surpluses appear imaginary and not real. Where can we get the money to make such a huge investment?

It could come from selling some of our resources. The 15 billion purported to be lost and stolen whenever diamonds are mentioned could easily have brought free internet for the entire country for 15 years.

The 3 billion in failed command agriculture could have secured free internet for everyone for 3 years. The corruption, looting, parastatal losses, leakages, and costly inefficiencies of the current government could easily run into a billion, which could be used for free internet.

It could come directly from the fiscus. If we build a capable state we should be able to generate an extra billion from tax revenues easily. The current government is generating only $ 4.7 billion because it has incapacitated itself through bad policies and corruption.

The country is losing $1.5 billion per year in undeclared gold exports. Foreign remittances coming into the country via unofficial channels are northwards of $500 million. Lowering the tax burdens alone could result in increased compliance and generate an extra billion in tax revenue overcompensating for the decline in tax rates. The point is, if the country’s economy is managed well, the state would be in a very much capable position to make a huge investment in IT infrastructure.

A resource-for-internet-infrastructure deal is very appealing, especially if we trade in some of our current resources that could be stranded in the coming decades. A good example is coal. If advances in green energy reach a level where renewable energy achieves cost parity with coal, we could be left with so much coal stranded under the ground, with very few buyers. If we can trade that coal for something now, we are better off. The argument that we should not extract all coal from the ground in this generation, we should leave some for the next generation is misplaced as it does not factor in the de-carbonization trend underway.

An example of a resource-for-infrastructure deal that we can strike in this regard is a follows. We could give the Chinese state $1 bn worth of coal in exchange for Huawei to build a 5G network all around our metro areas, growth points, and village centers. Huawei could wifi the entire country with 5G so everyone has internet access wherever they are.

Another example would be for us to mine lithium deposits worth a billion dollars and swap them for Starlink internet with Elon Musk, who owns both Starlink and Tesla. The latter needs a secure source of cheap lithium for their revolutionary battery technologies for Electric Vehicles. Guaranteed access to a key resource such as lithium is a big win for Elon and us having access to his Starlink satellite-based internet is a big win for us.

As much as we don't prefer raising new debt, we could be forced by circumstances. We might have to borrow. In line with the de-dollarization of reserves in favor of bitcoin, we could borrow in dollars on the back of our bitcoin reserves. Decentralized Finance (DeFi) platforms allow us to make such a trade. Some of these DeFi platforms that have just emerged are way bigger than our central bank balance sheets. We will have to swallow our central banking pride in order to execute this trade.

Where do we get the bitcoins if we don't have enough reserves? The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe has no meaningful and significant reserves. The central bank is dead-broke in terms of money that can be used outside Zimbabwe (foreign currency, gold, and SDRs). It comes back to the issue of a capable state. A capable state would naturally lead to a capable central bank.

Push comes to shove, we might have to extend the begging bowl. We could fundraise the initial billion needed from the billionaires across the world and all persons who support the noble endeavor of getting every Zimbabwean onto the internet. It is a noble endeavor indeed.

The ICT policy that you deserve is aggressive, socialist, populist, and command-like, but at the same time, it is developmental, progressive, revolutionary, and awesome.

Ciao!