According to Coleman (2019), “digital colonialism refers to a modern-day ‘Scramble for Africa’ where large-scale tech companies extract, analyze, and own user data for profit and market influence with nominal benefit to the data source” (p. 417). The instinct to enact data protection laws as a bulwark hardly measure up to the challenge, argues Coleman (2019).
“An analysis of Kenya’s 2018 data protection bill, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and documented actions of large-scale tech companies exemplifies how those limits create several loopholes for continued digital colonialism including, historical violations of data privacy laws; limitations of sanctions; unchecked mass concentration of data, lack of competition enforcement, uninformed consent, and limits to defined nation-state privacy laws” (Coleman, 2019, p. 417).
It is tempting to attribute the digital scramble to the ugly western legacy of slavery and colonialism. This would be lazy and inaccurate. What Big Tech firms are looking to do in African countries started at home, until the media and academia began to call them out, with laws such as the GDPR enacted quickly thereafter. Surveillance capitalism, which Zuboff (2019) explains as “a new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction and sales” underpins it.
In other words, Big Tech sees data as raw material, as you would crude oil or metals for refining into finished products of even greater value. What makes Africa particularly vulnerable, however, is a dearth of state capacity and political will to keep Big Tech in check. In the face of basic needs like food and infrastructure, African governments easily make the tradeoff of focusing on these basic priorities when negotiating with western partners in exchange for concessions on data protection and ownership. Pushed by deep-pocketed Big Tech lobby groups, a major requirement by America in delayed trade negotiations with Kenya is on data ownership, for instance.
The foreign takeover is taking many forms, and faces little resistance owing to the comfort it provides for a continent long deprived of basic services. Ride-hailing apps like Uber and Bolt provide a better taxi service than the local alternatives, and without any of the hassle that characterizes the latter. Netflix, a video-streaming service, provides more attractive programming at convenience than local media in many African countries. Google’s long reach extends not just from users’ emails, but their location, what ads they see, and the information that surfaces in their web searches.
These services, which are making the lives of many Africans much more bearable, come at great costs, however, as they provide an invaluable trove of data, which as they reside in foreign servers, perpetuate the continued dependence of the continent on the West. “Thus, tech corporations have expanded their products across the globe, extracting data and profit from users all around the world while concentrating power and resources in one country, the US (with China a growing competitor).”
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Africa is selling its digital future for free
Still, Africa does not have the capital or the knowhow to build its own digital infrastructure. It has to rely on foreign development partners and their firms, mostly western ones, but increasingly from Asia as well. There is growing evidence that the continent might be mortgaging its digital future in the process, however. Regulation can still work, some argue, if they are smart, fit-for-purpose, with adjustments for the myriad contexts and varied circumstances of African countries.
But data protection laws have to first be in place before the argument can be made about their efficacy. As it is, barely half of African countries have such laws, compared to almost all of the countries in Europe, for instance. Hitherto overlooked, there is growing interest in the American dominance of global tech, especially as it bears all the semblance of the labour and resource colonialism of African countries in the ugly past. Supposedly free digital products and services are not really so, as they incorporate a quid pro quo for personal data for free in exchange, with software and data increasingly centralised in cloud systems domiciled abroad.
There is a growing recognition in some African countries and the broader developing world about the importance of digital sovereignty. South Africa, and a number of developing economies, refused to sign the “Osaka Declaration on Digital Economy” or so-called “Osaka Track” at the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, in June 2019, for instance, arguing their inputs were not sought aforehand. Senegal was the only African country mentioned in the final document, in addition to Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, the European Union, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, South Korea, Russia, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
It is easy to understand why digital sovereignty has hitherto not be taken seriously by African countries. Great enthusiasm for technology in Africa, as it has been the solution to myriad infrastructural handicaps on the continent, has enabled Big Tech to enjoy a carte blanche of sorts, with governments throwing caution into the wind to sustain their custom. As there is no shock and awe of the kind of the military-backed economic colonialism of the past, the argument about local data ownership comes across as more than a tad puzzling to the still majorly agrarian African population and its largely conservative ruling elite.
That all that fun and learning on the internet, mobile money, Uber, breaking news on social media, and so on, could be a danger to African sovereignty has taken a while to be understood. Not until African leaders became subject to sanctions by Big Tech owing to their speech or actions on social media did it finally dawn on the continent’s ruling class that digital sovereignty is a matter to be taken seriously.
An edited version was first published by the Italian Institute for International Political Studies in Milan, Italy. References, figures and tables are in the original article. See link viz: https://www.ispionline.it/en/pubblicazione/digitalisation-sustainable-infrastructure-road-ahead-36357
