Tag: software

Compatriots, you can text all you want, own as many handsets as your job or your fancy impels you, and hold multiple phone conversations as either a habit you can’t help or actually find fulfilling, but if your nation, your region of the world does not have the infrastructures necessary for modern life, software will not sustain you! As a matter of fact, in such a state of profound disjunction between hardware and software in modern civilisation, you will in all likelihood be condemned to live out the time allotted to you on this earth in a more or less permanent state of anxiety, insecurity and, worst of all, the replacement of reality and the hard, unbearable facts of life with delusions. And this will be your lot, your “fate” whether you are rich or poor, a person of substance or a member of the multitudes of the disenfranchised and marginalised. Is this an exaggeration, an overstatement? Well, let us examine the contention carefully through some very concrete and very well known experiences that virtually all Nigerians share in common in this software civilisation of the new millennium.

One of the most seemingly trite but nonetheless immensely frustrating of these experiences is the one captured by the well known legend of “network error” that bedevils attempts to make phone connections in our country, an occurrence that happens at all times without rhyme or reason. In my line of work, I travel a lot in our continent and around the world. I don’t know about the experience of any person reading this piece who also happens to be a constant traveler, but I can state unequivocally that I have never encountered “network error” in any other country in Africa or the world at large. Perhaps worse than “network error” is the more sepulchral “the telephone number you are trying to call does not exist!” After my initial shock of hearing this “non-existence” ascribed repeatedly over two weeks to a number that I call fairly regularly, I had no recourse left than to turn the experience into a psychologically compensatory joke. In the joke which happened when I called the number of a person sitting right beside me only to be informed that the number belonged to the virtual world of nonexistence. It so happened that this “joke” was enacted between me and a sibling who had just been discharged from hospital after a bout with a very serious medical emergency. With this on my mind, I told my brother that he could at least take comfort in the fact that it was his phone number and not himself that was said not to exist!

I readily concede the fact that these are vexatious but for the most not dire, not life threatening misadventures with poor and unreliable GSM services in our country. But from these particular cases, let us we move to indubitably more ominous experiences. And so I ask: Can we ever be able to get an accurate assessment of how much is lost in revenue and peace of mind through the constant breakdown in internet access in private and public, personal and commercial activities due to either power outage or the overload and collapse of the local or national bandwidth? I have lost count of the number of times when I have gone to my bank only to be told that “the network is down” and I have to wait or even come back later. I have lost count – and my capacity to be outraged – of the number of times when the modems for internet access through my laptop have either worked at the speed of a chameleon or a tortoise or, worse still, completely failed to get me connection for days and weeks. [You might say that the cybercafés are there, but they also are not immune to these same problems, apart from the fact that I work on and with my laptop at all hours of the day and night] And need I add that in my experience, these extremely frustrating and wasteful expressions of IT backwardness and inefficiency in access and the provision of other services are worse in our country than most of the other places I have visited in Africa and other parts of the world?

We might well ask why these things are so bad in Nigeria. And indeed, this question is often posed in our newspapers and radio and television commentaries in our country. In my experience, two standard answers or explanations are often proffered. One is this: the number of subscribers to IT access and services in our country has far outstripped or overtaken the installed infrastructural capacity of the providers and the resulting overload can never be resolved until the gap between demand and capacity is rectified. The second reason is related to the first and it is this: like consumers of all other services in Nigeria, subscribers to GSM services and IT access do not enjoy adequate enforcement of legislation and guidelines protecting the rights of consumers and their advocates.

These explanations are of course factually correct and things might indeed get better if the problems they highlight are addressed and resolved. But there is a third answer or explanation that is not articulated enough or is expressed rather tepidly and it is this: The vexations and frustrations that we experience with GSM and IT services are related to other endemic problems like power outages that drive up production costs in Nigeria and cripple productive economic activities; roads and other physical infrastructures that are not only vastly inadequate but also constitute death traps for all, rich and poor; and hospitals and clinics that are unsanitary, unsafe and poorly maintained. I suggest that it is this particular explanation that leads us to the heart of the matter in this series concerning modern life and civilisation and the historic connections – or disjuncture – between the infrastructure and software of production and consumption, both for what is essential for bare life and what is an excess, a “supplement” that makes life richer and more fulfilling. Let me explain with regard to what I think of as Nigeria’s rather unique and negatively exemplary experience of the disjuncture between infrastructure and software in modern civilisation.

In virtually every region and country in the world, the infrastructures and institutions that we now take for granted as part of modern living grew out of two separate but intimately connected processes. One is the diversion of hundreds of millions of people, on a continuing and seemingly perpetual basis, away from farming and rural communities to towns and cities where the diverted communities join an ever growing actual and potential work force. The other, separate but related process or phenomenon is the growth of cities, megacities and metropolitan conurbations that are vaster than anything the world had ever known. Virtually all the infrastructures and institutions that we now consider vital to life as we live and experience it as part of a complex and sustainable modernity grew as both a response to and a motive force for these two processes: safe, motorable roads, highways and rail systems; factories of both heavy and light machinery and equipment; regular and sustained power generation and supply; access to clean, potable water and its sources; facilities for health care delivery and public and private sanitation that must forever be well maintained; and institutions for instruction, research and innovation that must not only keep the generality of the present generation educated and well informed but must also reproduce future generations of informed and enlightened human beings. Of all the countries in Africa and perhaps in the rest of developing world, Nigeria surpasses all others in the scale of these twin processes of diversion of populations from the rural to the urban and the growth of large towns, cities and conurbations. At the same time, Nigeria is unbeatable in the inadequacy of the infrastructures and institutions necessary to cope with the two processes.

The story of how what I have in this series been calling the “software” components of modern life came to connect with the fundamental infrastructures and institutions of modernity is a fascinating and complex tale. In all honesty and humility, I confess that it is a tale I am still trying to understand as fully as I think necessary. For this reason, I shall only be scratching the surfaces of this subject in this series. This entails only the briefest detailing of, in my own opinion, two of the more spectacular and by now indispensable dimensions of this new software civilisation. Here is the first one: “machines” and technologies that can, through preprogrammed apps, “think”, calculate and calibrate for us; that can probe the innermost recesses of the body and its internal organs for us; that can clone living tissues and organisms; and yet these “machines” are so infinitesimally small that they are measured in nanoseconds and nanometers which are one billionth of a second and a meter respectively. Here is the second one: the collection, storage, retrieval, reconfiguration and transmission across the length and breadth of the whole world of infinitely vast amounts of data and information through text, pictures and abstract, non-literal images collected on microchips that are much smaller than the eye of a needle. Needless to say, other than as consumers, Nigeria and most of the other developing countries of the world, at least now and for the immediately foreseeable future, have little to contribute to the production of these wondrous “machines” of the software revolution.

But things are not as hopeless as they might seem from the current state of things. At any rate, the very last impression I wish the reader to take from the reflections in this series is hopelessness. If the achievements of the software revolution seem so far from our reach, this is not the case with the infrastructures of modernity. These can be put in place in less than a decade. And once that happens, we can enter into another phase of history in which we might become significant players in the software revolution. At any rate, I believe that the only thing stopping us from a fully realised infrastructural modernity is the scale and impunity with which our oil wealth is stolen and wasted. Behind that, of course, is the fact that looting and wastefulness on such a colossal scale is possible only because an extractive, offshore political economy on which a parasitic rentier state has been erected like a behemoth holds us hostage and we seem unable to think our way beyond it, to see our way past it. In this respect, I would like to say that above every other consideration, what I would like any reader of this series to take away is a profound contempt for what the present administration and those before it call either “FSS 2020” or “Vision 2020”. What does this mean? It means that by the year 2020 Nigerian would have become one of the 20 biggest economies in the world. How delusional can a ruling class and/or party be? We are at least half a century behind in the installation of the infrastructures of modernity. And we are light years away from the software revolution. So compatriots, the next time your receive “network error” from your GSM provider and the next time you go to visit a friend or a relative in a hospital and you see the state of the things there, think of “Vision 2020” and separate yourself from the delusion, the fraudulent imposture of those who are looting us dry and mortgaging the future of our children and their children to bankruptcy in a land awash with petronaira and petrodollars. Go on texting, compatriots, but with the usual psychologically cleansing frivolities associated with texting, send out messages of hope and resilience that come from being not mere consumers but also potential producers in our global software civilisation.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

Since, as the saying goes, charity begins at home, let me start the reflections in this two-part series with some experiences from my own personal and professional life that bear directly on the subject of the series. This subject is none other than the individual, national and global effects and ramifications of living in what I choose to call a software civilisation, the very first of its kind in the history of the world. As we shall see, our exploration of this topic will enable us to get a grasp, perhaps even to get an understanding of some of the most important aspects of modernity, especially with regard to our place in it in Nigeria, Africa and most of the developing world.

The facts from my personal and professional life that I wish to use as illustrations for my topic in this series are three. One: I never succeeded in having my application for landline telephone installed in my house at Oke-Bola, Ibadan. My application, together with the fees I paid, was never rejected outright; it was just a case of happenstance that no one ever came to lay the lines that would have connected me to the grid. To this I may as well add the fact that those whose houses had landline telephone were only a little more fortunate than those of us who didn’t. This was because, generally speaking, the landline telephone system in our country worked so erratically, so fitfully that it could be compared to the way a car with dead batteries constantly has to be jump-started to get it to move.

Two: I never succeeded in learning how to type fast enough on a typewriter to be able to use the machine to produce my articles, monographs and books by myself. Consequently, I always wrote in longhand which I then handed to typists to turn into typescripts for me. When I look back now, I am stupefied by my memory of how long, how laborious and tedious it took to produce all the articles and books I wrote in the period, apart from the fact that it was also a very expensive process too. [Francis Akhabue, where are you today? You made a small fortune typing for me when I taught at OAU, Ife, but I did not complain then and I am not complaining now].

Three: When the computer emerged as an absolutely indispensable equipment for professional academic life, it took me a long, long time to adjust to this epochal development. This was so hopeless a case that for sometime when I was at Cornell University, I was one of three professors out of about sixty in the English Department that didn’t use computers and therefore could not be integrated fully into the department’s computer-driven records and communication listserve. It was only when the department decided to “bribe” me and the other two holdouts from the computer revolution by buying us the most expensive, state-of-the-art computers complete with the most sophisticated software and apps that I relented. And even after that and for a long time, the computer sat unused in my office. That is until one day when Femi Osofisan arrived at Cornell on a visit and more or less shamed and coerced me into taking my first faltering steps at mastering the use of the computer.

Readers of this piece would have by now, I hope, sensed that there is a happy ending to this small narrative from the past of my personal and professional experience. And indeed, there is. Today, like all the other denizens of planet earth, I am the deeply gratified possessor of unbelievably cheap landless and wireless handsets that easily connect me to both the closest and the farthest quarters and regions of the world. As a result, these cheap handsets have enormously compensated for all the years and decades when I languished as an unsuccessful and frustrated applicant for a landline phone. And needless to say, I do not miss the disappearance of typewriters; gone forever is the infernally laborious task of writing in longhand before having it transformed into a typescript. With the disappearance of longhand writing in my professional and creative life, writing has become infinitely easier, more pleasurable and more fulfilling than my experience of it before I became an unabashed and grateful beneficiary of our global software civilisation. [Femi Osofisan, who among the two of us is laughing now? You got me going on computers and I shall forever remain indebted to you for it, but you are still transfixed in that prehistory of textual production in which longhand writing necessarily comes before conversion to electronic typescripts!]

On that note, let me tarry a while longer in these reflections on the good, “happy-ending” side of the story – or stories – that I wish to tell in this series before we get to the not-so happy and perhaps even tragic narratives. Perhaps the most affecting “happy-ending” story of all is the fact that fellow beneficiaries of the software civilization are numbered in their billions. And significantly, they include some of the poorest and the most economically and socially marginalised members of our global community. The list and the range of these “talakawa” beneficiaries are almost limitless. Indeed, this is so significant that in my opinion, it ranks as one of the greatest success stories of modern life, this story that tells of how millions and even billions of the poorest people in our world, some of whose economic and social capital is far below the absolute poverty line, are nonetheless able to participate in many of the productive, communicative and recreational processes of national, regional and global economies. What am I referring to here?

Today, the poorest people of the world can, thanks to our software civilisation, speak and text people across the length and breadth of both national communities and our collective global community. With their cheap handsets, roadside mechanics, barbers, tailors, welders, hair dressers and even vendors and hawkers can reach present and potential customers without leaving their shops, or shacks or their homes if these also serve as workplaces from which they earn their livelihood. Similarly, the poorest nations on the planet with very bad roads, with failed or failing factories and ever decreasing industrial productive capacities, with desperately poor and inadequate municipal services and amenities can, thanks to computers and software engineers and technicians, participate in every aspect of global economic processes, with special regard to the financial services sector, currently the driving engine of the global economy. Indeed, on this account, I can testify from direct personal experience that some of the services offered through online banking and e-marketing by Nigerian banks and financial services corporate enterprises are ahead of similar services offered by U.S. banks!

To place these observations and claims in a historical perspective, consider this fact: Some 20 to 30 years ago, all of these unprecedented developments affecting the poorest peoples and nations on the planet were simply unthinkable, let alone being realisable. This is because the infrastructures, the hardware were simply either not there at all or were grossly inadequate. I mean, which barbers, welders and roadside mechanics could have had landline telephones when I, a senior academic, couldn’t? Rich and poor, who could text anybody in Nigeria and the wider world without using telegrams which only the post offices could transmit, and that with very severe limitations on the number of words that you could cram into a telegram? Which bank or financial services operator in the country could remit funds for you to relatives or friends in any part of Nigeria in a matter of minutes, not to talk of relatives and friends in the wider world? Who had any inkling that one could actually watch live broadcasts of sporting events taking place anywhere in the world when all that we knew then in terms of live broadcasts of sporting events were radio broadcasts that only rich people who had shortwave radios could tune into?

I think nothing reveals the unprecedented impact of our current software civilisation than the fact that in many parts of our country and continent, our infrastructures are still as bad, still as inadequate as they were 20 to 30 years ago. As a matter of fact, some infrastructures are in worse conditions now than twenty years ago! But in spite of these realities, we are still able to participate as consumers of all that the world can offer though the software revolution. In other words, if we were still completely at the tender mercies of our greatly inadequate and inferior infrastructures – the physical and technological hardware of our production and communicative processes – all the amenities and services now enjoyed by everybody including the very poor among us, thanks to the software revolution, would still be a dream, a fantasy far beyond anybody’s reach. This, I confess, is what made me give this series its intriguing title: “No infrastructures, no hardware? Have no worry, software will sustain you!” But are these the last words on this covert morality tale of modernity and its satisfactions and contradictions? Far, far from it!

Let us deal with this topic carefully, rationally. If you take the simple and globally ubiquitous handset, the bulk that constitutes the physical reality of the phone is the hardware, the “infrastructure”. The SIM card and all the micro-processes preprogrammed into the phone that enable it to be used as phone, radio, calculator, torchlight and computer screen for sending and receiving emails are the combined software. For the most part, nearly all of us take the “hardware”, the physical object for granted and instead concentrate on our enjoyment of all the facilities and services enabled by the software. But without the ‘hardware”, without the compact physical object itself that serves as both housing and enabler for the work of the software, we would be unable to get from the handset all the things that we have come to associate with it. This is the enigma, the paradox that the software civilisation confronts everyone, every society and every nation in the world at the current time. Let me express this dilemma, this conundrum as succinctly as I can: You can take the infrastructures for granted as much as you like because the software revolution enables you to do a great amount of things that all the denizens of our planet now uniformly enjoy, but if your region of the world and your nation lack the basic infrastructures of modernity, you are condemned to an experience of modern life that will be filled with great contradictions, acute frustrations and seemingly unending insecurities.

In next week’s column we shall see how this enigma plays out in our specific national and continental context. Here is a preview of this context: on the one hand, death-trap roads, inadequate and fitful power supply, crumbling public utilities and amenities, and hospitals and health clinics that are so bad that they serve more as waiting rooms for the mortuary than temporary shelters from ill health and diseases; on the other hand, banking and financial services facilities and global phone and communication access that are in the front ranks of 21st century high-tech developments. Meanwhile, compatriots, text your friends and relatives all you want; talk to four people all at once as you shuttle from one to another of your four expensive handsets. But go carefully as you drive on our roads and highways. [KK, I swear that I am not thinking of you here!]

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu