Grab A Coffee; The Founder's Budget Brief

What's up with you, uh, Mr. Kandwano? I mean, for the most part, the men in the arena will tell you that everything else could have gone haywire, but they can't afford not to have reliable connectivity, affordable connectivity, and an enabling connectivity that does not, for the most part, fleece them, but enable them to be able to do the things they do, and be in touch with everybody from whichever nook and corner of the world.

Now, you sit at that point where you may not be an internet service provider in the strictest sense of it, but you are a regulator or bulk purchaser.

I, I do not know i- i- what term you'd want to use to describe your enabling ability.

But you may wish to start from there and give us a sense of what you do when you wake up in the morning and what NIITA are you.

Uh, thank you, Simon.

Uh, NIITA in the sense, uh, we describe it as an enabler.

Okay.

Uh, enabling, uh, digital transformation.

And enabling digital transformation, uh, can be defined in many sorts of ways.

Uh, but bottom line is the foundation to which digital transformation or digital tech advancements, uh, spur, or develop, or accelerate.

So NIITA has been, uh, a key, uh, part in that journey.

Mm-hmm.

We all know that, uh, 10, 12, 15 years ago, uh, getting a safe and secure and fast internet connection was a problem in this country.

Yet we had liberalized the sector in 1996, bringing the likes of MTN, Zain, Airtel, and all those players.

But why is it that it was very hard to get a fast, reliable, and secure internet connection, even with private sector investments? We also had UTL, which is now, uh, is it UCTL or something like? It's now a limited company.

Uh, but when NIITA came in, it disrupted this, uh, ecosystem.

Uh, first of all, as a country, we didn't have a backbone Uh, through which, uh, high capacity bandwidth can be, uh, scaled out across the country.

Mm-hmm.

And this was around 2009.

As a country, I think we are celebrating how many, 50 years or something years of independence.

Mm.

But we are still, around 2009, we are still relying heavily on foreign traffic in terms of, uh, the ISPs or foreign, uh, service providers.

So what, uh, motivates me, uh, every time I go to NIITA is that...

Actually, even in my introduction, I didn't introduce that I'm a farmer, and that's where most my energy is put.

I'm just here temporarily in government serving in the private sector space, but, uh, I'm a big time farmer out there.