Tunisia, Nigeria and Beyond: How Communication is Changing the Middle East and Africa in 2011

In Nigeria in 1998, there were only 425,000 phone lines in a country of about 130 million people. Most of those lines were owned by companies. Many offices had multiple lines, in the hope that two or three of them would be working at any one time.

Often even this wasn't enough though, and to communicate people had to use satellite phones, which were both expensive and banned by the military. The alternative was sending and receiving messages via motorbike couriers.

Today, little more than a decade later, while the number of fixed lines in Nigeria has hardly changed, the number of mobile phone subscriptions has leapt from zero to over 78 million, according to International Telecommunication Union (ITU) figures.

In just the past five years, across Africa as a whole the number of mobile phone subscriptions has leapt from 88 million to 333 million, putting the continent ahead of the Arab world as a theatre for phone operators. The number of phones per 100 inhabitants leapt from 12 in 2005 to over 40 last year, while in some countries, such as Gabon, penetration is almost 100 per cent.

The ITU figures also show that, over the same period, the number of mobile phones in the Middle East rose from 86 million to 282 million.

Internet access in both regions has also soared. Across Africa, the number of regular internet users shot up from 16 million in 2005 to 77 million last year – an almost five-fold increase. So 10 per cent of all Africans regularly access the internet, but in some countries the proportion is much higher. In Nigeria 28 per cent of the population use the internet regularly, for example, while in Morocco it is 40 per cent. Internet usage in the Arab world has increased over the same period from 26 million to 88 million.

The effects of higher mobile and internet penetration

This dramatically rising mobile and internet penetration has important consequences for people in Africa and the Middle East. We have witnessed one of the most visible effects over recent weeks, with the popular uprisings in Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt and Libya and the spreading ripples of unrest to countries from Bahrain and Jordan to Algeria and Morocco. Three leaders have effectively been toppled, though the fourth – Gaddafi – still clings to power. Leaders of other authoritarian regimes across the region, from Riyadh to Damascus, are monitoring the situation with varying degrees of nervousness.

The mobile phone and internet didn't cause this widespread unrest, but they were a powerful contributory factor.

The revolt started in Tunisia in December. On 17th December, Mohamed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old unemployed university graduate, set himself alight in the central Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid in despairing protest at being stopped by the police from selling vegetables on the street to earn a living. In a country with high unemployment, and a high-living and reputedly corrupt authoritarian regime, this struck a chord with many people.

In late December, protests broke out in his home town. The news was kept out of the mainstream media but spread rapidly through social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

On 5th January, when Bouazizi died from the burns he suffered, supporters on Facebook called for the protests to spread. The demonstrations began three days later, supported by people in cities across Tunisia who had been asked to turn out by text messages and messages on the social networks.

The issues cited by protestors were straightforward – unemployment, food prices, corruption, freedom of speech and poor living conditions.

Again, the official media carried almost nothing on the protests, but the news still spread. Why? It is estimated that about 18 per cent of the Tunisian population is on Facebook and about 50 per cent of the Tunisian TV audience watch satellite stations such as Al-Jazeera. What's more, in its reporting of the events, Al-Jazeera itself relied heavily on what it could learn from Facebook pages and YouTube. So even TV reporting was enabled by the internet.

The fall of the Tunisian president Ben Ali inspired the opposition movements in Yemen and Egypt. In Cairo a young Google executive called Wael Ghonim set up a Facebook page called 'We are all Khaled Said', which was key to stimulating the protests in Egypt after the young businessman died in police custody. A rally was called for on 25th January and 90,000 people turned up.

And even in Libya, where internet access has been much more tightly constrained than in Egypt or elsewhere, it seems much of the organisation of the protests that became the uprising took place on Facebook and other such sites.

The promise of change

Earlier this year, Evgeny Morozov, the Belarussian academic and activist, published a book called The Net Delusion, which disputes the claims many people make about the power of the internet to bring about real change. He argues that people have overstated the power of social networking sites to move people from 'on-screen activism' onto the street. They may log on, he says, but they don't turn out.

Morozov also argues that the internet can be as much a tool for authoritarian regimes to use against others – to watch, trap and persecute opponents – as it is a tool for others to use against them. As such, the new communications are in some ways actually preventing change in the region, he concludes.

Indeed, in Tunisia, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that over several years the Ben Ali regime trawled the internet, hacking into Gmail and Facebook accounts, harvesting email lists of presumed opponents and arresting key ones.

In Egypt the authorities harvested names too, to prevent protests from breaking out. Then, in January, when they couldn't arrest everybody who was organising protests, they tried instead to prevent the protests by disrupting Twitter and Facebook services and cutting mobile signals in key areas. The government in Cairo even tried to force mobile operators such as Vodafone to send out messages appealing to their subscribers to "confront the traitors and criminals" who were staging the protests. Vodafone protested, but had clearly been used as a tool of an authoritarian regime.

But even when regimes took this approach, people found a way of getting around the obstacles.

For example, when the government cut regular broadband internet access, groups of online activists sent out text messages and tweets with lists of phone numbers to connect to dial-up modems. They reverted to older technologies such as faxes and ham radio. A memo was circulated, entitled '20 ways to circumvent the Egyptian government's internet block'.

The uprisings have amounted to the most profound upheaval to shake the authoritarian regimes of the Middle East since the Iranian revolution of 1979 – and they have brought a new promise of change. Years of frustration at corruption, bad government and the denial of basic rights were the cause of the uprisings. But the new means of communication that have spread worldwide over the past two decades enabled the uprisings to take place. They enabled change.

The implications for companies

Businesses don't like uncertainty, and in the short term at least, the uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East are only adding to the uncertainty that already existed. But in the long turn, authoritarian rule tends not to be good for business either: it stifles innovation and risk-taking and allows corruption to breed.

Indeed, in Africa at least, authoritarian rule has produced neither great stability nor great growth. Between 1966 and 1998 Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, suffered a civil war, six or seven military coups and half a dozen attempted ones. Its population, business community and media elite were unable to organise and challenge their leaders, and the mainly military governments were under no real pressure to create jobs, build infrastructure and grow the economy. Then, hit by the oil price collapse of the late 1970s, the economy went into a spin. Vital 'hard' infrastructure collapsed, while its 'soft' infrastructure – the skills of its people – collapsed too. Corruption and economic mismanagement drove good people – doctors, lawyers, business leaders – away.

When civilian rule was restored in 1999, trouble, unrest and corruption didn't end overnight, but business people tell me that the overall operating climate has slowly, but steadily, improved.

In 1998 the country was ranked 178th out of 178 on the Transparency International list of most corrupt countries; today it stands at 134. This doesn't quite put it on a par with Sweden or Norway, but it is better than it was. Earlier this year, the country's central bank governor, Lamido Sanusi, won The Banker magazine's Central Bank Governor of 2010 award.

The elections due to be held this month (April) will be the country's third since military rule ended. Already, this is the longest period of civilian rule in the country's history.

In the run-up to the election, candidates are campaigning via text messages and the internet. Groups such as the Save Nigeria Group are organising live online debates and pressurising the politicians to answer probing policy questions. All this is giving a voice to people whose voices previously went unheard – whether ordinary citizens or business people – in a way that makes the country more open, fairer – and, perhaps, ultimately more stable and better for business.

Much is wrong and the government is far from perfect. But, though far from perfect, it is much more open, and the country has seen economic growth averaging 8.9 per cent over the past decade, putting it among the ten fastest-growing economies in the world. The advent of mobile phones and the internet in Nigeria in 2001/2002 is part of the reason.

In 1998 Africa was characterised in the immortal Economist headline, as 'The Hopeless Continent'. This January the same magazine referred to Africa as 'the surprising success story of the past decade'. Between 1980 and 2000, it pointed out, only one African country – Uganda – made the list of the world's fastest-growing economies. The rest were all in Asia. But in the first decade of the current century, six of the ten fastest-growing economies were in sub-Saharan Africa, and the International Monetary Fund forecasts a similar picture over the coming five years.

True, much of the current growth is commodity-driven, and commodity-driven growth doesn't generate many jobs. But that doesn't tell the whole story. Standard Chartered bank predicted recently that Africa will become a major manufacturing centre for the world within the next ten to 15 years.

Obstacles remain – corruption, instability, weak rule of law, poor 'hard' and 'soft' infrastructure. But such challenges are best tackled by an open society, by people able to learn about what is going on and challenge where it is wrong. New communications technologies are allowing this to happen – and helping to encourage the return of members of the Diaspora at the same time.

Well educated and well connected, the sons and daughters of Africans who left the country for Britain and America, are now setting up businesses in their home countries and calling for change. The advent of the mobile phones and the internet, the tools of their generation, has made their return easier and mass communication possible. The bolstered middle class will stimulate demand for goods and services, provide a readier supply of qualified staff than has been the case for decades and contribute to a virtuous circle of positive change.

The growing economic power of China may command a lot of media coverage, but the scale and depth of social, economic and political change afoot in the Middle East and Africa at the moment are every bit as profound.