AYABONGA CAWE: Lessons from India: Cheap data critical in unlocking digital economy

President Cyril Matamela Ramaphosa has been inaugurated and we are waiting to hear who will be in his executive. A thousand kilometres from here, there would be similar novelty in the Indian parliament — Lok Sabha — following the resounding victory of BJP leader, Narendra Modi.

In both election campaigns, the messages have been similar. Jobs, the economy and geopolitics feature prominently. Far from being “epoch-making” it has been a signal of a gradual realignment of politics in both nations.

In SA, it has been a wake-up call for the ANC: in India, it has been the death knell for their ideological counterpart, the Indian National Congress.

The once dominant Congress is now a shadow of its former self, a lesson that liberation movements across the post-colonial world, are not endowed with a divine and immutable claim to power. Governance, agility and economic management matter.

In India, Congress is associated with the interests of the elite, dynasty politics — Rahul Gandhi, its current leader, comes from a long line of former prime ministers — and discredited centre-left politics to whom the failures of market liberalisation and globalisation have been attributed.

Gandhi’s competitor and victor in the race comes from a less distinguished but culturally dominant Hindi background and his appeal has been based on a Trump-esque trope of unlocking the “greatness of India”. In a world of identity politics, and a return to fantasies of cold war superpower status, this matters.

This context, for our president Ramaphosa, is relevant insofar as the similarities and differences illuminate a path to action responsive to the electoral promise of “growing SA” ’: responsive not just to the social media outrage machine but to the day-to-day politics of mundane life, in a shifting local and global environment.

Firstly, from the tech-city of Bangalore last week, on a visit with 14 South African media and tech startups, I was able to observe and draw insights from the changes in that society, that run parallel to the palace politics unfolding. A few insights are worth mentioning:

The six-week drama of electioneering was the largest of its kind, anywhere. With a voters roll of 900-million people, one would think, as the pressure placed on the IEC after our own elections, that electronic voting would be a perfect solution. It is not, and has been one of the most contentious themes in the elections. There have been reports of hacking and theft of electronic voting machines (EVMs) that have indicated that the electronic route is certainly not without its own challenges.

Secondly, Bangalore was a perfect display of what the start-up ecosystem in India has done to its macro-economy. With more than 390-million active internet users, it is unsurprising that the digital early-stage ecosystem has created 10-million jobs and spurred on 30bn rupees (R6.2bn) in investment in the last 10 years.

E-commerce giant, Flipkart has 15-million users daily, and 55% of these come from rural and semi-rural towns, mostly accessing the platform through mobile phones. This speaks volumes about the kind of enterprise and investment activity that having ubiquitous data access has facilitated.

Data is cheap and can be found across the urban-rural divide. This is crucial and has spurred on manufacturing, distribution and other related value chain jobs across the entire region. In this case, broadening access to data has not been a reluctant advance for large telecoms companies, or a charitable case for agitation and advocacy, but a macroeconomic imperative. The results show this.

SA may not have the scale economies enjoyed by India and China, but the latent potential of the digital economy is as crucial a consideration, if not more.

The litmus test for many in the digital startup ecosystem will be whether the sixth administration will create an environment that democratises what is increasingly becoming a basic right and a conduit to the structural change that will allow us to modernise, democratise and transition key product and service markets.

In the absence of this, even the impressive numbers of young people in the parliamentary benches and technocracy will be cold comfort for the content creators, manufacturers, distributors, influencers and other digital pioneers, who hold the key to unlock the jobs of the future.

• Cawe (@aycawe), a development economist, is MD of Xesibe Holdings and hosts MetroFMTalk on Metro FM.