The first is the prescribed standard: dig, bury the cable underground by land, so that when the road crews come through — and they will — the fibre survives, or by sea. We are familiar with it. One day, the earth is suddenly churned in your neighbourhood, trenches framed with rubble running parallel to your path, silt mixing with tarmac if it pours. Or, sometimes, the odd fibre cuts a rug right across the road. The second way is faster, cheaper and above ground: string it in the air, on poles, on trees, and lace it with a dollop of hope.Both methods deliver connectivity from day one, but only one is still delivering it in year five. “You can still string fibre in the air, on trees and get the same output. But you’re compromising on availability and reliability. Yes, it’s fast to do it on a tree, but it’ll be more costly in the future in maintenance, reliability, and customer satisfaction.”And that is how an engineer thinks about infrastructure and policy. It is also, Wamola will state, how a continent should think about digital transformation, yet too often, doesn’t. Yes, we know Africa has never lacked ambition. The policies exist. The strategies, laid out. The summits, annual. Missing, however? Implementation. The will to execute. As Head of Africa at the GSMA, the global body representing 800+ mobile network operators, Wamola sits at the precariously challenging yet exciting nexus between operators and regulators, investors and ministries, the networks that exist and the 960 million Africans under their coverage but have yet to go online. The stakes, cliched as this will sound, have never been higher. Because AI will not keep.Wamola’s route to policy is atypical. African regulators and policymakers come wielding law degrees more often than not. She approaches it as an engineer. Six years in Safaricom’s technology division as the first and only senior woman in its leadership, she literally planned and run the networks we angsted over every Friday evening with our peculiar habits, savoured, then took for granted over time; bars on a phone screen. “Having the engineering background, and having worked with a mobile network in the technology division, you get to really understand how a service is delivered. And that helps you appreciate the constraints. Because at the end of the day, the service is costed.”Every infusion into a network, from the licence to the diesel in the generator, ends up somewhere in the price a customer pays for a gigabyte of data. So does every policy decision. Take licensing. When a licence is tied to a specific technology, an operator pays twice for every generational upgrade: once for the real engineering work of new equipment on the towers, and again for a fresh licence, often hundreds of millions of dollars, just for permission to use the new technology, even on kit they already own. The undercurrent cost repeats with every leap from 3G to 4G to 5G, a double whammy flowing through to the price of data. “With technology-neutral licensing, it doesn’t matter whether I use satellite, fibre, 3G or 5G. You just get one licence, and it makes it cheaper.”Narrowing the coverage gap tower by tower, cable by cable to roughly nine per cent of the population living beyond the reach of 3G-and-above networks, coverage almost seems like the easy problem. “When you look at the usage gap (people who have access to the technology but are not using it), then we start looking at other barriers,” she says. Digital literacy. Device affordability. The absence of content in languages people actually speak. Close to a billion people stand on the paradox of an inactive side of that line: covered, but offline. Those people are your unbanked customers, unreachable citizens, digital channel users and everyone you build for but are just out of reach.When looking at African digital transformation as a whole system, Wamola identifies the point of failure not as spectrum, or fibre, or even skills. Instead, she says, it was narrative. “It’s in making it make sense. Digital transformation means you’re moving from something to something. From analogue to digital, from obsolete technology to new technology. It means there will need to be a business case. And making it make sense means somebody, at the end of the day, will pay for it. Because nothing comes for free.”That failure compounds. Africa has not made the case convincingly enough to investors, who must keep capital flowing into a brutally capital-intensive sector. Nor to customers, who somehow believe connectivity is exempt from economics. “In all the other sectors, prices are going up — fuel, food, school fees, hospital costs. The mobile industry is the only sector where the expectation from customers is that the price should go down. Does that make sense? The same fuel that runs your network went up in price, but somehow the data price should go down. The data ran on fuel. The data ran on a network.”A network under repeated assault. “Before, people were stealing copper. Now they’re stealing solar panels.” The panels installed to make rural sites sustainable. Each stolen battery, each severed cable, is priced back into somebody’s data bundle. It also means we need a come-to-Jesus moment. The network is a shared good. COVID proved it when it “became an essential service for life to continue. Mobile money runs on networks.” It contextualises redundancy, disaster recovery and security. “All of that is an investment. If we create awareness and shared value in society, some of those costs can be minimised because we’re having ‘an Ubuntu discussion.’”
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