If Kenyans cannot be creative, then let’s just copy paste and change the font colour

Importing products and services

A country that cannot produce products adequate for local consumption and even add value to meet international standards necessary for exports will be forced to be a net importer, and Kenya is one such country. Although in aggregate economic terms Kenya is a net importer, she has done well in the Agricultural sector where not only has she satisfied her national food demand for decades (except for a few instances where she had to ask for relief), but she has managed to export some agricultural comedies like tea, coffee, flowers, fish, sugar and others.

But experts forecast that this will change by 2050. According to these experts, as reported by The Standard, “Kenya is among African countries likely to starting [sic] importing more than three quarters of food required to feed the population by 2050 due to effects of climate change”. We can blame climate change and a whole lot of other factors for this sad scenario, but the underlying problem is our inability to be creative in supportive areas of research and development, technology, manufacturing and general invention/innovation.

As an agriculturally endowed nation, one would expect the headline of that Standard Article to have read, “Kenya to be one of the few global  food suppliers by 2050 due to effects of climate change”, but no, Kenya will grow her net import portfolio to include importing food supplies to sustain the ever growing population. Where will we get the funds to sustain such imports? Clearly, being a net importer of products and services is not sustainable thus not an option.

Go back to the drawing board and rethink our creativity

For us to continue existing alongside other nations, we have to create products and services that can fund and surpass our sustainability as a nation. To do this, we will require of our scientists, technologists, engineers and artists to aggressively rethink their creative potential, methods and delivery channels. Kenya, as any other country, must churn new, unique, viable and worthwhile products capable of surpassing local demand for net exports.

But if history is to teach us a lesson, the already developed world will always be two to three decades ahead. This is because the mere fact that the developed world has been able to secure resources and use the same to train their talented thinkers to continue in the thinking spree greatly disadvantage our creative potential . For instance, whenever I think that I have come up with a totally new way to look at the world in philosophical sense, a simple Google Search always proves to me that someone had thought in a similar manner many decades/centuries before.

Basically what I am trying to say is that if we want to take the route of creativity, then we must be ready to tail the developed world, and this will again lead us to the problems of net importation; thus not an immediate option for quick economic growth.

Copy paste and change the font colour

This is the only option we have left, to steal. Has controversial as this recommendation might sound, fact on the ground is that there is no developed nation/continent that achieved economic progress without stealing. Europe not only stole resources from places they colonized, but continue to steal both resources and brains that would think creatively from the very nations to date. They steal ideas (MPESA is rumoured to have been stolen from a Kenyan), they steal the brains thus causing brain drain, and then they steal the patent/copyright materials by the brains they already stole. Uncyclopedia lists several ideas that America stole.

There is a  letter that went viral back in 2012 titled You Lazy (Intellectual) African Scum written by Field Ruwe, a US-based Zambian media practitioner and author with a B.A. in Mass Communication and Journalism and M.A. in History” (a letter that you MUST READ if you haven’t done so already). Alongside offering insight on how IMF, World Bank and other Donors come to Africa in “large boats” to “fish [our] minerals and … wildlife and leave [us with] morsels [and] crumbs”, how the white man gets “what he wants” and we “get what we deserve”, and how African thinkers spend time “in bars quaffing”, how African ” intellectuals work from eight to five and spend the evening drinking”, the letter offered this million dollar worth of advice, ““Wake up you all [lazy Africans]” “You should be busy lifting ideas, formulae, recipes, and diagrams from American manufacturing factories and sending them to your own factories. All those research findings and dissertation papers you compile should be your country’s treasure. Why do you think the Asians are a force to reckon with? They stole our ideas and turned them into their own. Look at Japan, China, India, just look at them.”

Yes, we have to steal, and do it fast but smart. The smart part is what I mean by changing the font colour. Samsung stole iPhone idea from Apple and made their own Galaxy range of smartphones, and they have become a force to reckon with in the technology landscape. China has stolen, not even in a smart way, but through piracy and manufacture of counterfeit products, and this has enabled them to surpass Japan in GDP, hence becoming the second richest country after USA.

China has copy pasted Facebook, Google, Twitter and WhatsApp (WeChat is a Chinese version of WhatsApp) making the American products redundant in China (see Facebook statistics in Africa). Kenyans have also tried to copy paste these products, but due to factors that are not beyond control, they tend to give up too early. Iborian, a product by Kachwanya and friends, was a copy pasted Facebook product that received huge liking by several East Africans including me, but due to a number of technical and related challenges, the product was discontinued. The early success of Iborian shows that copy pasting can actually work in Kenya.

Related: What African developers need to do to offer ‘African solutions to African problems’ prescription)

What should we copy paste? How do we change the font colour?

As advised by Walter, the white man who spoke so strongly to Mr. Ruwe, we should copy paste virtually everything as we don’t have the time to be creative. We must set up agricultural, car, phone, value add, mineral, oil, music, film and a lot more production facilities on our soil based on templates stolen from the developed world. Even if we have to manufacture counterfeit products like Samsnug, lphone or even iPhome, whatever it is that we have to do, we have to do it now.

To avoid being caught, we have to change the font colour, not from blue to dark blue, but from black to white. Just as WeChat has been coloured so differently from WhatsApp, we must learn the art of colouring the stolen products so that the originator of the technologies can’t take us to some international court. We have to be as smart as Samsung, for they cleverly stole the iPhone idea, and have gotten away with it with a few legal hurdles. I want to see more of Kenyan Tinder, Fiber Optics Technologies, Space Exploration, Oil Drilling, Mineral Mining and Researches in areas such as AI, not based on original ideas, but based on what is already going on elsewhere. We can’t just afford to sit back and watch, can we?

If Kenyans cannot be creative, let’s copy paste and change the font colour. By the way, whoever can steal an idea and getaway with it, is more intelligent than the original creator.

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