ARTICLE by
ROBERT YAWE
hard talk
Mining The New Oil When it comes down to it, Kenya does have data. The problem is getting people to look at it and use it to make decisions or even projections. A few days before penning this article there was a major drop in the value of the technology stocks on the NASDAQ, the US equivalent of our NSE, which resulted in Apple losing its position as the most valuable company. It was replaced by Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer. It was quite ironic that when the world is obsessed with green gas emissions, which is mainly caused by the burning of fossil fuels such as crude oil, is selling like crazy especially after the lull of the COVID lock-down period. What this means is that even with access to petabytes of data on the effects of fossil fuels, we seem to be unable to use it to convince the masses of the need to reduce its use. I had assumed that the lock-down had given us time to reflect and work towards a new reality, but it seems it was not to be as we have reverted to our old ways of burning fuel like it was about to become extinct. Could this new reality be a sign to those of us who have been celebrating data as the new oil that we have not yet become efficient enough in processing data into useful enough information to convince us to get off crude oil? The speed with which we moved back to polluting the environment was perplexing. An indication that we have been selling more of a hype narrative than one which is data driven. We have been selling a ”heart story” similar the one on how computers would turn the office paperless resulting in the saving
of the Amazon Forest. On the latter, we forgot that there exists a multi-trillion-dollar industry behind the sheet of paper and that it extends from tree seedling nurseries to entire power plants with a myriad of humans in between. Could we have made the same mistake when demonising fossil fuels? Closer to home, the belief that data is what drives our economies is now questionable. But more so because we have not taken the time to share the data. Instead, we have been regurgitating information we gleaned from a slide during a closed industry event. It is time that we started having more broad-based conversations on the future of business. In a similar vein, Kenya is currently in the throes of her national election, which takes place every five years with the last six elections increasingly utilising ever more technology. The
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immediate to last election had an interesting court demand that requested the literal opening of a cloud server. As I listen to analysts discussing the forthcoming elections as well as making wild predictions, it does not escape me that none of them has actually looked at the historic election data we have accumulated over the past 20 years, but instead base all their analysis on some sample report by so called pollsters. Apart from the election data, we also have in machine readable form, the past three census data available to anyone who cares to access the relevant authorities website. If we were truly a data savvy nation, most of those giving predictions would be data scientists and not political scientists. Until that is the case, I will look at the commodities indexes first before the technology ones.
