By Nando Media
February 1, 2000
Davos - South African President Thabo Mbeki called Monday for an international initiative to keep Africa from missing out on the global Internet revolution. Speaking at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, he said there was a real risk that the continent's poverty could be compounded by lack of access to online revolution.
The situation "requires a conscious intervention, by somebody, maybe by an organization like International Telecommunication Union, to ... ensure that the African countries are not left behind," he told a press conference. Those who argued that technological progress would arrive due to market forces were wrong, he said. "The market will not correct this," he said.
He said the continent was too busy coping with more basic problems such as poverty, malnutrition and AIDS to put resources into developing Internet access. "You will not have .. participation by African countries in the involvement in this technological revolution (when) we don't even have the electricity infrastructure which make possible the access to this technology," he said.
Mbeki cited figures showing that entire African continent has just 1.7 million registered Internet users - 1.6 million of whom are in South Africa. "That tells the story," he said.
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