Fiscal constitution of Kenya’s digital future

In May this year the President William Ruto announced that the billion dollar data centre planned by Microsoft and G42 at Olkaria, Naivasha couldn’t proceed as designed, because turning it on would have meant switching off power to a large part of the country.

The first phase alone was to draw 100 megawatts from a grid whose peak demand already presses against its installed capacity.

Whatever one thinks of the decision, it told us something uncomfortable. The investment was announced, celebrated and timetabled before the most basic questions about what it would take from Kenya, and what Kenya would get in return, had been answered.

Technology is not new to us. It has been reorganising our economies, our work and our social lives for decades, from the mobile money revolution onwards. What is new is its ubiquity. Kenyans now talk to chatbots, borrow from apps whose algorithms score their creditworthiness in seconds, and file taxes through systems that decide, invisibly, who gets flagged for audit.

is a risk. All of this runs on physical infrastructure, on data centres and cloud services that consume land, water and electricity, and almost none of that infrastructure is ours.

Our data crosses borders to be stored and processed elsewhere, then sold back to us as services. If the coming decade of African life will be computed, the question of who owns and hosts the computation is a question of economic sovereignty, as consequential as the ownership of railways and ports was a century ago.

This is why I resist the notion of a foreign technology company arriving, building the infrastructure, collecting the incentives and owning the asset.

My research team has spent this year, under our Project TERRA work on technology, equality and regulatory risk assessment, mapping out data centres, their ownership, energy and water demands, and the tax treatment they enjoy to establish what has been given away, and to whom.