Don't Kill the Baby Before It's Born

How a Submarine Cable, a Cartel, and a Stubborn Permanent Secretary Built a Continent — and Why Africa is About to Lose AI the Same Way We Almost Lost the Internet

The Daily Pulse · By Julius Kirimi Sindi, Ph.D.

Picture the scene. It is 2008. Somewhere in Eastleigh, a young woman sits on a stool outside a kiosk lit by a single hurricane lamp, waiting. She is not waiting for a bus. She is waiting for midnight. At midnight, the per-minute rate for a Safaricom call drops from the daylight extortion of KSh 35–50 to something approximating mercy. So she waits. Across town, in Buruburu, a young man "flashes" his fiancée twice — the universal Kenyan Morse code for call me back, I'm broke. In Kisumu, an aunt sends a "Please Call Me" the way our grandmothers sent smoke signals.

Safaricom's then-CEO Michael Joseph, surveying the Friday-evening network jams from his perch on Waiyaki Way, famously diagnosed the nation. Kenyans, he said, had "peculiar calling habits."

Friends, it was not peculiar. It was a poverty tax. A tax on hello. A tax on uko aje. A tax on the simple, dignified human act of telling your mother you have arrived safely. Kenyans were not strange. The prices were strange. The market was strange. The colonial-era satellite monopolies were strange. We were merely behaving rationally inside a cage somebody else had built.

I tell you this story today not for nostalgia. I tell it because four weeks ago at GITEX, on a panel I had the privilege of listening to, Amb-Prof Bitange Ndemo told the story of how that cage was finally smashed open. And as he spoke, I realized — with the sort of cold clarity reserved for 3 a.m. — that Africa is standing at the exact same crossroads with AI. Same hesitation. Same committees. Same "regional protocols." Same death threats from a different cartel. And, if we are not very careful, the same lost decade.

So let me retell it for the policymakers in the back who are busy drafting regulations they have not yet earned the right to write.

The Cable That Was Almost Never

Before 2009, there was not a single undersea fibre-optic cable touching East African soil. Not one. International bandwidth was sold by the megabit per month at prices that would make a loan shark blush — between $3,500 and $7,500 per Mbps per month, depending on whom you bribed. We were not connected to the internet. We were tethered to it by satellite, like astronauts paying for oxygen.

The World Bank had a plan. A regional plan. Twenty-three African nations would jointly own the East African Submarine Cable System (EASSy). It was sensible. It was inclusive. It was Pan-African. It was also, by 2006, going absolutely nowhere. South Africa wanted control of the ownership model. Smaller nations bickered over share allocations. Three years passed in meetings, communiqués, and the kind of high-protein lunches that produce nothing but cholesterol and footnotes.

Permanent Secretary Bitange Ndemo from Kenya, backed by his Cabinet Secretary at the time — the indomitable Mutahi Kagwe — and with President Mwai Kibaki's quiet nod, did something that should be taught in every African policy school: they stopped waiting.

They pulled Kenya out of the regional protocol. They flew to the United Arab Emirates. They cut a direct deal with Etisalat. They structured it so that 85% of TEAMS — The East African Marine System — would be Kenyan-owned, with Etisalat holding the remaining 15%. They did this while receiving, as Ndemo confirmed at GITEX, literal death threats from the satellite cartels that were minting millions every time a domestic worker waited until midnight to call her child.

They pushed forward anyway. On 12 June 2009, the cable touched Kenyan soil at the port of Mombasa. Within months, the wholesale price of bandwidth collapsed from $3,500 to roughly $400 per megabit — a reduction of over 80% in a single year, according to Kenya ICT Board figures. The 256 Kbps DSL package at Telkom Kenya, which had cost KSh 16,008 a month, dropped to KSh 2,999. Calls fell to single digits per minute. The poverty tax on hello had been repealed.

The Part Nobody Tells You: He Was Terrified

Here is the detail from Ndemo's GITEX storytelling that I cannot get out of my head. After the cable landed — after the photographs, the speeches, the relief — he was terrified. He confessed it openly to the panel.

He was scared people would call TEAMS a "white elephant." That the cable would lie there in the Mombasa silt, unused, mocked, vindicating every cynic who had said Africa cannot run sophisticated infrastructure. So he went back to the World Bank. He pushed for subsidised broadband to every single university. He pushed for laptops for every student. He pushed for what would eventually become — in July 2011 — the Kenya Open Data Initiative (KODI), the first such portal in sub-Saharan Africa.

There was just one small problem. The KODI architecture stored government data in San Francisco, because that was where the best data centres were. This was in direct, blatant, magnificent violation of a colonial-era Official Secrets Act still on the Kenyan books from the British. Ndemo, by his own account, looked President Kibaki in the eye and said: "Mzee, I have never let you down. I will not let you down. But with this, I will build you a legacy."

Kibaki, God rest his soul, said yes.

The Harvest

From that one stubborn act of refusing to wait, an entire continent's digital economy was seeded:

• iHub opened in March 2010, becoming the first true tech hub in East Africa and incubating over 100 startups that have collectively raised more than $40 million and created over 40,000 jobs.

• M-Pesa, launched in 2007 but throttled until the cable came, scaled into the world's most successful mobile money system. Financial inclusion in Kenya leaped from 26% in 2006 to 84% by 2021. Research from MIT estimates M-Pesa lifted 194,000 households out of poverty — disproportionately female-headed ones.

• "Silicon Savannah" stopped being a Western journalist's cute alliteration and became a coordinate on Google's map. IBM opened its first African research lab here. Then Microsoft. Then Google. Then Visa. Then everyone.

• When COVID-19 arrived in 2020, Kenya went cashless almost overnight — on infrastructure built more than a decade earlier by people who had refused to wait for twenty-three countries to agree.

Demand was never the problem. Courage to build was.

Now Cue the AI Déjà Vu

Reader, look around. Tell me if this scene feels familiar.

It is 2026. The African Union endorsed its Continental AI Strategy in July 2024 in Accra — a thoughtful, ethics-forward, "people-centric" document with five focus areas, fifteen action areas, and a phased implementation timeline from 2025 to 2030. In April 2025, at the Global AI Summit in Kigali, 49 African nations signed a declaration promising a $60 billion Africa AI Fund, an Africa AI Council, regional data centres, distributed compute, and 12,000 Nvidia GPUs distributed across the Big Four economies plus Morocco. The African Development Bank estimates AI could add up to $1 trillion to Africa's GDP by 2035. McKinsey puts the Generative AI prize alone at $61–$103 billion in additional annual economic value for the continent.

Glorious. Magnificent. Pan-African. Inclusive.

Now tell me: how much of it has been built?

As of January 2026, the Africa AI Council's structure and authority remain unclear. The $60 billion has no binding contribution formula, no public capital-mobilization timetable, and no enforcement mechanism. South Africa published an AI policy draft in April 2026, then withdrew it after the AI tools used to write it hallucinated fake citations. (You cannot, as the elders say, make this up.) Meanwhile, Nigeria's National Digital Economy and E-Governance Bill, set for presidential assent in Q2 2026, has chosen as its model not the build-first instincts of the Ndemo era, but the prescriptive, risk-based architecture of the European Union's AI Act — a regulation so suffocating that 45 European companies and over 30 founders signed an open letter last year begging Brussels to "stop the clock" before the rules killed their startups.

Let us be clear about what Europe has built for itself. According to the European Commission's own impact assessment, a medium-sized EU firm of 100–250 employees now faces €193,000 to €330,000 in initial setup costs just to establish the Quality Management System the AI Act demands, plus another €71,400 to €150,000 annually in monitoring fees. A bootstrapped three-person startup building a CV-screening tool faces the same compliance burden as Microsoft. The result, in the elegant phrasing of one observer, is a "digital iron curtain" across the Atlantic — Europe writes the rules; America builds the products; China deploys them at scale.

And now, dear reader, we want to import that? We want to wrap a baby in a regulatory blanket, so heavy it cannot breathe — a baby we have not even named, let alone fed?

What Ndemo Said Next

At the GITEX panel, three sentences landed like stones in still water. I am writing them here because every African Minister, Permanent Secretary, Director-General and committee chair drafting an AI policy in 2026 needs to read them tattooed on the inside of their eyelids.

1. "Don't worry about demand. Build. It will come." (The TEAMS cable was supposed to be a white elephant. Today Kenya has six undersea cables and Big Tech is fighting over Nairobi data-centre real estate.)

2. "Africa, build together. Even the Europeans, who historically couldn't stand each other, built the EU. We have every reason — and every resource — to do the same." (The point is not to mimic Brussels' regulations. The point is to mimic Brussels' courage to integrate.)

3. "Don't over-regulate AI. Don't kill the baby before it's born."

That last one. Read it twice.

The Question

The midnight callers are gone. The "Please Call Me" SMS is a museum piece. KSh 50-per-minute extortion is a story we tell our children with the same incredulous laughter we use for matatu fare cards and Y2K. None of that liberation came from the satellite cartels deciding to be kind. None of it came from a 23-nation regional protocol. It came because Bitange Ndemo, Mutahi Kagwe and Mwai Kibaki — backed into a corner by their own ambition — chose to build before everyone agreed.

Africa stands in exactly that doorway again. The temptation, this time, is to draft a magnificent AI rulebook in committee, copy-paste from Brussels, and call it sovereignty. The temptation is to convene the twenty-three nations and wait. The temptation is to mistake regulation for action.

So I ask you, readers, the question I cannot stop asking myself:

What are we building today — or are we still waiting for 23 countries to agree?

The cable came home in June 2009 because somebody refused to wait. The baby will only grow if we feed it before we fence it.

Build. The demand will come. It always does.

About the Author

Dr. Julius Kirimi Sindi is a global expert in research funding, policy impact, and donor relations. With extensive experience in analyzing philanthropy, business, and science funding, Dr. Sindi fosters sustainable and inclusive research ecosystems. He has facilitated international business relationships across Africa, Europe, and Asia. His upcoming book, "The Blueprint of Life Well Lived," explores successful strategies for navigating complex business environments while achieving sustainable growth. He is the author of an upcoming book "How Societies Change and Why Most Reforms Fail," which introduces an African Theory of Scaling rooted in emotional truth, political safety, and system coherence. I hope to publish "CHANGING THE BATTERIES - How to Renew Purpose, Growth, and Connection When Your Light Grows Dim" as soon as possible. He is also the creator of The Daily Pulse, a widely read LinkedIn newsletter offering sharp, human-centered analysis of policy, politics, and development.