The Consequences Of Oscillating Between The Stone Age and The Information Age

Give a 6-year old child an old cell phone - of the mulika series and he will play with it as a toy. But give him a smartphone and he will immediately know what to do with it. Similarly, get a millennial kid behind a manual vehicle and they will be clueless but behind an automatic transmission vehicle, they are like fish thrown into the water, they swim effortlessly.

Those are just two examples of relatively modern times that epitomize the discomforting nature of out-of-date contraptions.

The irony of life is such that the more we advance technologically, the more likely it is for us to lapse back to the previous stages, and all in an instant.

It is now official that there has been more information developed and shared globally over the past two years than previously and going backwards to creation. Thanks to information technology.

In the stone age, a solar eclipse and the overwhelming effects of alcohol were the only known blackouts. Today, in an electricity-dependent world, blackouts momentarily return us to stone age times. Without electricity, we cannot access information, use our home appliances and much more. We lose our competitive edge and more importantly, the speed necessary to cope in today's world.

There are just four ages - Stone age, Agrarian, Industrial and the Information age.

The stone age was dominated by hunter-gatherers. Bows and arrows brought success.

The agrarian age had the hoe as the tool of success, later, mechanisation took over.

The industrial age had machines that required a huge labour force to keep the factories running.

Today, much as the information age has made nonsense of all earlier advancements, it has failed in one thing. It has not yet given us a full-proof exit from the earlier ages.

A power outage momentarily takes us back to all or either of the earlier forms of life. We often rely on the aphorism that: "not knowing something off head is of less importance than knowing where you can find the information when you need it". The power outage that I experienced in the middle of an urgent assignment recently, completely destroyed any truth in this school of thought because I could not access the internet when I needed to.

Every age requires a totally different set of skills to survive. Too many changes from forced oscillations require the use of more time, money and energy to compensate for the anomalies. This is why you buy a generator even if you are connected to the grid because you know better. Unfortunately, the generator set takes you back several thousand or millions of shillings because of the inherent failures to prompt service and make timely replacements in a rickety power grid.

The same goes for health insurance which is big business and the salient reminder of a failed public system despite taxes getting paid. Denial of access to health facilities on account of lacking medical cover condemns one to pre-independence options that are still available at a fee.

Bad roads remind us often that the technology in the contraptions that we drive never had such roads in mind. They were designed for the conditions in those countries that make them. What we do here is improvisation.

A life filled with improvisations is one of toil on account of the kind of failure that got the president to admit that Kes. 2 billion is stolen from our coffers daily.

Every leader that steals your money is the exemplification of a winch that steadily pulls you backwards into stone age times. What is meant to lead you away from backwardness keeps you right there so that they alone enjoy the fruits of the information age.

Now our oscillations between the stone age and the information age are aided by our choices between good, disguised as bad and bad, disguised as good. Even the most intelligent fall prey to the choices made at the ballot.

So stone-age leadership only brings us a stone-age lifestyle. Every stage has its effective leadership style. If your boss treats you like a farmhand, then his style is best suited for the times gone by in the agrarian age. You don't have to behave like an industrial age native to prove your industriousness, we have new metrics to guide us on that today.