Who said we could not dream?

When the NICI plan was first mentioned a few years ago, it sounded like a pipe dream. The plan was so ambitious that NICI (the National Information and Communications Infrastructure, the national ICT policy) that non-believers would have been forgiven if they had called it a white elephant.

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

When the NICI plan was first mentioned a few years ago, it sounded like a pipe dream.

The plan was so ambitious that NICI (the National Information and Communications Infrastructure, the national ICT policy) that non-believers would have been forgiven if they had called it a white elephant.

For many countries, ICT was just a convenient means of communications; as long as they had reliable internet connection, then that was it.

Rwanda’s vision of emulating the ‘Asian Tigers’ in banking on technology to pull it out of the poverty trap , by all indications, is about to be realized.

No place has played a bigger role in making the ICT  dream than in some disaffected building blocks that used to house the military academy.

These are the same buildings that gave birth to the Bagosora and his clique of officers (but not gentlemen) who, true to their word, came close to pushing the country to the brink of an apocalypse.

The former military establishment is today churning out a different kind of soldier, a tech- savvy soldier whose vision is not to annihilate innocent people, but spur them to higher heights of achievements.

The Kigali Institute of Science and Technology (KIST, as it is popularly known) was born out of the ashes of the 1994 Genocide, and like the phoenix, has learnt to soar even high.

The country now has a web of the latest Fibre Optic connections that by the end of this year will see the whole country connected.

KIST has produced hundreds of pioneers of the ICT generation that has been aptly named the "Cheetah Generation”.

These are the ones who will spur this country on the dream-come-true path.

US presidential candidate Barack Obama best seller was titled "The Audacity of Hope”, why shouldn’t ours be "The Audacity of Dreaming”?

Ends