murchr wrote:No gov has forced anyone to use any platform the regulations that have been set were formulated by the sector together with the gov. Safcom and Equity are just early birds catching worms. Those other laggards will complain later.
It's difficult to identify 'laggards', and it's equally difficult to have a restrictive market where 'laggards complain later'.
A digital world needs and perhaps must be open, and free for all. If the government appears to favor some market players over others then even the favored must fail to reap the the biggest rewards in a digital and cyber world, the continuous increase in productivity per capita. Why? Because in a traditionally competitive world, an organization will prefer monopoly. But monopoly in a market where information is ubiquitous and ideas innumerable and vast systems of networks create events, is doomed to failure.
'Collaboration' is the key word if there's to be any movement to a 'digital' world. And growth of a digital system entails the planting of the right seeds.
For example, let's take the question you asked: 'What's the value of cash transactions in a matatu?' A friend needs to go to town. But he's a hustler, and though he has fought hard and bought a phone, he has no money on his digital account. Can I afford to give him fifty shillings via m-pesa? The value of a cash transaction becomes the social cost plus the transfer charge.
Not unless every event has high present value and is registered monetarily, meaning there are no pure consumers, then one will always prefer cash to 'digital'. So the way to go for the government, if they want a fully digital society is to encourage a cultural shift to 'prosumption' combination of production and consumption taking place at the same time to all citizens. This implies massive structural and functional changes in government and society as a whole. Therefore the other seed is restructuring government to prosumption and universal collaboration.
A cashless society won't need a public transport system. The technology involved is enough to allow teleporting, and a host of other technologies that an 'analogue government can't even afford to tax. So clearly the government is sabotaging itself by coming up with such regulations.