NAIROBI (dpa) – The snow-capped peak of Mount Kilimanjaro has a new adornment -a mobile telephone transmission mast.
Topping Africa’s highest peak which soars from the plains of Tanzania to 5,895 metres above sea level, Vodacom’s steel tower is not just the highest telecommunications mast in the world.
It is also a symbol of mobile phone mania in East Africa, where transmission masts are springing up everywhere like mushrooms after the rain.
“We will soon make it possible for our clients to telephone from the most remote parts of the country,” a spokesman for the Kenyan mobile telephone company Safaricom says, adding that this is already possible from Mount Kenya, the highest peak in Kenya.
Mobiles also now function on the shores of Lake Baringo in the far north of the country, and the red and white masts of the competing companies will soon dot the Kenyan savanna.
“When you as a tourist see a lion, you will be able to ring your grandmother in Europe and tell her about it,” a company spokesman says with pride.
Of course there are important telecommunications reasons for this intrusion into the East African landscape, James Rege, an executive with Vodacom Tanzania, says.
The Kilimanjaro mast, like others of its kind throughout the region, provides access to emergency assistance. The Tanzanian government decided to forego lengthy environmental studies before construction in a bid to get the facility build quickly.
“To ensure that our activities do not disturb the natural beauty of Kilimanjaro, our technicians have erected the base station at Marangu Camp some 3,000 metres below the peak, Rege told Business Day, South Africa’s main financial daily.
The inhabitants take a similarly nonchalant approach to the sight of transmission masts in a nature reserve. This has something to do with the lack of traditional fixed line networks – according to the United Nations, only 1.4 per cent of the population of sub-Saharan Africa has access to such a network.
Now the mobile telephone guarantees users instant access to the rest of the world, something they might otherwise have had to wait for for another 20 years.
Nevertheless, with only 0.5 per cent of the population in the region owning a mobile telephone, the region is near the bottom of world rankings, followed only by southern Asia.
The mobile boom across East Africa has brought with it the usual problems associated with mobile phones.
Kenyan parliamentarians are thrown out of the debating chamber if their cellular phone rings in the middle of a session, after envious parliamentarians not yet in possession of one of these manifestations of modernity voted in November last year to impose a ban.
The high rates of violent crime in Nairobi, one of Africa’s most dangerous cities, can spell death for those unlucky enough to be in the act of telephoning when a supermarket or petrol station is attacked by robbers.
“A customer caught by the robbers while phoning is risking his life,” a security guard says.
“The gangster thinks immediately that he is calling the police and simply shoots him.”
By contrast a transmission mast on the East African savannah is far less dangerous, a Safaricom spokesman says.
“Lions are not bothered by the sound of a telephone ringing,” he believes.
