The IT buzz in town is impossible to miss, isn’t it? Officials are aggressively advancing the idea to enable government functionaries to embrace the inevitable change with courage and demonstrated skills. The state luminaries in attendance at the November 17/ 2025 event hosted by the Ethiopian Artificial Intelligence Institute are living testaments of the road map we all are required to file behind. According to news bulletin reported by ENA, Artificial Intelligence is poised to make “intervention” in ranges of economic and public affairs including but not limited to agriculture, service, health and data mining.
If you are an Outsourcing Company Executive the news does whet your appetite. Bottom-line, the correlation between Outsourcing business and ICT is something like what lawyers call a sine qua non factor. Thus, while surfing the net to get the general sense of the business in the horn of Africa context, time after time I came across the English language comparative advantage we have as natives of the Sub-Continent. You aren’t gonna believe this but even ‘the accent’ makes one more desirable than another. For instance, the Outsourcing Association of Kenya tries to bank on the ‘Englishness’ of Kenyans to sell its services across the wide spectrum of the globe. I kinda felt sorry for the recently departed celebrated author James Ngugi who had ditched English for his native Gikuyu-not even Swahili.
Hate it or like it Outsourcing business is a little unpatriotic. Nothing makes international border as pores as offshore outsourcing. So much so that it is capable of bending your old stubborn habesha will to adopt or fake a ferenji accent for your employer to advertise its service accent free or accent-neutral. In your defense all you gottta say is, ‘it’s the language, Stupid.’ Incidentally unlike the rest of the colonized world for some reason Ethiopians speak accent neutral English. They are intimidated by and are loathe speaking the language but those who do, speak it without any particular country specific accent.
That is right, it is the language. Remember James Carville? Surely you are familiar with the expression ‘it is the economy, stupid’ if you are pushing past forty or beyond. The reason I say it, the presumed ‘expletive’ was in vogue even here in Ethiopia among top tier opinion makers and leaders featuring articles on Fortune and Capital. In the event you didn’t know James Carville alias the Raging Cajun-a reference to his Louisiana heritage- was Clinton’s campaign manager or advisor known for his brashness of character albeit being such world class top notch strategists. They say that catchphrase had defined the economics illiteracy of GH Bush’s team.
Perhaps, you are wondering, okay; we get it what is the downside to AI? The way I see it, though we cannot afford to underestimate its importance, we will have to come up with means to mitigate its ‘dominance’ and tendency to autopilot everything. The overarching AI dominance reminds me of an episode from old cartoon movie. When we were kids we had watched how the house keeper tried to substitute good old Tom with Mechano, a mechanical mouse-catcher. Her reasoning was impeccable-no fuss, no fur and no feeding. She taunted Tom “…we are in the machine age and stuff, Tom”. But Mechano turned out to be vicious and unruly. No emotional intelligence, no pity no nothing. That was back in the 30s or 40s; I kinda think AI is our version of Mechano. Mechano- I mean AI- tends to dull human intelligence and renders him clever in half measures.
In the bygone decades when the nearest one gets to making a quick reference on a given subject was reaching for the Encyclopedia Britannica or in the later days Encarta Dictionary, students push the limits to learn.
The funny thing is even such tendency was frowned upon as some kind of intellectual dishonesty. You see you were supposed to tap the idea from the original source-the reference book! We have come a long way from that stoically brutal era of academic conservatism. These days we are dealing with the smooth talking AI solutions for every problem. The other week a colleague of mine was telling me how AI is invading academia like the invasive Enboch weed suffocating Lake Tana.
The veritable challenge AI is posing is while it is helping and advancing the ‘writing’ skill it is killing the ‘speech’ and ‘reading ‘ aspect so much that instead of saying ‘walk the talk’ to we are required to demand ‘talk the word’. God Bless.
