The controversial ICT Practitioners bill 2020 is a scam by a few cartels to control the ICT Biz.
On Wednesday the Kenyan parliament revived the ICT Practitioners bill 2020, which seeks to establish a legal framework for training, registration, licensing practices, and basic standards for ICT Professionals in Kenya. The Bill that has been rejected and amended thrice before, is a ticking timebomb.
Here is the truth why all techies, from cyber owners, application developers, and ICT Managers to those working for top technology companies should wake up and join the efforts to kill the ICT practitioners bill before the president signs it into law hurriedly. Part of the bill suggests that, if you practice ICT and you don’t have academic papers i.e., a university degree or diploma, then prepare to be fined, jailed, or sanctioned for not being registered with the institution being proposed.
While this could work for some professionals in other fields like law and accounting, where innovation is almost static, the game is totally different in the ICT field, which is very dynamic and volatile.
Academic papers are just a formality in this field. In fact, by the time one completes their degree or diploma in school, you find a lot of progressive development out there already. Right from top tech giant owners such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and many more who have excelled in this industry, to cyber owners from my village town called Kikima, who earn a living out of what they do, is enough evidence that papers should not be used as the minimum threshold.
Besides that, how many ICT and computer science degree holders do you work with who cannot even install windows or even a minor upgrade on their machine? Yes, they are working as ICT Managers in these top companies, thanks to their papers, but they lack the hands-on skills, surviving by outsourcing or delegating their work to their juniors, who have minimal or no formal training in ICT.
In sum, developing a legal framework to control the industry is incredibly fine, but we cannot allow it to be controlled by a few people seated in the boardroom with no clue whatsoever about what happens in the field.
Seemingly, Kenya already has a Computer Misuse Act and a Cyber Crimes Act that are equally functional laws in regulating the use of technology in Kenya. We cannot allow duplicate regulative structures.
No! Tumekataa!
