Seeing how quickly Trump - the world's most powerful man - has been deplatformed and sent into digital darkness, you have to acknowledge the foresight of the Chinese when they blocked American digital giants and instead created their own alternatives.
Companies from social media giants to payments processors like Stripe and PayPal to platforms like Android, IOS, Amazon and shoppify have stopped providing services to trump his businesses and those that support him.
What would happen if the US government asked Google to block Google services in Kenya? it would be chaos on an unimaginable scale.
The recent actions of American tech giants should make everyone aware of the powers they hold in today's digitised world. That the man with nuclear codes can be sent into digital oblivion should worry everyone. Now imagine what the US government can do to an entire country.
As Africans, we should copy the Chinese model and create entire ecosystems out of reach of the West. Our own app stores, our own Facebooks, twitters, YouTubes, reddits et all. Our own Internet and the web basically.
Unless we do that our prosperity, security and privacy will always be dependent on the whims of politicians sitting in Washington and coders in Silicon Valley.
