Governments across Africa have did their best in the 20th century and into the 21st to make putting up landlines as difficult as possible. So many Africans went straight from having no phone to having a mobile phone, a technology far harder for governments to thwart than landlines.
Marian Tupy writes:
Almost all African countries had state-owned and state-run telecommunications monopolies until recently. Some, including Kenya and Zambia, still retain a monopoly on the provision of landline services. No wonder, therefore, that the number of fixed telephone lines in Africa peaked in 2009 at 4 lines per 100 people. In Tanzania, there is just one landline per 100 people. The vast majority of Africans, in other words, never had reliable means of calling a doctor or a loved one.
The rise of the cell phone changed all that.
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