Landlines are still prohibitively expensive to maintain in Kenya resulting in an enduring attraction to mobile phones. Paul Mason argues in this programme shot for Newsnight's GeekWeek, that Kenya, and the rest of Africa could skip a whole step in development by taking advantage of the possibilities advanced by mobile telephony.

Recently, when the Kenyan national exam results for both primary and secondary schools were released, it was possibly for the first time to get exam results in a matter of minutes via text messaging .Soon it will be possible to send money through SMS and the service provided by M-Pesa (PDF), while already a farmer can check the price of commodities in various markets on their phone in real time.

In a few months, Safaricom will launch M-Pesa, a service, sponsored by Vodafone, that allows users to transfer and receive money via the mobile telephone. With more than 50% of Kenya's population living in poverty, Mason contends that this money transfer capability will allow for increased money flow as more cash will be rendered liquid. He also reports that once Vodafone takes M-Pesa global, cash remittances from Kenyans living abroad will have a great impact on the economy. At present the Kenyan government approximates that Kenya receives about Ksh. 58 billion in remittances from Kenyans dispersed around the globe.

Mobile telephony further proposes to revolutionise Kenyan agriculture . In the programme Mason meets with a Kenyan farmer who uses his mobile phone to find out in seconds the prevailing prices of his produce in different markets of Kenya cutting out the middleman completely and thus saving costs.

While in Nairobi the BBC crew pay Kibera a visit. Kenya's largest slum is described as a short drive from all the glamour of the city, as its abject destitution is compared to the bustling sheen of commercial Nairobi. A community organizer there speaks about measures to forcefully move the residents of the slum and the effectiveness of mobile use in rallying together the inhabitants of the slums when a section of them are under attack by the eviction enforcing 'Youthwingers.'

Elsewhere in the show a Maasai school teacher talks about the effects of mobile phone on her community, proving its reach and ending the reporters' expectations that they would find an outpost of technological backwardness at the bottom of the Rift Valley. She speaks of telephone conversations with her roaming herdsmen and informs the surprised reporter that over half her villages inhabitants are armed with mobile phones. Mason wonders if mobile phones have had an impact on literacy among the villagers. She is equivoal about her response but adds interesting anecdotes on how spouses are now arguing over unknown callers, and checking through call histories to discover cheating spouses!