Africa's technological revolution seems the real thing. But it is just like Kenyan Cheddar: it has all the capacity to excite and seduce - only ultimately to madden and disappoint

It's 4pm. Sitting at my desk in the shiny glass tower housing the Kenyan newspaper where I work, I'm feeling antsy. The flow of stories to edit has dried up, and I would dearly like to read my e-mails. In theory, this should be easy, as every computer screen comes equipped with broadband internet access. In practice, the blue line indicating successful contact edges slowly halfway up the gauge and then freezes. I haven't been able to read my e-mails now for a day and a half. "It's the rain," the technicians tell me.

I could try the cybernet cafe across the road, where the born-again manager keeps a CD of tinny evangelical music playing on a permanent loop. But experience has shown that when internet access at the newspaper is down, most of Nairobi's cybernet cafes are similarly afflicted. I dig out my mobile phone to give the cafe a call to check. Then I remember that my battery is flat. I couldn't charge it because the power went off last night and hadn't come back on again by the time I left for work. What explains the power cut? "It's probably the rain," says a friend.

It's at moments of frustration such as these that I find myself thinking about Kenyan Cheddar. Cheese is not normally a big part of the African diet, despite the vast cattle herds whipped across the continent by nomads. Milk rots too fast in Africa's climate; storage is a headache. So when westerners who have moved to Nairobi pay their first visit to a Kenyan supermarket, they are delighted to see the golden packets of locally manufactured Cheddar gleaming on the fridge shelves.

"Fantastic! Cheese!" they think.

It's the same sense of relief, gratitude and excitement that most visitors feel when they make their first trip to Nairobi's bustling city centre. They gaze at the gleaming high-rises, with their marble-lined lobbies and uniformed doormen. They note how young men and women in smart suits jostle past one another, briefcases under their arms. Every street corner seems to boast either a mobile phone shop or a yuppie sandwich bar, every alleyway a cybernet cafe. This feels like a modern African city on the move, and all the more impressive for being so recent.

When I lived in Nairobi just five years ago, e-mail was still a novelty. There was only one cybernet cafe and nothing sent from its terminals ever reached its destination. Mobile phones had only just been introduced and the network was so patchy that most of us stuck to landlines, even though it could - on a bad day - take 20 minutes of dialling to get through to a London number. On a really bad day (that pesky rain again), I would set up my satellite phone - a piece of equipment meant for war zones - and use it to talk to friends in the suburbs a few miles away.

So who can blame us today when our hearts beat a little faster at what seems like a technological revolution? "Fantastic!" you think. "I'm going to be able to keep in touch with friends, send my articles back to the New Statesman, even read the international newspapers on the internet!" And then it goes and rains. Or put it this way: then you open your packet of Kenyan Cheddar.

Kenyan Cheddar may look wonderful. But it has all the taste, aroma and consistency of India rubber. It's so bland that it hardly qualifies as cheese at all. And Africa's technological revolution has the same capacity initially to seduce and excite, only ultimately to madden and disappoint. Instead of gazing up at the skyline, try looking down. Then you will suddenly notice the shattered paving stones, the pools of fetid water, the broken-backed shoes and battered cars.

If countries such as Kenya are modernising, they have left it disastrously late in the day. African leaders delayed things as long as they could because the state-owned telecommunications companies they were being pressed to privatise were fantastic money-making machines; and authoritarian regimes are allergic to free information. However impressive, a cripplingly

expensive mobile phone network

and intermittent internet access - both completely out of reach to millions of rural poor - do not constitute a revolution.

It's just a small, belated step forward, but one that won't close the widening gap with the rest of the world.

The bustle on Nairobi's streets is the frenzy of desperation, not the dynamism of steady achievement. The first day that I walked to work, I got a glimpse of the grim reality behind the glossy fantasy. During the 15-minute stroll I was approached not once, but twice, by young men carrying zip-up cases and mobile phones. Each politely introduced himself, gave me a quick summary of his qualifications and asked - without much hope - whether I could find him a job. Their shirts were neatly pressed, their English impeccable, but the business cards they handed over were handwritten and their briefcases empty but for copies of that day's newspaper.

Not Cheddar, not the real thing, just India rubber.

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