Kenya claims to be a technological paradise, yet we are (some would say rightly) wary of technology. Kenya runs a very labour-heavy economy, especially in the service sector. When you walk through the typical supermarket, you may encounter dozens of supermarket employees, from the guys stacking the shelves, to people pointing out the location of various items, to cashiers, bag-people, supervisors, customer service agents and managers. A typical petrol station has at least six people within sight, from the ones who guide you to a pump, to the people who actually fill your car up, to the person (typically a security guard) who helps you pump up your tyres.
However, imagine this scenario: Your supermarket offers you a 5% discount if you agree to check your own goods out and bag them yourself. How will they achieve the required savings? Building a smartphone app to enable this is a doozy: You can scan barcodes with the app, and if Safaricom ever opens up its MPesa API sufficiently, your virtual shopping cart can be directly connected to it. The supermarket doesn't need employees to stock shelves, as this can be done by the vendors themselves. Stock thefts (by customers or anyone else) can be mitigated using technology (a simple RFID chip, which is becoming ever cheaper, and a scanner by the entrance does the trick). Thus, a supermarket branch that may now have fifty employees may end up making do with five.
Same thing with petrol stations - the world over, people pump their own petrol, pay and drive away, and all the required technology to match payment to dispensed petrol, avoid dishonest customers and the like, is in place and is in use. Again, imagine a company that offers a 5 bob per litre discount to people willing to pump their own petrol: how many would take up that offer?
We carry on as if we would never agree for this to happen, because of the socioeconomic disruptions it would cause, but if we agree that customers would obviously be delighted with the cost savings, can we agree that the thought is not farfetched? If we were to go through another wrenching period for the economy and companies decided to save money, or if there was a disrupter a la Uber (remember people saying that Kenyans would never accept that level of tech?), the flip from a labour-intensive economy to a tech-intensive one would happen in a blink.
My fear is that no one is preparing us for that scenario. Our economy is geared towards absorbing large numbers of low-skilled workers, who accept low pay and non-existent benefits, in exchange for at least having a paycheque at the end of the month. If this implied bargain ends, what then happens to the millions of people in low-level, low-skill, low-paying jobs? We tend to not pay attention to these conversations when they occur at the international level, because the language is of post-industrial economies (we were never an industrial economy to begin with) and newfangled ideas like 3D printing and the 'fourth industrial revolution' (when we were never part of the first three). But at the same time, we claim to be a service-led economy, yet what that simply means is that we have hundreds of thousands of people doing very fragile jobs for rather little pay.
How do we start this conversation? How do we re-design our country, our economy and our society for the brave new world about to hit us like a tsunami?
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