I was asked to speak at the Renaissance Capital Investor Conference in Nairobi. On my way there yesterday, I got caught in the traffic caused by the striking taxi drivers. Since my little speech was going to be on the political situation in Kenya with the impending Presidential election, something quite profound struck me, which I made part of the speech.
The insight is this: even as we continue bickering and spending a whole year speaking about politics and doing little else, the world is not stopping. Changes are coming and they'll impact us in a way we're not ready for, and the taxi strike is part of this. While we may deride the striking drivers for not accepting technology with all its disruptions, they are maybe the last voice crying out for an economy they can understand and manage.
Let me put it simply. The Kenyan economy has always had a tiny, formal element (what people used to call 'white collar jobs') and a huge informal element where everyone else operated. Young men who could not find a path to the formal economy would often apprentice themselves to people such as - you guessed it - taxi drivers and, as long as they could acquire some sort of jalopy, they could provide for themselves. Uberisation, with its demands for certain kinds of drivers and certain kinds of vehicles, are closing this path off.
Think of where else the world is intruding on this economic/ employment model. In Kenya (and most of Africa), the farm has been the natural labour sink. If you couldn't - or wouldn't - make it in the city, you stayed or went back to the farm. Your productivity was low and was restricted by the manual nature of your labour, but you could go off for a day and, at the very least, produce enough to eat and (largely) stay out of trouble. Now, however, climate change means that the productivity and predictability of agriculture have plummeted. You could dig for a day and not be able to produce enough to eat. And that is if you're lucky to have a piece of land to work. Concretisation of farmland around cities, increasing pressure of people, often means that there is NO shags to go back to.
The third, and back to motoring, is another type of apprenticeship. Especially for young men, if you showed a bit of aptitude and interest, you could apprentice yourself to a mechanic, learn the trade (beginning as a literal 'spanner boy'), and be guaranteed that at least the headmaster's 504 was available for you to work on once you were good enough. If your vehicle overheated anywhere between Kisumu and Nairobi, you could count on a village mechanic in any hamlet along that road to sort you out (and I distinctly remember this very scenario happening to us in 1985). Now, however, engine bays are black boxes, which even experts dare not tinker with. Much worse when hybrids and electrical vehicles become commonplace.
Think of any industry of this kind. Furniture - people are importing whole containers from China, rendering craftsmen obsolete. Salons and the hair industry - go to YouTube and learn how to manage your own natural hair, and reduce your visits by half, leaving salonists idle.
Point is, we're not immune to these tides and developments, and no amount of politicking is going to hold them at bay. Few if any politicians and parties are grappling with these issues (and note that I have avoided newfangled terms like 'the fourth industrial revolution). Yet these issues will lead to more educated, jobless, desperate and disillusioned young people, and we all know what that can lead to.
And I was ten minutes late to the venue of the speech, by the way.
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