If you write a regular column for any publication at all, one thing you should look forward to hearing from your friends and family is that “You think you know everything”.
The point here is that easily accessible and affordable internet services makes it possible for a columnist to research and subsequently comment authoritatively on just about any topic that may come to his attention.
More than 20 years ago when I first wrote this kind of column, internet access was both limited and somewhat expensive. So, you depended on your memory of past events if you were to write a decent analysis. And in general, you could only write about what you already knew.
But with things as they are now, if I was offered an adequate financial inducement to write about cosmology, or “string theory”, I am sure I could manage provided I put enough time into researching the subject online.
All the data you need to be able to write on any of these abstruse topics is easily available provided you have a smartphone, tablet, or laptop and access to moderate speed Wi-Fi.
The problem though is that not all online data support the same conclusions. And so, you do need to have some little prior knowledge in some cases, if you are to make sense of what you find online.
In any case, this week I want to write about a topic that I know very little about: what we in Kenya usually refer to as the ICT sector but is globally just referred to as the “tech sector”.
Consider the fact that if you go by our local news sources, then Kenya is on the cusp of a major tech-sector take-off, which will create tens of thousands of jobs. Optimists even talk of millions of jobs.
Barely a month passes but there is some “tech hub” being officially “launched”. Or some prominent personality is urging young Kenyans to seek employment in the tech sector.
But turn to global news sources and what do you find?
Well, to quote just one reliable news source, “According to NPR, the big tech companies like Facebook parent company Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and Google together have eliminated at least 51,000 jobs. It is estimated that in 2022 alone, over 120,000 people have been dismissed from their job at some of the biggest players in tech – Meta, Amazon, Netflix, and soon Google – and smaller firms and start-ups as well."
So how exactly are we going to create those tens of thousands of jobs, in a sector in which hundreds of thousands of competent tech people are no longer needed by their employers and are being dismissed?
Then we had the New York Times tech columnist, Farhad Manjoo, about two weeks ago, come out with a column which had this provocative headline: "It’s the end of computer programming as we know it: don’t bother learning to code."
He poses the question, “Wait a second, though — wasn’t coding supposed to be one of the can’t-miss careers of the digital age?” And then goes on to explain that given the rapid advances in Artificial Intelligence, to quote one expert, “the conventional idea of “writing a program” is headed for extinction, and indeed, for all but very specialized applications, most software, as we know it, will be replaced by A.I. systems”.
This brings me back to the question: is it realistic to expect that young Kenyans are headed for a bonanza of tech sector jobs, as so many of us seem to believe?
This is an existential question for us as a nation, if you consider that in all the 60 years since independence, we have only managed to create one new economic sector which barely existed in 1963.
This is the hospitality sector in which we inherited a tiny niche elite form of tourism in the form of “big game hunting” and went on to create the mass tourism sector which now brings us roughly a million visitors in a good year, and also employs about a million Kenyans directly and indirectly.
Other than that, we remain what we were at independence – an agrarian economy: a nation of small-scale farmers.
