It was Labour Day, but the workers are going, going, gone

What you need to know:

  • There seems to be some serious moves this time to hold talks between Museveni and FDC opposition politician Kizza Besigye (or is it between NRM and FDC?).
    But one senses it will mostly be political dialogue if it happens, and at best it could end in a lukewarm power-sharing pact.

Monday was Labour (May) Day, the occasion when they honour the hard working people and toiling masses of the world. The thing with Labour Day, is that it could be the first one to become irrelevant, because of technological change.

Most workers whom we honour on May Day, are the ones most likely to lose their jobs to automation. There tends to be a lot of comfort in Uganda, and most of Africa, where agriculture/farming employs the most people, that it will take many more decades before workers begin to lose jobs to robots. Kenyan tea pickers used to think that way. How wrong they were.

In recent months, they have been protesting against the introduction of mechanical tea pickers. This will soon be the fate of the tea pickers – and sugarcane cutters - in Lugazi.
Just over a year ago, Creativity versus Robots, a report by Oxford University academics and UK-based non-profit research and innovation group Nesta, said growing of cereals and fibre crops are near-certainties to be taken over by robots.
The two occupations are among the least creative, and are therefore prime candidates for automation.

The two jobs had a computerisation probability of 100 per cent and 91.2 per cent respectively. Another Ugandan occupational mainstay, raising dairy cattle, was also up there, with an 89.3 per cent chance of computerisation. Mixed farming was also on the hit list.

As this column noted before, in South Africa, a giant company is already deploying driverless tractors, run from control rooms far away, to work fields. There is no human to take a lunch break, or whom the neigbhour can bribe to dig for him too on the side.

Precisely because we have to contend with issues like corruption, and a cultural context where if you are a good citizen you have to take off days to go for funerals, automation is particularly tempting.

Early this year, there was report of a Chinese factory that replaced 90 per cent of its human workers with robots.
The result was mind-blowing. Production rose by 250 per cent and, defects dropped by 80 per cent.

The factory used to be run by 650 employees, and had gone down to just 60 people. In the future, they expect only 20 people, working with robots, to be doing the work of the previous 630!
The reason these things should exercise our planners and policy makers, is that they are not driven solely by investors seeking higher returns.

First, because wages have generally stagnated, the lives of most citizens aren’t going to improve through income growth. It will come from reduced cost of living, which will come from availability of cheaper quality products, which in turn can only come from greater productivity and efficiencies from industry and farming.

That level of productivity is not going to come from more deployment of human labour, but automation.
Secondly, resources like land are getting limited and very expensive with growing populations. To get more out of the limited land, we need to throw technology at it.

Recently there was a report on farming robots. You unleash them on a vast field when you are going to sleep. They work through the night, and when you wake up, all your fields have been planted with seed, or weeded.

Overnight, the job for which you would have hired 30 casual labourers to do for a week would be done! That means you are able to bring produce cheaper and quicker to the market.
Unfortunately, for us, our solutions would also be the things that kill us. What will happen to the millions of people who make their livelihoods on the land?
That should be our big issue.

There seems to be some serious moves this time to hold talks between Museveni and FDC opposition politician Kizza Besigye (or is it between NRM and FDC?).
But one senses it will mostly be political dialogue if it happens, and at best it could end in a lukewarm power-sharing pact.
While that is important for lowering the political temperature, the more defining national dialogue should be about Uganda’s future and the challenge of technology.

Such dialogue could agree on the education reforms for the times, how to fund innovation, worker retraining, how to pay for transition, and how to help the few small creative pockets in various sectors that we have (yes, they are there), to grow into bigger things.

Because, if I had $2 million to invest in a farm in Tororo today, believe me, if you visited you wouldn’t find any heroic human workers on it.

I would automate the damn thing from the start. I know of at least 10 upcoming Ugandan entrepreneurs who have even more radical views about the deployment of technology on the land and everywhere else.

Onyango-Obbo is the publisher of Africa data visualiser Africapedia.com and explainer site Roguechiefs.com. Twitter@cobbo3