Envisioning the future of work (2)

YOMI MAKANJUOLA, PhD

Yomi Makanjuola earned a doctorate in Materials Engineering and Design and worked primarily as an Associate Partner at Accenture in Nigeria. Currently, he is an author and freelance consultant in the UK. He is the author of the book, “Nigeria Like A Rolling Stone”. “His most recent book titled “iProverbs: Wisdom Rebooted” is available on the Amazon platform at https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0D31W2P2W. He can be reached at 9yoma9@gmail.com

Ostensibly, the world of work’s bifurcation between advanced and underdeveloped countries could be attributed to a persistent technological divide. As ancient cultures evolved, those that mastered time conservation, physical measurements and navigation, such as the use of a map and compass, got a jump on traditional societies whose practices remained imprecise or slapdash. While the former began to harness the power and complexity at the boundary of order and chaos, the trailing cultures stayed rooted in muddle and inertia.

Over time, the age-old definition of “work” diversified from subsistence farming to the fashioning of products and services enabled by science, technology, engineering and mathematics, colloquially known as STEM. Today, over 80 percent of our planet’s eight billion people own smartphones, each phone exponentially more powerful than the guidance computer onboard the 1969 Apollo 11 spacecraft! It is rather incongruous that even the underprivileged in economically-backward countries can afford these digital marvels. Although the smartphone screen is a miniature window through which people everywhere now experience daily life, the technological gap between makers and crawlers is stubbornly entrenched.

To illustrate, at the end of WWII in 1945, the leading Axis powers, Japan and Germany, had been partially nuked and carpet-bombed back to the Stone Age. Nevertheless, by leveraging American magnanimity, both nations managed to recover economically within three decades. Their extraordinary rebound was facilitated by a strong commitment to STEM, and the technical ramp afforded by apprenticeship schemes and vocational training. Circa 1960, dead in the water nations like South Korea, Singapore and Malaysia proved that it is possible to shift gears through various stages of development within two generations, by emulating the German Dual Education Model.

By contrast, Nigeria’s post-colonial workforce developed a ludicrous preference for impractical, often worthless paper qualifications. Disdainful of deferred gratification and exactitude, Nigerian workers are not reputed for making anything propulsive from scratch. In droves, farm workers migrated to urban centres in search of low-skill service jobs, artificially boosted by oil revenues. Furthermore, religious ideologues not only frowned on the dissemination of “Western education” (ignoring the fact that a Muslim, Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, was dubbed the “father of algebra”), but simultaneously promoted child marriage. This engendered a population explosion that projects Nigeria becoming the world’s third most populous nation by 2070.

Therefore, using Nigeria and sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) as archetypes for the world’s least advanced economies, what does the future hold for their labour markets, based on Nigeria’s current trajectory?

Post-independence, Nigeria has operated a largely statist economy characterised by policy volatility, graft, red tape, and underinvestment in infrastructure and human capital development. Broadly, high production costs have limited Nigeria’s ability to industrialise meaningfully and to compete with import flows. Historically, conventional jobs in education, health care, energy, financial services, retail, telecommunications, construction, transportation, and such, have anchored a huge domestic market.

To ensure food security, Nigeria’s current reliance on massive importation must give way to mechanised, agro-allied clusters that offer attractive employment opportunities. Housing is another basic necessity, which would require an army of well-trained bricklayers, tilers, plumbers, electricians, among other artisans. Tourism, unfortunately, is largely untapped due to official negligence. For SSA as a whole, dependence on extractive industries, like petroleum exploration and mineral mining, will not dissipate overnight. While Nigeria’s overreliance on hydrocarbons as an export-earner will decline, mining represents a source of mass employment, if properly exploited.

To lay the foundation for a modern work culture, Nigerians must learn to respect time and to expunge the unscientific mindset that “near enough” is good enough. Mental rigour must be instilled during early child development, followed by compulsory primary education that emphasises arithmetic, writing and reading. Thereafter, introduction to basic STEM subjects should open up avenues for innovation, entrepreneurship and self-employment, aided by new technologies like additive manufacturing. No doubt, Nigeria will produce its fair share of knowledge workers, including media, sports, fashion, movie, and other soft skills professionals, but this small cohort will pale in significance relative to the multitudes that could end up without marketable skills.

From a global perspective, as advanced technology tailwinds buffet the innards of developed economies, integration of value chains with poorer economies for low-cost manufacturing and service sector-oriented outsourcing could crumble, thereby hampering job creation. Scaling back on automation in SSA might increase the volume of high-touch tasks and manual labour, but this has the drawback of lowering productivity and hindering competitiveness. More realistically, access to robust digital infrastructure that enables virtual work in developing countries will be indispensable.

Given such a murky and rather suboptimal outlook, what are the likely worst-case scenarios facing Nigeria, with its ballooning population? One touted outcome could be the emergence of an authoritarian central government inclined to establish regimented “work camps,” in the guise of coercive social reengineering. Another ugly scenario envisages Nigeria disintegrating, which might trigger the rise of Mad Maxian warlords and the nightmare of legions of marauding, poverty-stricken refugees.

Rather than lurch into a failed state, Nigeria still has a fighting chance to turn its fortunes around, by taming endemic corruption, embracing the rule of law, transforming its huge human capital into a regional asset and, concertedly, defying the doomsayers. 

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