MUGA: Myths about Kenyan youth cannot be taken seriously

Kenyan mythology has for some time been dominated by the claim that the large numbers of young Kenyans currently arriving at adulthood, our so-called 'youth bulge', is a good thing.

And the frequent conclusion of those who talk or write about this, is that we stand to receive a 'demographic dividend' from this youth bulge.

Along with this favourable assessment is the equally frequent claim that Kenyan youths are 'tech-savvy'. And that this creates for an environment in which innovations are bound to thrive, especially as Nairobi is a recognised 'innovation hub'.

All this would be very good news indeed if it were true.

But is it really?

First, I would point out that in any country at all, those who have the capacity to innovate – the skills needed as much as the drive to work relentlessly towards their goals – are invariably a tiny minority. A minority so small that it has a negligible impact on employment statistics.

So, if we are trying to look into job creation, we need to consider instead the services and products that these entrepreneurial innovators have been able to come up with, which might evolve into new businesses.

And on this, the record of success is rather thin. If we take an arbitrary base of measurement and say that for any such ICT-based innovation to be taken seriously, it has to be used regularly by at least one million Kenyans, we find that most of the innovations that qualify were invented either in China or in the US.

Our only outstanding success in this field is Safaricom’s M-Pesa. It remains our gold standard as an innovation that created many thousands of jobs and improved the lives and livelihoods of millions.

But M-Pesa’s cash transfer service has now been in existence for over 20 years. And so far, no new success of similar potential has appeared on our horizons.

The other issue raised by this mythology is that having large numbers of young people within a country is an inherently good thing.

I would argue that this depends entirely on the country’s ability to create economic opportunity for these young people.

Everything I read about the new age of artificial intelligence suggests that the advances expected in AI, automation and digitisation will lead to fewer jobs, not more. There will always be things which AI cannot do. But where it works, it raises productivity by making it possible for every worker to do more with the aid of machines.

Given that ours is still a predominantly agrarian economy, consider this: there are already remote-controlled mini tractors available, which can effortlessly do the work of roughly a dozen strong men.

If a day comes when the prices of such tractors have dropped low enough to make them as affordable as the ubiquitous boda boda motorcycles, this will dramatically enhance farm productivity. But it would lead to far fewer farm jobs, not more.

So, all this talk of our beneficial 'youth bulge' and its correspondent claim to Kenya having an advanced ICT ecosystem which will empower young entrepreneurs to 'innovate' our way to national prosperity, cannot be taken seriously. It is but part of our national mythology; it consoles us in the face of hundreds of thousands of families having invested in their children’s education, only to find that no jobs are available for these well-qualified youths.

Our problem is not at the entrepreneurial level. It is at the policy level: consecutive leaderships have simply not found a way to grow the economy at a pace that enables it to absorb all these young people into suitable employment.

This is not a uniquely Kenyan problem. I don’t know much about the economy of the UK, but I keep reading how both the Labour Party and the Conservative Party (the two leading political parties in the country) have not been able to come up with policies that will pull the country out of its current state of unacceptably low economic growth.