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Down on the corner, sitting around doing nothing... It isn’t as easy as it looks, actually

Monday September 26 2016

I once overheard a busload of Americans musing to themselves about the idleness of the youth that they observed lining the road along which we sped.

As you probably well know, under every shade tree in every settled space there is always a handful of people sitting around looking like they are doing nothing at all.

And by people I mean men, because let’s not even try to deny that free time and public chilling is a luxury that few women enjoy thanks to the dual demands of productive and reproductive labour.

In the cities it is likely to be young men sitting around and that’s what our visitors were confounded by: How can so much productive labour be static during the workday? Isn’t this part of the reason why these folks are not developing as fast as they “should?”

It didn’t seem like the best time to raise the topics of colonialism and the contribution of African labour to the wealth of the American nation through the practice of slavery, so for once I wisely kept my thoughts to myself. When tickling a donor, one must be on their best behaviour.

As an expert on idleness and its various practices, I didn’t quite agree that what we were observing accurately be described as such. Under the shade trees and at intersections I saw young men who weren’t particularly interested in spending their lives hoe in hand. They were clearly trying their luck at urban “employment.”

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If you gaze keenly into the kijiwe, the kijiwe will gaze keenly back at you, trying to suss out what manner of service they can offer you in exchange for a buck or two. And indeed as we sped by I could feel the probe of the stares; after all, curiosity and opportunism have a particular visual weight.

Still, there is no disputing that my busload of Americans were right about the man-hours of labour being lost as long as these young men were not engaged in a measurable, economically productive activity. This is an issue that has been tormenting my government for over a decade now.

Tanzania is young, and young Tanzania is struggling to find gainful employment. So you can imagine my excitement when this administration declared that Tanzania would transform itself into a “country of factories.” Go industrial revolution! Factories need workers and Tanzanians need work!

Except that... well. Um. This is 2016, not 1700. I don’t know if we should hang the nation’s hopes on a Tanzanian industrial revolution because of Asia, especially China, and because of automation.

China has been squeezing the air out of bigger economies than ours by being able to offer any product the world desires at an irresistibly low price. With automation, the need for warm bodies in factories is decreasing and this trend will continue: The future is robots. Worse yet, with the rise of Artificial Intelligence technologies, machines are starting to outstrip humans in areas that have serious implications. Recently, some AI thingy outperformed medical doctors in detecting cancer from data provided – is this good or bad for the medical profession?

While the world is far from not needing human labour anymore, it seems to me that we are inching towards the post-scarcity society that Karl Marx had predicted would emerge from the automation of labour. And while post-scarcity sounds nice on the surface, it introduces a very difficult challenge for humans: What happens when you decouple work from remuneration?

You know who knows what that is like in a visceral way? The unemployed. Is there anything more exhausting than seeking your daily bread in the most unpredictable of environments, toiling at trying to break into some form of reciprocal relationship where you can offer your muscle, brain or talents in exchange for pieces of paper that get you housing, food and clothing?

Hustling is very different from idleness; it is the ultimate form of self-employment in a society that is hostile to those who can’t get a foothold in a slippery and ever-changing labour market. If the biggest and most industrialised economy in the region – Kenya – can’t find a way to keep its young employed, does Tanzania really have the magic bullet to the problem?

Maybe. There is always room to hope. We may even surprise ourselves by industrialising for real, and producing primary and secondary school graduates who are employable in an industrial setting rather than an agrarian one.

But in the meantime, I say to my kijiwe people: You know what’s up. Keep hustling. Idleness is what happens when you have given up hope and as long as you are lining the streets keeping an eye out for any potential deal, then clearly you haven’t.

Let the macroeconomists figure out how to make this “work” but don’t let them distract you from the business of living.

Elsie Eyakuze is an independent consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report, http://mikochenireport.blogspot.com. E-mail: [email protected]

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