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Nations such as Kenya, that have followed this tech-fuelled utopia, need to go back to the basics of industrialisation and real structural transformation that creates jobs, produces goods and services.
By ASHRAF PATEL
On September 1, 2016, Mark Zuckerberg tweeted to his 78 million followers: ‘Just landed in Nairobi! I’m here to meet with entrepreneurs and developers, and to learn about mobile money – where Kenya is the world leader.’
Who would have predicted that those heady days of Kenya, as a Silicon Savannah, would crash so spectacularly. July 2025 in Kenya is now ground zero of this tech-fuelled dystopian wasteland.
‘My son died like an animal!’ said Meshack Ojwang, before breaking down in tears in front of journalists outside Central Police Station in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi. His only son, Albert, was arrested in their village of Kakoth, near the western town of Homa Bay, on Saturday June 7 as he was having lunch with his wife, Nevnina Onyango. Two days later, Kenya’s National Police Service announced that Albert Ojwang had died while in custody. According to a BBC Africa report on June 17, one of the five arresting officers told the family Ojwang was accused of insulting a police boss on social media.
The killing of the teacher-blogger sparked a wave of protests in the capital after doctors debunked the police account that Ojwang had died of self-inflicted injuries. Police then fired on protestors marking the first anniversary of the bloody June 25, 2024, protests against tax rises. Media outlets report that 31 protestors have been killed by police since protests following Ojwang’s death. However, according to rights groups more than 60 people have been killed.
Triggered by anger against police brutality, the protests have spread to voice widespread discontent, especially among the youth, against anti-poor economic policies and lack of transparent governance.
The protests and the government reaction must surely cement the end of Kenya’s neoliberal tech utopia.
From arresting opposition MPs to repressing bloggers, Kenya is the prototype of an authoritarian neoliberal state that represses liberties and human rights in the name of ‘investment and stability’. Its trajectory is rooted in a particular kind of tech-fuelled deregulation of finance, and glorification of an App economy that extracts value from gig workers.
Roots of Kenya’s neoliberal deregulation model
The roots go back two decades with Kenya being the poster child of World Bank and IMF reforms, as well as big tech’s prototype ecosystem in Africa. A key to this model is deregulation; reducing the powers of regulators, all in the name of foreign investment.
This dovetailed with the rise of fintech that promised instant wealth and ‘financial inclusion’ as long as financial, consumer and labour regulators and compliance took a back seat and allowed fintech and crypto kings to run the show. But that narrative came crashing down when the Kenyan government increased the VAT tax rate in July 2024, which sparked nation-wide cost of living riots leaving over 300 protestors dead due to police action.
Gig worker and content moderation exploitation
Kenya’s other ‘success story’ – that of gig workers’ – has now become a dystopian nightmare in this deregulatory void.
Billed as ‘Silicon Savannah’, Kenya rapidly scaled to become the darling of investors over two decades, especially the tech industry which lobbied for generous tax breaks and pumped billions in start-up capital only to demand more tax incentives. Even worse, they lobbied for deregulation of the financial market to ‘enable the Fintech ecosystem’.
Deregulation has pitted the gig workers, who work as content moderators, against the mighty big tech ecosystem. In April 2023, a Kenyan labour court decided that both Meta and Sama, the Kenyan Meta contractor which had hired the moderators, could be tried for discrimination and violating the moderators’ rights. Meta appealed this ruling, but the court has now upheld the decision. This shows that African gig workers are at the bottom of the global digital economy working long hours moderating the most harrowing content, at the lowest wages and without any social or wellbeing support programmes.
In this milieu, content moderators Sama and Remotasks – who operate outside labour compliances – have become vampire intermediaries that extract value from gig workers.
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This is an extract from an exposé by Mophhat Okinyi, a former Remotasks data worker in Nairobi:
‘In the digital age, the promise of remote work has offered a glimmer of hope for many seeking flexibility and opportunity. For the workers of Remotasks in Kenya, this promise quickly turned into a nightmare when the platform abruptly shuttered its operations, leaving them stranded without their hard-earned wages. Imagine you’re working hard from home, earning money to support yourself and your family. Then, out of nowhere, you’re told you can’t access the money you’ve earned. That’s exactly what happened to a group of people in Kenya who relied on Remotasks for their income.’
Okinyi continues:
‘It all started in December 2023 when AirTM, the trusted platform used by these workers to receive their earnings, dropped a bombshell. They announced through an email that they were investigating the money earned through Remotasks. Little did the workers know that this email would be the harbinger of a crisis that would upend their lives. Suddenly, workers found themselves unable to withdraw their hard-earned cash. For many, it was a devastating blow. Months of effort, late nights, and hard work seemed to vanish into thin air.
‘As weeks passed, the situation only worsened. AirTM sent out another email announcing that workers’ accounts were being frozen because of claims that funds from Remotasks were improperly obtained. Those funds were returned to Remotasks. Workers watched helplessly as their savings disappeared before their eyes. Then, to add insult to injury, Remotasks shut down workers’ accounts for good on March 9th, 2024. Overnight, workers found themselves locked out of their source of income, with no way to access the money they had rightfully earned.
Development is about bricks and mortar – not just bits and bytes
Nations such as Kenya, that have followed this tech-fuelled utopia, need to go back to the basics of industrialisation and real structural transformation that creates jobs, produces goods and services, grows the middle-class and increases exports, thus sustaining jobs, earning foreign exchange and boosting national budgets that can reinvested in social development and infrastructure. This has been the rock bed of success of East Asian and Latin American nations that have seen them grow sustainable middle-classes and meet their United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Development is about real bricks and mortar. The ‘bits and bytes’ digital economy and AI apps are the services that enable economic development and not a substitute for the hard work of industrialisation.
Many global development experts have long warned that leapfrogging into the digital economy without the hard work of structural transformation and industrialisation was always fraught with dangers. The culture of gig work has been a boon for some only, with hundreds of thousands of Kenyans and South Asians doing the ‘dirty work’ of the digital economy in the most exploitative conditions.
Tracy Chapman’s famous eighties song, ‘Talkin’ Bout a Revolution’, certainly rings true for Kenyans and other African nations dealing with the collective burden of unemployment, high cost of living, a dire debt crisis, Trump tariffs, climate crises, and AI-driven inequalities. This time the revolution is real as neoliberal tech and Orwellian authoritarianism becomes the ‘new normal’.
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There must be an alternative!
Ashraf Patel is a Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Global Dialogue, UNISA.
