This archive report was first published on 20 July 2020.
On a sunny day in December last year, the Nation Media Group held its inaugural Kusi Ideas Festival in Kigali, Rwanda. The event aimed to peer into the future of Africa, envisioning the continent's trajectory over the next 60 years.
Speakers at the festival presented a plethora of ideas, some of which seemed like a utopian dream, while others highlighted the perils that progress often brings. Little did they know that a global pandemic, COVID-19, was just around the corner.
One of the festival's keynote speakers, Strive Masiyiwa, founder and chairman of Econet Wireless, shared an intriguing idea. He had invested in a tech start-up that created an Uber-like platform for tractors, allowing farmers to link up with a central database and order a tractor via SMS. This innovation, he noted, was particularly valued by women farmers, enabling them to circumvent social norms that might otherwise hamper their ability to hire a tractor.
Another speaker, Aidan Eyakuze, executive director of Twaweza East Africa, painted a vivid picture of Africa in 2079. He foresaw a future where the vast majority of Africans earn their living through multiple micro-tasking (MMTs), with every job unbundled into its component tasks. This, he argued, would leave only those unbundled micro-tasks requiring social intelligence, creativity, or dexterity to be done by people.
According to Eyakuze, incomes would be kept low by the relative scarcity of tasks requiring the human touch. The unrelenting competition for tasks would be both stressful and socially divisive, with people competing against each other all the time. Even marriages would have renewable term limits, 'in case someone better comes along.'
Arthur Muliro, a representative of the Society for International Development, gazed into a future where Africa would be truly borderless. He envisioned a scenario where Libya, once a war-torn country, would welcome other Africans and allow them to settle. The peace deal that had come after a decade of civil war would be holding, and there would be new optimism, in part boosted by the arrival and expansion of new migrant groups who had settled there and were helping rebuild their adopted country.
