Kenya's key export was coffee but now it's cheap labour that is abused overseas

Did you miss last Friday’s “double-whammy”?  No, we aren’t talking about the mixed message “ODM@20” celebrations at the Coast.  No, it isn’t even about President William Ruto’s latest development tour, this time to the Sh850 billion economy that is Lower Eastern, or Ukambani, region, where he pledged (or launched?) Sh110 billion in “development” without timelines.

We refer today to a biting double piece by the New York Times on, to put it mildly, the travails of Kenyans working in Saudi Arabia.  In today’s nanosecond times, the headline is now the whole story, so we had two.  First, “Kenya’s key export used to be coffee; now it’s cheap labour”.  Then, “Kenyan workers get abused abroad.  The President’s family and allies benefit”.  Wow, and wow again!

There is plenty to ponder in the two articles, beginning with the assertion that the current Ruto administration “acts as an arm of a staffing industry that sends poor Kenyans abroad in droves”.  That politicians (and senior officials) have capitalized on this “boom”, and government has “rolled back worker protections, while maximizing industry profits”.  That the player we call government has basically “positioned Kenyans as the cheapest, least protected workers in the marketplace”. 

To repeat, there is much more dynamite in the articles, but the sad image that emerges is one of this administration as an opportunistic cabal of greed at every turn.  If you think about it, the only thing missing was nobody was called a “slave trader”!  Here are two final snippets to ponder. 

First, the claim that one out of ten registered staffing companies are owned by persons connected to the administration, including current senior officials. Apparently, only the people who are in “good government jobs can get it” (this business).  Second, do you remember our local Saudi “showhouse” where potential workers were to be trained?   Well, when the New York Times’ investigating team visited the house, they found most “training appliances” hadn’t even been opened!  By the way, in the wider scheme of things, training seems to be viewed as an extra, unnecessary cost.

Kenya isn’t a country, it’s a business, right?  Is this how we will progress from third to first world? 

This “Kenya is a business” image is not new.  Our economy has always ridden on the back of crony capital; the whole “economic restructuring” point of the bottom-up economic transformation agenda was to overturn this.  Yet today, every Kenya Kwanza initiative seems to have a questionable back-end; from materials suppliers and contractors for affordable housing, to service providers under universal health care, to importers of supposedly subsidised farm inputs.

On that Times’ Saudi story, there are many specific questions to be answered, and, as said before, there is an established machinery of government to respond.  So far, we see diversionary replies on side issues relating to worker registration, and terribly coincidental news about new pay scales.

This doesn’t mean we can’t ask different questions.  Here are a couple of general reflections.

First, how is our three-pronged jobs strategy really doing?  Remember, kazi kwa ground (local work); kazi majuu (overseas work) and kazi mitandaoni (virtual/on-line work).  On the first, we now hear about 600,000 new jobs in housing which Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) is yet to confirm. 

On the second, we are told about 400,000 new jobs overseas, including Saudi, in the past two years.  That would be an astonishing 10 per cent growth rate since 2022 given an estimate that up to four million Kenyans live and work abroad. 

On the third, we also hear about 200,000 or so new jobs.  This week’s State of the Nation address might clarify the data.

But, second, and this is the point of the Saudi story, it’s more than quantity, it’s about quality too.  At what point do we get officials to pay equal attention to the quality of these jobs abroad?  Of course, officialdom currently seems to argue that a bad job overseas is better than no job locally.  Remember too, that quality isn’t just about overseas jobs – thinking locally about those housing jobs, are they sustainable in the long-run (or more correctly, how can they be made sustainable?)

A third angle speaks to the first Times headline; the matter of cheap, or low-cost, labour exports as an economic strategy.  The short-term official argument, beyond dealing with the youth unemployment problem, speaks to the potential to grow remittances and skills as others have done.  The real question crudely boils down to if we are pursuing a South Korea strategy or a Philippines one.  That the former used the “relief” from exporting labour to build their own industries; while the latter didn’t.  In other words, whether or not our strategy is sustainable.  It is the reason so much noise is made about why we aren’t building our own economy for jobs.

Or put differently since government doesn’t create jobs, are we unable, or unwilling, to create the local conditions and enabling environment for serious private sector investment and job creation?  It is easy to think of what we are doing as reactive necessity, not proactive strategy. 

The final angle is a little unusual.  Although the government doesn’t actually create jobs, what does the Ministry of Labour actually do on a day-to-day basis?  Their website claims six functions — labour market information, labour dispute resolution, occupational safety and health, trade union registration and, interestingly, productivity and competitiveness (centre) and foreign contract authentication.  You will be extremely lucky to find current data in any of these areas. 

But you will find all manner of ongoing surveys and other input processes with outputs unseen.  And you will not find, as elsewhere, the sort of tripartite to multi-stakeholder social dialogue ministerial role that stops Kenyans being mistreated by foreign employers abroad and at home.

Hey, don’t even dream about a US-style Bureau of Labour Statistics around here.  Yes, the place where you can access data using multiple data retrieval tools and apps, or access charts and tables.  That part of their Ministry of Labour that has markets on their toes with real-time information, while also taking the time to engage in highly nuanced labour market research and surveys.

Indeed, it is impossible not to get the feeling that the Labour ministry is the missing part of our puzzle; not the first point of call for serious answers now being provided by other departments of government; not the central repository of labour and employment data before we get to KNBS or World Bank documents; not even a think tank on our important jobs and livelihoods questions.

Do you get the impression that this ministry is as broken as it is the broker in these Saudi labour woes?  Because, thinking about it in a wider context across government at large, for Kenya to be a business, not a country, what we might think is incapacity (broken) is actually incentive (broker)!