How to be unemployed in 2024: Part III; The Kenya Kwanza’s Jubilee playbook

When Dr Patrick Njoroge’s Central Bank of Kenya pulled out the weekly advertisement of treasury bonds sales, they were by extension following this Jubilee playbook to weaken the media.

At that time this was a strategy by the Uhuru Kenyatta administration to control media narratives. He withdrew advertisement from media houses creating Government Advertising Agency- GAA, and piled up pending bills into the billions. Subsequently profitability in the media plummeted.

With falling advertisement revenue, the media has gone through a rough decade, forced to cut down on workforce and shrink to become sustainable.

But while the media were the first victims of the withdrawal of state largesse, today, the rest of the economy is witnessing the same trend.

After driving consumption over the last decade on tenderpreneur led overpriced wheelbarrows and concrete, the government has run out of loans to splurge. They have been forced to cut spending drastically, accumulating more pending bills and cancelling projects.

In the half year to December, the state only spent Kes70.4 billion, just 7 per cent of the Kes1 trillion collected in taxes on development with 93 percent going to recurrent expenditure mostly debt.

So the Kenyan economy can learn some foresights as to how this trend affected the media.

To survive, the media industry had to resort to annual job cuts that made employment erratic and unpredictable. The fight to survive sparked the most vicious editorial Royal Rambo that hurled out some of the most talented journalists I have seen in my time for no fault of their own.

With cost cutting, it was not a matter of if, but when the ‘shoka’ an industry shorthand for the annual, sometimes two rounds of indiscriminate job cuts swinging like an axe to slice you off.

As a business journalist tracking the swing of financial trend-cycles like a Ray Dalio economic machine and trying to communicate predictions by the economists to investors, you have to ask yourself if you are taking your own advise, ( and Charles Darwin’s). It is not the strongest of the species that survives, not the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”

The media had not only suffered from fiscal shrinkage, it was also at the throes of unprecedented disruption from the fifth industrial revolution, technology. Coupled with the rise of misinformation and under attack for its gate keeping role, the future did not seem rosy for an institution too bureaucratic to evolve.

Read Also: How to be unemployed in 2024: Part II; Flying blindly

I joined the profession just a decade ago rising through the ruts from cub reporter chasing Patrick Mayoyo’s fire engines into Kibera, covering city government and crime, before I found a niche in business.

I reckoned if I could spend the next couple of years experimenting on digital media at a donor funded media organization, I would acquire the set of skills, that the media of the future would require. So I moved from Business Daily, Kenya’s leading economic paper for a short stint at Debunk Media where things didn’t quite work out.

Job loss

A year ago at a time like this I was a bundle of woven up anxiety when I lost my job at that media start-up in Nairobi. I was anxious whether I could support my family and afford that nan my son Manyala loved so much.

A few months later a cousin called me and told me he had also been cut off and the organization walked off his more than a decade career like he was as replaceable as a geko’s tail. By the time the year closed I knew of two more friends who had been pushed out of job for one reason or another. In a country where there are just 9 per cent of the working population are on formal jobs, when 70,000 out of a possible 3.19 million employees are fired from their jobs, you will know at least one or two of them, especially if the trend keeps up.

I realized a lot of people will find themselves jobless during this economic downturn and maybe they could a learn a thing or two from my humble journey.

Read Also: How to be unemployed in 2024: Part I: Why the oracles are silent

Research has shown that a job is more than a source of income. It is a fundamental social role providing a source of identity, self-concept, and social relations.

The greatest thing I learned being jobless over the course of last year was that that my identity was not fixed to the eight to five job and that one can re-invent themselves out here.

One thing is I have always seen myself as a writer from when I was Mayenje Primary school and I have learned and practiced the art for quite a while.

So a good place to start if you find yourself out of work could be in trying to find something they are good at, what we called idle passions as children and pursue them.

The real lesson is to return back to the state of learning, new technologies and ways of improving very basic things like the way our relatives farm and sell their produce, then try to make some money out of it.

For me, I felt that there was a great opportunity creating a community of freelance journalists and cross selling well executed premium content. It would be an online content house, Maudhui House; and we could share resources to contain costs and attain faster economies of scale.

Kenya’s media is not githeri, for a lack of talent, I have worked with incredible colleagues especially at Kenya’s business desks which have always been very well organized. Over the years they have created a weekly cycle of the country’s most incisive stories on Kenya’s economy carried as magazine inserts in the dailies on Tuesdays.

Over the years of cost cutting and budgets, this segments have been gutted and ignored, yet I felt that such a model replicated online could be a game changer. It could provide the sort of analytical content that could justify a paywall.

It is always wise to seek counsel of those who have seen further than you and been in rooms where sizeable money decisions are made.

Mr Deepak Dave believed I could pull off an African Substack. If we could build the future of newsroom as the first collaborative platform for freelance journalists we would be able to assemble some of the most interesting analytical stories from journalists being kicked out of newsrooms or going months without pay.

If we could sell content for as little as Kes20 each. Then by paying the writers 90 percent of the sales we could make freelance work sustainable.

I knew that with more journalists out of employment than those currently within the mainstream media, there would be an explosion of fragmented digital media, but they would struggle to be sustainable.

Truly truly as night follows day I recently got offer through a friend of someone selling a pretty decent business blog.

The vision was a minor success especially on the lessons we picked up, but also because we managed to convince a hundred people to pay for good storytelling. With no marketing budget and a difference in alignment with my partners, I was unable to see it through, but it is an idea whose time will come.

To survive, I did a lot of writing gigs for anyone who needed work done. The lesson here was take as many jobs as you can because most will not pay, and those that will the pay will be delayed. Try to space out those pending bills of pending bills because cash flow will be one of your greatest challenges.

One more thing, you must adapt and learn new skills. Personally, I finally outgrew Twitter snobbishness and joined Instagram and TikTok and learned that you do not need special equipment to go live, just your phone and interesting content. I also learned how to design on Canva and that young people know so much about technology, and they are willing to teach us.

You must also be willing to admit that a lot of chance got you where you were in the first place; and that triumph and disaster as similar imposters. Everything is just a phase and this cycle too will pass.

I took a chance on a path that led me back to surprising places, back to Kisumu city where I had lived as a child; I would be roughly the same age as Manyala, my son, when we moved here in the 1990s.

The doors also led me back to Seamless Frames, a business idea we came up with my college mate Emmanuel Oyier back at Maseno University where I took my undergraduate course in media.

Maybe it was time the stars aligned for the creation of a voice for the East Africa region and where better to host it than on the shores of Lake Victoria. But first we are modest, we are hoping to build a regional voice, for the Lake basin region with over 10 million people which constitute about 25 percent of the population in Kenya.

And that is how Orals East Africa; at the hut of the story begins.  

Lastly I learned that your social capital is not your rolodex but your family and friends.

Part IV; Social Capital