By Y. Z. Ya’u, CITAD

I watched this advert on CNN marketing online training programmes and telling people how they could get fabulous jobs. The mantra is that with technology, there are simply too many jobs, all you need is to get the needed skills. This eldarado of affluence and abundance being created by technology is increasing. As a technology enthusiast, I might have also marketed the future in similar terms but in my most sober self, I know that this does not present a realistic picture of the future. It is either a marketing gimmick by training firms who want sell training so as to make money or is a naïve reading of the dynamics of technology in society.

To be sure technology is enabler of economic transformation. Countries that have better access to technology and more digitally connected have their economies growing faster and bigger. China and India are the usual examples, but it is not just only in the context of countries. Even within countries states or regions with better technology tend to prosper better than others. That is why today California, the host of Silicon Valley has its economy stronger than those of many other states of the USA. But not all economic transformation generates jobs, otherwise there would be no unemployment in countries like USA, China, etc.
It is also true that technology is creating new jobs as well as transferring jobs from one country to another, we have seen that many jobs have moved out of say USA to countries that have built capacity for outsourcing such as India, China, Malaysia, etc.

Teleworking and now working remotely means that jobs would travel to meet people rather than people traveling to meet jobs.

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But there is another mechanism of jobs transfer, signifying that job transfer itself is not one way traffic. Arising from the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) is the commoditization of education among other services such as healthcare. As commodities, they are now tradeable. As investors seek for profits, these services would be concentrated in the richer segments of the society that could afford them. Thus, many poor people will experience the paradox that while availability of these services has been enhanced, affordability has greatly been diminished. Such a paradox will exacerbate exclusion not only in the national space but also globally since Nigeria will have less affordability for these services.

As more advanced countries flood developing countries such as Nigeria with their services, they outcompete our service sectors, thus creating jobs back in their countries through the selling of their services to us. In this case, our consumption of their service transfer jobs from our country to their countries.

So, the chief character of technology is not job creation but jobs transfer and recomposition of jobs out of which some increment in quantum of jobs may result. However, even at this, for a number of reasons, the capacity of technology to create new jobs is not unlimited. This rather hyper optimist view assumes that there will also be surplus of jobs that supply of skills is unable to meet. The reality is that growth in a linear economy is exhaustive and sooner or later, an equilibrium between skills demand and supply will be reached after which there would be more skills than is demanded.

You may say that it will take long for that equilibrium to be reached and you would be right but there are also other dynamics which place limits to job creation. First, take the more commonly acknowledged that technology, through outsourcing, is creating new jobs. Outsourcing is not a net new job creator. It merely transfers jobs from one country to another such that while the receiving countries gain in the totality of new jobs created, the supply country suffers job lost in equal measure and records net increase in unemployment. That is why is policy makers of the technology decoupling hue in the USA for instance are crying about job losses due to companies moving to China where labour is cheaper compared to the USA.

The second challenge to this infinite growth is that technology is not job additive mechanism in a linear fashion. What it does is to decompose and recompose the skills needed at any given time in society. Such decomposition and recomposition means that as it creates new skills for new jobs, it kills other jobs that are no longer needed. Take for example, typists. Younger people today will not know the place of typists in organizations because they have disappeared. We have now become our own typists. Typists could retrain to get new jobs in the areas that are needed, that is what we are told.
You would be right to suggest as most technology evangelists do that it is destroying hazardous and difficult jobs or tasks. For example, there is the case of smart toilets project in India which has thrown thousands of workers who earned their livelihood cleaning toilets out of jobs. While we could frown at toilet cleaning as not a decent job, the fact is that these smart toilets have not created the new jobs that could absorb those who have lost their jobs.
Deployment of robots in factories has seen millions of workers thrown out of jobs in the industrialized countries and many of them have not yet been absorbed by the creation of new jobs. Here in Nigeria, many bank clerks and other workers were through out of jobs when banks outsourced cash disbursement/collection to ATMs and POS and there are no new places to get their jobs back. Rather banks have succeeded in trimming their workforce.

Even a leverage of technology by big competitors can result in huge job losses. This is what has happened when mobile national operators (MNOs) used their technology clout to take over the role of internet service providers (ISPs), in the process killing hundreds, if not thousands of ISPs and with that, killing millions of jobs that were provided by the ISPs but for which the MNOs have no place for. it is easy to win the argument that digitization is weeping out non-decent jobs such as the example of digitalization of toilets in India, but the creation of new decent jobs is not matching up with the job lost.

A third challenge comes from the very motive that has been fueling the evolution of technology. At the core of that is the desire by industrialists to wrestle control of job processes from the workers, reduce the cost of the cost of labour by simplifying complex industrial processes through Taylorism that breaks the tasks into simple routine and repetitive tasks. Here technology promotes deskilling. These looking for evidence of this might well recall what was needed to use the computer before the era of graphical user interface operating systems (GUIs). Users had to remember the codes before they could use the computer whereas with GUIs all you need to do is look for the icon that represents the task. So, if you want to print, you just point your mouse to the icon of the printer and click. It is that simple, no skill is needed or remembering of any code.

Technology is generated sold as a means to ease the burden of people. Yet while it can and has changed the way we do things and has invariably made life “easier” for many people this in fact is not the key reason for technological advancement. Technology is driven by three key motivations. The first is to control the labour of workers. The second is to maximize surplus extraction and the third is to expand the scope of profit extraction. All these aim at profit maximization which is at the root of capitalism. These are the arena of capital accumulation and not about making life better for the people
It is also about reducing the labour needs so that you have less number of workers doing the same work. This is at the core of the efficiency discourse: to maximize profits while reducing the cost of production. Not that there are no other reasons for technology advancement, but many other benefits of technology are accidental to the purpose of its development. The internet is a typical example. No one set out to invent the internet as we know it today. It arose out of the need to coordinate advanced research that was being done jointly by a number of universities, sited in different locations.
The fourth is direct extension of the third is which automation. Automation, a process or procedure in which factories and systems run with minimal or no human intervention beyond pressing a switch, is marketed as freeing human beings from hazardous and difficult tasks but in fact it is about doing away with workers who would take holidays, want pay rise, and could go on strike which the automated systems with have no need for. No one who deploys automation will claim to want to create new jobs or enhance employment. Deploying robots to do the work that human beings are doing cannot create new jobs. When you have self-driven cars and planes, you have no need for drivers and pilots. Similarly, when you have robots cleaning buildings, doing construction work, assembling products, supervising stores, you have no need for cleaners, labourers, clerks, etc.

As we enter into the world of internet of things, in which everything can be done by a click from wherever you are more people will be displaced by artificial intelligence-controlled systems. Consider this: Imagine closing from work. It is about 45 minutes’ drive to your house. You do not want your food cold. You click your auto-kitchen from your office and give it instructions of what you want to eat. By the time you get home, the food is laid on the table ready for you. You have discarded your cook. As you continue to give instruction to the auto kitchen of your likes, it stores, analyses and learns from this pattern of your instructions and with time, it discards you. It simply decides what you like to eat any particular time and prepare it for. It has done an extensive profiling on you. It simply takes over your decision-making function, making you feel being more like a mechanical structure yourself.

Finally, we have to consider the limitation of linearity in production and manufacturing. Extractive and consumerist models will have to hit a limit when we exhaust all the resources we are using. Linearity in technology is not just about extraction and consumption but also about creating waste whose management will continue to be a major challenge. Aside from occupying space, and generating hazardous elements, waste also contributes to the stocks of carbon dioxide that is inducing climate change. Even we go for greener energy, such as changing to solar in place of fuel-based energy, we have to remember that the elements with which solar cells are made are extracted from the environment on the basis of linearity model. That means that even renewable energy sources are not in themselves free from the challenges of linearity.

What does this mean? I should not dampen your enthusiasm or belief in technology. It can transform economy and society. It has revolutionary impact on how we live and how we produce and reproduce. But it is not that the internet produce of jobs. All those that speculations about jobs waiting for the people are either naive or simply being cynical. The truth is that technology can increase some level of availability but availability without redistribution and equity will only result in greater concentration of wealth in the hands of a few people while many will suffer in want. No technology has been invented and none will be invented that will address questions of fair play, justice, and redistribution without which there can be jobs for many, not matter how skillful they are.
Technology can improve economy and transform societies but creating jobs is not the calling of technology. Creating jobs is in the realm of politics and policy options. Let us not continue to invest technology with what it cannot do: limitless addition to the world stock of jobs from which we can make our selection by what skills we decide to acquire. Those who control technology are not interested in creating jobs. They want to maximize profit. Technology creates profits for those who own it and makes life easier for those who can afford it and only accidentally creates jobs for those that can be absorbed to the extent that it does not affect profit margins.

Malam Y.Z. Ya’u is the Executive Director centre for information technology and development (CITAD)

By Bala Ibrahim.

About three days ago, Nigerians received the shocking reports of the massacre of scores of security operatives, including soldiers and police at a mining site in Shiroro Local Government Area of Niger State. According to reports, at least 43 people, including 30 soldiers, seven mobile police personnel and civilians were killed, when armed men stormed the Gold mining site, abducting many people, including several Chinese nationals.

The Nigerian Army was quick to confirm the sad story, through a statement issued by it’s Director, Army Public Relations, Brigadier General Onyema Nwachukwu, who said, “The troops of the Nigerian Army, deployed in Shiroro general area, responded to a distress call of bandits attack on people operating a mining site. En-route the location, the troops ran into an ambush, staged by the criminal elements. Sadly, a number of personnel paid the supreme price in the fierce firefight that ensued. Subsequently, the location has been reinforced and troops are on the trail of the criminals with some already neutralized”.

The statement added that the GOC 1 Division, has moved to the location, to take charge of the follow up operations.

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Piqued by what happened, some people began posting the images of the victims on the social media, including the soldiers killed, the action of which seems to have angered the Nigerian Army the more, compelling it to issue another statement, decrying such postings on the social media.

The press statement signed by the same Brigadier General, Onyema Nwachukwu reads,

“Some clips of the incident have surfaced online and we wish to encourage well meaning Nigerians to exercise some restraint in posting images of such occurrence, mindful that our brothers and sisters who may have lost their breadwinners deserve to be properly notified and not to get such information via the media. We mention this, mindful of the inalienable rights of citizens to use the social media which is respected”.

But if the Nigerian Army is calling on people to be mindful that our brothers and sisters, who may have lost their breadwinners deserve to be treated with respect, methinks the top echelon of the Army also needs a reminder on the idiom, respect begets respect. The ambition of the idiom is to alert our conscience to the fact that, what you send out from the core of your heart, in the form of thoughts and emotions, will result in the return of similar circumstances of thoughts and emotions to you. If you send out respectful thoughts, respect from others will come back to you.

By the muffled message from the Army, of the upper command, directing only the GOC 1 DIV, to move to the location and take charge of the follow up operations, I think the public, particularly the families of the victims, who have, as rightly observed, lost their breadwinners, have not been treated with reciprocal respect. The Army ought to do better, and make the public see that something better is being done.

30 soldiers killed in one go, at a time the Nigerian Army is celebrating it’s 159 years of existence, under the Nigerian Army Day celebration, and the Chief of Army Staff can not cancel all engagements and move there, even if on the day of the burial?

It may not be right to accuse the Army of being insensitive, but it would not be wrong to say that they have not shown enough pity and tenderness, to those that have sacrificed their today, for our own tomorrow.

Yes, PMB had described the massacre as a direct assault on Nigeria, vowing that the attackers would not go unpunished, saying the government would do everything possible to ensure the return of those abducted. But looking at the frequency of the occurrence such horrific attacks, alongside the fact that the president has been talking with such tough language repeatedly without results, one is tempted to ask, whether the authorities really know the latitude and location of the long hands of the law. There seems to be a disconnect somewhere.

Certainly something is wrong with Nigeria’s national security under Monguno, which the President does not understand or does not want to understand. And posterity may not necessarily be kind to the two of them, when it comes to unveil it’s findings on them.

On the President, it may accuse him of being a weakling commander in chief, that was ineffectual in the sanctioning of subordinates. Because, retaining the same NSA for nearly eight years, under whose watch national security is progressively going worse, is certainly a sign that something is wrong somewhere.

About two months ago, the Nation newspaper wrote and I quote:

“Last Thursday, members of the House of Representatives, while vehemently proposing that the National Assembly be shut down to force President Muhammadu Buhari to wake up to his responsibility of ensuring the protection of life and property in Nigeria, asked a question that has been on the lips of millions of Nigerians for months now. Many of the legislators who spoke on what they described as the terrible state of security across the country, demanded to know the whereabouts of National Security Adviser (NSA), Major General Babagana Monguno (rtd). Some even rhetorically wondered whether he had resigned his position. Eventually, a lawmaker called for the resignation or sacking of Monguno, saying he should have been fired along with the last set of service chiefs. Emotions ran high in the chamber during the extended debate on growing insecurity in the country”.

It is now almost four months, since the attack on the Kaduna bound train from Abuja, in which armed bandits killed at least eight persons and kidnapped many. The suspicion is that the train victims are being held somewhere in the same axis, where the Army and Police are now massacred.

Please, the C in C and the military need to act more, beyond sending mere muffled and meaningless messages.

Bala Ibrahim is an ace broadcaster who worked with the BBC and a public affairs commentator

By Y. Z. Yaú, CITAD

The long standing debate around the control of the social media in Nigeria, last week took a new turn with the release by NITDA of the draft Code of Practice for Interactive Computer Service Platforms/ Internet Intermediaries. Predictably, the Code has launched a new controversy around the motives of government for coming up with the code at this time of our history. One ground of suspicion about the intention of the code is that it is coming at about the time we are entering electioneering campaign period. Mischief says that this government that benefited greatly from the use of social media in the run up to the 2015 general elections when it was in opposition does not want to be hurt the same way it had used the same social media to hurt the campaign aspirations of the former ruling party.

But there have also been many initiatives in the last seven or so years by this government to control the use of the social media. They include the anti-social media bill, the hate speech bills, and many other efforts, including the suspension of the operations of Twitter in the country for six months. These have fuelled suspicions on the part of the public that this government is only too happy to make it difficult for citizens to make use of the social media.

The expressed tone of the code is to make the social media safe for citizens, which is a noble objective, but it is important to make sure in achieving a safer social media space, we do not make it impossible to use. There is no doubt that the social media is like any other technology, being misused in the country. This misuse manifests in various forms such as the spread of misinformation and disinformation, the proliferation of hate and dangerous speech, commodification of nudity, child pornography, sexual exploitation and human trafficking as well as recruitment of young people to violent gangs such as terrorists and bandits. There also other crimes such as scamming, impersonation, identity theft, etc. All these make the cyber space to be a site which many fear to venture.

These are however not peculiar or unique to social media or even to Nigeria. Every technology is capable of being used and misused and people are socialised into the socially useful uses of these technologies at an early contact these technologies so that they grow to know how to use them for the benefit of society. These are not the products or the consequences of social media. They predate it. They are in fact the projection of the offline versions of these crimes. That for centuries we have not been able to stamp them out means that it will be naive to think that they can just be eradicated by certain codes. Codes do help but not everything can be cured by codes. And many of the ills of social media are of that nature. They require entirely different approach.

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Admittedly the ills of the social media have been counterproductive to the essence of social media. But it will not work by throwing the baby with the bathwater. Moreover, not all users of social media indulge in these anti-social uses. In reality, very few people engage in these. However, this is not to say that what the small minority does is not worrisome. In the place I work, we have spent considerable length of time fighting many of those. For instance, since 2014, we having running an observatory for monitoring and countering hate speech in the country. We have also engaged in sensitization programmes to enlighten and alert Nigerians about the dangers of hate speech and what we could collectively do to sanitize the cyber space of these. We are also identifying and countering fake news, misinformation and disinformation as well as combating gender violence online. In all these, we have sought the partnership of all stakeholders, including government, to develop national strategies to deal with these issue, drawing from global best practices.

However, government discourse of the problem tends to focus on control than on education and empowering citizens to know their limits of their freedom which would be most helpful and it is from this perspective that I see the weaknesses of the code as a solution. The code is sweeping in many of its assumptions and prescriptions,
Take for example, it wants to criminalize platforms providing space for the crimes of the users. Had that road been taken, the internet as we know it today will not have existed. Following this logic of pushing the burden of misuse of the users on the platform providers, one of the provisions of the code says that “A Platform must acknowledge the receipt of the complaint and take down the content within 24 hours”. This gives the government the challenged power to make unilateral determination and classify items and to be the judge and prosecutor. Platform provider operate on a multi-layered architecture that requires escalation processing for a decision to be reached. Much of the issues that go to the top are those about interpretation and most cannot be resolved within 24 hours unless the intention is to say that whatever the government says it does not want, becomes the law that cannot be contested nor be subject to independent and neutral interpretation. And this can easily lead to abuse. Even on seemingly settled matter of deleting nudity, the code does not make exceptions. For instance, certain levels of nudity are needed for educational purposes. Certain nudity could be used to mobilize against certain crimes and to raise awareness, so when you make a no-exception case, the government simply makes it difficult to use relevant images for these purposes.

There are provisions also that seek to outsource the functions of government to the platform providers. One of these says that they should “Exercise due diligence to ensure that no unlawful content is uploaded to their Platform”. Such a task is the responsibility of the police and other law enforcement agencies. Platform providers are not content providers or owners and cannot have the capacity to carry out such due diligence to ensure that the over billions of users do not upload “unlawful” content. Another says that platform providers should “Make provision for verifying official government accounts and authorised government agencies”. This is the responsibility of government through its relevant agencies. If government is unable to come up with an enforceable guideline for the use of social media by its agents and officers, it should not push that burden to third parties.

The elements of control-thinking can also be seen when vague terms are used. For instance, we all know that certain content could cause psychological harm to people. But there is no scale about psychological pains and persons react differently, having different thresholds of being affected. Without certain rules to establish levels of pains, this can lead to arbitrariness. If I write that a minister has been involved in corrupt deals, he or she can plead “psychological harm” and both myself and the provider are in trouble.

The code also deploys a stacking technique; thus loading offenses of different nature over a single line. Take for instance article 2 © of part 11 which requires platforms to inform users not to create, publish, promote, modify, transmit, store or share any content or information that “is defamatory, libellous, pornographic, revenge porn, bullying, harassing, obscene, encouraging money laundering, exploiting a child, fraud, violence, or inconsistent with Nigeria’s laws and public order”. Clearly libel and defamation are offenses that have clear laws whether they are committed offline or online. So why add them here? They can be the herring to frighten users of social media.

Even innocuous terms as “false or misleading” are difficult to define. Is an item misleading because of intent or due to the effect? If I put a content and someone feels misled, will that be misleading simply because someone thinks it is misleading, perhaps due his (mis)interpretation? Or because he or she draws the wrong conclusion? Or because of the materiality of the item? Being misled is not a straight cause and effect logic. As for falsity, it can also be the test of limit to access to what counter factuality that comes to live after publication. In other words, a material could be true at the point of publication and becomes false after publication. In this case there was no intent to publish false item and in this case, no false information was published even if by the time it is read, it is not no longer true.

Finally, it seeks to order platforms to Preserve any information concerning a person that is no longer a user of a Platform due to withdrawal or termination of registration, or for any other reason. This has the effort of pre-empting the efforts to ensure the right to forget. When information about people who are they no longer users of a platform is forced be retained, it would be used somehow and breach not all their right to forget but also their privacy,

One way to think about the code is to recognize that the digital space is an extension of our civic space. The civic space is what materialises our humanity and citizenship, it is the embodiment of our human rights, this been so, the digital space is also a concretization of these rights, their projection online. The notion of a digital civic spec presupposes a regime of digital rights that are the projection of our offline human rights. They include the right to freedom of expression, the right to organization, and more importantly, the right to privacy. Many of these crimes we see are derogation of these rights. Many commit these the infractions that the code lists because they do not see their codification to protect citizens from digital abuse.

Government itself has been guilty of abuse the digital rights of citizens through intrusive digital surveillance and failure to ensure that all citizens have access to digital space.

In this sense, the best government is best advised to get the Digital Rights Bill passed and signed. This has a wholesome provision of rights and responsibilities along with measures for enforcement rather than limits its gaze on criminalization which seems to be the tone of the Code. This will help both government and citizens as well as the platform providers. in the end, it will cost less and achieve more when government focuses on educating users than in prosecuting them. There are useful parts to the Code but its underlying assumptions and prescriptions are suspect and subject to being abused. By all means let the providers by corporate citizens of this country with clear responsibilities but we as citizens also want our freedom be respected.