If you’re walking around town, it’s really hard to miss them. They walk around through the CBD and through Westlands and Kilimani holding placards.
What am I talking about? Those walking-billboards often held by some young men either selling a pizza offer or some shop promotion.
Can you imagine? Close to 40 years after the internet was created and over 20 years after the first social media site went live, we are still having people walk up and down with placards.
It escapes me, that over 50 years after the Mau Mau won and the white man ceded power, a team sat down and this would be the greatest output from their collective intellectual output. That is the kind of petticoat-and-Savco-Jeans level of marketing that I would never like to work with. Those are the kinds of people who think that communications work only involves doing a Facebook post here and there and so they can’t understand why you charge a premium for a digital strategy.
Anyway, I digress. So a conversation came up online over this sort of advertising aka human exhibitionist. Some people felt it was torture or inhumane. Others felt like someone was taking advantage of these young men’s desperation while still to others no one should ever have to do this sort of work.
I disagree. Let me explain why. It goes back to what we view as real work.
I started off as a hustler. I had a vision of creating a website which we would then pitch to businesses to run their ads. My role was that of a data collector cum office messenger. I walked around Nairobi all day collecting data on all the car yards in Nairobi.
My dad had invested in my business and I was earning Sh10,000 a month, which at the time felt like generational wealth. The business eventually collapsed but not without a lot of great lessons. I was still in college and I felt like I was doing something world-changing with my life.
A few years later, I was interning in this organisation and was being paid peanuts. In fact, I couldn’t even afford peanuts with what they paid me. I made Sh200 a day (which would be paid daily). I had to take up side hustles to afford my running costs during the internship. I was extremely frustrated. I worked on the side as a parking attendant and as a messenger among many other odd jobs. I was extremely embarrassed at my predicament. “You would make more money at a construction site as an ‘unskilled labourer’ than you are currently doing,” someone teased. This stung. It was true. I was not even making half of what a construction guy made.
I had come from a university with expectations about the kind of job I thought I deserved. I had come from campus armed with pride about the jobs which I considered worth my time but also with unconscious bias against people doing manual jobs or jobs we consider to be ‘unskilled labour.’
If we view jobs like carrying placards around town as pure torture, what would we say then to the hawkers who spend their full days in traffic wooing customers? Or construction workers? Or miners? Or people load carriers? Or for that matter, any other number of jobs that are physically intensive and exerting?
Work isn’t torturing because it requires physical strength neither is it straining because you don’t fancy doing it.
In my school of thought, there shouldn’t work labelled as “Kazi ya kushikilia.”
All goes wrong when we place the value of ourselves solely on what we do.
This is one of the major reasons middle-class men have identity issues when they lose jobs or have to take up jobs that they feel are beneath them.
Kazi ni Kazi and it’s time we started rethinking our attitude towards odd jobs.