Uber: The beauty and wrath of disruptive technologies in Africa

The term Uber has entered the global lexicon, complete with an adverbial expression – uberisation – symbolising the impact disruptive technologies are meting wherever we live anywhere on the planet. Until the Uber made it to the global scene in 2009, revolutionising how taxi business is conducted, not many appreciated how times have changed. The American company has since disrupted the taxi business as we know it with low standard charges that woo away clients, causing panic and eliciting bitter and sometimes violent protests from traditional taxis in major cities across the world, as well as Africa, from the Cape to Cairo. Several Uber taxis have been destroyed and their drivers assaulted in the Kenyan capital Nairobi, for instance. A disruptive technology is, by definition, a technology that significantly alters the way that businesses operate. Locally, the most common disruptive technologies have included the mobile phone (who owns a landline nowadays?) and its offshoot, Mpesa – the mobile money innovation that has transformed the way we transact business and do our banking. The beauty of this has been its inclusiveness. And because of it, Africans, especially those in the East African Community, are now likely to pay for goods and their utility bills or even withdraw their monthly salaries via the phone, avoiding the ATMs and queues at the bank, even to get loans. The banks have had to adapt, and have adopted the mobile money platform to not only retain their market, but “bank the unbanked” that some of the major lenders had overlooked as unprofitable. This is a case of how disruptive technology has forced companies to alter the way they approach their business, or risk losing market share and, worse, risk folding by becoming irrelevant. However, the Uber concept is predicated on what economists refer to as “slack resources” or “underutilised capacity.” And the reality driving Uberisation across the world is deceptively simple: its primary mission is to efficiently and profitably allocate human beings and what they own – their intellectual or physical possessions. The disruptive Uber example demonstrates the effectiveness of the “on-demand economy” with allocation of physical possessions – how Uber does not need to own a car, relying, instead, on volunteers who subscribe to its mobile app and get connected to clients, who are competitively charged on a metred-cost basis. Intellectually, this same concept is extending to the traditional workplace. One technology writer observes how, “just as Uber is doing for taxis, new technologies have the potential to chop up a broad array of traditional jobs into discrete tasks that can be assigned to people just when they’re needed, with wages set by a dynamic measurement of supply and demand, and every worker’s performance constantly tracked, reviewed and subject to the sometimes harsh light of customer satisfaction.” The point being that the customer is king. And the customer being the one who must make the final choice, it is the very mitigation against the jitters and violent opposition to the Uber phenomenon sweeping across the world. This echoes the sagacity of Victor Hugo, the French novelist and poet-cum-dramatist who famously observed that “no army can stop an idea whose time has come.” The Uber idea is steadily making its way and is virtually on the door-step of fast growing cities such as Kigali. Here, it has inspired a species of similar initiatives, such as SafeMotos, an app-based motorcycle taxi service, and the recently launched car taxi service, 250Taxi. These new initiatives are just catching on, and are yet to prove themselves in the market. The car taxi service, for instance, operates under Rwanda Utilities Regulatory Authority guidelines, specifically those that cap the price taxis should charge per kilometre. This means that the Kigali model charges the same as normal taxis, its main innovation being the convenience of using an app to call and track the taxi as it picks you from your doorstep. This model has incorporated the normal taxi operators. SafeMotos’ main selling point is safety. Aside from the elite Kigali suburbs, the traditional taxi-moto is ubiquitous and virtually at every street corner. Just step out your door and hail one. But, no doubt, Uber cometh.

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Uber: The beauty and wrath of disruptive technologies in Africa