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The tragedy of modern work is not simply that millions of people are underpaid. It is that many are too exhausted to escape being underpaid.
Every morning, commuters pour into buses, trains and traffic jams across African cities and beyond, heading towards jobs they do not particularly like but cannot afford to leave. They work through the day, return home depleted, attend to children, family obligations and unfinished domestic labour, then wake up to do it all again.
Somewhere inside this punishing routine sits the CV that needs updating. The professional course waiting to be taken. The business idea scribbled in a notebook. The job application that could change everything.
Many young Africans are increasingly trapped in this ‘waithood’: a prolonged waiting state between education, unemployment and meaningful economic independence.
But these things require something increasingly scarce: time.
This is time poverty, the condition of having so little discretionary time that survival consumes the hours needed to imagine, prepare for and pursue a better life. And it may be one of the least discussed forces keeping millions trapped in jobs they have already outgrown.
Years ago, it was good to see how the Mo Ibrahim Foundation revamped governance index metrics by adding the lived experience of poverty by heavily addressing the core components of time poverty through its Ibrahim Index of African Governance (IIAG) and related data stories
The popular story of economic mobility is seductively simple: if you dislike your job, improve your skills, network, apply elsewhere and create opportunities for yourself. There is truth in this, but it assumes that everyone possesses the most important resource required for reinvention: enough uninterrupted time to think. Many do not.
A person working long hours for modest pay is not merely financially constrained. They are often cognitively constrained. Exhaustion narrows the horizon. When every day becomes a negotiation between transport, work, food, family and sleep, long-term planning begins to look like a luxury reserved for people with lighter burdens.
This matters now because work is changing faster than workers can adapt. Artificial intelligence is reshaping industries. Employers increasingly demand new skills. Economic uncertainty is making jobs less secure. Yet the people who most urgently need time to retrain are often those with the least of it.
The result is a cruel paradox: the worse your job is, the harder it may be to find the time and energy required to leave it.
Time poverty does not announce itself as dramatically as unemployment. There is no queue outside a government office counting those who were too tired to update their LinkedIn profile. No national statistics measure how many people abandoned a career change because they could not find three uninterrupted hours to study.
But its consequences are everywhere.
The first is stagnation.
People remain in professions they no longer enjoy because leaving requires preparation, and preparation requires time. They postpone applications. They delay learning. They tell themselves they will begin “next month”, not because they lack ambition but because each week arrives already overcrowded.
Over time, postponement hardens into permanence.
The second consequence is inequality.
Wealth does not only buy better homes and better healthcare. It buys time. The affluent can outsource domestic labour, afford shorter commutes, pay for training and take career breaks. A worker living from salary to salary often cannot.
This creates an invisible divide between those who can invest in their future and those whose present consumes them completely.
The third consequence is psychological.
Human beings need periods of reflection to make meaningful decisions. Without them, life becomes reactive. We answer messages, meet deadlines, solve immediate crises and extinguish fires. But we rarely ask the questions that determine the direction of our lives: What am I good at? What is this job costing me? What skills will matter in five years? Where else could I earn more?
A society that keeps people permanently busy can quietly prevent them from becoming deliberate.
There is, of course, an opposing argument: everyone has the same 24 hours. Plenty of people work demanding jobs and still find time to study, build businesses or change careers. Discipline matters. Sacrifice matters. Personal responsibility matters.
All of that is true.
But the argument becomes dangerous when it mistakes individual success stories for universal conditions. Twenty-four hours are not experienced equally.
An executive who finishes work at 5 pm and has domestic support does not possess the same usable hours as a single parent who spends four hours commuting, works a ten-hour shift and returns home to unpaid care work. Telling both people simply to “manage their time better” ignores the fact that one person has considerably more time available to manage.
The answer is not to deny individual agency. People must still seek opportunities, acquire skills and make difficult choices where possible. But ambition alone cannot solve structural exhaustion.
Someone told me how one of his mentees was once trapped in a classic burnout paradox: her job drained so much of her energy that she lacked the time and mental capacity to search for a new one, yet she couldn’t afford to quit without income.
To break the cycle, he and his friends guaranteed her salary so she could resign. That financial safety net gave her the ultimate career asset: time. Unhurried, she turned down a couple of sub-optimal offers before securing a position where she thrives, earns significantly more, and loves her work. Her talent hadn’t changed; her leverage did. She was no longer forced to negotiate from desperation.
Employers have a role. Predictable schedules, reasonable working hours and genuine flexibility are not merely employee benefits; they can determine whether workers have the capacity to develop beyond their current roles.
Governments also have a role. Better public transport can return hours to workers. Affordable childcare can free parents, particularly women, to pursue education and better employment. Labour policies should recognise that excessive working hours do not always produce productivity. Sometimes they merely produce tired people. After Jakande’s contruction of Low-cost estates in Abesan; the1004 Estate where I lived in my early years, and the Gwarimpa Housing Estate in the mid-90s, there’s hardly any massive housing infrastructure targeting workers. The government must invest heavily in housing civil servants to ameliorate financial and psychological pressures.
Individuals, too, must treat reflection as a necessity rather than an indulgence. Even small pockets of protected time can matter. An hour a week spent updating a CV, learning a skill, or researching a new industry will not transform every life. But it can interrupt the dangerous illusion that the present must continue indefinitely.
The deeper challenge is cultural. We have learned to admire busyness so much that we rarely ask what it is doing to us. A full calendar can look like progress while quietly becoming a prison.
The greatest poverty is not always the absence of money. Sometimes it is the absence of the time required to change the conditions under which money is earned.
For millions of workers in this country, the problem is not that they have no dreams of a better job. It is that their current job has occupied so much of their day, and drained so much of their energy, that dreaming has become the easiest part.
The real measure of a decent economy should not simply be whether people have work. It should also be whether their work leaves them enough life to imagine something better.
