Today he is making pottery, for the first time in 20 years.
Bernard Sokpe himself announced this on Twitter.
His post features a clay fist raised in the air, the symbol of resistance, especially in the black community.
Sokpe now has time to tinker as Twitter fired him, along with almost the entire team in Accra, the capital of Ghana.
According to media reports, only one employee was allowed to stay.
It was only a few days ago that Sopke's tweets read very differently.
On 11/1
he, who was responsible for senior partner management at the short message service, posted: »Today we officially opened Twitter's Africa headquarters in Accra.
(...) That should be celebrated in view of the tense news situation in the world.« Including photos of the team and a »care package« for the employees.
The package didn't have to last long, because just four days later an e-mail landed in the private mailboxes of almost all employees with the headline: "Termination of their employment."
It said: »Your last working day will be on December 4th.
be."
Four days – that's how long the widely announced dream of »Africa Headquarters«, from where Twitter wanted to coordinate an entire continent, lasted.
At the end of 2019, the then Twitter boss Jack Dorsey traveled through Africa and then wrote about the "continent that will determine the future".
In April 2021, Twitter finally announced that it wanted to open an office in Ghana to “improve and adapt” the service on the African continent.
Eleven people were initially employed.
Hope in Ghana was great.
However, due to the pandemic, these employees almost always worked from home, and the new offices could only be occupied on November 1, 2022.
Then Elon Musk took over the shop and four days later he was kicked out.
And it turned out that the alleged boom continent of Africa was probably no longer worth reading the local employment law for the management of Twitter.
Because unlike the colleagues in Silicon Valley, the employees in Ghana were initially not offered any severance pay or three months of continued salary payments.
After just four weeks, they should end up on the streets.
"My clients were deeply shocked and have asked themselves why they are considered second-class employees," says lawyer Carla Olympio, who now represents those affected.
In such cases, labor law in Ghana prescribes informing a kind of government arbitration board in advance and finding a solution together.
But that didn't happen, although it was a matter of mass layoffs, according to the lawyer's argument.
Twitter has not yet responded to a request from SPIEGEL.
Several media outlets reported on the dubious layoffs, including CNN.
In the meantime, Twitter has given in and now wants to negotiate with those affected, after all.
But many in the tech scene are appalled by the company's actions.
“We all always wanted to work for Silicon Valley companies because we thought they would treat us better.
But that has now turned out to be a facade«, criticizes Odanga Madung from the Mozilla Foundation.
In recent years, he has conducted intensive research on working conditions in the tech industry.
Twitter is not the first company on the continent to make international headlines.
The Facebook parent company Meta has already come under massive criticism.
The company outsourced the moderation of its content to a provider in Kenya, where posts glorifying violence should also be found and deleted.
A former employee of this provider is now suing Meta - the working conditions are catastrophic, many employees are suffering psychologically from the consequences of their work.
"It's the exploitative underworld of tech companies in Africa, it often stays hidden, we're not supposed to see it," says Madung.
Meta denies the allegations. At the beginning of next year, a court in Kenya wants to decide whether the American group must be held legally responsible.
The supposedly exploitative underworld of the tech companies in Africa is not only evident in the offices.
If you order an Uber or Bolt in Nairobi or Lagos, Nigeria, you can quickly see for yourself.
“The fees they charge us are disproportionate to the profit.
It's like slavery, the tech companies don't give a damn about the people in Africa," says Uber driver Martin* from Kenya's capital Nairobi.
He has been driving a taxi for 16 years, after a brief boom through digital providers, everything is now worse than ever: less income because the taxes are too high.
The new employers in distant America are not even approachable.
Odanga Madung demands from the governments of African countries
more regulation of the sector, especially more protective rights for workers, similar to what is happening in the US or Europe.
In Ghana, too, the fired Twitter employees have now sent a letter to a government representative.
In the letter that SPIEGEL has seen, it says: "The current Twitter didn't seem to be of the opinion that employees in Africa deserve the same treatment as elsewhere in the world." and clients receive appropriate compensation.
But while Twitter employees are fighting for fair compensation, experts see a completely different problem: the uncontrolled flood of fake news and hate speech.
These dark sides of the short message service are much more pronounced in Africa than in the Global North.
Paid trolls are rampant, fake news dominates entire debates.
In Ethiopia, for example, it has been shown that the circulating hatred on Twitter fueled the violence during the civil war.
Odanga Madung from the Mozialla Foundation fears that the layoffs in Ghana and the USA will exacerbate the problem: »From now on, if we come across such content, it will be even more difficult to point it out to Twitter.
Right now is probably the best time to spread disinformation in Africa.«
This contribution is part of the Global Society project
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