Uber Peels Out of the Human Driver Business

After 12 years of disrupting Nigeria’s transportation industry, Uber has decided to leave Africa’s most populous country overnight. On Wednesday, the ride share behemoth announced it was ending operations in the cities of Lagos, Abuja, and Kampala effective immediately, following a “thorough review of its business”. The move came as a shock to thousands of Moove customers, Uber’s largest vehicle financing partner in the world, who suddenly found themselves unable to book fares on their UberGo app and wondering how they were going to make their next car payment.

Despite the Nigerian startup’s quick decision to remove the contractual restrictions that prohibited its drivers from using other ride-hailing apps in the wake of Uber’s exit, it’s unclear what comes next for the 6-year-old company and its auto-loan contacts. Even though Moove’s drivers had long sought permission to work on competitors’ platforms, getting what they always wanted arrives with serious questions about the deals they signed and their financial obligations as a result of Uber’s actions.

Protests broke out last year after Moove arbitrarily hiked drivers’ weekly remittance charges by 100%, leading to a temporary shut down of operations in Lagos. The rift disclosed a few details of Moove’s onerous contracts, which include multiple fees aside from the loan itself. According to documents provided to Technext, drivers are charged for car insurance, maintenance costs, health insurance, and a dubious “handling” fee that accounts for almost half of the entire remittance forked over by Moove drivers on a weekly basis. Only about 33% actually goes to pay off the car loan.

Now that Uber is gone, Moove’s only advantage in Nigeria is gone, too. Ever since the entry of Estonia-based competitor Bolt in 2016 and the more recent arrival of Russia’s InDrive, Uber’s market share had never surpassed second place and was dropping fast. Other factors like the end of a state oil subsidy in 2023 further cut into Uber’s profit margins in the African nation, while many point to the Nigerian government’s clamp down on airport ride share concessions earlier this year as the final nail in the coffin for Uber’s prospects in the country, which the company has denied. 

Uber’s denials notwithstanding, regulatory standoffs have been at the center of the ride share giant’s rapid wind down of operations across the entire continent. This past January, Uber closed up shop in Tanzania after the East African nation’s transportation authority capped the commissions ride-hailing platforms could charge drivers at 15%, among other measures like minimum fare requirements, that undermined Uber’s ability to implement its notorious “surge” pricing model. Late last year, Côte d’Ivoire’s unfavorable regulatory environment led to Uber’s exit from that country. Only Uganda, where Uber also wrapped up 10 years of operations yesterday, seems to have been motivated by market share concerns alone.

Uber has cut its presence on the African continent by half over the last seven to eight months, leaving only Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa on the list of countries served by the ride share company. As part of its rollback of operations in Africa, Uber also announced it is shedding roughly 10% of its global workforce, as it pivots to driverless technologies. In its May earnings call, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi touted the company’s Autonomous Solutions division that launched in February to accelerate autonomous mobility & delivery worldwide, projecting autonomous vehicle (AV) deployments in 15 cities by the end of the year. Khosrowshahi also underscored Uber’s 30 AV partnerships, which include companies like Avride, Lucid, Nuro, and Rivian, as a key to building what he calls the “hybrid network” at the core of the company’s growth strategy. 

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As Uber faces increasing pressure from governments and unions to curtail its exploitative labor practices, and price gouging tactics, the deteriorating economic reality around the world is simultaneously bringing more drivers into the platform. Nevertheless, the promise of driverless technologies to eliminate any need to deal with real people or their messy humanity is too alluring to pass up, and the company has already “doubled down” on its US $10 billon investment plans into the robotaxi space last month, despite a weak profit forecast.

A recent deal between Uber and Chinese multi-national Baidu just put driverless vehicles on the streets of Dubai, and a robotaxi pilot program unveiled in London yesterday with UK tech firm Wayve, provide insight into what Khosrowshahi actually means when he talks about a hybrid network. In addition to their global workforce of human drivers catching fares in the gig economy, Uber is leveraging all the geolocation data it has gathered over the last 17 years through those human drivers, to reinvent itself as robotaxi central for AV companies all over the world.

Uber’s AV Mission Control is a fleet management system that was developed in conjunction with NVIDIA’s Data Factory, to offer a turnkey operational solution for AV developers as it seeks to carve out a “structural platform advantage” in the industry. AV Mission Control is part of Uber’s Autonomous Solutions suite of services and capabilities, which include things like “data-enriched mapping”, to cover pick-up location or routing, and regulatory support to grease the wheels of AV deployment in the appropriate markets.

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Countries like Nigeria and Uganda don’t fit the bill. Not merely because the cost of a robotaxi would be prohibitive for most of their populations, but also because of the infrastructure requirements of AV technologies themselves. Smooth, well-paved roads with clear traffic signal and pedestrian crossing infrastructure is critical for AV systems to operate at all. And even then, accidents are nowhere near being eliminated.

Uber’s departure from some of Africa’s biggest cities and pivot to autonomous vehicles is a symptom of a larger reality. The wealth gap between the richest people on earth and the rest of us gets bigger every day, and technologies like AI are being used to make that gap even wider while we are gaslighted with stories about a future full of technological wonders and the end of poverty.

When the UK’s British International made its $20 million investment in Moove back in 2022, it came with grandiose, and familiar promises of economic development in Africa. It was part of  a five-year plan to pour billions of pounds into “inclusive finance” projects across the continent, and Nigerians were sold a pipe dream about the future, that was nothing more than a debt obligation. A few years later in 2024, Uber plunked down another $100 million to keep the dream going as Moove’s largest investor. In 2026, after billions have been extracted in profits, capitalism is moving on to the next, while thousands of Nigerians are stuck trying to pay off a depreciating asset.