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Africa is Not Poor Because of Colonization


8m read
·Nov 7, 2024

Well, you list here in one of your articles, where you make reference to these rating systems, the bottom 10 countries for doing business in the world: Chad, Haiti, Central African Republic, Congo, Democratic Republic, South Sudan, Libya, Yemen, Venezuela. There's a lovely example: Eritrea and Somalia.

And so there are three exceptions in the African ecosystem: Mauritius, Rwanda, Kenya, South Africa, Botswana, and Zambia. You pointed out in your prospectus, is it prospectus or the prospectus article of the right Institute, right, that Mauritius is a rising star and Rwanda is in some ways comparable to Georgia. So some of these countries have started to get this right.

Yes. And so what's the consequence of that? And what does "right" mean? What they have understood—what these countries have understood—is that economic freedom is at the center for prosperity building.

Rwanda, for example, Paul Kagame, the president of Rwanda, is explicit about it. He said he wants to be the Singapore of Africa, and Lee Kuan Yew is his model. Now the dirty mouths are going to start shouting, "Oh yeah, see authoritarian blah blah blah," whatever. I want to talk only about the economic side. If you take Lee Kuan Yew and Singapore as your example, then it means that like him you're going to have to be serious about economic freedom, and that's exactly what he did.

That's what Singapore did. When Singapore figured that out, they went on to put in the right reforms to make their environment one of the most business-friendly environments in the world, one of the most free market environments in the world. And you saw the magic of Singapore. Today, Singapore is richer than its ex-colonizer, Great Britain.

So when I hear people telling me today, "Oh, Africa is poor because of colonization," I'm like, please, let's move on from that. Does it have maybe a tiny percentage in where we are today? Maybe, maybe, and I don't know. But I know it's not the cause because if it were, many countless countries have been colonized before.

And by the way, colonizing one another is humanity's history. It just happened that maybe Africa has been one of the last, you know, colonized regions in the world. So enough psyche; it is there, and it acts like nothing happened before to others. But, flash news, it's the history of the world. We've been capturing each other back and forth, all of that.

So anyway, the truth is, Singapore is richer than Great Britain today. And then Hong Kong happened. And then because Hong Kong happened, China even today happened. Because China is like, "Wait a minute, what went on over there?" And then China went on to do the exact same thing with its SEZs—the special economic zones, some of the most free market zones in the world.

And then look at it happen in China. China, when it comes to economics, decided that we're going to do the free market; we're going to be capitalist because that's the only way. We tried everything else; we killed hundreds of millions of people, and we have nothing to show for it.

But now that we're tired of being disrespected members of society—because guess what? That's the other thing too. You want to be respected in this world? You're going to have to be among the prosperous ones. For other reasons, would it be nice? Gee, that we respect people just because? Absolutely! But that's really not the world we live in.

So when China got tired of being disrespected, they're like, "Maybe we got to build some prosperity here because that's when we're going to be heard." And today, China, being where it is at, even Hollywood—Hollywood, who tries to tell the world how to think—is being told by China what movies to make and how to tweak stories and history in order to be palatable for them.

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What would you recommend concretely to countries like Senegal to get the hell out of the way, let's say, of the people who would like to—who would do everything they could to try to make it better?

I mean one of the things that happened with India is India established the Indian Institute of Technology, which is a deadly engineering school, and a huge number of its graduates went to Silicon Valley, as you well know. And many of the successful Indian graduates of IAT started to dump money back into India and build a capitalist infrastructure there or help build a capitalist infrastructure there.

So this sort of thing can really take hold if you were making recommendations to governments who wanted to get on board and stop being like Chad, Haiti, Central African Republic, Congo, South Sudan, Libya, Yemen, and Venezuela, etc. What concrete steps should they take from the bottom up to get the hell out of the way?

Exactly. So two things we've been doing—because I'm a practitioner, that's my enterprise, so I practice what I preach. But I also preach for free markets.

When it comes to that, I'm one of the hats that I wear as the director for the African Center for Prosperity of the Atlas Network, the largest organization in the world of free market think tanks. And so what we do there is we work on reforms around the world to take down barriers of entry for local entrepreneurs. So that's one thing.

But as we all know, that's a great initiative to take, and we've been making some really good advances in many countries, especially in Ghana. We've been making a lot of progress with our partners there, Imani. But, piecemeal, it takes forever; it is hard as heck. And by the time you meet again here, you made 20 losses over there, and it's a continuous problem. But until we get better, we've got to continue at it.

So that's one thing we've been doing, and so that's a hat I wear, working with free market think tanks to try to make it easier for local entrepreneurs to join into the party.

Additionally, I'm going bold; I'm going radical. For the past few years, we've been advocating an idea for Africa that found some of its roots in Latin America. And again, I'm related to the people who are involved in this—my husband has been one of the key figures in this movement—a movement called the charter cities.

Paul Romer calls it like that; he's a Nobel Laureate in economics. I like to call it the startup cities. So the best way to think about it, Jordan, and it goes back to what you were talking about earlier when you said when you use the word "operating software." Most of the poor developing, most low-income nations—so meaning back in the days, the way we used to call it is poor nations—they have regulations for poverty.

They basically regulated for poverty, meaning the laws—the set of laws—poverty; it only calls poverty. And so what some of these folks have thought about, looking at the Dubai example. Dubai just recently entered the top 10 of international financial centers of the world, and what Dubai did at some point is think about it and be like, "On this bare plot of sand that's technically worth nothing right now, as is this 110 acres of land, sand everywhere, they're like, 'Well, maybe Sharia law is not the best for business. We got to think about better set of laws for business.'"

We're talking about only about business, not family law, not anything else, but business. And they decided there's got to be something better. And so they looked around, and that's actually when—to take one of the terms you used earlier—they're starting to realize, "Hmm, common law is actually a better way for business," specifically British common law.

So at that point—and I'm oversimplifying here because otherwise we can totally geek out on it; remember this is like one of my latest things that I've been involved in, but latest it's been the past 10 years—and I'm going to share with you a win.

So Dubai is like, "We have to adopt British common law, primarily British common law. We're going to hire retired British common law judges to come and educate the law here, train our own people," and that, along with many other reforms, to also become a top center when it comes to the free market, when it comes to the finances—British common law.

So it's very, very interesting, theologically and metaphysically. So it's predicated on the idea that every individual has all the rights that there are, except for those that are specifically regulated and limited by legal necessity. And then generally, that realm of necessity has emerged only as a consequence of disputes between people.

So you're free to do whatever you want unless you have a dispute with someone else. Then the dispute is adjudicated according, essentially, to constitutional and theological principles and then a precedent is established. Then the whole body of law is built up, that body of precedence.

Yes, it's bottom-up, top-down. It's totally in English common law. It's a gift from God, man, it's something else, absolutely. And that's the key word there when you said "bottom up."

So common law is so much better for bottom-up approaches. And we all know that markets work better in a bottom-up approach. And also when they have to educate the law and resolve a dispute, they're going to be much more respectful to the contract that was passed between the two parties than, say, civil law would be.

Right. And so anyway, from this standpoint, here you have Dubai, who is now wanting to put all of this together, and eventually they put a set of laws together that would now be conducive to being a top international financial center in the world.

And voila, in less than a generation—in less than 25 years—Dubai is completely unrecognizable.

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