Africa’s mixed economy: freedom without responsibility

Due to his obedience, Paul was promoted to manage a large compound where human traffickers keep their captives. Paul had been a captive in the compound until the traffickers appointed him to manage other captives. Following the traffickers’ patterns, Paul seizes and sells the desirable organs discovered in any of the captives. Then, he occasionally shares nice food and clothes to calm and discourage the captives from revolting. Without the ethnic people’s freedom to manage their resources, Africa’s mixed economy remains a most irresponsible political system.

Africa is almost synonymous with poverty, disease, hunger, war, illiteracy and human right abuses. Many post-colonial government office-holders live extravagant lifestyles, while the people languish in poverty, disease and tribal wars. “These wars diminished in number after the turn of the millennium, but their chief cause – the lack of common nationhood – remains. Africa’s nation states were formed by foreigners, lines drawn by Europeans on maps of places they had often never been to. They carved out territories, cut up kingdoms and societies of which they had little idea… Africa’s nation states lack a common conception of nationhood.”¹

Free and prosperous societies grow from people’s agreement to collaborate in using their human and natural resources to produce what they need and trade.² And humans create wealth by applying their intelligence on land and its resources to produce useful commodities.³ To ensure steady satisfaction of needs, people adopt different economic systems to own and manage their human and natural resources. Two prominent economic systems that continue to influence world development are CAPITALISM and SOCIALISM.

SOCIALISM:Insocialism, government owns the major factors of production (land and minerals), while the people provide skilled/unskilled labour to earn money. The government creates industries or permits some people to create industries to extract resources or produce goods. To justify ownership of the primary factors of production, socialist states provide education, social services and regulations for the people. Some socialist states include China, Russia and Belgium.⁴ Socialist advocates argue that socialism improves human dignity and wellbeing by making all citizens’ shareholders in the state.⁵

CAPITALISM: Incapitalism, private citizens own primary factors of production through companies, and then pay taxes to a central government. The government in turn uses the tax to provide education, healthcare, regulations and other social services for citizens. The various capitalist industries and firms employ other citizens to produce and distribute profitable goods and services. Hence, many citizens earn their living by working in capitalist companies, while governments provide social services, regulations and jobs for the rest. Many high-earning nations adopt capitalism since individual owners compete for excellence and market-share.

AFRICA’S MIXED ECONOMY: Current Africa’s economic system follows the colonial pattern of mixing SOCIALISM and CAPITALISM as MIXED ECONOMY. It leans towards socialism when seizing people’s lands¹ and mineral resources²³⁴ for former colonialists’ industries. And it turns to capitalism when it comes to responsibility for the people whose mineral resources are seized and exported. Hence, African governments charge the exploited people to provide jobs, healthcare, water, electricity, roads and other social services for themselves.⁵

AFRICA’s PRECOLONIAL Economic SYSTEMS

Before colonialism, different African kingdoms and communities had their different ways of owning and sharing their lands in their clans.⁶ Then different families shared their land-portions among family members from which they cultivate foods or mine resources for crafts and blacksmithing.⁷ Various African goldsmiths and blacksmiths learnt and fabricated hoes, gongs, arrows and other basic tools for various occupations. Eventually they traded their different products by barter among themselves, or other communities who had products to exchange.

DISORGANIZING AFRICA’S PRECOLONIAL POLITICAL SYSTEMS

Eventually, European colonialists invaded Africa in search of human and mineral resources for their industries.⁸ They imposed a land-expropriation law to erase the economic systems by which different African kingdoms and communities owned their lands. In place of the indigenous system, they amalgamated different kingdoms and communities under single colonial administrations they carved as nation-states;⁹ executed or exiled the people that opposed their invasion and trained few loyal ones to assist in local administration.¹⁰ The loyal native trainees learnt the invaders’ language and were promoted to collect taxes, and to seize and export the resources. These loyal native assistants were rewarded with colonial tickets (money) for buying European consumer goods,¹¹ while the natives lost the rights to their mineral resources.

INSTALLING POST-COLONIAL AFRICA’S MIXED ECONOMY

After Mahatma Gandhi’s successful independence revolution in India, the world criticised colonialism, and many Africans demanded independence. To avoid a repeat of Indian-styled revolution in Africa, colonialists handed over to their loyal assistants to continue their agenda.¹ They made constitutions to guide their former assistants to militarily control Africans and supply their resources in exchange for money as ticket to European products. This was how the different communities who used their mineral resources for producing tools lost their resources to colonially-imposed governments. The government then seize and sell various people’s mineral resources to foreigners and private firms.

EFFECTS OF THE IMPOSED MIXED ECONOMY ON AFRICANS

Due to the prolonged seizure of their mineral resources, many Africans lost courage in their ability to use their resources for productivity. Instead, they keep pursuing the tickets for foreign products by providing administrative or resource-exportation service to post-colonial governments. The remaining people struggle to import, market, use, install or prescribe foreign products for profit. And the profits later return to foreigners as payment for other foreign goods or services.

Africa’s mixed economy is thus a blend of the imposed government resource-confiscation and private companies’ importation of foreign products. Some of the resources the post-colonial government seize and export to foreigners are deposited in specific ethnic communities. But since the colonially-imposed constitutions state that resources belongs to the arbitrarily made countries, other ethnic communities insist on liquidity. It means that the communities who do not have the resources insist on joint ownership of other people’s resources, and prefer that the resources be sold, so they can get shares of the money (tickets to foreign products). And this is why many African communities, families and individuals remain poor, underdeveloped and dependent of foreign products and services.

WHY ARE SOME PEOPLE DEFENDING AFRICA’S MIXED ECONOMY?

Despite the increasing poverty resulting from Africa’s mixed economy, some African scholars defend it. They suggest that identifying colonial interference as a root cause of Africa’s poverty is blame-game and irresponsibility from Africans. Instead they prefer to blame the undistinguished ‘WE AFRICANSare corrupt’ despite the fact that the different communities were forcefully merged and held together at gunpoint. Some of the reasons why some Africans may still support Africa’s mixed economy include:

• They have got used to foreign products and may not be confident to attempt producing theirs.
• They occupy positions that allow them gain access to the limited foreign products even amidst its insufficiency in Africa.
• They now think they are gaining optimally from Africa’s mixed economy that exchanges their mineral resources for foreign products.
• Some of them come from ethnic communities without the foreign-desired mineral resources for foreign exchange. Hence, they need to tag along Africa’s mixed economy for partaking in the ownership.
• They lost hope in the possibility of finding their own resources (human, solid, agricultural or others) for productivity.
• They are afraid of the uncertainties in standing on their own.

But despite the fear of losing out foreign products in the demise of Africa’s mixed economy, they can learn to process theirs. Every community has resources to process for productivity: human resources, solid minerals and other natural resources. And Africa may never get out of poverty if thousands of communities depends on foreign revenue from few communities. Instead every community can rise to use their resources for producing and trading what they can with other people.

REMODELLING AFRICA’S MIXED ECONOMY

African countries who wish to free themselves from the stagnating mixed economy may take the following steps:

• Conduct a social research to determine and acknowledge the different colonially-bound peoples and their respective lands and resources.¹
• Organize intercommunal conferences within local governments, states and regions towards a national conference for the different peoples to agree on their partnership style. Thus, constitutional decisions and laws will reflect the people’s beliefs and agreement for a better partnership and technologically productive collaboration.
• Invite local (and maybe foreign) specialists to train the people to process their local resources for further industrial production. Hence, each section of the society will work to specialise in producing more of whatever natural resources they have.
• Release the people’s onshore resources for industrial productivity and eventual tax-payment to the central governments. This will motivate the government to support and protect people’s productivity for better tax-returns. A productive people with active industries will generate enough raw and semi-processed materials for local and foreign entrepreneurs to refine, remould in higher production and distribute. They will also be able to afford the goods and services to be provided by the entrepreneurs as viable demands.

When different ethnic communities rise and use their natural resources to produce what they can for consumption and trade, poverty will reduce significantly. Though there may be some initial doubts and fears of losing a bird in hand for oncoming fifty. Yet, the ethnic communities in Africa will recover their confidence for local productivity