Africas cheetahs versus hippos by George Ayittey Well, first of all, let me thank Emeka -- as a matter of fact, TED Global -- for putting this conference together. This conference is going to rank as the most important in the beginning of the 21st century. Think African governments will put together a conference like this? You think the A.U. will put together a conference like this? Even before they do that they will ask for foreign aid. I would also like to pay homage and honor to the TED Fellows June Arunga, James Shikwati, Andrew, and the other TED Fellows. I call them the Cheetah Generation. The Cheetah Generation is a new breed of Africans who brook no nonsense about corruption. They understand what accountability and democracy is. Theyre not going to wait for government to do things for them. Thats the Cheetah Generation, and Africas salvation rests on the backs of these Cheetahs. In contrast, of course, we have the Hippo Generation. (Laughter) The Hippo Generation are the ruling elites. They are stuck in their intellectual patch. Complaining about colonialism and imperialism, they wouldnt move one foot. If you ask them to reform the economies, theyre not going to reform it because they benefit from the rotten status quo. Now, there are a lot of Africans who are very angry, angry at the condition of Africa. Now, were talking about a continent that is not poor. It is rich in mineral resources, natural mineral resources. But the mineral wealth of Africa is not being utilized to lift its people out of poverty. Thats what makes a lot of Africans very angry. And in a way, Africa is more than a tragedy, in more ways than one. Theres another enduring tragedy, and that tragedy is that there are so many people, so many governments, so many organizations who want to help the people in Africa. They dont understand. Now, were not saying dont help Africa. Helping Africa is noble. But helping Africa has been turned into a theater of the absurd. Its like the blind leading the clueless. (Laughter) There are certain things that we need to recognize. Africas begging-bowl leaks. Did you know that 40 percent of the wealth created in Africa is not invested here in Africa? Its taken out of Africa. Thats what the World Bank says. Look at Africas begging-bowl. It leaks horribly. There are people who think that we should pour more money, more aid into this bowl which leaks. What are the leakages? Corruption alone costs Africa 148 billion dollars a year. Yes, put that aside. Capital flight out of Africa, 80 billion a year. Put that aside. Lets take food imports. Every year Africa spends 20 billion dollars to import food. Just add that up, all these leakages. Thats far more than the 50 billion Tony Blair wants to raise for Africa. Now, back in the 1960s Africa not only fed itself, it also exported food. Not anymore. We know that something has gone fundamentally wrong. You know it, I know it, but lets not waste our time talking about these mistakes because well spend all day here. Lets move on, and flip over to the next chapter, and thats what this conference is all about -- the next chapter. The next chapter begins with first of all, asking ourselves this fundamental question, Whom do we want to help in Africa? There is the people, and then there is the government or leaders. Now, the previous speaker before me, Idris Mohammed, indicated that weve had abysmal leadership in Africa. That characterization, in my view, is even more charitable. (Laughter) I belong to an Internet discussion forum, an African Internet discussion forum, and I asked them, I said, Since 1960, weve had exactly 204 African heads of state, since 1960. And I asked them to name me just 20 good leaders, just 20 good leaders -- you may want to take this leadership challenge yourself. I asked them to name me just 20. Everybody mentioned Nelson Mandela, of course. Kwame Nkrumah, Nyerere, Kenyatta -- somebody mentioned Idi Amin. (Laughter) I let that pass. (Laughter) My point is, they couldnt go beyond 15. Even if they had been able to name me 20, what does that tell you? 20 out of 204 means that the vast majority of the African leaders failed their people. And if you look at them, the slate of the post-colonial leaders -- an assortment of military fufu heads, Swiss- bank socialists, crocodile liberators, vampire elites, quack revolutionaries. (Applause) Now, this leadership is a far cry from the traditional leaders that Africans have known for centuries. The second false premise that we make when were trying to help Africa is that sometimes we think that there is something called a government in Africa that cares about its people, serves the interests of the people, and represents the people. There is one particular quote -- a Lesotho chief once said that Here in Lesotho, weve got two problems: rats and the government. (Laughter) What you and I understand as a government doesnt exist in many African countries. In fact, what we call our governments are vampire states. Vampires because they suck the economic vitality out of their people. Government is the problem in Africa. A vampire state is the government -- (Applause) -- which has been hijacked by a phalanx of bandits and crooks who use the instruments of state power to enrich themselves, their cronies, and tribesmen and exclude everybody else. The richest people in Africa are heads-of-state and ministers, and quite often the chief bandit is the head-of- state himself. Where do they get their money? By creating wealth? No. By raking it off the backs of their suffering people. Thats not wealth creation. Its wealth redistribution. The third fundamental issue that we have to recognize is that if we want to help the African people, we must know where the African people are. Take any African economy. An African economy can be broken up into three sectors. There is the modern sector, there is the informal sector and the traditional sector. The modern sector is the abode of the elites. Its the seat of government. In many African countries the modern sector is lost. Its dysfunctional. It is a meretricious fandango of imported systems, which the elites themselves dont understand. That is the source of many of Africas problems where the struggles for political power emanate and then spill over onto the informal and the traditional sector, claiming innocent lives. Now the modern sector, of course, is where a lot of the development aid and resources went into. More than 80 percent of Ivory Coasts development went into the modern sector. The other sectors, the informal and the traditional sectors, are where you find the majority of the African people, the real people in Africa. Thats where you find them. Now, obviously it makes common sense that if you want to help the people, you go where the people are. But thats not what we did. As a matter of fact, we neglected the informal and the traditional sectors. Now, traditional sector is where Africa produces its agriculture, which is one of the reasons why Africa cant feed itself, and thats why it must import food. All right, you cannot develop Africa by ignoring the informal and the traditional sectors. And you cant develop the informal and the traditional sectors without an operational understanding of how these two sectors work. These two sectors, let me describe to you, have their own indigenous institutions. First one is the political system. Traditionally, Africans hate governments. They hate tyranny. If you look into their traditional systems, Africans organize their states in two types. The first one belongs to those ethnic societies who believe that the state was necessarily tyrannous, so they didnt want to have anything to do with any centralized authority. These societies are the Ibo, the Somali, the Kikuyus, for example. They have no chiefs. The other ethnic groups, which did have chiefs, made sure that they surrounded the chiefs with councils upon councils upon councils to prevent them from abusing their power. In Ashanti tradition, for example, the chief cannot make any decision without the concurrence of the council of elders. Without the council the chief cant pass any law, and if the chief doesnt govern according to the will of the people he will be removed. If not, the people will abandon the chief, go somewhere else and set up a new settlement. And even if you look in ancient African empires, they were all organized around one particular principle -- the confederacy principle, which is characterized by a great deal of devolution of authority, decentralization of power. Now, this is what I have described to you. This is part of Africas indigenous political heritage. Now, compare that to the modern systems the ruling elites established on Africa. It is a total far cry. In the economic system in traditional Africa, the means of production is privately owned. Its owned by extended families. You see, in the West, the basic economic and social unit is the individual. The American will say, I am because I am, and I can damn well do anything I want, anytime. The accent is on the I. In Africa, the Africans say, I am, because we are. The we connotes community -- the extended family system. The extended family system pools its resources together. They own farms. They decide what to do, what to produce. They dont take any orders from their chiefs. They decide what to do. And when they produce their crops, they sell the surplus on marketplaces. When they make a profit it is theirs to keep, not for the chief to sequester it from them. So, in a nutshell, what we had in traditional Africa was a free-market system. There were markets in Africa before the colonialists stepped foot on the continent. Timbuktu was one great big market town. Kano, Salaga -- they were all there. Even if you go to West Africa, you notice that market activity in West Africa has always been dominated by women. So, its quite appropriate that this section is called a marketplace. The market is not alien to Africa. What Africans practiced was a different form of capitalism, but then after independence, all of a sudden, markets, capitalism became a western institution, and the leaders said Africans were ready for socialism. Nonsense. And even then, what kind of socialism did they practice? The socialism that they practiced was a peculiar form of Swiss-bank socialism, which allowed the heads of states and the ministers to rape and plunder Africas treasuries for deposit in Switzerland. That is not the kind of system Africans had known for centuries. What do we do now? Go back to Africas indigenous institutions, and this is where we charge the Cheetahs to go into the informal sectors, the traditional sectors. Thats where you find the African people. And Id like to show you a quick little video about the informal sector, about the boat- building that I, myself, tried to mobilize Africans in the Diaspora to invest in. Could you please show that? The men are going fishing in these small boats. Yes, its an enterprise. This is by a local Ghanaian entrepreneur, using his own capital. Hes getting no assistance from the government, and hes building a second, bigger boat. A bigger boat will mean more fish will be caught and landed. It means that he will be able to employ more Ghanaians. It also means that he will be able to generate wealth. And then it will have what economists call external effects on a local economy. All that you need to do, all that the elites need to do, is to move this operation into something that is enclosed so that the operation can be made more efficient. Now, it is not just this informal sector. There is also traditional medicine. 80 percent of Africans still rely on traditional medicine. The modern healthcare sector has totally collapsed. Now, this is an area -- I mean, there is a treasure trove of wealth in the traditional medicine area. This is where we need to mobilize Africans, in the Diaspora especially, to invest in this. We also need to mobilize Africans in the Diaspora, not only to go into the traditional sectors, but to go into agriculture and also to instigate change from within. We were able to mobilize Ghanaians in the Diaspora to instigate change in Ghana and bring about democracy in Ghana. And I know that with the Cheetahs, we can take Africa back one village at a time. Thank you very much. (Applause)
Posted on: Sun, 04 Jan 2015 10:49:24 +0000
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