first published 8-November-2004
It will be beneficial to the general population of an oil-producing country, if the oil revenues are applied to improve the socio-economic lives of the people.
Many citizens of oil-producing countries expect responsible governments to ensure that this IS what actually happens. Responsible governments use the monies received to create a domestic enterprise-enabling community. The empowered community raises domestic productivity, creates employment, and pays tax revenues back to the government.
Popular economics is based on the theory that demand for produce and supply of produce determines the equilibrium market price of produce. This theory is falsifying because it is incomplete. It ignores the effect of demand for money and supply of money on the prices of goods.
Money is a commodity, just like bread, suya, palmwine, rice or crude oil. Like any commodiy, money is used as a medium of exchange as well as a store of value. What makes money unique is the fact that it can be created by "fiat", an order enabling the creation of money, nowadays executed in most countries by a central bank.
Most central bank actions are conducted as part of a government's monetary policy (decisions to control the demand of and/or supply of money). Responsible governments attempt to regulate the productivity of their economies via monetary policy and fiscal policy (decisions to control the production of and consumption of goods).
The supplier of produce has a demand for money. The buyer of produce is a supplier of money. In any market transaction, these negotiations attempt to attain two equilibrum prices: one for produce and one for money. Two commodities are exchanged - produce and money - at the equating equilibrum price level.
= Suppliers of money and produce are not created equal =
Usually the supplier of produce sets the desired asking price that a buyer must meet. For example, Mr. Agbee may want Money1000 for his 1000kg of corn. If Mrs. Bureedi only has supply of Money600, some negotiations must begin or she walks, empty handed.
However the total quantity he can offer for sale remains 1000kg: this reality represents the tangible bounds of physical commodities. Economists will say that if Mrs. Bureedi has higher wages, she may be able to afford money supply of Money800 or Money900.
Economists will say the increase in Mrs. Bureedi's wages will usually cause Mr.Agbee to increase his prices (lead to inflation in market prices), and that inflation is a bad thing. If he expects market prices will go up, Mr Agbee will aim to supply more grain to the market next time. In an enterprise-enabling community, he goes to a bank to obtain the funds necessary to increase production. However, if Mr Agbee expects market prices to go down, he must still sell his product or watch it waste into rot. So, if the market is about to close for the day, Mr Agbee may despairingly drop the asking price to within Mrs. Bureedi's money supply.
quantity
of produce ^
|.......\..../ supply of produce (Sp)
|........\../
|.........\/ * Equilibrium market price at intersection *
|........./|......../..|......./....\ demand of produce (Dp)
|_______________>
prices of produce (market prices)
=Money is different from other commodities =
There are no physical bounds restricting the suppliers of money, previously identified as the central bank acting, presumably, on behalf of a responsible government. Banks will happlily make new loans (supply more quantities of money) if they expect higher interest rates. Making such loans is a matter only of entering records in a computerised ledger in this days of fiat currency. In the very olden days when physical commodities were used as money, "merchant-bankers" were at greater pains to "under-write" a loan.
A responsible government can strongly regulate money supply in a local currency market. However, governments lose control of money supply in a "free" market with minimum capital controls. When uncontrolled money combines with weak domestic productivity, money supply then depends largely on the manipulations of the banks.
Severe capital value devaluation in a highly consumptive political economy that has low physical productivity; high external debts denominated in foreign currency; and money markets with little capital controls. The government's own demand for foreign currency with which to repay the foreign-denominated external debt is matched by increased government supply of the local currency into the money markets. This will cause the value of local currency to fall with respect to foreign currency, resulting in a weaker exchange rate.
Falling local currency values also mean lower interest rates. Borrowing is more affordable at lower interest rates for producers like Mr Agbee or consumers like Mrs Bureedi. Their demand for demand for money increases.
Unfortunately, responsible banks will want to supply less money at the lower interest rates. Fiat currency money cannot rot and with weak capital controls in place, banks have no reality check that forces them to supply their money commodity even at low interest rates. So they try not to. Governments occasionally force banks to release money by conducting "mopping up" operations at the central banks.
quantity
of money ^
|.......\..../ supply of money (Sm)
|........\../
|.........\/ * Equilibrium interest rate at intersection *
|........./|......../..|......./....\ demand of money Dm)
|_______________>
prices of money (interest rates)
= The role of a responsible government =
A responsible government can do a number of things to stimulate DOMESTIC ENTERPRISES and to boost DOMESTIC PRODUCTIVITY.
# Domestic businesses are stimulated, jobs are created, and longer term productivity is attained if government increases demand for domestically produced goods and services e.g by using domestic producers in construction of roads, housing, stadia, furniture, etc. Purchasing locally made goods and services by governments will cause the demand of produce (Dp line) to shift rightwards (along the Sp line) and cause market prices to rise.
Eventually, increased domestic production (shift up the Sp line) and a higher equilibrum market price is achieved. Responsible government intervention MAY result in higher costs of living.
# Likewise, domestic productivity is stimulated if a responsible government uses its fiat to make borrowing AFFORDABLE for domestic businesses. Two actions are possible:
## A naive government may demand more money from banks (e.g increased reserve levels), consumers (e.g increased minimum fuel prices), or businesses (e.g. as taxes or licenses). Interest rates will fall. But such an action will eventually bankrupt the community. This is because consumers, businesses and banks (!) must supply such money from earnings on sale of commodities, and neither have infinite source of those commodities.
## On the other hand, a responsible government may inject more money into the community e.g by lowering reserve levels for banks, lowering fuel prices, or lowering business taxes and other statutory costs. Interest rates will rise EVEN IF the increased government spending (shift up along the Sm line) IS NOT MATCHED by a increased DOMESTIC DEMAND (rightwards shift of the Dm line) to yield a higher equilibrum interest rate.
The ensuring LEVEL OF INFLATION (rate of increase in interest rates) depends (in simplified terms, adjusting for complexities of elasticity in demand and supply) on the origin of rhe additional money supply and the purpose to which it is utilised.
Inflation is MORE manageable IF the increased money supply originates from domestic consumers and enables domestic producers to produce more goods and services. Inflation is extremely damaging IF the increased money supply originates from consumption of foreign produce (which is what foreign direct investment is) or does not increase domestic productivity in goods and services.
What then is the NET effect on domestic productivity and enterprise-capacity in a community when a government that does the following:
# Increases the supply of domestic money through a combination of devaluation e.g selling domestic currency to purchase of foreign currency (= rightward shift along Sm line and increase in local interest rates)
# Places high demands for money on domestic consumers, businesses and banks (= shifting the Dm line rigtwards and increase in interest rates).
# Increases demand for foreign produce that are cheaper than equivalent local goods. This reduces demand for and supply of domestic produced goods. Lack of sufficient foreign produced goods or domestic prodced goods results in persistent high market prices.
This situation is exacerbated by actions that impede market activity: persistent consumption of foreign produce by governments or the people; produce hoarding by businesses; and money hoarding by banks.
The observed effect is a definate strangulation of domestic production (especially manufacturing) capacity, rampant unemployment, intense economic emigration, and a market concentration of domestic businesses into "non-tradable services" such as hotels, restaurants, schools, transportation, haircuts, unfulfilled contracs etc.
= Surviving an irresponsible government =
All governments have three core responsibilities to the general population they govern:
# Create an enabling environment for domestic enterprises to grow and prosper;
# Provide community services that to assist the needy;
# Vigorously defend the property, territory and well being of the general population they govern.
Only a bad government fails in ANY of these three responsibilities. Bad governments do not deserve to govern and should not be in office. By these measures, most modern governments do not deserve the people they govern. Yet, a general population deserves its government, whether strong or weak; good or bad. This is because no government exists in a vacumn. All are drawn from the general population. By implication, a weak government reflects the weakness of its people. A corrupt government arises from a corrupt mandate.
A responsible government facilitates the enfranchisement of its people by performing its core responsibilities diligently. To enfranchise is to take control of the rule of law and of the markets in which one operates. The rule of law underlines the political system, which includes and defines the economic system of markets and payments. A bad government fails in these responsibilities. An akotileta government is not only bad, it goes further to actively impoverise, impede or attack the people it effects to govern. A government that disenfranchises its people can continue in governance only if the people have no self-conviction. The "values" of the population under bad government need to be restructured. Only when revalued, can the population restructures the government.
The only way to survive a akotileta government is to recreate the failed responsibilities at the community level. This has the added benefit of decentralising and localising both the rule of law and economic markets.
Observation indicates that people derive maximum socio-economic benefit from community-based policies and markets.
Working examples range from large countries such as China and Germany (prior to the unifications), to the Scandivanian nation-states, to self-referencing tribal-states confined withing in larger country borders. The keys to these communities are strong domestic production efficiency and an effectively local currency.
# Small, homogenous, and productive communities may have increased access to an export-oriented strategy but they often lack the population mass to sustain an effective local currency.
# Larger countries can sustain a strong internal market for both local currencies and import-subsititution goods, provided they are not handicapped by foreign debt repayment obligations.
# Those with large foreign currency repayment obligations need to implement strategies that protect the internal market, convert foreign debt obligations into the local currency, and induce the opening of foreign markets for domestically produced goods and services. Interestingly, these "beggar-thy-neighbour" policies are most often associated with contries that manifest a robust military strength.
When enduring an irresponsible government, communities need also to protect themselves against attempts by such government to impoverise its own communities!
An "akotileta" government has the particulary nasty property of focusing so much on meeting demands of foreign producers that it ends up suffocating domestic producers.
=Self-help enterprises are essential=
Communities need to be resourceful in order to control bad fiscal or monetary policy imposed by akotileta governments that are bent on destroying local productivity. These policies have historically included bans on organised labour, decentralised provision of infrastructure services, operation of local currencies or exhorbitant minimum prices in essential commodities.
Businesses in such communities should consider associative or cooperative operating or organisational strategies. Rather than rules of law formulated by such governments, trading may organised by informal code of conduct which is enforced at community level. Rather than bank-based money transfers, market transactions are conducted via barter exchange or by interest-free local currencies.
The essential glue of community-level businesses is communal trust. Crime and corruption are less likely when the family of potential culpits face the option of becoming ostracized from the community and subsequent difficulty in joining another. Even thefts are not so damaging in local currency economies as the stolen money must be spent within the same community.
Best of all, community-level enterprises result in bottom-up prosperity and in enhancement of living standards at the local level. As the communities grow and prosper, businesses can expand to link across regions and nations. Such networks of businesseses retain loyalty to their roots and are more likely to engage in complementing (or conducting) the normal responsibilities of responsible governments.
Showing posts with label markets. Show all posts
Showing posts with label markets. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Ibiti Owo Ise Wa Nigbati Ashewo NEEDS Lati Sope Owo Tan
How to raise business finance when the bank NEEDS to say no
It is the 2nd (ikeji) of the Enterprising Communities series to be published by ALARAN DEVELOPMENT ENTERRISES. This series aims to assist African enterpreneurs in building business enterprises based on innovations in science, technology, engineering and medicine.
HOW TO RAISE BUSINESS FINANCE WHEN THE BANK "NEEDS" TO SAY NO.
Introduction:
A person who works in a bank is a worker, not a banker. It is the people who own (equity shares in) the bank that are bankers. The Enterprising Communities series shows you how to raise funds for an enterprise in your community, when the bank and its workers only want to buy and sell foreign exchange . . .
Article:
These days, it is likely that the bank located in your community NEEDS to do business mainly with multinational enterprises. An examination of the structure of enterprise economy in many African countries reveals three distinct layers: the multinational trading companies; a small middle tier of brokers, and vendors of non-tradable services; and a vast community of family-controlled enterprises. Only the multinationals can readily do business with our banks, precisely because the multinationals have access to vast capital resources of their own. They use the banks only to pay local employees, suppliers and brokers.
The banks for their part think they are too big for the community enterprises. Rather than investing in and supporting community enterprises with appropriate lending, savings and leasing schemes, our banks are attuned to become "globally competitive". As a whole, Africa generates some 5pc of global trade. There are regional development authorities or states elsewhere with far greater impact on global trade flows. For example, the land mass of all of Western Europe will fit within the borders of Sudan alone. But financially, all of Sudan is smaller than Birmingham UK or Birmingham USA. In the same vein, Texas USA generates some 30pc of USA's USD 3 trillion GDP. That is more than productivity of all Africa other than Nigeria and South Africa. Yet the main operations of our banks rarely extend beyond fishing for deposits, round-tripping of foreign currency, and daisy-chaining of import-export financing letters. These banks make it difficult for community enterprises to operate bank accounts. They don't want you dirtying their marble floor-to-ceiling lobbies. As a result, many enterprises do their business in cash. They buy, sell, lend and collect cash payments. Businesspeople travel with large sums of cash. Politicians settle issues with bags of cash. Major capital expenditures are financed in cash. Only a small portion of this cash enters the formal banking system.
Here then is a guide to raisng funds for community enteprises.
Many middle-tier enterprises conduct the bulk of their business with one or two trade suppliers. It is not uncommon that 70pc to 80pc of supplies for your beer brokerage comes from one supplier. Community enterprises tend to have a more varied distribution of suppliers and customers. Your metal-working workshop may source wrought iron from any number of metal vendors and sell ornamental gates to any number of home-improvers. These trading patterns signify three vibrant sources of business funding for your enterprise, without you needing to exhange dirty looks with a bank worker: vendor finance, supplier finance, and customer prepay finance.
Vendor finance is when the manufacturer of a product gives you some time to sell the product before you pay the manufacturer. The longer you have traded with a manufacturer, the better terms of this "credit" you will likely get. Vendor finance is not likely from your local bukateria (restaurant) where the product is consumed immediately, is not fungible, and is not recoverable. In fact you may see a prominent display that signals "Do not ask for credit as refusal often offends". You should request vendor finance from manufacturers of products that are durable, relatively expensive, and are physically discrete. Such products include stoves, water tanks, car parts, and houses. Although the product is in your possession, its ownership remains with the manufacturer until it is sold. If you are unable to sell the product as agreed, the manufacturer is able to recover the product from your possession and try a more successful trader.
Supplier finance is when a wholesaler, importer or other big trading company supplies you with products or services and gives you some time before you have to pay. This type of financing is the most common in many business-to-business transactions in African markets. Usually ownership and control responsibility for the products become yours. You usually have to pay your supplier when your credit period is due, whether or not you have succeeded in selling the products. Supplier financing tends to cover products with same properties as vendor finance.
Customer prepay finance is when your customer pays before you release your goods and services. This is the type of financing most commonly available to the owner-manager of a bukateria, butchers, small hotel and other open market community enterprises. Interestingly, it is the becoming the most preferred payment mechanism deployed by multinational trading enterprises in African markets. Many Africans do not have credit records or bank accounts. They do not own bank cards or credit cards. They do not own passports or identity cards. They may not even have discernable addresses, as there are no centralised street maps or postal codes. Yet, multinationals know there is plenty-plenty money to be made in your community. Solution: they sell you prepayment cards which you then use, instead of credit or debit cards, to pay for their products.
So how applicable are these funding sources in helping your business enterprise?
You may get vendor finance if your business is resale of capital goods. You should find supplier financing is readily accessible if you deal in fast moving consumer goods. You are already getting customer prepay finance if your business trades on "money for hand" basis. Of course, combinations of all three business financing sources is possible.
When you have ambitions to grow your product-based business, you should consider offering vendor or supplier finance to your business customers. You may be pleased to find significant increases in business volume compensate for delays in getting your cash up-front. You will need to communicate more with your buyers and help develop their business e.g by identifying emerging markets for your products. Do not offer vendor or supplier finance to home consumers.
If your business provides services to a wide range of end-user customers, you should consider introducing a prepayment accounts system tiered to price discounts. For example, you run a restaurant, hotel or mechanic workshop and want to expand your business but don't have the money. Your customers always tell you they really appreciate your food, room service, or car tuning. They only wish you were closer to where they live or work. Bless them. Tell them you want to open a shop near them and are offering discounts on any of your shops to those who pay in advance. Offer 5pc to 10pc discounts for 13weeks or 6months prepayments, respectively. Always issue a computer-printed prepayment voucher that proclaims this offer, and issue a receipt. Use the money to build and furnish your shop. This is the way multinationals fund their GSM "foreign" investments: it is the community paying. Hardly any new money is brought into the community. You can do it too, and you don't need a bank. You only need your regular customers.
Finally, you are advised to invest in information systems to keep track of your growing business, your suppliers, your products and services, and your customers more efficiently. Giving your suppliers and customers computer-generated records improves the profile of your business. Using information systems also helps you to monitor your income and expenditure, profits and losses, and cash flows, so that you know in advance when your enterprise will need money. You really need to plan your business better.
Remi-Niyi Alaran writes on enterprise and social capital.
ALARAN DEVELOPMENT ENTERPRISES. Enterprising Communities.
Copyright (c) ALARAN DEVELOPMENT ENTERPRISES, 2004
You may copy, transmit, or otherwise use this document provided the copyright notice is attached.
It is the 2nd (ikeji) of the Enterprising Communities series to be published by ALARAN DEVELOPMENT ENTERRISES. This series aims to assist African enterpreneurs in building business enterprises based on innovations in science, technology, engineering and medicine.
HOW TO RAISE BUSINESS FINANCE WHEN THE BANK "NEEDS" TO SAY NO.
Introduction:
A person who works in a bank is a worker, not a banker. It is the people who own (equity shares in) the bank that are bankers. The Enterprising Communities series shows you how to raise funds for an enterprise in your community, when the bank and its workers only want to buy and sell foreign exchange . . .
Article:
These days, it is likely that the bank located in your community NEEDS to do business mainly with multinational enterprises. An examination of the structure of enterprise economy in many African countries reveals three distinct layers: the multinational trading companies; a small middle tier of brokers, and vendors of non-tradable services; and a vast community of family-controlled enterprises. Only the multinationals can readily do business with our banks, precisely because the multinationals have access to vast capital resources of their own. They use the banks only to pay local employees, suppliers and brokers.
The banks for their part think they are too big for the community enterprises. Rather than investing in and supporting community enterprises with appropriate lending, savings and leasing schemes, our banks are attuned to become "globally competitive". As a whole, Africa generates some 5pc of global trade. There are regional development authorities or states elsewhere with far greater impact on global trade flows. For example, the land mass of all of Western Europe will fit within the borders of Sudan alone. But financially, all of Sudan is smaller than Birmingham UK or Birmingham USA. In the same vein, Texas USA generates some 30pc of USA's USD 3 trillion GDP. That is more than productivity of all Africa other than Nigeria and South Africa. Yet the main operations of our banks rarely extend beyond fishing for deposits, round-tripping of foreign currency, and daisy-chaining of import-export financing letters. These banks make it difficult for community enterprises to operate bank accounts. They don't want you dirtying their marble floor-to-ceiling lobbies. As a result, many enterprises do their business in cash. They buy, sell, lend and collect cash payments. Businesspeople travel with large sums of cash. Politicians settle issues with bags of cash. Major capital expenditures are financed in cash. Only a small portion of this cash enters the formal banking system.
Here then is a guide to raisng funds for community enteprises.
Many middle-tier enterprises conduct the bulk of their business with one or two trade suppliers. It is not uncommon that 70pc to 80pc of supplies for your beer brokerage comes from one supplier. Community enterprises tend to have a more varied distribution of suppliers and customers. Your metal-working workshop may source wrought iron from any number of metal vendors and sell ornamental gates to any number of home-improvers. These trading patterns signify three vibrant sources of business funding for your enterprise, without you needing to exhange dirty looks with a bank worker: vendor finance, supplier finance, and customer prepay finance.
Vendor finance is when the manufacturer of a product gives you some time to sell the product before you pay the manufacturer. The longer you have traded with a manufacturer, the better terms of this "credit" you will likely get. Vendor finance is not likely from your local bukateria (restaurant) where the product is consumed immediately, is not fungible, and is not recoverable. In fact you may see a prominent display that signals "Do not ask for credit as refusal often offends". You should request vendor finance from manufacturers of products that are durable, relatively expensive, and are physically discrete. Such products include stoves, water tanks, car parts, and houses. Although the product is in your possession, its ownership remains with the manufacturer until it is sold. If you are unable to sell the product as agreed, the manufacturer is able to recover the product from your possession and try a more successful trader.
Supplier finance is when a wholesaler, importer or other big trading company supplies you with products or services and gives you some time before you have to pay. This type of financing is the most common in many business-to-business transactions in African markets. Usually ownership and control responsibility for the products become yours. You usually have to pay your supplier when your credit period is due, whether or not you have succeeded in selling the products. Supplier financing tends to cover products with same properties as vendor finance.
Customer prepay finance is when your customer pays before you release your goods and services. This is the type of financing most commonly available to the owner-manager of a bukateria, butchers, small hotel and other open market community enterprises. Interestingly, it is the becoming the most preferred payment mechanism deployed by multinational trading enterprises in African markets. Many Africans do not have credit records or bank accounts. They do not own bank cards or credit cards. They do not own passports or identity cards. They may not even have discernable addresses, as there are no centralised street maps or postal codes. Yet, multinationals know there is plenty-plenty money to be made in your community. Solution: they sell you prepayment cards which you then use, instead of credit or debit cards, to pay for their products.
So how applicable are these funding sources in helping your business enterprise?
You may get vendor finance if your business is resale of capital goods. You should find supplier financing is readily accessible if you deal in fast moving consumer goods. You are already getting customer prepay finance if your business trades on "money for hand" basis. Of course, combinations of all three business financing sources is possible.
When you have ambitions to grow your product-based business, you should consider offering vendor or supplier finance to your business customers. You may be pleased to find significant increases in business volume compensate for delays in getting your cash up-front. You will need to communicate more with your buyers and help develop their business e.g by identifying emerging markets for your products. Do not offer vendor or supplier finance to home consumers.
If your business provides services to a wide range of end-user customers, you should consider introducing a prepayment accounts system tiered to price discounts. For example, you run a restaurant, hotel or mechanic workshop and want to expand your business but don't have the money. Your customers always tell you they really appreciate your food, room service, or car tuning. They only wish you were closer to where they live or work. Bless them. Tell them you want to open a shop near them and are offering discounts on any of your shops to those who pay in advance. Offer 5pc to 10pc discounts for 13weeks or 6months prepayments, respectively. Always issue a computer-printed prepayment voucher that proclaims this offer, and issue a receipt. Use the money to build and furnish your shop. This is the way multinationals fund their GSM "foreign" investments: it is the community paying. Hardly any new money is brought into the community. You can do it too, and you don't need a bank. You only need your regular customers.
Finally, you are advised to invest in information systems to keep track of your growing business, your suppliers, your products and services, and your customers more efficiently. Giving your suppliers and customers computer-generated records improves the profile of your business. Using information systems also helps you to monitor your income and expenditure, profits and losses, and cash flows, so that you know in advance when your enterprise will need money. You really need to plan your business better.
Remi-Niyi Alaran writes on enterprise and social capital.
ALARAN DEVELOPMENT ENTERPRISES. Enterprising Communities.
Copyright (c) ALARAN DEVELOPMENT ENTERPRISES, 2004
You may copy, transmit, or otherwise use this document provided the copyright notice is attached.
Ise Agbe Ile Osan Ju Owo To Ra Onji Ode
Sustainable farming by local farmers, please
Large-scale, commercial farming is a capital and labour intensive business. In the oyinbo countries in US/EU, farming is also heavily subsidised: it is estimated that the EU spends approx eight times more to subsidise each cow than it spends on aid in Africa, about Euro 300. Under the Common Agric Policy, EU farmers are paid to NOT grow food because they otherwise grow too much and further depress world prices. Even with these subsidies, a lot of their excess production is dumped in Africa or "sold" as aid to countries. The effect of this dumping is to remove market incentive of local farmers to cultivate land. One of the dump sites is Nigeria, which imports just about every foodstuff you can imagine apart from cassava and yam.
Much of the farming in US/EU is controlled by the big food processors such as Cargill and Del Monte, the Bigpharmas such as Glaxo and Roche, chemical companies such as Dow Chemical and ICI, and the seed producers such as Syngenta. The biggest 10 seed companies control some 30pc of world grain supply. They have invested in producing seeds that are pest-resistant, and require lots and lots and lots of chemical fertilizer and mechanically controlled irrigation systems, as well as expensive mechanical equipment for planting, harvesting, storage, and distribution investment. These seeds are known in the trade as "terminator seeds" because their root structures and their heavy addiction to chemical fertilizers prevent any other plants, so called weeds, from growing near them.
Terminator seeds also germinate only once. This means that farmers need to go back to the seed producers every year to get new stock. The farmers have contracts to buy seeds from seedCos; contracts to buy fertilizer from chemCos; and contracts to sell their produce to the processors who supply the likes of WalMart, KFC and McD. Needless to say, subscale farmers who do not quality for subsidies get a raw deal most of the time while large landowners are some of the richest peope in US/EU. Some smaller farmers band together to form co-operatives in order to afford seeds or processing machinery and exercise better bargaining power with customers.
What does this all have to do with Zimbabwe/SA farmers coming to Nigeria? When in southern Africa, many of these farmers were in cooperatives that have contracts to supply flowers or grapes or fresh fruit to the UK/EU market. Due to their contracts, they try not to produe any more than their processors can accommodate - hence the large tracts of "set-aside" land that created such rumpus in Zimbabwe. They did not farm the land or allow it to be farmed by the nationals. Their farming investments are not oriented to feeding their host communities. They produce few valuable jobs and retain very little capital in the local economy. The cooperatives refused to allow black farmers as members before or after apartheid in much of southern Africa.
The Akotileta in Nigeria have passed a lot of laws to attract FDI. Many of these laws impact very hard on progressive businesses and production capacity in the country. The little FDI that comes to Nigeria is now directed via the descendants of the Cecil Rhodes generation controlling MTN, Protea, AfricaOne, etc and their counterparts controlling the oil sector.
The s/elected wasters in power do not appreciate that Nigerians will have an incentive to produce their own food and drink if cheaper products are not dumped into the country. Even the farms and businesses belonging to these "leaders" are managed by asians or south Africans.
The cooperative business model is one that holds a lot of potential for progressive entrepreneurs throughout Africa. There is not-a-lot to learn from foreign farmers in the commercialised farm business because black farmers are unlikely to get supply contracts from EU buyers. Africans need to focus on food sufficiency and security within the continent. There is no need to destroy African farmland with the intensive methods described above. If you want to assist African farmers in resisting the antics of the Akotileta and their paymasters, organise cooperatives for your local farmer community. Invest in processing equipment to raise the value-added component. This will bring your community higher prices. Target the African market, and. . .
Do not allow bad seeds to set root in your ancestral land.
Remi-Niyi Alaran writes on enterprise and social capital.
ALARAN DEVELOPMENT ENTERPRISES. Enterprising Communities.
Copyright (c) ALARAN DEVELOPMENT ENTERPRISES, 2003
You may copy, transmit, or otherwise use this document provided the copyright notice is attached.
Aja ti ko ba gbo fere odee, o nfi ku shere: the (hunting) dog that does not hear the hunter's whistle plays with its death.
Interesting that migrants are being invited from all over the world to help fulfil the agriculture component of this government's wretched NEEDS programme. Thought one should cast some detail on why Zimbabwe's outcasts should not be invited by the Akotileta to farm land anywhere in Africa and especially Nigeria.
Firstly, it is important to note the significance of the assertion that, on "independence" the colonials merely handed their estates for safekeeping to its house-servants. In Asia the field-hands are resuming control of their economies. Elsewhere, the colonials are reestablising proxy control of the assets they left behind.
Secondly, there is no reasoning with the Akotileta in government throughout Africa. Progressive people really need to rise above their s/elected governments who insist in looking to foreign "investors" at the expense of home sufficiency.
On to farming...
Firstly, it is important to note the significance of the assertion that, on "independence" the colonials merely handed their estates for safekeeping to its house-servants. In Asia the field-hands are resuming control of their economies. Elsewhere, the colonials are reestablising proxy control of the assets they left behind.
Secondly, there is no reasoning with the Akotileta in government throughout Africa. Progressive people really need to rise above their s/elected governments who insist in looking to foreign "investors" at the expense of home sufficiency.
On to farming...
Large-scale, commercial farming is a capital and labour intensive business. In the oyinbo countries in US/EU, farming is also heavily subsidised: it is estimated that the EU spends approx eight times more to subsidise each cow than it spends on aid in Africa, about Euro 300. Under the Common Agric Policy, EU farmers are paid to NOT grow food because they otherwise grow too much and further depress world prices. Even with these subsidies, a lot of their excess production is dumped in Africa or "sold" as aid to countries. The effect of this dumping is to remove market incentive of local farmers to cultivate land. One of the dump sites is Nigeria, which imports just about every foodstuff you can imagine apart from cassava and yam.
Much of the farming in US/EU is controlled by the big food processors such as Cargill and Del Monte, the Bigpharmas such as Glaxo and Roche, chemical companies such as Dow Chemical and ICI, and the seed producers such as Syngenta. The biggest 10 seed companies control some 30pc of world grain supply. They have invested in producing seeds that are pest-resistant, and require lots and lots and lots of chemical fertilizer and mechanically controlled irrigation systems, as well as expensive mechanical equipment for planting, harvesting, storage, and distribution investment. These seeds are known in the trade as "terminator seeds" because their root structures and their heavy addiction to chemical fertilizers prevent any other plants, so called weeds, from growing near them.
Terminator seeds also germinate only once. This means that farmers need to go back to the seed producers every year to get new stock. The farmers have contracts to buy seeds from seedCos; contracts to buy fertilizer from chemCos; and contracts to sell their produce to the processors who supply the likes of WalMart, KFC and McD. Needless to say, subscale farmers who do not quality for subsidies get a raw deal most of the time while large landowners are some of the richest peope in US/EU. Some smaller farmers band together to form co-operatives in order to afford seeds or processing machinery and exercise better bargaining power with customers.
What does this all have to do with Zimbabwe/SA farmers coming to Nigeria? When in southern Africa, many of these farmers were in cooperatives that have contracts to supply flowers or grapes or fresh fruit to the UK/EU market. Due to their contracts, they try not to produe any more than their processors can accommodate - hence the large tracts of "set-aside" land that created such rumpus in Zimbabwe. They did not farm the land or allow it to be farmed by the nationals. Their farming investments are not oriented to feeding their host communities. They produce few valuable jobs and retain very little capital in the local economy. The cooperatives refused to allow black farmers as members before or after apartheid in much of southern Africa.
The Akotileta in Nigeria have passed a lot of laws to attract FDI. Many of these laws impact very hard on progressive businesses and production capacity in the country. The little FDI that comes to Nigeria is now directed via the descendants of the Cecil Rhodes generation controlling MTN, Protea, AfricaOne, etc and their counterparts controlling the oil sector.
The s/elected wasters in power do not appreciate that Nigerians will have an incentive to produce their own food and drink if cheaper products are not dumped into the country. Even the farms and businesses belonging to these "leaders" are managed by asians or south Africans.
The cooperative business model is one that holds a lot of potential for progressive entrepreneurs throughout Africa. There is not-a-lot to learn from foreign farmers in the commercialised farm business because black farmers are unlikely to get supply contracts from EU buyers. Africans need to focus on food sufficiency and security within the continent. There is no need to destroy African farmland with the intensive methods described above. If you want to assist African farmers in resisting the antics of the Akotileta and their paymasters, organise cooperatives for your local farmer community. Invest in processing equipment to raise the value-added component. This will bring your community higher prices. Target the African market, and. . .
Do not allow bad seeds to set root in your ancestral land.
Remi-Niyi Alaran writes on enterprise and social capital.
ALARAN DEVELOPMENT ENTERPRISES. Enterprising Communities.
Copyright (c) ALARAN DEVELOPMENT ENTERPRISES, 2003
You may copy, transmit, or otherwise use this document provided the copyright notice is attached.
How Africa NEEDS t'AGOA'bout competing in this NEPAD age.
How Africa NEEDS t'AGOA'bout competing in this NEPAD age.
Introduction:
African businesses must sometimes feel they are being led to slaugther. For many, the firm belief is that the economic policies emanating from our governments have significantly removed both government subsidies and eroded private sector purchasing power. Yet, African businesses can turn the flood of misguided policies into as source of competitive advantage, with a change in market and cultural orientation.
Article:
Are we being led to slaughter? Are those appointed to lead our flock selling us to the butchers? Do the butchers intend to take payment in our flesh and blood? Home-grown analysts of the terms under which African businesses engage in international trade, may wsll answer yes, yes and yes. We have the power. We must have the will. We must also frustrate the actions of those who assign a low-value role to our interests in international trade
Article:
Those who celebrate religions by symbolically cannibalising their orisha need not worry; this article is not about blind faith. Rather it is about misguided and downright treacherous agitations about economic progress.
The National Economic Empowermeent and Development Strategy (NEEDS) programme of the Nigerian government will not deliver either economic prosperity or social stability to the Nigerian people. The marketing is slick but this is stale wine in new packaging.
The programme is wrong because the model it is based on is unreplicable and because it is inimical to the progressive interests of Nigerians.
Let us distinguish the stakeholders in NEEDS. The proclaimed primary beneficiaries are the Nigerian people. This programme will supposedly deliver the people from economic dependence on elected government by privaising all public owned institutions. The operators of NEEDS are the government officials, mainly in the financial sector and multilateral agencies, particularly the IMF, the WB and the Clubs of moneylenders. The sponsors of NEEDS are the international community of international governments and companies who will gain trading benefits from transacting in newly liberalised markets.
NEEDS proclaims: export driven trade, full employment, transparent accountancy, etc. It does not address the cultural, military and social is built on a model with the following premises:
# All countries should industrialise along the European model, so industrial-age technology must be transferred to Nigerians;
# Domestic savings should fund acquisition and application of technology; high interest rates will encourage people to save their funds in the banks;
# The national savings rate is low, so foreign aid and foreign investment must be procured;
# Much industrial-age technology is now obsolete, so foreign technical assistance must be retained to implement technological breakthroughs and assist Nigeria to leap-frog gaps in domestic technical capability;
savings. encouraging people to build savings in order to afford labour-saving machinery, use industrial technologies in creating jobs, manufacturing and exporting goods so that Nigeria and Africa must follow an alternative route to socio-economic improvement than that mapped by the sponsors of NEEDS. The structure of economic opportunity is
State aim of needs. Proposed implementation of needs. Likely impact of implementation. Non-needs alternative
Linkshttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif
Nigeria needs to succeed
But development isn't just a question of making markets and economic policy work better. We now know that investing in people - in their health and nutrition, and in their education and training - is an indispensable part of good economic policy. - Tony Blair, Britain leader.
Remi-Niyi Alaran writes on enterprise and social capital.
ALARAN DEVELOPMENT ENTERPRISES. Enterprising Communities.
Copyright (c) ALARAN DEVELOPMENT ENTERPRISES, 2003
You may copy, transmit, or otherwise use this document provided the copyright notice is attached.
Introduction:
African businesses must sometimes feel they are being led to slaugther. For many, the firm belief is that the economic policies emanating from our governments have significantly removed both government subsidies and eroded private sector purchasing power. Yet, African businesses can turn the flood of misguided policies into as source of competitive advantage, with a change in market and cultural orientation.
Article:
Are we being led to slaughter? Are those appointed to lead our flock selling us to the butchers? Do the butchers intend to take payment in our flesh and blood? Home-grown analysts of the terms under which African businesses engage in international trade, may wsll answer yes, yes and yes. We have the power. We must have the will. We must also frustrate the actions of those who assign a low-value role to our interests in international trade
Article:
Those who celebrate religions by symbolically cannibalising their orisha need not worry; this article is not about blind faith. Rather it is about misguided and downright treacherous agitations about economic progress.
The National Economic Empowermeent and Development Strategy (NEEDS) programme of the Nigerian government will not deliver either economic prosperity or social stability to the Nigerian people. The marketing is slick but this is stale wine in new packaging.
The programme is wrong because the model it is based on is unreplicable and because it is inimical to the progressive interests of Nigerians.
Let us distinguish the stakeholders in NEEDS. The proclaimed primary beneficiaries are the Nigerian people. This programme will supposedly deliver the people from economic dependence on elected government by privaising all public owned institutions. The operators of NEEDS are the government officials, mainly in the financial sector and multilateral agencies, particularly the IMF, the WB and the Clubs of moneylenders. The sponsors of NEEDS are the international community of international governments and companies who will gain trading benefits from transacting in newly liberalised markets.
NEEDS proclaims: export driven trade, full employment, transparent accountancy, etc. It does not address the cultural, military and social is built on a model with the following premises:
# All countries should industrialise along the European model, so industrial-age technology must be transferred to Nigerians;
# Domestic savings should fund acquisition and application of technology; high interest rates will encourage people to save their funds in the banks;
# The national savings rate is low, so foreign aid and foreign investment must be procured;
# Much industrial-age technology is now obsolete, so foreign technical assistance must be retained to implement technological breakthroughs and assist Nigeria to leap-frog gaps in domestic technical capability;
savings. encouraging people to build savings in order to afford labour-saving machinery, use industrial technologies in creating jobs, manufacturing and exporting goods so that Nigeria and Africa must follow an alternative route to socio-economic improvement than that mapped by the sponsors of NEEDS. The structure of economic opportunity is
State aim of needs. Proposed implementation of needs. Likely impact of implementation. Non-needs alternative
Linkshttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif
Nigeria needs to succeed
But development isn't just a question of making markets and economic policy work better. We now know that investing in people - in their health and nutrition, and in their education and training - is an indispensable part of good economic policy. - Tony Blair, Britain leader.
Remi-Niyi Alaran writes on enterprise and social capital.
ALARAN DEVELOPMENT ENTERPRISES. Enterprising Communities.
Copyright (c) ALARAN DEVELOPMENT ENTERPRISES, 2003
You may copy, transmit, or otherwise use this document provided the copyright notice is attached.
Agbe Ni Arin Ilu.
This is the 4th (ikeerin) of the Enterprising Communities series to be published by ALARAN DEVELOPMENT ENTERRISES. This series aims to assist African enterpreneurs in building business enterprises based on innovations in science, technology, engineering and medicine.--------
WITH A LITTLE LATERAL THINKING, CITY DWELLERS CAN PROFIT FROM TRADING HOME
Introduction:
The population of many countries are very skewed towards residency in urban areas. Many who migrate retain some familial linkages with their rural origins. Those links can be made into profitable trade links.
Article:
Reading:
http://www.jacaranda.suite.dk/Micro-enterprises.htm
Remi-Niyi Alaran writes on enterprise and social capital.
ALARAN DEVELOPMENT ENTERPRISES. Enterprising Communities.
Copyright (c) ALARAN DEVELOPMENT ENTERPRISES, 2005
You may copy, transmit, or otherwise use this document provided the copyright notice is attached
WITH A LITTLE LATERAL THINKING, CITY DWELLERS CAN PROFIT FROM TRADING HOME
Introduction:
The population of many countries are very skewed towards residency in urban areas. Many who migrate retain some familial linkages with their rural origins. Those links can be made into profitable trade links.
Article:
Reading:
http://www.jacaranda.suite.dk/Micro-enterprises.htm
Remi-Niyi Alaran writes on enterprise and social capital.
ALARAN DEVELOPMENT ENTERPRISES. Enterprising Communities.
Copyright (c) ALARAN DEVELOPMENT ENTERPRISES, 2005
You may copy, transmit, or otherwise use this document provided the copyright notice is attached
Ejo Oja Eru Ni Europe
The Story of the (European) Slave Trade
The Slave trade, started by the Portuguese in the middle of the 15th Century closely followed by the Spaniards, and at a longer interval (1562) by the British, then in quick succession by the Dutch (about 1620), the French (about 1640), the Swedes, Danes and Prussians, attained the full extent of its terrible activities in the 18th Century.
The earliest beginnings of the traffic were marked rather by an admixture of religious bigotry and love of adventure than by sordid motives. The passion for geographical discovery which inspired the famous Henry the Navigator of Portugal, great grandson of our Edward III., was the originating cause of a hideous and protracted tragedy. The captains of two of Prince Henry's exploring caravels brought back with them to Lisbon in 1442 a dozen Africans, whom they had captured on the West Coast in the course of a wholly unprovoked attack upon an African village. Further exploits of a similar kind followed. The ancient Portuguese chronicles recording them resemble the literature of the Crusaders. The African was a heathen, and as such fair game for the prowess of the noble Christian Knights who opposed their steel breast-plates, tempered swords and cross-bows, to his bare chest and primitive spear. Here is a typical account of one of these predatory forays:
Then might you see mothers forsaking their children and husbands their wives, each striving to escape as best he could. Some drowned themselves in the water, others thought to escape by hiding under their huts; others stowed their children among the sea-weed, where our men found them afterwards, hoping they would thus escape notice.... And at last our Lord God, who giveth a reward for every good deed, willed that for the toil they had undergone in His service they should that day obtain victory over their enemies, as well as a guerdon and a payment for all their labour and expense; for they took captive of those Moors, what with men, women and children, 165, besides those that perished and were killed. And when the battle was over, all praised God for the great mercy He had shown them, in that He had willed to give them such a victory, and with so little damage to themselves. They were all very joyful, praising loudly the Lord God for that He had deigned to give such help to such a handful of His Christian people.
Thus did Europe first bring the "glad tidings" to the African. It did not take long to ascertain that the spiritual consolation derived from converting the African to Christianity had its utilitarian counterpart. He made an excellent labourer. Thenceforth every newly-returned caravel brought its quota of miserable captives, and a brisk traffic grew up, Lagos in Southern Portugal becoming the principal slave mart.
That was the first stage. The second began with the discovery of America by Columbus, and of gold in the Island of Haiti, which the Spaniards termed Hispaniola. The aboriginal Caribs and Aranaks proving either intractable or useless as labourers, the Spaniards contracted with the Portuguese for supplies of Africans. Thus, in the opening years of the 16th Century, the black man was transported across the Atlantic and flung into that "New World," where he was fated to suffer such unspeakable agonies and which he has fertilised to such purpose, and for ultimate ends still concealed from the vision of prophecy, with his blood and tears and sweat.
For some years the Spaniards continued to employ the Portuguese as intermediaries for their African slaves. But with the extension of their conquests in the West Indies and on the American mainland, the demand for additional human material to exploit the natural riches of the country, gold and silver, precious stones and spices, waxed incessantly. The Spanish Sovereigns thereupon inaugurated a. system of special contracts ("Assiento") which became of international significance, and under which they bestowed from time to time the monopoly of the supply of Africans for their American possessions upon foreign nations, corporations, or individuals, who in turn employed sub-contractors.
In 1562 the first British sub-contractor appeared on the scene in the person of John Hawkins, and with Queen Elizabeth as sleeping partner, embarked on his career of murder and brigandage in the good ship "Jesus," lent him by his Royal confederate. Ten years later Elizabeth knighted him as a reward for his persistent energies -- contemporaneously described as "going every day on shore to take the inhabitants with burning and spoiling their towns."
The century which followed saw the breakdown of Spain's attempted imperial monopoly of the Americas, and of Portugal's attempted imperial monopoly of the African Seas; nascent British and French Empires rising across the Atlantic; adventurous spirits of many nationalities hastening towards the New World, and British, French, Danes and Dutch disputing for mastery at countless points on the West African Coast. And throughout that period the trade in African flesh and blood grew steadily in volume. Towards the middle of the 17th Century the British became direct exporters, both from the West Coast through "The African Company," and from the Mediterranean Coast of Morocco through "The Company of Barbary Merchants," among whose directors were the Earls of Warwick and Leicester. The French, Dutch, and Danes were then exporting considerable numbers of slaves from the settlements they had founded on the West Coast to their respective possessions in the West Indies and on the mainland, to work the sugar and coffee plantations. The Swedish effort at slave trading was short-lived as was the Prussian. A curious, isolated attempt on the part of one of the German Baltic Barons also came to nothing.
One can only speculate as to the total number of unfortunate Africans torn from their homes between 1442 and 1700, or as to the number that perished in the course of transportation on the slave ships -- the "middle passage" of infamous memory -- when:
the slaves could not turn round, were wedged immovably, in fact, and chained to the deck by the neck and legs ... not infrequently would go mad before dying of suffocation ... in their frenzy some killed others in the hopes of procuring more room to breathe ... men strangled those next to them, and women drove nails into each others' brains.
These horrors were intensified a thousandfold when the trade became an international offence.
It is computed in American records that the British were responsible in the twenty years, 1680-1700, for importing 300,000 Africans into the West Indies and the mainland.
But with the dawn of the 18th Century the trade assumed gigantic proportions. It had been thrown open two years previously "to all British subjects," and a swarm of speculators competed to meet the ever-increasing demand from the American plantations, which were now yielding enormous quantities of tropical produce, thanks entirely to this African slave labour. The risks for those engaged in the actual operations were not inconsiderable: but the profits were correspondingly large. Thenceforth the slave trade "occupied the very foremost part in English policy," and became a predominant concern of our foreign policy. This was clearly shown in the Treaty of Utrecht which closed, in 1713, the needlessly prolonged war of the Spanish Succession in which England, Austria, and the United Netherlands opposed Louis XIV. and Philip V. The part of the Treaty which gave "unqualified and unanimous satisfaction at home" was the "Assiento" compact, whereby England secured from Philip, in accordance with the practice of the Spanish Sovereigns referred to above, an "absolute monopoly of the supply of slaves to the Spanish Colonies." The monopoly was conferred by the British Government upon the South Sea Company. The "immense amount of guilty wealth acquired through the 'Assiento' Treaty did much to compensate for the great pecuniary sacrifices of the war." The generation which concluded it came to regard the "extension of the slave trade as a capital object of English commercial policy," and it became the "main object" of national policy to "encourage the kidnaping of tens of thousands of negroes and their consignment to the most miserable slavery." In fact the Peace which brought a precarious and short-lived truce to Europe, brought war, war of the most atrocious and desolating character, and on a scale until then unimagined, to Africa, and "made of England the great slave trader of the world."
The tradition persisted all through the century. Chatham made the development of the trade a main object of his policy, and "boasted that his conquests in Africa had placed almost the whole slave trade in British hands." Even Pitt, after the war with France which broke French sea-power, annihilated the French slave trade, shattered the French Colonial Empire and made us its heirs, went back upon the position he had precedently assumed [under the influence of Wilberforce] in the teeth of the opposition of three of his colleagues supported by George III. The result was that "in consequence of the British conquests and under the shelter of the British flag, the slave trade became more active than ever," and that under Pitt the English slave trade "more than doubled."
A considerable number of statistics are available from various sources covering the activities of the trade during the 18th Century and the closing years of the 17th, which give some idea of the stupendous havoc wrought in Africa -- almost entirely Western Africa -- during that period. The following have been selected from the most reliable authors, but they are only approximately consecutive:
1666-1766. -- Number of slaves imported by the British alone into British, French, and Spanish American Colonies -- three millions (quarter of a million died on the voyage).
1680-1786. -- Slaves imported into the British American Colonies -- 2,130,000, Jamaica alone absorbing 610,000.
1716-1756. -- An average of 70,000 slaves per annum imported into all the American Colonies, or a total of 3,500,000.
1752-1762. -- Jamaica alone imported 71,115 slaves.
1759-1762. -- Guadeloupe alone imported 40,000 slaves.
1776-1800. -- An average of 74,000 slaves per annum imported into all the American Colonies, or a total of 1,850,000. (Annual average: by British 38 000 ; Portuguese, 10,000; Dutch, 4,000; French, 20,000; Danes, 2,000.)
Some notion can be formed of the profits of the trade by taking selected cases. From about 1730, Liverpool began for various reasons to eclipse both London and Bristol as the chief English centre of the trade. In the eleven years, 1783-1793, 921 Liverpool ships were employed in the convoying of slaves. They carried 303,737 slaves of the total value of £15,186,850. After deducting 15 per cent. under divers heads, the net return to Liverpool in those eleven years amounted to £12,294,116, or an average of £1,117,647 per annum. The net profit to those actually engaged in the trade was £2,361,455 6s. 1d., or an average of £214,677 15s. 1d. per annum.
There was, of course, a double profit upon the value of the slave when sold in the West Indies, and upon articles of British manufacture -- largely cotton goods -- disposed of in Africa for the slave's purchase: Manchester merchants largely profited from the latter. It is computed that from 1750 to 1800, one-fourth of the ships belonging to the port of Liverpool were employed in the slave trade: Liverpool monopolised five-eighths of the British slave trade, and three-sevenths of the total slave trade of the world.
These figures do not, of course, convey any true impression of the horrors and of the devastation involved in securing the slaves in Africa, or of the cruelties attending their treatment in the West India Islands and on the mainland of America. The trade had grown so large that mere kidnaping raids conducted by white men in the immediate neighbourhood of the coast-line were quite insufficient to meet its requirements. Regions inaccessible to the European had to be tapped by the organisation of civil wars. The whole of the immense region from the Senegal to the Congo, and even further south, became in the course of years convulsed by incessant internecine struggles. A vast tumult reigned from one extremity to the other of the most populous and fertile portions of the continent. Tribe was bribed to fight tribe, community to raid community. To every native chief, as to every one of his subjects, was held out the prospect of gain at the expense of his neighbour. Tribal feuds and individual hatreds were alike intensified, and while wide stretches of countryside were systematically ravaged by organised bands of raiders armed with muskets, "hunting down victims for the English trader whose blasting influence, like some malignant providence extended over mighty regions where the face of a white man was never seen," the trade put within the reach of the individual the means of satisfying a personal grudge and of ministering to a private vengeance.
The direct loss of life which this perennial warfare inevitably necessitated must have been enormous in itself, to say nothing of the indirect loss through the destruction of crops and granaries incidental to it, and the consequent starvation ensuing. The transport to the coast by land and water of an incessant stream of shackled captives, over distances extending to many hundreds of miles, must have been even more ruinous. It has been estimated that something like 30 per cent. of the captives perished before reaching the coast, where the exhausted and emaciated survivors were crowded like cattle in barracoons waiting for a slave ship, whose arrival meant for them the still more terrible agonies of the "middle passage."
Throughout the century did this imported hurricane make furious havoc in the forests, plains and valleys of Western Africa, flinging the human wreckage upon the distant shores of the "New" Continent. Arrogantly and savagely did England's rulers oppose the multiplying evidence of aversion exhibited by the North American colonists at the black flood which England poured upon their country, a policy persisted in until the eve of the War of Independence. "We cannot allow," declared Lord Dartmouth, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, in reply to one of these remonstrances, in 1775, "the Colonies to check or to discourage in any degree a traffic so beneficial to the nation."
Lord Dartmouth was merely giving expression to what, since the Peace of Utrecht, had become the fixed national policy. He was supported by the spirit of the time. The monarchy, the aristocracy, the commercial world, and ecclesiasticism, alike, defended the slave trade and directly benefited therefrom.
Queen Anne saw no objection, it is said, to increase her dowry, like her celebrated predecessor, from its operations. A statute of King William of pious memory affirms that "the trade was highly beneficial to the kingdom"; another of George II. declares it to be "very advantageous to Great Britain," and "necessary to the plantations," while the "Society for propagating Christianity," including half the episcopal bench, derived, as masters, from the labour of their slaves in the West Indies, an income which they spent in "teaching the religion of peace and goodwill to men."
England continued to be "the great slave trader of the world," until a handful of her sons, humane and determined men, compelled her to gaze into the depths of the Hell the greed of her ruling and trading classes had done so much to create.
The treatment of the transported African varied considerably. There is a concensus of opinion that he fared best under the Portuguese, the Danes, the French and the Spaniards, and worse under the Dutch and the British. The abuses, the immoralities, the tortures practised upon the slaves, and the fierce outbreaks to which they occasionally gave rise, fill hundreds of volumes. They seemed to have reached the height of their intensity in Dutch Guiana and the British West Indies. "For a hundred years slaves in Barbadoes were mutilated, tortured, gibbeted alive and left to starve to death, burnt alive, flung into coppers of boiling sugar, whipped to death."
It would be beyond the scope of this volume to deal with the long struggle waged by Clarkson, Sharp, Wilberforce, and others against the trade, the gradual awakening of the public conscience to its infamies, and the final triumph of the reformers. To Burke, more than to any man, is probably due the changed mental attitude of England towards the rights and the wrongs of coloured peoples, which ultimately enabled the efforts of Wilberforce and his colleagues to attain fruition. In Sir Charles Dilke's incessant labours for the same ends during the closing years of the 19th, and the opening years of the 20th Century, a later generation will perceive more vividly perhaps than does the present one, the persistence of a Parliamentary tradition which he helped to undo something of the evils of official England's African record, and caused her in recent years to give to the colonising Governments of Europe as good an example, on the whole, as the bad one she so long personified. But neither the vigour which Britain showed in the early part of last century in stamping out the slave trade which had conduced so largely to her prosperity in the previous one nor her condemnation of its revival in inverted form on the Congo, nor the comparatively better treatment she has meted out to her coloured subjects during the past half century would qualify her, in view of her terrible past performances, to exercise the functions of judge in relation to the offences of her contemporaries.
Nor are Britain's hands wholly clean to-day. The hands of every European Power which has had dealings with him is stained deep with the blood of the African. For any such Power to approach the African problem on the morrow of the Great War otherwise than with a consciousness of past sins, would be to proclaim itself hypocrite in the eyes of the world. What Britons may legitimately hope for from their rulers is that British policy, devoid of pharisaism, may be directed patiently, strenuously and unselfishly to the task of providing for the long persecuted black man and his descendants a future of hope, promise and assured security.
Citation: Morel, E. D. The Black Man's Burden: The White Man in Africa from the Fifteenth Century to World War I (Manchester: National Labour Press, 1920; BoondocksNet Edition, 2001). http://www.boondocksnet.com/editions/morel
-------------------
Remi-Niyi Alaran writes on enterprise and social capital.
This material is copy from BoondockNet website [04.02.2005].
The Slave trade, started by the Portuguese in the middle of the 15th Century closely followed by the Spaniards, and at a longer interval (1562) by the British, then in quick succession by the Dutch (about 1620), the French (about 1640), the Swedes, Danes and Prussians, attained the full extent of its terrible activities in the 18th Century.
The earliest beginnings of the traffic were marked rather by an admixture of religious bigotry and love of adventure than by sordid motives. The passion for geographical discovery which inspired the famous Henry the Navigator of Portugal, great grandson of our Edward III., was the originating cause of a hideous and protracted tragedy. The captains of two of Prince Henry's exploring caravels brought back with them to Lisbon in 1442 a dozen Africans, whom they had captured on the West Coast in the course of a wholly unprovoked attack upon an African village. Further exploits of a similar kind followed. The ancient Portuguese chronicles recording them resemble the literature of the Crusaders. The African was a heathen, and as such fair game for the prowess of the noble Christian Knights who opposed their steel breast-plates, tempered swords and cross-bows, to his bare chest and primitive spear. Here is a typical account of one of these predatory forays:
Then might you see mothers forsaking their children and husbands their wives, each striving to escape as best he could. Some drowned themselves in the water, others thought to escape by hiding under their huts; others stowed their children among the sea-weed, where our men found them afterwards, hoping they would thus escape notice.... And at last our Lord God, who giveth a reward for every good deed, willed that for the toil they had undergone in His service they should that day obtain victory over their enemies, as well as a guerdon and a payment for all their labour and expense; for they took captive of those Moors, what with men, women and children, 165, besides those that perished and were killed. And when the battle was over, all praised God for the great mercy He had shown them, in that He had willed to give them such a victory, and with so little damage to themselves. They were all very joyful, praising loudly the Lord God for that He had deigned to give such help to such a handful of His Christian people.
Thus did Europe first bring the "glad tidings" to the African. It did not take long to ascertain that the spiritual consolation derived from converting the African to Christianity had its utilitarian counterpart. He made an excellent labourer. Thenceforth every newly-returned caravel brought its quota of miserable captives, and a brisk traffic grew up, Lagos in Southern Portugal becoming the principal slave mart.
That was the first stage. The second began with the discovery of America by Columbus, and of gold in the Island of Haiti, which the Spaniards termed Hispaniola. The aboriginal Caribs and Aranaks proving either intractable or useless as labourers, the Spaniards contracted with the Portuguese for supplies of Africans. Thus, in the opening years of the 16th Century, the black man was transported across the Atlantic and flung into that "New World," where he was fated to suffer such unspeakable agonies and which he has fertilised to such purpose, and for ultimate ends still concealed from the vision of prophecy, with his blood and tears and sweat.
For some years the Spaniards continued to employ the Portuguese as intermediaries for their African slaves. But with the extension of their conquests in the West Indies and on the American mainland, the demand for additional human material to exploit the natural riches of the country, gold and silver, precious stones and spices, waxed incessantly. The Spanish Sovereigns thereupon inaugurated a. system of special contracts ("Assiento") which became of international significance, and under which they bestowed from time to time the monopoly of the supply of Africans for their American possessions upon foreign nations, corporations, or individuals, who in turn employed sub-contractors.
In 1562 the first British sub-contractor appeared on the scene in the person of John Hawkins, and with Queen Elizabeth as sleeping partner, embarked on his career of murder and brigandage in the good ship "Jesus," lent him by his Royal confederate. Ten years later Elizabeth knighted him as a reward for his persistent energies -- contemporaneously described as "going every day on shore to take the inhabitants with burning and spoiling their towns."
The century which followed saw the breakdown of Spain's attempted imperial monopoly of the Americas, and of Portugal's attempted imperial monopoly of the African Seas; nascent British and French Empires rising across the Atlantic; adventurous spirits of many nationalities hastening towards the New World, and British, French, Danes and Dutch disputing for mastery at countless points on the West African Coast. And throughout that period the trade in African flesh and blood grew steadily in volume. Towards the middle of the 17th Century the British became direct exporters, both from the West Coast through "The African Company," and from the Mediterranean Coast of Morocco through "The Company of Barbary Merchants," among whose directors were the Earls of Warwick and Leicester. The French, Dutch, and Danes were then exporting considerable numbers of slaves from the settlements they had founded on the West Coast to their respective possessions in the West Indies and on the mainland, to work the sugar and coffee plantations. The Swedish effort at slave trading was short-lived as was the Prussian. A curious, isolated attempt on the part of one of the German Baltic Barons also came to nothing.
One can only speculate as to the total number of unfortunate Africans torn from their homes between 1442 and 1700, or as to the number that perished in the course of transportation on the slave ships -- the "middle passage" of infamous memory -- when:
the slaves could not turn round, were wedged immovably, in fact, and chained to the deck by the neck and legs ... not infrequently would go mad before dying of suffocation ... in their frenzy some killed others in the hopes of procuring more room to breathe ... men strangled those next to them, and women drove nails into each others' brains.
These horrors were intensified a thousandfold when the trade became an international offence.
It is computed in American records that the British were responsible in the twenty years, 1680-1700, for importing 300,000 Africans into the West Indies and the mainland.
But with the dawn of the 18th Century the trade assumed gigantic proportions. It had been thrown open two years previously "to all British subjects," and a swarm of speculators competed to meet the ever-increasing demand from the American plantations, which were now yielding enormous quantities of tropical produce, thanks entirely to this African slave labour. The risks for those engaged in the actual operations were not inconsiderable: but the profits were correspondingly large. Thenceforth the slave trade "occupied the very foremost part in English policy," and became a predominant concern of our foreign policy. This was clearly shown in the Treaty of Utrecht which closed, in 1713, the needlessly prolonged war of the Spanish Succession in which England, Austria, and the United Netherlands opposed Louis XIV. and Philip V. The part of the Treaty which gave "unqualified and unanimous satisfaction at home" was the "Assiento" compact, whereby England secured from Philip, in accordance with the practice of the Spanish Sovereigns referred to above, an "absolute monopoly of the supply of slaves to the Spanish Colonies." The monopoly was conferred by the British Government upon the South Sea Company. The "immense amount of guilty wealth acquired through the 'Assiento' Treaty did much to compensate for the great pecuniary sacrifices of the war." The generation which concluded it came to regard the "extension of the slave trade as a capital object of English commercial policy," and it became the "main object" of national policy to "encourage the kidnaping of tens of thousands of negroes and their consignment to the most miserable slavery." In fact the Peace which brought a precarious and short-lived truce to Europe, brought war, war of the most atrocious and desolating character, and on a scale until then unimagined, to Africa, and "made of England the great slave trader of the world."
The tradition persisted all through the century. Chatham made the development of the trade a main object of his policy, and "boasted that his conquests in Africa had placed almost the whole slave trade in British hands." Even Pitt, after the war with France which broke French sea-power, annihilated the French slave trade, shattered the French Colonial Empire and made us its heirs, went back upon the position he had precedently assumed [under the influence of Wilberforce] in the teeth of the opposition of three of his colleagues supported by George III. The result was that "in consequence of the British conquests and under the shelter of the British flag, the slave trade became more active than ever," and that under Pitt the English slave trade "more than doubled."
A considerable number of statistics are available from various sources covering the activities of the trade during the 18th Century and the closing years of the 17th, which give some idea of the stupendous havoc wrought in Africa -- almost entirely Western Africa -- during that period. The following have been selected from the most reliable authors, but they are only approximately consecutive:
1666-1766. -- Number of slaves imported by the British alone into British, French, and Spanish American Colonies -- three millions (quarter of a million died on the voyage).
1680-1786. -- Slaves imported into the British American Colonies -- 2,130,000, Jamaica alone absorbing 610,000.
1716-1756. -- An average of 70,000 slaves per annum imported into all the American Colonies, or a total of 3,500,000.
1752-1762. -- Jamaica alone imported 71,115 slaves.
1759-1762. -- Guadeloupe alone imported 40,000 slaves.
1776-1800. -- An average of 74,000 slaves per annum imported into all the American Colonies, or a total of 1,850,000. (Annual average: by British 38 000 ; Portuguese, 10,000; Dutch, 4,000; French, 20,000; Danes, 2,000.)
Some notion can be formed of the profits of the trade by taking selected cases. From about 1730, Liverpool began for various reasons to eclipse both London and Bristol as the chief English centre of the trade. In the eleven years, 1783-1793, 921 Liverpool ships were employed in the convoying of slaves. They carried 303,737 slaves of the total value of £15,186,850. After deducting 15 per cent. under divers heads, the net return to Liverpool in those eleven years amounted to £12,294,116, or an average of £1,117,647 per annum. The net profit to those actually engaged in the trade was £2,361,455 6s. 1d., or an average of £214,677 15s. 1d. per annum.
There was, of course, a double profit upon the value of the slave when sold in the West Indies, and upon articles of British manufacture -- largely cotton goods -- disposed of in Africa for the slave's purchase: Manchester merchants largely profited from the latter. It is computed that from 1750 to 1800, one-fourth of the ships belonging to the port of Liverpool were employed in the slave trade: Liverpool monopolised five-eighths of the British slave trade, and three-sevenths of the total slave trade of the world.
These figures do not, of course, convey any true impression of the horrors and of the devastation involved in securing the slaves in Africa, or of the cruelties attending their treatment in the West India Islands and on the mainland of America. The trade had grown so large that mere kidnaping raids conducted by white men in the immediate neighbourhood of the coast-line were quite insufficient to meet its requirements. Regions inaccessible to the European had to be tapped by the organisation of civil wars. The whole of the immense region from the Senegal to the Congo, and even further south, became in the course of years convulsed by incessant internecine struggles. A vast tumult reigned from one extremity to the other of the most populous and fertile portions of the continent. Tribe was bribed to fight tribe, community to raid community. To every native chief, as to every one of his subjects, was held out the prospect of gain at the expense of his neighbour. Tribal feuds and individual hatreds were alike intensified, and while wide stretches of countryside were systematically ravaged by organised bands of raiders armed with muskets, "hunting down victims for the English trader whose blasting influence, like some malignant providence extended over mighty regions where the face of a white man was never seen," the trade put within the reach of the individual the means of satisfying a personal grudge and of ministering to a private vengeance.
The direct loss of life which this perennial warfare inevitably necessitated must have been enormous in itself, to say nothing of the indirect loss through the destruction of crops and granaries incidental to it, and the consequent starvation ensuing. The transport to the coast by land and water of an incessant stream of shackled captives, over distances extending to many hundreds of miles, must have been even more ruinous. It has been estimated that something like 30 per cent. of the captives perished before reaching the coast, where the exhausted and emaciated survivors were crowded like cattle in barracoons waiting for a slave ship, whose arrival meant for them the still more terrible agonies of the "middle passage."
Throughout the century did this imported hurricane make furious havoc in the forests, plains and valleys of Western Africa, flinging the human wreckage upon the distant shores of the "New" Continent. Arrogantly and savagely did England's rulers oppose the multiplying evidence of aversion exhibited by the North American colonists at the black flood which England poured upon their country, a policy persisted in until the eve of the War of Independence. "We cannot allow," declared Lord Dartmouth, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, in reply to one of these remonstrances, in 1775, "the Colonies to check or to discourage in any degree a traffic so beneficial to the nation."
Lord Dartmouth was merely giving expression to what, since the Peace of Utrecht, had become the fixed national policy. He was supported by the spirit of the time. The monarchy, the aristocracy, the commercial world, and ecclesiasticism, alike, defended the slave trade and directly benefited therefrom.
Queen Anne saw no objection, it is said, to increase her dowry, like her celebrated predecessor, from its operations. A statute of King William of pious memory affirms that "the trade was highly beneficial to the kingdom"; another of George II. declares it to be "very advantageous to Great Britain," and "necessary to the plantations," while the "Society for propagating Christianity," including half the episcopal bench, derived, as masters, from the labour of their slaves in the West Indies, an income which they spent in "teaching the religion of peace and goodwill to men."
England continued to be "the great slave trader of the world," until a handful of her sons, humane and determined men, compelled her to gaze into the depths of the Hell the greed of her ruling and trading classes had done so much to create.
The treatment of the transported African varied considerably. There is a concensus of opinion that he fared best under the Portuguese, the Danes, the French and the Spaniards, and worse under the Dutch and the British. The abuses, the immoralities, the tortures practised upon the slaves, and the fierce outbreaks to which they occasionally gave rise, fill hundreds of volumes. They seemed to have reached the height of their intensity in Dutch Guiana and the British West Indies. "For a hundred years slaves in Barbadoes were mutilated, tortured, gibbeted alive and left to starve to death, burnt alive, flung into coppers of boiling sugar, whipped to death."
It would be beyond the scope of this volume to deal with the long struggle waged by Clarkson, Sharp, Wilberforce, and others against the trade, the gradual awakening of the public conscience to its infamies, and the final triumph of the reformers. To Burke, more than to any man, is probably due the changed mental attitude of England towards the rights and the wrongs of coloured peoples, which ultimately enabled the efforts of Wilberforce and his colleagues to attain fruition. In Sir Charles Dilke's incessant labours for the same ends during the closing years of the 19th, and the opening years of the 20th Century, a later generation will perceive more vividly perhaps than does the present one, the persistence of a Parliamentary tradition which he helped to undo something of the evils of official England's African record, and caused her in recent years to give to the colonising Governments of Europe as good an example, on the whole, as the bad one she so long personified. But neither the vigour which Britain showed in the early part of last century in stamping out the slave trade which had conduced so largely to her prosperity in the previous one nor her condemnation of its revival in inverted form on the Congo, nor the comparatively better treatment she has meted out to her coloured subjects during the past half century would qualify her, in view of her terrible past performances, to exercise the functions of judge in relation to the offences of her contemporaries.
Nor are Britain's hands wholly clean to-day. The hands of every European Power which has had dealings with him is stained deep with the blood of the African. For any such Power to approach the African problem on the morrow of the Great War otherwise than with a consciousness of past sins, would be to proclaim itself hypocrite in the eyes of the world. What Britons may legitimately hope for from their rulers is that British policy, devoid of pharisaism, may be directed patiently, strenuously and unselfishly to the task of providing for the long persecuted black man and his descendants a future of hope, promise and assured security.
Citation: Morel, E. D. The Black Man's Burden: The White Man in Africa from the Fifteenth Century to World War I (Manchester: National Labour Press, 1920; BoondocksNet Edition, 2001). http://www.boondocksnet.com/editions/morel
-------------------
Remi-Niyi Alaran writes on enterprise and social capital.
This material is copy from BoondockNet website [04.02.2005].
O Ye Ki Afi Ilu-Pipin Sile Lati Wa Oja Fun Ra Won.
Free the states and the people to compete.
Let us decentralise security, revenues and expenditure.
Why not encourage the various states to compete among themselves for industry? Right now, they seem all to be competing ONLY for allocation of primary commodity revenues, principally crude oil, which are then consumed leaving nil for investment and economic growth.
May be the arrangement of public affairs should be changed such that the federal owns all the land in the country while each state owns the physical resources within its borders. Anambra can sell its coal/ores to metallurgists in China or in Ondo state. Lagos can sell its financial services / access to ports at commercially viable rates. The Niger Delta states can own their crude oil and trade with whoever they want. Kaduna investors can refurbish the refinery and petrochemical plant then sell refinates to Sokoto or Oyo states at market prices. If surrounding states impose toll gates (tariffs) on all roads, sea and air lanes leading to/fro Anambra, Lagos, ND or Kaduna, so be it. Hurray for private enterprise. As for Abuja FCT, it will probably develop a (commercially viable) lobbying industry as states, investors and market makers joustle to attract wealth benefits for their respective operations from federal regulators. All is well as long as such benefits improve general living standards and our competitiveness as a people. And the states that do not presently have mineral resources? Look to Lagos, Japan, Switzerland, Isreal or Somalia (without the war-mongering) for your economic models: Invest in enabling knowledge industries, assume neutrality, and you will (very likely) do well in the services sectors: discretion, logistics, leisure and communications.
The federal retains overall authority / power to enforce security, taxation or environmental controls but devolves responsibility / exercise to each state. What the federal loses in monopoly e.g on coersion by violent force, we will all gain in mutual self-interest e.g the making of each state more resistant to disgruntled elements within or without the body politic. Any state that thinks too insularly will face the consideration of its many neighbours, rather than the one federal. Same with the external aggressors who watch our current turpor, and wait.
Revenues should increase all round: [1] To the federal because all economic activity must necessarily occur through, around, over or under (federal) land. [2] To the states, who must compete to attract skilled and industrious workers as well as tax-paying and job-creating businesses, who in turn fuel their economic activity by organising private finance. [3] To the technically competent, who harvest the fossil fuel energy resources or harness the solar, wind or water energy resources so abundant in the country. [4] To the many currently listless unemployed or underemployed, who now find businesses competing for skills and knowledge, with resulting increases in living standards, choice of goods and services, and greater mobility of ideas, labour and capital. [5] To private investors, who now have an incentive to spend their gains on productive activities within the country rather indulge the 'we can always import it' economic empowerment and development strategists. The acquisitve-but-lazy cannot end up buying all the land in the country as the federal (i.e all of us) own it all. Some rent-seeking and horse-trading will occur, that's fine and fine-able.
Federal citizens can invest, work, reside or move freely across state boundaries and no state may expel any federal citizen from that state. Will the mineral-producing states export all their production across the Atlantic and import foreign manufactured produce in return? Producers can certainly grow rich, but it is not likely that they will commit economic secession. [1] For starters, the states with higher living standards will attract hordes of opportunity seekers. The federal taxes the exports, tariffs the imports, and pays close attention to minimum standards in matters of housing, wages, health, and environment. [2] Secondly, neighbouring states will try to develop processing and manufacturing facilities in order to improve their comparative advantages in regard to the producers. As quality of local manufactures improve to match or exceed import standards and new markets are created, so will demand grow. Comparative advantage is not viable in the 'classic' economic sense of "lowest cost producer". Rather, comparative advantage is in yield of highest marginal benefits (high profits, low costs, security of supply or markets, etc) to the producer. [3] Thirdly, neighbouring states will export their unemployed and disgruntled inhabitants across the porous boundaries into uncooperative rich states, who will soon realise their incentive to share the wealth.
All state and federal transactions should be denominated and conducted in the federal currency. That includes all external and internal borrowing, technical assistance, joint ventures, foreign direct investment, "monetised" foreign aid etc. The existing foreign-currency denominated external debt should remain federal responsibility. Tax-paying investors can register businesses (including banks) at state level. The businesses may operate across the nation. They pay federal taxes and pay business rates in the state of registration. Each bank can operate in at least three states (regional) or in all states (national), with appropriate levels of capitalisation. Banks pay federal taxes and pay business rates in each states of operations. So, states may compete to attract bank operations.
Land occupancy should be levied on a per sqm basis, and fallow land levied at higher rate than land that is registered as in economic use. Registered land may only be used for its registered purpose and that purpose should start within specified time frame. Registered land reverts to the state pool if it does not record investment returns within the time frames. No state may prevent squatters from occupying fallow land in that state. Squatters of five years residency should be eligible to claim occupany rights provided they can evidence economic use of such land.
All these measures may well distribute land into the control of persons with incentive to profit from its economic use. Our aim is not wealth redistribution or income growth, but rather to build on the industriousness of people willing to improve their lives. Our policies should catalyse, release and sustain the spirit of competitive enterprise and the performance-based work ethic in our people. Suitabley encouraged, they will incorporate the efficiencies of scientific thought and technological tools into their enterprises - if only they know how. If Africans are to survive the global competition we face from others, we will need to embrace, to master, and to improve on the ways of intelligent enquiry, application of knowledge, on timeliness, and on due attention to detail. There are also bad habits to lose. It is unintelligent to submit uncritically to any authority, whether celestial or temporal. It is equally unproductive to expect others to sweat, bleed or toil for our leisure. The engineer who braves the high seas or the scientist who dares breathe noxious fumes. The investor who buys our deliquent bonds or the farmer who wakes at dawn and rests after dusk. These are people taking risks so that they may earn rewards for themselves. Sharing such rewards with lazy, wasteful and high-living rent-seekers does not appeal to their sense of fair trade. Neither will our appeals to tradition, forgetfulness, observance of fatuous religions, or tardiness when the time comes to pay for their cunning, capital, goods and services. Imported technologies cannot help our understanding unless we dismantle, reassemble and improve on what we get. Likewise, to depend on foreign technicians or capital is to court permanent economic damage. Anybody will be deemed mad who helps a supine market to gain economic sovereignty.
Accordingly, the education curriculum should be restructured to emphasise general competency in the vocational application of knowledge sciences and technologies at secondary school level. This recognises the fact that many people do not proceed in formal education beyond the secondary school certification. The institutions of higher learning may exercise minds further with academics, abstractions and research aimed at acquiring, and adapting to local industry, the world's knowledge in every field of endeavour, irrespective of the ingenuity, origin, patent, or might of protector: all knowledge belongs to the world. In time, we too will contribute our innovations to the world to improve upon.
The current structure of economic opportunities is flawed. It induces paralysis in enterprise. It destroys personal initiative. It rewards corruptive behaviour. It is damaging our competiveness with other peoples of the world. We need to carefully consider the lessons African history offers from such a flawed structure. Slavery of African people continues in the world today in all aspects of our lives. It will not stop until we can compete in all aspects and then ensure it is unprofitable to continue. The proposal is to have a flexible yet robust superstructure that can extend to accomodate more or fewer states; merger or devolution of state or federal authorities; expansion or collapse of business enterprises. Competition is risky.
These unrefined words are just a few thoughts on getting African land and people back to work.
Refinements welcome. Send email to: iyaalata@netscape.net or post your comments below
Remi-Niyi Alaran writes on enterprise and social capital.
Copyright (c) ALARAN DEVELOPMENT ENTERPRISES, 2005
You may copy, transmit, or otherwise use this document provided the copyright notice is attached
Why not encourage the various states to compete among themselves for industry? Right now, they seem all to be competing ONLY for allocation of primary commodity revenues, principally crude oil, which are then consumed leaving nil for investment and economic growth.
May be the arrangement of public affairs should be changed such that the federal owns all the land in the country while each state owns the physical resources within its borders. Anambra can sell its coal/ores to metallurgists in China or in Ondo state. Lagos can sell its financial services / access to ports at commercially viable rates. The Niger Delta states can own their crude oil and trade with whoever they want. Kaduna investors can refurbish the refinery and petrochemical plant then sell refinates to Sokoto or Oyo states at market prices. If surrounding states impose toll gates (tariffs) on all roads, sea and air lanes leading to/fro Anambra, Lagos, ND or Kaduna, so be it. Hurray for private enterprise. As for Abuja FCT, it will probably develop a (commercially viable) lobbying industry as states, investors and market makers joustle to attract wealth benefits for their respective operations from federal regulators. All is well as long as such benefits improve general living standards and our competitiveness as a people. And the states that do not presently have mineral resources? Look to Lagos, Japan, Switzerland, Isreal or Somalia (without the war-mongering) for your economic models: Invest in enabling knowledge industries, assume neutrality, and you will (very likely) do well in the services sectors: discretion, logistics, leisure and communications.
The federal retains overall authority / power to enforce security, taxation or environmental controls but devolves responsibility / exercise to each state. What the federal loses in monopoly e.g on coersion by violent force, we will all gain in mutual self-interest e.g the making of each state more resistant to disgruntled elements within or without the body politic. Any state that thinks too insularly will face the consideration of its many neighbours, rather than the one federal. Same with the external aggressors who watch our current turpor, and wait.
Revenues should increase all round: [1] To the federal because all economic activity must necessarily occur through, around, over or under (federal) land. [2] To the states, who must compete to attract skilled and industrious workers as well as tax-paying and job-creating businesses, who in turn fuel their economic activity by organising private finance. [3] To the technically competent, who harvest the fossil fuel energy resources or harness the solar, wind or water energy resources so abundant in the country. [4] To the many currently listless unemployed or underemployed, who now find businesses competing for skills and knowledge, with resulting increases in living standards, choice of goods and services, and greater mobility of ideas, labour and capital. [5] To private investors, who now have an incentive to spend their gains on productive activities within the country rather indulge the 'we can always import it' economic empowerment and development strategists. The acquisitve-but-lazy cannot end up buying all the land in the country as the federal (i.e all of us) own it all. Some rent-seeking and horse-trading will occur, that's fine and fine-able.
Federal citizens can invest, work, reside or move freely across state boundaries and no state may expel any federal citizen from that state. Will the mineral-producing states export all their production across the Atlantic and import foreign manufactured produce in return? Producers can certainly grow rich, but it is not likely that they will commit economic secession. [1] For starters, the states with higher living standards will attract hordes of opportunity seekers. The federal taxes the exports, tariffs the imports, and pays close attention to minimum standards in matters of housing, wages, health, and environment. [2] Secondly, neighbouring states will try to develop processing and manufacturing facilities in order to improve their comparative advantages in regard to the producers. As quality of local manufactures improve to match or exceed import standards and new markets are created, so will demand grow. Comparative advantage is not viable in the 'classic' economic sense of "lowest cost producer". Rather, comparative advantage is in yield of highest marginal benefits (high profits, low costs, security of supply or markets, etc) to the producer. [3] Thirdly, neighbouring states will export their unemployed and disgruntled inhabitants across the porous boundaries into uncooperative rich states, who will soon realise their incentive to share the wealth.
All state and federal transactions should be denominated and conducted in the federal currency. That includes all external and internal borrowing, technical assistance, joint ventures, foreign direct investment, "monetised" foreign aid etc. The existing foreign-currency denominated external debt should remain federal responsibility. Tax-paying investors can register businesses (including banks) at state level. The businesses may operate across the nation. They pay federal taxes and pay business rates in the state of registration. Each bank can operate in at least three states (regional) or in all states (national), with appropriate levels of capitalisation. Banks pay federal taxes and pay business rates in each states of operations. So, states may compete to attract bank operations.
Land occupancy should be levied on a per sqm basis, and fallow land levied at higher rate than land that is registered as in economic use. Registered land may only be used for its registered purpose and that purpose should start within specified time frame. Registered land reverts to the state pool if it does not record investment returns within the time frames. No state may prevent squatters from occupying fallow land in that state. Squatters of five years residency should be eligible to claim occupany rights provided they can evidence economic use of such land.
All these measures may well distribute land into the control of persons with incentive to profit from its economic use. Our aim is not wealth redistribution or income growth, but rather to build on the industriousness of people willing to improve their lives. Our policies should catalyse, release and sustain the spirit of competitive enterprise and the performance-based work ethic in our people. Suitabley encouraged, they will incorporate the efficiencies of scientific thought and technological tools into their enterprises - if only they know how. If Africans are to survive the global competition we face from others, we will need to embrace, to master, and to improve on the ways of intelligent enquiry, application of knowledge, on timeliness, and on due attention to detail. There are also bad habits to lose. It is unintelligent to submit uncritically to any authority, whether celestial or temporal. It is equally unproductive to expect others to sweat, bleed or toil for our leisure. The engineer who braves the high seas or the scientist who dares breathe noxious fumes. The investor who buys our deliquent bonds or the farmer who wakes at dawn and rests after dusk. These are people taking risks so that they may earn rewards for themselves. Sharing such rewards with lazy, wasteful and high-living rent-seekers does not appeal to their sense of fair trade. Neither will our appeals to tradition, forgetfulness, observance of fatuous religions, or tardiness when the time comes to pay for their cunning, capital, goods and services. Imported technologies cannot help our understanding unless we dismantle, reassemble and improve on what we get. Likewise, to depend on foreign technicians or capital is to court permanent economic damage. Anybody will be deemed mad who helps a supine market to gain economic sovereignty.
Accordingly, the education curriculum should be restructured to emphasise general competency in the vocational application of knowledge sciences and technologies at secondary school level. This recognises the fact that many people do not proceed in formal education beyond the secondary school certification. The institutions of higher learning may exercise minds further with academics, abstractions and research aimed at acquiring, and adapting to local industry, the world's knowledge in every field of endeavour, irrespective of the ingenuity, origin, patent, or might of protector: all knowledge belongs to the world. In time, we too will contribute our innovations to the world to improve upon.
The current structure of economic opportunities is flawed. It induces paralysis in enterprise. It destroys personal initiative. It rewards corruptive behaviour. It is damaging our competiveness with other peoples of the world. We need to carefully consider the lessons African history offers from such a flawed structure. Slavery of African people continues in the world today in all aspects of our lives. It will not stop until we can compete in all aspects and then ensure it is unprofitable to continue. The proposal is to have a flexible yet robust superstructure that can extend to accomodate more or fewer states; merger or devolution of state or federal authorities; expansion or collapse of business enterprises. Competition is risky.
These unrefined words are just a few thoughts on getting African land and people back to work.
Refinements welcome. Send email to: iyaalata@netscape.net or post your comments below
Remi-Niyi Alaran writes on enterprise and social capital.
Copyright (c) ALARAN DEVELOPMENT ENTERPRISES, 2005
You may copy, transmit, or otherwise use this document provided the copyright notice is attached
Ka She Anfani Onise Sile Fun Awon Iran To Nbo Lehin
Build capacity for a new generation of African manufacturers
The African manufacturing sector is currently dominated by enterprises that are oriented towards external investors and markets. The orientation is both direct and indirect. Official trade policy promotes intervention of foreign direct investment as “juju” for curing perceived disfunctions in local savings and investment levels. Societal consumption patterns sustain indirect dependency on foreign manufacturers through export of raw materials and import of finished goods.
Current generation of manufacturers are not environmentally sustainable in that they draw neither technological inspiration nor economic sustenance from the African markets. A progressive society is one in which cultural relevance underpins scientific research and technological innovation. African manufacturers are undistinguished in research or innovation in a world where the quintessence of market competitiveness is a societal culture of science and technology .
There are three breeds of these unsustainable manufacturers: the vast majority export mineral extracts or agricultural commodities to foreign markets. Global revenues for these commodity suppliers are on a long-term downward spiral as the primary markets become glutted or as primary processors resort increasingly to using innovative synthetic alternatives. The second breed assemble components imported from foreign manufacturers for distribution within African markets. Dramatic falls in purchasing power, high capital costs, and rapid devaluation of local currencies combine to dampen affordability of foreign exchange for importation of imported components. It is also becoming increasingly difficult to ensure reliable supply of the requisite process tools or machinery in an age of rapid technological obsolescence. The third breed are marginally sustainable as they concentrate on domestic processing of local commodities for consumption in African markets or for export. They survive on the margins because their products fulfil low-order nourishment and security needs such as food, fuel or housing.
The long-term survival of today's manufacturers is doubtful because African consumers are becoming more discerning and aspiratorial. They are very fed-up with making-do on inferior goods that have no quality guarantees, low cultural relevance, or high security risks. Examples of such products include stand-by generators, “tokunbo” automobiles, “GSM” telephones, and “pure water” sachets – all dominant products in various African markets despite the ready availability of superior alternatives.
To boost competitiveness in both the local and the global markets, African manufacturers will need to evolve a new generation of enterprises that are technically capable of fulfilling higher-order needs such as cultural relevance, self-actualisation, and wealth creation. The new generation of African manufacturers must be “glocal”: competitive in global economic markets yet sustainable by local cultural aspirations. The glocal duality is necessary. There is really no local economic market anywhere in the world: the aforementioned products continue to penetrate even the most remote African village. The most insidious driver of such globalisation is cultural packaging. Product promotion activities wrap aspiration (for the improved living conditions deemed attainable by using the products) with cultural affinity to the societies that manufacture and package the products. Product promotion activities permeate the education, work, entertainment and religious events in our daily lives. These busienss activities and cultural events indoctrinate Africans that the 'best', 'original', 'true', 'acceptable' products or services are only those imported from foreign manufacturers. In this manner, African products are rendered uncompetitive as trade dependency thrives on misplaced cultural aspirations. It is necessary not only to remove these foreign cultural baggage from the products we want, but also to manufacture and/or wrap such products with African cultures.
The new generation of African manufacturers can succeed only by helping to create a new societal culture. A culture that creates and reinforces higher-order expectations that:
• African socio-economic aspirations are progressive;
• African manufacturing is fabricated on research and technological innovation;
• African products are globally competitive on price and quality terms;
• African consumers can and should aspire to locally made products.
By undertaking product promotion activities which cultivate and communicate these expectations in homes, in schools, in the media, in religious gatherings, etc, African manufacturers and public institutions can create an enabling environmentt in which their businesses are globally competitive yet locally sustainable.
The burden of expectation is, of course, performance.
It is fairly obvious that the current generation of African manufacturers do not presently endure these expectations. The extent to which they can at least perform an evolution of the next generation is unclear. As earlier indicated, their orientation to foreign markets and investors may be incompatible with promotion of African culture as a competitive advantage. Today, only a few of these manufacturers operate research-based businesses. Even fewer, continuously incorporate technological or managerial innovations into their production processes, even when such improvements are imported as 'black-box' solutions from foreign markets. Fewer still, conduct product promotions that seek to globalise truly African cultural values. It is the rare African manufacturer who combines cultural relevance with technological improvements to yield products that are competitive in world markets.
Alaran Development Enterprises aims to work with the new breed of manufacturers and public institutions boost the global competitiveness and local sustainability of Made-in-Africa products. Alaran D.E conducts strategic advisory, research and operations management in agric-synthetic materials, distributed energy, and robotics industries.
We are pioneers, too.
Remi-Niyi Alaran
Ijebu-Ode, Ogun , West Africa. March 2005
(c) Copyright Alaran Development Enterprises 2005
The African manufacturing sector is currently dominated by enterprises that are oriented towards external investors and markets. The orientation is both direct and indirect. Official trade policy promotes intervention of foreign direct investment as “juju” for curing perceived disfunctions in local savings and investment levels. Societal consumption patterns sustain indirect dependency on foreign manufacturers through export of raw materials and import of finished goods.
Current generation of manufacturers are not environmentally sustainable in that they draw neither technological inspiration nor economic sustenance from the African markets. A progressive society is one in which cultural relevance underpins scientific research and technological innovation. African manufacturers are undistinguished in research or innovation in a world where the quintessence of market competitiveness is a societal culture of science and technology .
There are three breeds of these unsustainable manufacturers: the vast majority export mineral extracts or agricultural commodities to foreign markets. Global revenues for these commodity suppliers are on a long-term downward spiral as the primary markets become glutted or as primary processors resort increasingly to using innovative synthetic alternatives. The second breed assemble components imported from foreign manufacturers for distribution within African markets. Dramatic falls in purchasing power, high capital costs, and rapid devaluation of local currencies combine to dampen affordability of foreign exchange for importation of imported components. It is also becoming increasingly difficult to ensure reliable supply of the requisite process tools or machinery in an age of rapid technological obsolescence. The third breed are marginally sustainable as they concentrate on domestic processing of local commodities for consumption in African markets or for export. They survive on the margins because their products fulfil low-order nourishment and security needs such as food, fuel or housing.
The long-term survival of today's manufacturers is doubtful because African consumers are becoming more discerning and aspiratorial. They are very fed-up with making-do on inferior goods that have no quality guarantees, low cultural relevance, or high security risks. Examples of such products include stand-by generators, “tokunbo” automobiles, “GSM” telephones, and “pure water” sachets – all dominant products in various African markets despite the ready availability of superior alternatives.
To boost competitiveness in both the local and the global markets, African manufacturers will need to evolve a new generation of enterprises that are technically capable of fulfilling higher-order needs such as cultural relevance, self-actualisation, and wealth creation. The new generation of African manufacturers must be “glocal”: competitive in global economic markets yet sustainable by local cultural aspirations. The glocal duality is necessary. There is really no local economic market anywhere in the world: the aforementioned products continue to penetrate even the most remote African village. The most insidious driver of such globalisation is cultural packaging. Product promotion activities wrap aspiration (for the improved living conditions deemed attainable by using the products) with cultural affinity to the societies that manufacture and package the products. Product promotion activities permeate the education, work, entertainment and religious events in our daily lives. These busienss activities and cultural events indoctrinate Africans that the 'best', 'original', 'true', 'acceptable' products or services are only those imported from foreign manufacturers. In this manner, African products are rendered uncompetitive as trade dependency thrives on misplaced cultural aspirations. It is necessary not only to remove these foreign cultural baggage from the products we want, but also to manufacture and/or wrap such products with African cultures.
The new generation of African manufacturers can succeed only by helping to create a new societal culture. A culture that creates and reinforces higher-order expectations that:
• African socio-economic aspirations are progressive;
• African manufacturing is fabricated on research and technological innovation;
• African products are globally competitive on price and quality terms;
• African consumers can and should aspire to locally made products.
By undertaking product promotion activities which cultivate and communicate these expectations in homes, in schools, in the media, in religious gatherings, etc, African manufacturers and public institutions can create an enabling environmentt in which their businesses are globally competitive yet locally sustainable.
The burden of expectation is, of course, performance.
It is fairly obvious that the current generation of African manufacturers do not presently endure these expectations. The extent to which they can at least perform an evolution of the next generation is unclear. As earlier indicated, their orientation to foreign markets and investors may be incompatible with promotion of African culture as a competitive advantage. Today, only a few of these manufacturers operate research-based businesses. Even fewer, continuously incorporate technological or managerial innovations into their production processes, even when such improvements are imported as 'black-box' solutions from foreign markets. Fewer still, conduct product promotions that seek to globalise truly African cultural values. It is the rare African manufacturer who combines cultural relevance with technological improvements to yield products that are competitive in world markets.
Alaran Development Enterprises aims to work with the new breed of manufacturers and public institutions boost the global competitiveness and local sustainability of Made-in-Africa products. Alaran D.E conducts strategic advisory, research and operations management in agric-synthetic materials, distributed energy, and robotics industries.
We are pioneers, too.
Remi-Niyi Alaran
Ijebu-Ode, Ogun , West Africa. March 2005
(c) Copyright Alaran Development Enterprises 2005
Friday, October 12, 2007
Marketeers or Governments: who should control the economy?
Commanding Heights video 1 video 2 video 3
Supposedly the 'new world order' is the re-eminence of market forces over control of the economy. Globalisation of capitalism, privatisation, weakened representative government and opened markets. Who pays the gold, controls the rulers. But now, the logical consequence of un-restrained capitalism is evident across the globe. The owners of global capital and violence become a separate society dominant over local owners of labour and materials.
Globalisation is a system of world economic restructuring. It is not the end in itself of the globalising forces. So who are the driving forces, and what do they want from the localised? These videos highlight the old Hegelian dialectic of right / free marketeers and left / big government. Commanding Heights does not show who really holds the commanding heights of our societies and economies. Globalisation is not here to stay, unless it shares its risks and rewards more equitably.
Interesting pattern, Food disappears from markets. Chaos. The globalists, the church-jesuits and the media appear in the right place. Governments kill industry and hand the people over. Food appears. Order.
For example, Bolivia, an agrarian economy like much of the world, finds it difficult to feed its own people. Global marketeer Jeffry Sachs is asked for economic development plan, travels to Bolivia, AND just happens to run into the soon-to-be-president. Hmmm.
Bolivian 'Shock Therapy' becomes the standard medicine offered by world bank / IMF to the 'developing world'. But only if they agree not to compete in advanced markets and stay in primary production.
At the national level, the central banks are the agencies of free markets.
Supposedly the 'new world order' is the re-eminence of market forces over control of the economy. Globalisation of capitalism, privatisation, weakened representative government and opened markets. Who pays the gold, controls the rulers. But now, the logical consequence of un-restrained capitalism is evident across the globe. The owners of global capital and violence become a separate society dominant over local owners of labour and materials.
Globalisation is a system of world economic restructuring. It is not the end in itself of the globalising forces. So who are the driving forces, and what do they want from the localised? These videos highlight the old Hegelian dialectic of right / free marketeers and left / big government. Commanding Heights does not show who really holds the commanding heights of our societies and economies. Globalisation is not here to stay, unless it shares its risks and rewards more equitably.
Interesting pattern, Food disappears from markets. Chaos. The globalists, the church-jesuits and the media appear in the right place. Governments kill industry and hand the people over. Food appears. Order.
For example, Bolivia, an agrarian economy like much of the world, finds it difficult to feed its own people. Global marketeer Jeffry Sachs is asked for economic development plan, travels to Bolivia, AND just happens to run into the soon-to-be-president. Hmmm.
Bolivian 'Shock Therapy' becomes the standard medicine offered by world bank / IMF to the 'developing world'. But only if they agree not to compete in advanced markets and stay in primary production.
At the national level, the central banks are the agencies of free markets.
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
On Africa's Trade Dilemma 4: Investment
A fourth dilemma involves the real hustle of modern times: the scam of foreign direct investment (FDI). This scam says Africa does not have enough managerial and financial capital to manage its mineral resources and financial assets, so foreigner should be allowed in to provide both. In turn, the investors demand free trade, weak controls and proxy ownership. The hustle is that no meaningful investment actually comes into local economies even as assets are stripped and resources are exported to foreign markets.
Promoting FDI now seems to be the raison d'etre of many, if not all, post-colonial nation-states in Africa. Enabling FDI is the main text of "free trade" as documented in the many multilaral and bilateral trade agreements from NEPAD to AGOA and EU-EPA. Protecting and enforcing FDI is almost definately the principal activity of the "world" bodies (WTO, World Bank, IMF, UN), the national central banks, and the governments of erstwhile sovereign states. There is clearly a need for caution in use of FDI to fuel enterprise in African communities.
So where will the investment come from? Three sources are prepayment based on capitalisation of future cashflows, trade credit, and local value-added. With FDI. the investors put in a small amount of equity as prepayment, add layers of trade credit structured as tied loans, and then send in their own nationals to be the expartriate value added in the recipient country. Countries are made up of communities of people. An intelligent people make effort to define long term interests, country policies, and economic activities that ensure wealth grows and stays within their communities. If foreign markets or agents are sought, the community should look first to the African Diaspora. In turn, the diaspora should maintain its relevance and vigilance.
Promoting FDI now seems to be the raison d'etre of many, if not all, post-colonial nation-states in Africa. Enabling FDI is the main text of "free trade" as documented in the many multilaral and bilateral trade agreements from NEPAD to AGOA and EU-EPA. Protecting and enforcing FDI is almost definately the principal activity of the "world" bodies (WTO, World Bank, IMF, UN), the national central banks, and the governments of erstwhile sovereign states. There is clearly a need for caution in use of FDI to fuel enterprise in African communities.
So where will the investment come from? Three sources are prepayment based on capitalisation of future cashflows, trade credit, and local value-added. With FDI. the investors put in a small amount of equity as prepayment, add layers of trade credit structured as tied loans, and then send in their own nationals to be the expartriate value added in the recipient country. Countries are made up of communities of people. An intelligent people make effort to define long term interests, country policies, and economic activities that ensure wealth grows and stays within their communities. If foreign markets or agents are sought, the community should look first to the African Diaspora. In turn, the diaspora should maintain its relevance and vigilance.
On Africa's Trade Dilemma 3: Vigilance
The third dilemma arises when raw commodities and trained youth are exported from Africa. In turn, the continent imports world pollution, finished goods, foreign consumer cultures, and closed technologies. Good trade consists of keeping the former in and the latter out. There needs especial vigilance in 'world' trade negotiations such as AGOA, EU-EPA and in bilateral negotiations with India, China, Brasil and other foreign countries. There needs vigilance as well to ensure foreign ownership or control does not adversly influence ports of entry or core assets such as farms,schools, mines or oilfields or communications and transport resources. Always think: if we are in a war situation: will our food be secure? will our telephones work? Can we still obtain essential supplies or markets?
This dilemma highlights the weakness of Africa's communities, governments and nation-states in business and security matters. Trade is a zero sum game, meaning that particular trade benefits can accrue only in one place at a time. When the gains of trade are sufficiently unequal, its beneficiaries act to secure their advantage both by stregthening themselves with monopoly of ultra-violence and by weakening others by conflict, pollution and distraction. The military weakness of African communities, in our fragmented nation-states and in the diaspora, is another intolerable state of affairs. Obviously, no African anywhare is safe unless a strong African nation can protect the santicity of all Africans everywhere.
The rise of vigilantes and citizen militia is not exclusive to African nation-states. However the structural failure of many governments in these states to provide for essential services and products has resulted in "do-it-yourself" security and vigilante groups. Ominiously, private militia prefer to gather around areas of mineral resources and to drive away the peoples who live there. Particularly unacceptable is the subverting of state sovereignity by foreign businesses who engineer foreign mercenaries or proxy wars in "conflict" areas. This practice does not happen without the complicity of the home countries of such businesses. Its effect is to elevate trade trade into bloody warfare. As such, many resource-rich nation-states in Africa need to actively grow strong self-sufficiency in business and security so as to withstand the continuous warfare from their trading partners.
This dilemma highlights the weakness of Africa's communities, governments and nation-states in business and security matters. Trade is a zero sum game, meaning that particular trade benefits can accrue only in one place at a time. When the gains of trade are sufficiently unequal, its beneficiaries act to secure their advantage both by stregthening themselves with monopoly of ultra-violence and by weakening others by conflict, pollution and distraction. The military weakness of African communities, in our fragmented nation-states and in the diaspora, is another intolerable state of affairs. Obviously, no African anywhare is safe unless a strong African nation can protect the santicity of all Africans everywhere.
The rise of vigilantes and citizen militia is not exclusive to African nation-states. However the structural failure of many governments in these states to provide for essential services and products has resulted in "do-it-yourself" security and vigilante groups. Ominiously, private militia prefer to gather around areas of mineral resources and to drive away the peoples who live there. Particularly unacceptable is the subverting of state sovereignity by foreign businesses who engineer foreign mercenaries or proxy wars in "conflict" areas. This practice does not happen without the complicity of the home countries of such businesses. Its effect is to elevate trade trade into bloody warfare. As such, many resource-rich nation-states in Africa need to actively grow strong self-sufficiency in business and security so as to withstand the continuous warfare from their trading partners.
On Africa's Trade Dilemma 2: Mis-management
The second dilemma arises because our misuse of human and material resources results in export of value-added to competitor markets. Despite the rapid innovation in manufacturing technologies and efficiencies, the essential processes and scientific principles have remained largely unchanged. Oil refining and salt production are still processes of extraction under pressure and fractional distillation involving the separation of fluids at different boiling points. Metal working is a process of joining or reforming metals at different melting points. A bridge is the same essential structure as a bed or a bench, but subject to wind or water movements. A bullet proof vest is an ultra-fine mesh of baskets. Electric motors, grain mills, paper-making, vehicle engines, railways, ships, aeroplanes and water pumps are the same technologies as decades ago. Why then do we still ask others to "transfer" technologies that can be found in most textbooks? Is it because technical knowledge can be found in textbooks that the textbooks are missing from many classrooms? Entrepreneurs should start private schools at all levels and should translate technical writings into the many African languages. Knowledge of your own language is sufficient to comfortable living.
The key dilemma seems to be lack of esteem in organisation of complex production or logistics. Self-esteem builds on achievement, itself a function of setting goals and trying until sucess in attaining. Failures are inevitable as are imperfections. A recommendation is to form activity groups that will undertake to dismantle and reassemble any technology you come across. In schools, attention should focus on learning-by-doing, critical reasoning and problem solving. No promotion until material competence is demonstrated. Foreign languages and texts should be introduced only in the early teens. African communities should endeavour to examine the education curriculum and media content to ensure that they promote creative productivity and intellectual stimulation as well as management of resources.
The key dilemma seems to be lack of esteem in organisation of complex production or logistics. Self-esteem builds on achievement, itself a function of setting goals and trying until sucess in attaining. Failures are inevitable as are imperfections. A recommendation is to form activity groups that will undertake to dismantle and reassemble any technology you come across. In schools, attention should focus on learning-by-doing, critical reasoning and problem solving. No promotion until material competence is demonstrated. Foreign languages and texts should be introduced only in the early teens. African communities should endeavour to examine the education curriculum and media content to ensure that they promote creative productivity and intellectual stimulation as well as management of resources.
On Africa's Trade Dilemma 1: Core values
James Shikwati = Director, Inter Region Economic Network writes
"African policy makers ought to recognize the fact that all trade deals with both the emerging and developed economies are done purely for purposes of promoting existing business interests. Africa nations cannot have effective trade talks when they exclude the business community in their strategies. One cannot rely on ill equipped civil servants with nothing to lose, politicians with votes to look for, and Non Governmental Organizations that are agents of Western countries to draw a strategic plan on trade talks. The African business community must wake up and take an active role in suggesting approaches that their civil servants ought to carry whenever they go out to negotiate trade issues.
An illustration of the poverty in long term strategic thinking can be demonstrated by the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA)."
IJEBU DRUMS comment:
Increasingly, competitive trade advantage presents dilemmas for African trade in terms of attracting and retaining the educated and talented, value added in regional markets, trans-regional externalisation of exploitation and conflict, and financial imperialism.
Africa's first trade dilemma arises from the mis-orientation of our education and enterprise activities towards markets outside our communities. No body human or politic can prosper while its efforts are devoted so overwhelmingly to alienating itself from its its own while promoting the dominance of its competitors. African communities are hastening into unproductive survivalism at home and abroad.
Education serves to indoctrinate and inform our core values, same as religion and the media. We should actively define our core values and the strategies for attaining them in the short, medium and long term. What do we want? Who are we competing with? What do they want and what are they prepared to do to attain their values? How do we control the education and enterprise systems so to attain our core values? This sort of thinking will force our communities into education curricula and media content very distinct to what is currently taught in our schools and broadcast into our homes.
"African policy makers ought to recognize the fact that all trade deals with both the emerging and developed economies are done purely for purposes of promoting existing business interests. Africa nations cannot have effective trade talks when they exclude the business community in their strategies. One cannot rely on ill equipped civil servants with nothing to lose, politicians with votes to look for, and Non Governmental Organizations that are agents of Western countries to draw a strategic plan on trade talks. The African business community must wake up and take an active role in suggesting approaches that their civil servants ought to carry whenever they go out to negotiate trade issues.
An illustration of the poverty in long term strategic thinking can be demonstrated by the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA)."
IJEBU DRUMS comment:
Increasingly, competitive trade advantage presents dilemmas for African trade in terms of attracting and retaining the educated and talented, value added in regional markets, trans-regional externalisation of exploitation and conflict, and financial imperialism.
Africa's first trade dilemma arises from the mis-orientation of our education and enterprise activities towards markets outside our communities. No body human or politic can prosper while its efforts are devoted so overwhelmingly to alienating itself from its its own while promoting the dominance of its competitors. African communities are hastening into unproductive survivalism at home and abroad.
Education serves to indoctrinate and inform our core values, same as religion and the media. We should actively define our core values and the strategies for attaining them in the short, medium and long term. What do we want? Who are we competing with? What do they want and what are they prepared to do to attain their values? How do we control the education and enterprise systems so to attain our core values? This sort of thinking will force our communities into education curricula and media content very distinct to what is currently taught in our schools and broadcast into our homes.
Youth entepreneurship
Nardos Bekele-Thomas writes
"We need to be more critical in our thinking on the interventions we make on youth entrepreneurship if we are to effectively and sustainably improve the livelihoods of millions of people. While the term entrepreneurship is coined strongly in business terminology and dynamics, it is critical to realize that in most developing countries, the stronger concern is meeting some basic needs like access to water, energy and health. It thus becomes critical for youth entrepreneurship to mould itself in forms of social entrepreneurship. If young people decide to drill a borehole to provide water for a community at affordable prices for example, this goes a long way in improving their standard of living and the livelihood for this community. It would be much cheaper than a water company making this provision and at the same time it improves the livelihood for the youth who have drilled the borehole. Most critical is the importance of water to the basic needs in this community which represents a response to the market. Another example could be the preparation of solar panels for areas that do not have electricity.
Through social entrepreneurship, young people can provide alternatives to help reach the MGDs. They can start small businesses aimed at providing access to key services to the people at the ‘bottom of the pyramid’ such as water, energy and ICT. Having business support such initiatives is invaluable. Business must do more than merely exploiting markets. It must play a role in cultivating these markets to ensure sustainability. This is the ‘Win-Win’ situation that in my view developing countries require. Partnerships which respond to the real needs on the ground can only be possible through the innovation of youth and genuine corporate responsibility."
Youth should be vigilant to ensure that equity and employment in businesses that set up in their communities. They should be vigilant that neither government officials nor local chieftains appropriate the benefits of local enterprises by rent-seeking while claiming to act on behalf of the people.
"We need to be more critical in our thinking on the interventions we make on youth entrepreneurship if we are to effectively and sustainably improve the livelihoods of millions of people. While the term entrepreneurship is coined strongly in business terminology and dynamics, it is critical to realize that in most developing countries, the stronger concern is meeting some basic needs like access to water, energy and health. It thus becomes critical for youth entrepreneurship to mould itself in forms of social entrepreneurship. If young people decide to drill a borehole to provide water for a community at affordable prices for example, this goes a long way in improving their standard of living and the livelihood for this community. It would be much cheaper than a water company making this provision and at the same time it improves the livelihood for the youth who have drilled the borehole. Most critical is the importance of water to the basic needs in this community which represents a response to the market. Another example could be the preparation of solar panels for areas that do not have electricity.
Through social entrepreneurship, young people can provide alternatives to help reach the MGDs. They can start small businesses aimed at providing access to key services to the people at the ‘bottom of the pyramid’ such as water, energy and ICT. Having business support such initiatives is invaluable. Business must do more than merely exploiting markets. It must play a role in cultivating these markets to ensure sustainability. This is the ‘Win-Win’ situation that in my view developing countries require. Partnerships which respond to the real needs on the ground can only be possible through the innovation of youth and genuine corporate responsibility."
Youth should be vigilant to ensure that equity and employment in businesses that set up in their communities. They should be vigilant that neither government officials nor local chieftains appropriate the benefits of local enterprises by rent-seeking while claiming to act on behalf of the people.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)