Stop Waiting for the State to Save Africa

Stop waiting for liberation and go liberate yourself.

Photo by Road Ahead on Unsplash

Across Africa, the overriding feeling is that the liberation of Africa remains incomplete. But it’s important to understand why it’s not complete, and in many cases we have gone backwards. The first thing to accept is that liberation was never about freedom from white people or only from Europe; many people from these groups have always supported African liberation, and it’s just not a productive way of looking at things.

This is an important starting point because there is far too much conspiracy theorising without any evidence. People feel the lack of freedom and because their framework is white vs black, they must invent a magical white force pulling the strings of current African governments. There is also a worship of the state that makes people unable to acknowledge that rather than more state power magically solving problems, their eyes are not deceiving them, it is the state itself that is causing the feeling of not being free.

Just look at Uganda over the past month. The Chief of the Defence Forces, who is also the son of Uganda’s President for life, Yoweri Museveni, has been kidnapping and torturing political opponents. He has been making unilateral decisions that ought not to be possible in a constitutional state. He has even made the absurd statement that no opposition that is not approved by him will be allowed to exist in Uganda.

So, which foreign element is causing him to oppress his own people?

The truth is, Africa’s problem is the state; a state in an environment where there is not a powerful enough and decentralised private sector. A state that does not derive its power from that private sector but rather from a centralised elite which has no interest in pushing for wider reforms, only conducting its business unmolested. This is why mineral wealth will not make any African state wealthier if we do not have a powerful and distributed private sector alongside.

Of course there is also foreign aid. It either insulates government from accountability by taking over the work the government should be doing via aid-funded NGOs, or worse, governments are funded through aid and therefore can rely less on their people. All forms of aid need to end. We need to exercise the muscle of building institutions from the ground up to serve our own interests – we cannot do that when billions of dollars are being dumped on the continent by foreign governments.

Decades of investing in god-like states that can’t do something as simple as building a road has been a total failure for the continent, and yet the statists are not deterred. They keep suggesting more and more things governments should do to fix our problems. The next phase of liberation should be about learning competence by building private institutions to solve real problems at all levels.

This phase of liberation has nothing to do with the government at all; preferably the government should leave people alone to do this, but it’s useless to expect a parasite to stop killing its host just because the parasite would also benefit from a healthy host. All the parasite knows is to consume until nothing can be consumed. So, we must do this despite the government.

What kinds of institutions do we need? It will differ for every individual and every community, but since it’s the World Cup, a good institution to build is a community-based, community-run football club. Once upon a time that model is what birthed the mighty Orlando Pirates; it was meant to be a place for the youth of Orlando to keep themselves busy and entertained in a healthy way. The Premier Soccer League (PSL) has departed from these principles – now most clubs are owned by individuals for their own personal benefit, and there is nothing wrong with that – but we also need the community club to come back.

It might help to solve the empty stadium problem faced by the PSL. Only when big clubs like Kaizer Chiefs and Orlando Pirates play are stadiums occupied to any decent level. Not even a successful team like Mamelodi Sundowns is able to do this consistently. Having clubs that primarily serve the community, no matter who the owner is, should lead to better stadium attendance for home games.

Another favoured institution of mine is the stokvel. This institution is seriously underestimated in terms of the transformational role it can play in any community. Our law allows a lot of freedom for stokvels, and of course it’s not perfect, but usually this kind of freedom is highly regulated for normal financial institutions. Small-scale financial institutions can be very useful for helping people start smaller businesses, informal or otherwise.

It doesn’t really matter which institution; the main thing is to adopt an attitude of ‘how can we solve this problem ourselves?’, instead of waiting for some politician to decide to do it. Institutions can be for-profit or non-profit, if the institution is solving a real problem you or your community faces.

And you will discover, by engaging in this institution-building, that you build trust among those involved. You build confidence in your ability to do things together. And you build resilience against the worst government decisions or indecisions. By doing this and developing this institution-building muscle, you also build competence and methods of determining who is competent and who is not.

Only by doing this can you then have a competent government because the lessons learnt from the private institutions are transferred to the government. This process often happens automatically – people don’t even know they’re implicitly transferring knowledge from one arena to the next – but that’s what always happens if you are to have a “good government”. Notice how none of this is about ideology per se, but because it is not about the abstract; it’s not about government policies, it’s simply about you and what you can do right now, it is different from what we think of as ideology or politics.

African liberation will remain incomplete without governments that rely on the people to govern. That cannot happen if we do not have decentralised institutions that can already do everything the government is supposed to do. Ultimately, we must change our perspective from ‘the government must’, to ‘the people must do it and then decide what to transfer to the government’. No government is created and suddenly knows how to do things; expertise and competence are first built up in the private sector in a decentralised manner so that the best way of doing things can rise to the top.

Stop waiting for liberation and go liberate yourself.

Mpiyakhe Dhlamini is a libertarian, writer, programmer and an Associate of the Free Market Foundation.