The One Thing Anti-Capitalists Don't Understand
Why “Kill Capitalism” Is Not the Solution for African People You Think It Is…
I have no patience whatsoever for people who claim they want to help Africans or Black people flourish but who are “anti-capitalists.”
For the most part, I believe these people are well-meaning. They don’t like exploitation or foreign debt, and they want Africa to have economic sovereignty. I’m with them on those fronts. There’s one problem: Their methods DON’T WORK, and consistently hurt Africans.
Over and over, I’ve seen the harmful consequences of the philosophies they promote.
I’ve seen Africans living in squalor, after being promised that an NGO, like Jeffrey Sachs’s Millennium Villages project, would help them.
I’ve watched Africans die at sea, while others face enslavement in Libya trying to access European jobs so they could build a better life for themselves.
I’ve stood face-to-face with Africans who’ve lost their livelihoods because crusading Westerners railed against the “sweatshops” and factory jobs that kept food on the table.
By seeing the harmful consequences of the philosophies these people promote in the name of “good,” I learned the meaning of the phrase, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
They believe that they’re helping by promoting anti-capitalist values and providing aid to Africans in need. Instead, they’re keeping Africans in hell.
Their hatred of capitalism is more important to them than helping real people.
Here’s what anti-capitalists fail to understand:
Most African countries suffer from massive unemployment, poverty, and emigration NOT because of capitalism but because they have terrible business environments.
African nations dominate the bottom of the Doing Business ranking; most African nations are among the worst places in the world to do business, which means entrepreneurial capitalism cannot flourish. It cannot lift Africans out of poverty due to the restrictions. It’s this LACK of capitalism in Africa that keeps us in the state we are in.
I’ll give you Magatte 101: Where do most people earn an income? Jobs. Where do jobs come from? Business. (If you say government or NGOs, where does their funding come from? Taxes on or donations from business and individuals). If jobs and incomes come from business, shouldn’t we make it easy for entrepreneurs to start businesses? Especially if my people are dying in the ocean because of a lack of jobs?
That’s why I say: If you are anti-capitalist, you are anti-Africa.
We need to call out woke anti-capitalism so we can course correct, even if it means bruising the hearts of people who will complain, “But we just wanted to help.” They say they want to lift Africans out of poverty, but their beliefs and actions undermine progress every step of the way. Because when you look at the historical data from the last century, you’ll find an undeniable pattern:
Entrepreneurial capitalism makes poor countries rich.
Look at China, India, South Korea, and Taiwan. They were once considered underdeveloped, but by embracing entrepreneurship and creating favorable business environments, they’ve become economic powerhouses.
Or, look at Singapore. Between 1965 and 2015, Lee Kuan Yew developed Singapore from a poor nation—similar to many African nations today—to one of the most prosperous countries in the world. He prioritized creating a world class business environment that was attractive to foreign direct investment, featuring high levels of economic freedom based on a common law legal environment.
Or, what about Dubai? Since 2004, when the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) was established as a common law financial zone, Dubai has grown from a fledgling city into a top-ten global financial center.
Or, let’s take an example from the African continent. Rwanda has been one of the most rapid improvers on the Doing Business rankings and economic freedom rankings for most of the past two decades. In the 2020 Doing Business ranking, Rwanda ranked 38th in the world, just behind Switzerland and Slovenia and ahead of Portugal and the Netherlands.
From 1995 to 2019, Rwanda was one of the fastest growing economies in the world, averaging 6% annual growth. Today, Rwanda’s economy is almost 3x as large as that of its neighbor Burundi, and as of 2012, it was attracting 264 times as much foreign direct investment!
The data doesn’t lie.
For African nations to prosper, they need better business opportunities—not anti-capitalist rhetoric.
Capitalism isn’t the problem. Bad business environments are.
When I made this realization, I was eager to explain it to people in my circle. But when I started talking about the correlation between prosperity and economic freedom to friends, colleagues, and acquaintances in the Bay Area, I’d hear one of two responses:
1) Some people were honestly curious and surprised they hadn’t heard this information before. They wanted to know more and continued to support me.
2) The other response was rejection, either ignoring or dismissing my new perspective. They saw me as too pro-capitalist, too “libertarian,” or too “right wing.”
I’d put 5 percent of people in the first category and 95 percent in the second.
If you are anti-capitalist, you are anti-Africa.
—Magatte Wade
But here’s the really frustrating thing: the people in the second category didn’t provide an argument against my new perspective. No one tried to argue that Africa’s insane business obstacles to business were a good thing. Instead, they’d talk about the bad things that Bush, Jr., had done, or the World Bank, or this or that multinational.
Their criticisms didn’t make a single African life better. They missed the point entirely. Making it easier for African entrepreneurs to do business in Africa has nothing to do with approving of Republicans or the World Bank. It has everything to do with improving the lives of my people.
Their anti-capitalist bias prevented them from seeing what should have been glaringly obvious: Better business environments mean more jobs, better wages, and shared prosperity.
Gradually, I came to the conclusion that many of my anti-capitalist friends were motivated more by their hatred of capitalism than by a positive love and care for Africans.
Once I realized their hatred of capitalism was more important to them than the lives of actual people, I could no longer view them as morally serious human beings. And I slowly peeled away from them.
Now, I’ve stopped wasting my time on people who are too blinded by ideology to create real, meaningful, lasting change. I’m focused on actually making a difference. The good news is that it only takes a small percentage of people who think for themselves to shift opinion on many issues.
I invite you to be one of them.
Off to Rwanda we go then. We have heard your call and we are here and we are listening. We are paying attention. Africa has risen and as we expel the westerners our intention is to import jobs and export finished goods not just raw materials and labour.
We need Magatte to continue guiding more entrepreneurs and those living outside Africa to come together and make permanent change. The time is now. While our brothers in West Africa bare arms our role online is to accumulate capital and invest in our Motherland for the good of The Continent and our People.
The anti-capitalists make the mistake of associating exploitation with Capitalism. In fact, it's Capitalism's tremendous ability to create competition for workers among the Capitalists, that provides workers with the ability to negotiate with enterprises, and sell their skills to the enterprises that bid the highest. It frees workers from any oppressive tendencies that companies might have in suppressing wages and offering poor working conditions. It's only when governments give companies power through government sponsored monopolies, or by stifling competition and entrepreneurship, that the job market leans against workers ability to choose and thrive