The Black Man’s Burden: The Diaspora's Urgent Mandate to Awaken Africa's Sleeping Giants
Part I: exploring the modern algorithm to national growth and development.
This piece is part of a four part article series that explores how the African Diaspora can act as a bridge between the continent and the rest of the world, and by doing so, deliver unprecedented economic success for Africa. The first part of this series examines different economic systems, and attempts to lay out a formula of sorts for national economic success.
The path towards economic development and riches is inexplicably tied to technological adoption and innovation. For as long as we can gather, us human beings have utilized our brainpower and finger dexterity (as distinguished by our relatively large and flexible thumbs) to survive and acquire more resources for ourselves and our communities.
Extending all the way back to roughly a million years ago, when our manipulation and creation of fire probably made it easier for us to move around in larger groups - technology has been, and remains the X factor. Fire also gifted us with a new method of protection against larger, more powerful animals. It doubled up as a primitive form of hunting (known as fire-drive hunting) against those same beasts too. At this point, humans were now consuming healthier, cooked meat that fueled population growth and enlarged our brains (25 percent of calories expended goes to keeping our brains running and sharp after all).
Other technological advancements, like the carving and creation of hunting tools from stone, the manipulation of seed and soil that enabled us to produce rather than forage food and grain, to much more modern and familiar inventions such as the printing press, the locomotive steam engine, and the plane and the automobile, have all contributed to expanding human capacity and improving human quality.
Technology is the driver of development and not mere accessory to it. It always has been and always will be, arguably even moreso now and hereon out thanks to AI technology.
In a national context, foreign investment and international trade are closely tied and inter-related to technology. With all three of them coming together to spawn ecosystems that we often refer to as economies. Such economies operate very much like the habitats our natural ecosystems give rise to. The planting of trees strengthens soil, provides food and shelter for a range of animals and insects, and enables transpiration and subsequent rainfall to occur. The result being: a healthy ecosystem that facilitates an upward trajectory. Environments of this nature expand and enrich local biodiversity, extending and deepening site robustness and the invigoration of plant life and matter.
Indeed, it is in nature as it is with the economy, that once you foster or disturb one of these core features, you affect the overall balance and flux of things.
To recap, technology, foreign direct investment (FDI) and international trade are interdependent upon one another for launching economic growth and development. Prominent economists such as Joseph Schumpeter, Robert Solow and Paul Romer have developed theories and literature supporting this thesis - a thesis acutely relevant in the 21st Century, within a hyper-globalized, tech-embedded world.
However, similarly to a natural ecosystem, the vitality of the core pillars of technology, FDI and trade within an economy, is rooted in the organisms responsible for generating energy. Anything that may pervert the ability for clusters of biomatter to carry out their assigned roles and functions stymies overall growth. Throughout the 20th Century, a prognosis mirroring these effects manifested itself amongst many former communist states.
Although Industrial Germany and Britain marked as the birthplaces of communist and socialist ideology, as channeled through Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, its impact was felt the world over. The Russian Revolution of 1917 ushered in Marxist and communist theory across the national realms of the Kremlin. And under the leadership of Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, the country became the first to experiment with a political and economic system anchored in top-down, centrally planned and controlled management.
As the chaos of the first half of the 20th Century roared on, Russia would eventually extend its reins to Central Asia and the eastern portion of Europe. Central planning, teemed with an authoritarian government garnered swift and clinical decision-making and implementation. Resulting in major successes which include the formulation of an expansive and organized military and military arsenal, rapid and far-reaching industrialization, space exploration and nuclear technology, for what was now the Soviet Union.
In spite of such awe-inspiring advancements, broad-sweeping corruption and brutality still swept the empire. With the fruits of the rural majority and natural resources and minerals of the hinterlands redirected to supplement the productive resources and lifestyles of an urban minority.
Nonetheless, to the view to most of the world beyond the confines of the Iron Curtain, the Soviet Union presented a successful alternative to the newly established US-led ‘Free World', that prioritized a decentralization of economic planning and management via private, individual businesses, sellers and labourers within a free market. We didn’t know it then, but the view of the USSR was nothing more than a Potemkin Village, of which more than a few new, and blossoming nations would buy into.
The list of countries that would go on to adopt some variant of communism and central planning in respect to governance and economy throughout the 20th Century included (and was not necessarily limited to) the following: China, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, India, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Chile, Peru, Cuba, The Republic of Congo (Brazzaville), Angola, Mozambique, Tanzania, Ethiopia and Somalia.
One-by-one, nearly every single nation named attempted to execute the teachings and principles of Marxism to differing degrees. What followed, were disastrous results, followed by an eventual embracing of free markets and private property. Whether it was the land collectivization programs, centrally-planned and built housing projects, government-led industrialization and subsidy schemes, import substitution, the implementation of fixed exchanged rates, they all yielded less efficient and lower quality output once compared with their capitalist counterparts.
The Hong Kong-communist Communist China border captured this stark divide and reality well. Simply put, one side exuded wealth and ripe activity, encompassing structures and spaces with their own unique shapes, sizes, colours and patterns; looking at the other side of the border you were presented with sleepy fishing villages and sprawling bush. Even when projecting further out into the cities of the Mainland, into major cities like Guangzhou, what you were left with were a sea of brown and grey dated buildings. Some unfinished, and even more found in a state of partial disrepair. Other border comparisons like those between West and East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall paint a similar picture. Today, the last remnants of this communist-capitalist divide are still seen in the borders shared by lonely hold-out North Korea and a reformed, pro-markets China up north, then between North and South Korea down south.
By severely restricting your rights to own, manage, manipulate and profit from your own private property, labour and skills - all in the name of government planning and redistribution - raw innovation and what John Maynard Keynes referred to animal spirits are essentially watered-down and heavily distorted.
Just like in our forest economy, organisms and creatures will not strive to thrive within a habitat that harbours weak and counterintuitive reward (growth and multiplication in this case) patterns. They will either migrate elsewhere or stay and stagnate, spiraling out into a deterioration of the entire surroundings. In centrally planned economies, where resources are redistributed “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”, a similar scenario usually played itself out after some time. Because the most skilled, productive and innovative - whom are responsible for raising the bar - have no incentive to bust their asses contributing more to a pot all for relatively less in return. Everyone works to the lowest common denominator instead. Productivity, and eventually production dwindles, reducing the total size of the economic pie as people pretend to work, while their communist overlords pretend to pay them.
Under communism, all of the growth-generating factors in technological adoption, FDI and international trade are retarded, poisoned at the root. The fountain of productive capacity flows slower, so that any external intervention merely shuffles smaller volumes from one stream to another, delaying the inevitable.
For the Second World and its allies, inevitability came knocking with the dissolution of the Soviet Union throughout the late eighties and early nineties. By the noughties (also known as the 2000’s), everyone had become capitalist, transposing our planet into the big, global marketplace that we recognize it as today. To put it in layman terms: everybody (except the Scots with their love of Irn Bru) drinks Coca Cola now.
This is all a very roundabout way of me positing that history has shown us, in no uncertain terms that nations need to create a macroeconomic environment that is conducive to maximizing the three development pillars of technology, foreign direct investment and international trade in order to attain economic success. In this multi-part series, I will explore how Africa can tap into its sizeable diaspora found the world over to aid this process. In Part ll of this four part series, we will delve into what multiple diaspora around the world are doing to drive economic growth for their homelands and ancestral nations.