The era of Afro-Capitalism

As a free market thinker it has been very great, amazing and not surprise that the first 50 companies that have made a change in the world, never had any African company involved.

History attests that all such 50 companies listed below started from the micro scale and for a period of years had transitioned to large scale enterprise employing over 1000s of people globally.

List of names of these companies are: 1. Microsoft 2. AT&T 3. Ford 4. Apple 5. McDonalds 6. America Online 7. FedEx 8. CBS 9. Philip Morris 10. Wal-Mart 11. General Electric 12. IBM 13. Sears Roebuck 14. General Motors 15. J.P Morgan & Co. 16. Union Pacific 17. RCA 18. Nike 19. Intel 20. CNN 21. Boeing 22. Hawlett-Packard 23. Standard Oil 24. Sony 25. US X-U.S Steel Group 26. Agency France –Presse 27. Levitte & Sons 28. The Walt Disney Co. 29. Netscap 30. Coco-Cola 31. Thyssen Krupp 32. Proctor & Gamble 33. Yahoo 34. Toyata 35. People Express 36. Manpower 37. Toys “R” Us 38. National Football League 39. Kelloggs 40. Johnson Publishing 41. Fire Stone Time & Rubber 42. Avon Products 43. Hilton Hotels 44. Ben & Jerry’s Homemade 45. Re/Max 46. Singer Sewing 47. Shorebank Corp 48. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer 49. L.L.Bean 50. H.J. Heinz These capitalist changed the world and their country by solving problems of the people by their business ideas and furthermore philanthropically supported in funds to build their country to the present status. All this happened, because their country appreciated their effort and created the enabling environment for their business growth.

Contrarily, the African continent was built on socialist ideologies and practices. What it simply means is that, government saw private businesses as a threat in competing with it existing structures put in place to deliver similar services. Most governments in Africa moved further ahead to tighten the economy to deliberately kill such domestic businesses.

At least, if we advocate our position today as Afrocentric and define the continent by the Africans’ perspective, why not learn the good example of the European liberalism to support SMEs growth, which will in turn aid government with their funds to address the problem of the masses.

Our governments in Africa need to understand that, they cannot continue reaping what they have not sow by receiving donor funding from developed countries. Until we begin learning how to sow and harvest from our sweat, we will continue to remain in economic slavery.

This calls for an end to government of Africa embarking on unnecessary competition with the private businesses as a market player. Rather the respective governments should appreciate the essence of Afro-capitalism by action, not by words to build domestic African business environment to complement government effort in developing the continent.

This will help to change the definition of Public and private partnership (PPP) whereby the politicians managing public enterprises begin to think of European and Asian private business executives for partnership because no home grown business could meet such expectation.

For Africans to win over economic slavery, then there is only one way available, stimulating our consumers to development interest in local consumption and empower our entrepreneurs to meet such market demand, then they will be ready to domestically donate to support government effort.

Tweneboah Senzu PhD. Bastiat Ghana (Free Market Economic Think Tank Institute)

www.bastiatghana.org