[Market Economy Guide] Africa’s Painful Mistake

“The reason African countries are still poor is that they mistakenly understood the market economy as imperialism”

The African continent accounts for 20% of the earth’s landmass and is home to about 15% of the world’s population. It is also a vast storehouse of natural resources, including oil, gold, diamonds, and titanium. Africa seems to lack for nothing, yet the reality is utterly devastating. Most countries on the continent are poor. The overwhelming majority of their people suffer from extreme poverty and hunger. What, then, made Africa so desperate? Why did Africa fall into extreme poverty?

Colonized Africa Under Plunder

The reason goes back some 50 years. In the past, many African countries were plundered by Western imperialism, and only in the 1960s, after enduring all kinds of oppression, were they finally able to achieve the independence they had long dreamed of. That long-awaited independence opened the way for political freedom and the possibility of economic development, but unfortunately, Africa made a critical mistake at that point.

Most African countries that had painfully won independence from colonial rule by the Western powers misunderstood democracy and capitalism as imperialist ideas and stubbornly rejected them. In the end, Africa misdirected its deep hostility toward imperialism into rejecting capitalism, free enterprise, and foreign investment, and made the grave mistake of choosing the socialist path. As a result, more than 50 years after independence, most of Africa is trapped in far deeper poverty than before independence. Even more tragic is the fact that while African people have had to rely on foreign aid for survival, the rulers who chose the socialist path accumulated unimaginable wealth and created a world in which “only they prospered, not the people as a whole.” This return to dictatorship and monarchy makes a mockery of the earlier boast that socialism would save Africa.

Economic Growth and Economic Systems

In this sense, communism can be described as a system that turns all people into beggars. Because communism does not recognize private property and nationalizes all means of production, uprooting the very engine of growth, it is difficult to expect economic growth under such a system.

Every socialist experiment attempted by humanity has ended in failure. History has proven that socialism was, from the beginning, nothing more than an impossible fantasy.

Yet there are still socialists who argue that only actually existing socialism has failed, while the socialist ideal itself is not wrong. They say the problem lies not in the ideology but in the people, and that pure socialism is still valid. But is that really so?

To speak plainly, this claim is wrong. Pure socialism is, from the outset, nothing more than an impossible delusion. No matter how much passion and ability one devotes to it, an ideology that is flawed from the very first step has no future.

Socialism does not treat members of society as independent individuals but submerges them into the collective, readily accepting individual sacrifice for the sake of society as a whole. In other words, it takes the view that as long as the whole society benefits, the individual hardly matters.

Awaken the Individual

In a society where ordinary people are alienated and the right to personal freedom and individuality disappears, creative passion and innovation cannot possibly flourish. Where freedom and human rights are pushed aside, inhuman and irrational coercion and control take their place, and society hardens into an unnatural, artificial order. The national economy then collapses, turning the entire population into poor, sick beggars. In other words, efforts to build an ideal society in which “everyone lives well together” ultimately produce “a world full of beggars in which everyone lives equally badly.”

There is only one way to escape such national poverty: break away from the socialist centrally planned economy and actively adopt a capitalist market economy. Free competition must be maximized through the market so that the economy can function smoothly on its own and discover its own engines of growth. What is the use of delivering relief supplies day after day if Africa’s economic fundamentals remain unchanged? One must teach people how to fish, not simply give them fish. Only by enabling a capitalist market economy to take root on its own in Africa can the continent’s chronic poverty problem be solved.

● Please remember

Most African countries that had painfully won independence from colonial rule by the Western powers misunderstood democracy and capitalism as imperialist ideas and stubbornly rejected them. In the end, Africa misdirected its deep hostility toward imperialism into rejecting capitalism, free enterprise, and foreign investment, and made the grave mistake of choosing the socialist path.

Sung-no Choi, President of the Center for Free Enterprise (CFE)

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Original title: [시장경제 길라잡이] 아프리카의 뼈아픈 실책

Author: Sung-no Choi

Date: 2019-09-09

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=column&pn=12&idx=21863