My new interview with John Papola on Dad Saves America is out.

We spent nearly three hours on the question that has followed me since childhood: why does Africa remain poor, and what would it take for Africans to build prosperity at home?

Most people reach for the same explanations: colonialism, slavery, racism, IQ, corruption, foreign aid, capitalism. In this conversation, I make the case that the missing piece is economic freedom: whether Africans can start businesses, create jobs, and solve problems without being trapped by bad rules.

John and I got into:

• Why colonialism alone does not explain Africa’s poverty

• The race and IQ question, and why fatalism is wrong

• Why foreign aid follows from the wrong diagnosis

• How Marxism became so attractive after independence

• Why starting a business in Senegal can be almost impossible

• The migrant boats from Senegal that still haunt me

• Why agency matters more than victimhood

• Why I still believe America has something to teach the world

The full conversation is here:

You can also listen or read the episode page at Dad Saves America:

Dad Saves America

Why Africa Stays Poor (It’s Not Colonialism) - Magatte Wade

I sat down with Senegalese immigrant and entrepreneur Magatte Wade to discuss why Africa remains the poorest continent and why the most popular explanations are wrong…

Listen now

a month ago · 13 likes · John Papola and Magatte Wade

If this speaks to you, please share it with someone who cares about Africa’s future, immigration, capitalism, education, race, or the future of the West.

It goes like this: “We cannot prosper because the West will not let us. The system is rigged. When our leaders try to develop, they get removed.”

I am not here to say that nothing bad was ever done to Africa. Unjust things happened. Colonial powers carved up the continent and left behind extractive institutions. The Cold War turned African nations into pawns.

But here is what also matters: Africa is not the only place this happened to. Asia was colonized. Latin America was colonized. Vietnam was literally bombed into rubble. These regions suffered enormously at the hands of Western powers, and many of them found a way forward anyway.

The question is not whether Africa was wronged. It was. The question is whether that history must be a permanent sentence — or whether it can be what it was for Vietnam, Botswana, and Mauritius: a painful chapter that ended when better choices began.

What about Vietnam?

Vietnam was not merely “interfered with” by the West. It was bombed for over a decade. Millions died. The country was physically destroyed. After the war, the United States imposed a total trade embargo that lasted until 1994.

If Western interference is what keeps countries poor, Vietnam should be the poorest nation on earth.

Instead, it is one of the great economic success stories of the last forty years. In 1986, facing 700% inflation and chronic food shortages, Vietnam launched the Doi Moi reforms — opening markets, welcoming investment, and allowing private enterprise. A country that could not feed itself exported 1.4 million tons of rice by 1989. GDP per capita went from roughly $100 to over $4,700 today. Poverty dropped from over 70 percent to around 2 to 3 percent under the national poverty line.

Vietnam did not achieve this by blaming America for the war. It achieved this by changing its own economic policies. The same country America tried to destroy is now one of its largest trade partners.

The proof is here

Now let’s look at Africa itself, because we do not even need to leave the continent to find the evidence.

When Botswana gained independence in 1966, it was one of the poorest countries on the planet with 12 kilometers of paved road, only 22 university graduates, and a budget dependent on British aid. Its first president, Seretse Khama, chose a different path from most post-independence African leaders. He adopted low taxes, liberalized trade, protected property rights, fought corruption, and negotiated a 50-50 split with De Beers on diamond revenues. He reinvested in infrastructure, healthcare, and education.

Botswana was one of the world’s fastest-growing economies after 1966, with rapid growth sustained for about three decades. Khama governed until his death from natural causes in 1980. Nobody stopped him, and nobody overthrew him. He built, and his country got more prosperous.

Then there is Mauritius. In 1961, Nobel Prize-winning economist James Meade predicted the island would fail because Mauritius was “too small, too remote, too dependent on sugar.” Instead, the country opened export processing zones, attracted investment, invested in education, and maintained fiscal discipline. Per capita income went from under $1,000 in the 1970s to roughly $12,000 today. A comparative study between Mauritius and Senegal, two countries with similar colonial backgrounds and political stability, found that the divergence comes down largely to policy choices. Mauritius averaged 3.6 percent per capita growth since independence while Senegal averaged 0.6 percent.

“But they kill our leaders”

This is the objection I hear more than any other: “The West kills any African leader who tries to develop the continent.”

It comes up every single time. And I understand why people believe it, because there is a real history behind it. African leaders have been overthrown and assassinated with Western involvement. That happened, and I’m not here to pretend it didn’t.

That said, I need you to actually ask yourself a question. Were any of those leaders killed for opening markets? Were any of them killed for lowering tariffs, simplifying a tax code, attracting investment, or making it easier for ordinary people to start a business?

The answer is no. Every single case, when you actually look at what happened, comes back to Cold War geopolitics. Ideological alignments, superpower rivalries, things that had nothing to do with building a free economy.

Now think about who wasn’t killed. Seretse Khama liberalized Botswana’s economy, welcomed foreign investment, protected property rights, and governed peacefully until he died of natural causes. Nobody touched him. Mauritius dropped trade barriers, opened export processing zones, and built one of the freest economies in Africa. No coup, no assassination, no foreign intervention. Rwanda has climbed into the top tier of African countries for business environment and ease of doing business, and nobody has tried to stop that.

Give me one name. One African leader who pursued genuine economic liberalization and was killed by the West for it. Just one.

There isn’t one. Because it has never happened.

The leaders who were targeted were targeted over ideological conflicts and geopolitical power struggles. The leaders who focused on building open, growing economies were left alone to do exactly that. And they prospered.

So the real question was never whether the West would allow Africa to develop. It’s whether we’ll choose the policies that actually create prosperity. Again, every time an African leader has made that choice, nobody stopped them.

Everyone wins

Here is what people on every continent should understand: a prosperous Africa is not a threat to anyone. It is an opportunity for everyone.

A rich Africa would add 1.4 billion consumers to the global market, which means more demand, more trade, and more business for everyone. It would also mean African entrepreneurs solving African problems at scale, then exporting those solutions abroad. And as living standards rise, the pressure that poverty puts on migration systems falls.

Today, millions of Africans leave the continent each year because earning a decent living at home is too hard. They leave families, languages, cultures, and communities behind, not out of adventure, but because opportunity is elsewhere. That is not the kind of movement people celebrate. It is economic exile.

Someone once said it perfectly:

I want to live in a world where people leave their countries out of taste, not out of hunger.

That is what economic freedom makes possible. People move because they are curious, ambitious, or simply in love with another place, not because their hometown cannot offer a future. A Senegalese engineer chooses Montreal because she likes the city and the work. A Nigerian developer stays in Lagos because Lagos is where the best options are.

This is not mystery. When the rules stop treating builders like suspects, prosperity shows up fast. When the rules reward work, investment, and honesty, people stop feeling like they have to run away to breathe.

Vietnam proved it. Botswana proved it. Mauritius proved it.

So what exactly are we waiting for?

In 1978, a Czech dissident named Vaclav Havel wrote an essay called The Power of the Powerless. He wasn’t president yet, just a playwright the communist regime had banned from the theater, and he’d spend the next several years in prison for writing things like this.

The essay opens with a greengrocer (a small shop owner who sells vegetables) who puts a sign in his shop window every morning: “Workers of the world, unite!” — one of those communist party slogans the regime expected every shop to display. He doesn’t believe in it, and he’s never really thought about whether he does. The sign goes up because that’s what every shop on the street does, and if he didn’t put it up there’d be consequences for him and his family. So up it goes.

The communist system survived not because of the secret police or the army, but because of this greengrocer. Millions of ordinary people performed a lie they didn’t believe in, day after day, because going along felt easier than refusing. As Havel wrote: “for by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.”

There is a sign in the window right now, and it’s about my continent.

The sign today says “Save the planet,” or “Net Zero by 2050.” The words change, but it works the same way as that sign in Prague.

Banks sign net-zero pledges and quietly stop funding energy projects in Africa while continuing to fund the exact same projects in America, Canada, and Norway. The African Energy Chamber has a term for this: financial apartheid.

Meanwhile, NGOs run campaigns like #StopEACOP to pressure Western financiers out of the East African Crude Oil Pipeline, a project Uganda and Tanzania are building to export their own oil. The European Parliament actually passed a resolution against it in September 2022. Two sovereign African countries building infrastructure with their own resources, and the European Parliament felt it was their business.

And every quarter, investors publish sustainability reports full of net-zero targets that have almost nothing to do with whether anyone in sub-Saharan Africa can turn on a light. Africa is responsible for about 4% of global CO₂ emissions. Four percent. No serious calculation says that cutting off financing to the continent that contributes the least will change the trajectory of the climate. But the reports still need to be filed, so the money goes elsewhere.

Back home, 600 million people on my continent don’t have electricity.

The WHO estimates that cooking with wood and charcoal kills around 800,000 people a year in Africa from the smoke alone, most of them women and children. The solution is LPG, which comes from natural gas, but building the gas infrastructure to distribute it gets caught in the same net-zero logic that chokes everything else.

Nigeria sits on some of the largest natural gas reserves in the world and its power grid collapsed again in February 2026. At Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital in 2025, three ICU patients died during a blackout because the hospital had gone days without power. Twenty-six percent of health facilities across sub-Saharan Africa have no electricity at all. And the people signing those net-zero pledges in London and New York will never know their names.

No single bank executive decided to keep Africans in the dark. But the net-zero pledges created a structure where not funding African fossil fuels became the easy, compliant thing to do, and funding them became a career risk. So the money dries up, and the sign stays in the window, and the system holds together the same way Havel described it nearly fifty years ago: not because anyone believes in it, but because everyone goes along.

Uganda and Tanzania had to go find African and Gulf banks to finance the same pipeline the European Parliament tried to block because the Western ones walked away. It’s 79% complete now and should be done by July 2026. They found the money and built it anyway, but that they had to go looking tells you whose rules these are.

Havel spent nearly five years in prison after writing The Power of the Powerless. He believed that when even one person stops performing the lie, it shows everyone else that refusing is possible. The Velvet Revolution happened in 1989, the communist regime fell without a war, and Havel became president of a free Czechoslovakia.

My continent hasn’t had its Velvet Revolution on energy yet. Most of the institutions that matter are still going along. But some African countries are starting to take the sign down, and others will follow.

I grew up in Senegal, and I remember my grandmother cooking over fire because there was nothing else when the power went out. Cutting off Africa’s energy doesn’t save the planet. It just guarantees that the next generation grows up the same way mine did.

That’s what I’m working to change through Prosperity Not Poverty — because African nations have the right to use their own resources to build their own futures.

It sounds damning. It feels righteous… And it gets the causation completely backwards.

The people who make this argument assume that childhood was once a protected, carefree period, and then capitalism came along and ruined it. That version of history is a fairy tale. A comforting one, sure. But a fairy tale nonetheless.

Children have worked for as long as human beings have existed. Not because of any economic system, but because of poverty, the universal human condition for most of recorded history. When your family cannot eat without every pair of hands contributing, moral abstractions about the sanctity of childhood become a luxury you cannot afford.

Mary Beard, the Cambridge classicist, puts it bluntly in SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome: the very concept of “child labor” as a problem would have been incomprehensible to the Romans. Children worked because everyone worked. The idea that childhood should be a separate, protected stage of life is a modern Western invention — one that only became thinkable after societies grew wealthy enough to sustain it.

Medieval Europe was no different.

Children across the continent worked continuously — on farms, in artisan workshops, in households — for centuries before a single factory chimney appeared on the horizon. There was no debate about it. There was nothing to debate. A peasant child who did not work was a peasant child whose family might starve.

In colonial and early America, the pattern held. By age five, children on American farms were expected to contribute labor. Benjamin Franklin was apprenticed at twelve. The arrival of a new child was not merely a blessing — it was, in cold economic terms, the arrival of a future worker.

This was the norm everywhere. In every civilization. For thousands of years.

There is another detail that critics of capitalism consistently leave out: the overwhelming majority of child labor, both historically and today, has occurred within families, not in factories.

The 1900 U.S. Census found that most working children aged 10 to 15 were employed in agriculture. Between 1910 and 1920, over 60 percent of American child workers labored on farms. During the Gilded Age, the very period that critics love to weaponize, two-thirds of all child labor happened on farms, not in factories. Six out of ten male farmhands during that era were working for their own fathers.

E. P. Thompson, a Marxist historian (not exactly a defender of capitalism) acknowledged in The Making of the English Working Class that parents “not only needed their children’s earnings, but expected them to work.” These were not evil people. They were poor people making rational decisions under desperate constraints.

The factory did not invent child labor. It just moved it from dispersed, invisible farmsteads into concentrated, visible buildings where reformers could finally see it — and photograph it.

Ludwig von Mises made this point with characteristic directness in Human Action: the women and children who entered factories were not stolen from comfortable homes. They were “destitute and starving.” The factory was, in his words, their “only refuge” — it “saved them, in the strict sense of the term, from death by starvation.”

That is an uncomfortable truth. But it is the truth.

I can speak about this with a certain authority that most Western commentators cannot, because I have actually witnessed child labor up close. I grew up in Senegal. I know what it looks like.

Roughly 87 million children in Sub-Saharan Africa are engaged in work — nearly two-thirds of all children in child labor worldwide. 85 percent of it happens in agriculture, children working as unpaid laborers on their own family farms. In many households, income from working children represents 25 to 40 percent of total family earnings. Read that again. A quarter to nearly half of what keeps the family alive comes from the children.

Again, these parents are not villains; they are trapped by poverty.

If you want to understand what this looks like at its most brutal, read Siddharth Kara’s Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives. Kara spent years in the Democratic Republic of the Congo documenting the conditions in artisanal cobalt mines, the mines that produce a significant share of the cobalt in every lithium-ion battery on earth. What he found was children as young as six digging in toxic pits with their bare hands, earning a dollar or two a day, breathing in dust that will likely kill them. Up to 70 percent of the DRC’s cobalt has some connection to child labor. As Kara himself wrote:

Across twenty-one years of research into slavery and child labor, I have never seen more extreme predation for profit than I witnessed at the bottom of the global cobalt supply chains.

Now, the instinct of many Western observers is to blame the companies buying the cobalt — Apple, Tesla, Samsung. But blaming the demand side without addressing the supply side misses the point entirely.

Those children are not in the mines because multinational corporations dragged them there. They are in the mines because their families are desperately poor and the DRC has virtually no functioning economic institutions — no enforceable property rights, no rule of law, no competitive labor market that would give these families alternatives.

Which brings me to something I need to address directly: MrBeast’s free breakfast initiative.

In March 2025, MrBeast announced that his company Feastables was giving away free breakfasts at schools in West Africa to get children off cocoa farms and into classrooms. He reported that one school’s attendance rose 10 percent in the first week. He said he had spent two to three thousand hours researching the problem and surrounded himself with “the greatest minds.”

I do not doubt his sincerity, but this approach reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of why child labor exists.

As I already argued, attendance going up 10 percent does not mean child labor went down 10 percent. Are those children actually leaving the cocoa farms? Or are they just showing up for the food and then going right back to work after the meal? The metric that matters is not how many children show up at school; it is whether child labor is actually decreasing. And a free breakfast does not change the economic equation that forces children into labor in the first place.

This is the same mistake Western aid organizations have been making for 60+ years. Since 1961, USAID has spent hundreds of billions of dollars building schools, clinics, wells, and roads across Africa.

A child might show up for a free breakfast. But when the school day ends, that same child goes back to work, because the family still needs money. A meal does not pay rent. It does not buy medicine. It does not replace the income that child was generating.

The only intervention that has ever consistently ended child labor at scale is rising household income. When parents earn enough to survive without their children’s wages, they pull their children out of work voluntarily.

Now, here is the part that surprises people most: laws did not end child labor – prosperity did. The laws came after.

The United States tried to legislate child labor away multiple times before it actually disappeared. The Keating-Owen Act of 1916, America’s first federal child labor law, was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1918 as unconstitutional. Congress tried again in 1919 using a ‘child labor tax,’ and the Supreme Court struck that down in 1922. A proposed constitutional amendment in 1924 failed to win ratification. It was not until the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 that federal restrictions on child labor finally stuck — but by then, child labor had already been declining steeply for decades.

Economic historians are explicit about this: the legislation was not the primary driver:

Industrialization and economic growth brought rising incomes, which allowed parents the luxury of keeping their children out of the work force.

Clark Nardinelli found that child labor rates in British cotton and flax factories were already declining for two full decades before the Factory Act of 1833 — the first major child labor law in Britain. A National Bureau of Economic Research study found that GDP per capita alone explains 80% of the worldwide variation in child labor rates.

Lawrence Reed summarized the evidence well: child labor was “virtually eliminated” only when “the productivity of parents in free labor markets rose to the point where it was no longer economically necessary for children to work to survive.”

Prosperity did most of the heavy lifting. Laws tended to follow, reinforce, and standardize a trend already underway.

Today, fewer than 10 percent of children worldwide work for a living. That number was essentially 100 percent for most of human history. The decline is one of the great achievements of the modern era, and it was driven overwhelmingly by economic growth.

The children who still work are concentrated in the poorest countries on earth — those with the least economic freedom, the weakest property rights, and the most barriers to trade and entrepreneurship.

Every economic system throughout history has had child labor.

Only free market economies have systematically eliminated it. Not by passing laws first and hoping prosperity would follow, but by generating the prosperity that made child labor economically unnecessary and the laws that followed merely codified a transformation that markets had already set in motion.

If you genuinely want to end child labor in poor countries today, the prescription is not more international regulations, not more bans, and not more charity. It is economic freedom.

Millions are cheering.

I’m not.

I’m a Senegalese entrepreneur. I run a factory in Senegal. I employ people there. I fight the system there every single day.

And I’m telling you - his take on Africa is not just wrong. It’s the kind of wrong that keeps my continent poor.

Senegal’s labor code is, on paper, one of the most protective in the world. If you want to fire someone, you need written notice, a formal hearing, severance scaled to how long they’ve worked for you, and if you get any of those steps wrong, a labor court can force you to take them back and pay damages on top.

It sounds like a system designed to take care of workers. If you read the text of the law without knowing anything else about Senegal, you might believe it does.

As an entrepreneur, I’ve started businesses in the US and in Senegal, and I’ve been involved in ventures across the continent.

In the US, employment is at will. In Senegal, I had to think twice before hiring anyone, because even if they stopped showing up or did poor work, they could walk into the inspection du travail and file a claim against me. The rules that were supposed to protect workers made me afraid to hire them. As I always say, “If I can’t fire you, I can’t hire you.” Most people wouldn’t get married if divorce were illegal.

96 percent of Senegalese workers are in the informal economy.

Why? Because the rules are so expensive to follow that almost nobody enters the formal system at all. People hear that and blame corruption, or weak institutions, or shrug and say that’s just how things are in Africa. But the same logic is eating Europe alive right now, in countries with the strongest institutions on earth. Pieter Garicano wrote a piece in Works in Progress that makes it impossible to look away.

Europe’s labor laws have made it so expensive to let workers go that companies have stopped taking risks, and when companies stop taking risks they stop innovating, and when they stop innovating they fall behind. In the US, restructuring costs about 7 months of salary per employee laid off. In Germany, it’s 31. France, 38. Italy, 52. In Spain, 62 months. Over five years of salary to let one person go.

If it is expensive to lay people off, employers avoid creating jobs that they might subsequently discontinue. Innovation involves experimentation and risk, so jobs in innovative areas of the economy are more likely to be discontinued than jobs elsewhere. High severance costs create a fundamental incentive for European businesses to avoid innovative areas and concentrate on safe, unchanging ones. In the long run, this is a recipe for decline.

When Audi’s electric SUV flopped and they closed the Brussels factory, severance alone cost €610 million. More than the factory itself was worth. When Volkswagen’s CEO tried to push the company to compete with Tesla, the works council blocked his plans for factory closures and he was fired for it. Nokia spent €200 million to lay off 2,000 people at a single German plant. Amazon offered French employees a full year’s salary just to quit voluntarily, because firing them through the legal process would have cost even more.

In 2000, incomes in the original EU countries were about 10 percent behind the US. Today that gap has doubled to 20 percent. Tesla is now worth more than the next 9 largest carmakers combined, and most of those are European companies with decades of engineering heritage. The continent didn’t run out of talent. It made risk too expensive.

Companies like Grammarly and Hugging Face were once headquartered in Europe... 11 percent of US tech startups have a European co-founder: it is just not the case that Europeans are not entrepreneurial enough. Europe’s problem is that they choose to be entrepreneurial somewhere other than Europe.

So why are African presidents copying this?

Most of francophone Africa modeled their labor codes directly on the French Code du Travail. Senegal did it. So did Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, and Cameroon. Their leaders looked at Europe and saw rich countries with strong worker protections and concluded that the protections were part of what made them rich.

That gets the history backwards. Europe industrialized and built its wealth during a period of relatively flexible labor markets, when businesses could hire and fire without months of legal process and years of mandatory severance. The heavy protections came later, layered on top of economies that were already wealthy enough to absorb the cost. Even with all that wealth underneath them, the cost is dragging Europe down.

Even France knows these laws are a problem. Macron has spent years trying to reform them. France, the country that wrote these rules, is actively trying to undo the damage. Meanwhile, we in Africa are still clinging to the old version of the Code du Travail like it’s sacred text, refusing to touch it, and wondering why we can’t build anything.

India made the same bet decades ago. The Industrial Disputes Act of 1947 requires any company with 100 or more employees to get government permission before firing anyone. Most Indian factories stay under 99 workers on purpose, because crossing that line means entering a regulatory system with 1,536 labor laws and 69,233 compliance requirements. Manufacturing stayed deliberately small for decades.

China went the other way entirely. In cities like Shenzhen during the boom years, labor rules were light and growth-friendly. Companies could hire and fire without begging for bureaucratic approval, which meant they weren’t afraid to scale past 100 employees, or 1,000, or 10,000. Today China accounts for about 28 percent of global manufacturing value added. India is at 3.

Copy the right version

When an African leader looks at France or Germany in 2026 and says “let’s adopt their standards,” he is looking at the wrong period of European history. This is the Europe that is losing its car industry to America and China, the Europe whose best founders leave for New York and Dubai and Singapore because the regulatory burden makes scaling a company nearly impossible.

The Europe that built BMW, Siemens and Nokia had flexible labor markets. Starting a business was straightforward, with entrepreneurs having control over their own workforce without extensive legal hurdles. The regulations came after the wealth was already there, not before.

Some European countries figured this out. Denmark lets employers fire at will, but workers receive unemployment insurance that covers 90 percent of their income for up to two years. Switzerland has no mandatory severance but maintains a strong public safety net.

Denmark and Switzerland have given the continent Novo Nordisk, Roche, Nestlé, and Novartis. The small and few countries that have adopted a flexible model are Europe’s innovation heavyweights. Meanwhile, the countries with the strictest employment protection, like the Spaniards and the Italians, are some of the worst.

Africa doesn’t need to become America. But it should stop copying France in 2026, especially when France itself is trying to move on from the laws we imported. If the country that wrote the Code du Travail is reforming it, maybe it’s time we stopped treating it like gospel.

Many of you know that I have built my reputation on principles of integrity, transparency, and ethical business conduct. My reputation is of paramount importance to me, and I will defend it at all costs.

Earlier last year, a group of my former business partners at Próspera Africa attacked my reputation by making false and misleading statements, accusing me of illegal and unethical conduct in connection with my separation from Prospera Africa. Although I hoped to put an end to their attacks privately, I ultimately found that I had no choice but to seek legal intervention. On December 23, 2025, I filed a defamation lawsuit in the U.S. District Court of Wyoming against Defendants Prospera Africa LLC, NeWay Capital LLC, Erick Brimen, Nicholas Dranias, and Tom Murcott. In the lawsuit, I seek to hold the Defendants accountable for their false and damaging statements. A copy of the Complaint is attached here.

While I am saddened to have reached this point, I feel that I have no choice but to take legal action to set the record straight and prevent further damage to my personal and professional reputation. The false and damaging statements made about me and my business practices left me with no alternative but to seek relief through the judicial system.

I am grateful for the legal protections that allow individuals to seek recourse when false and defamatory statements threaten their reputation and livelihood. I have full confidence in the legal process and look forward to presenting the facts in court. While I won’t be able to discuss the day-to-day developments of the lawsuit, I will provide periodic updates as the case progresses. In the meantime, if you have any questions about the lawsuit, please do not hesitate to reach out.

To see the facts for yourself, the Complaint can be read here. I look forward to a resolution that sets the record straight.

Thank you for your continued support—I appreciate each and every one of you.

2025 was the year everything finally started to make sense.

It stripped things down in a good way. My faith grew deeper and stayed steady during the quiet moments instead of getting loud. I just started to trust that God is at work whether I can see it or not.

I have learned so much about restraint lately.

We live in a world where everyone wants to win fast, but I understood that some seasons are just about staying the course and refusing to walk away.

The year refined my sense of work and responsibility. I was reminded that leadership doesn’t need theatrics. It needs integrity, steadiness, and respect for people as they are. I never want to treat people like props for a story.

The ordeal I went through did me a favor. It cleared things up and showed me exactly what is mine to do and what I need to let go of. That kind of clarity is a gift.

I have spent so much time lately moving between different countries and seeing so many different ways of living. It always brings me back to the same place.

We need to listen first. We need to judge less.

I have found that when your feet are finally planted on solid ground and you know exactly what you stand for, the rest of the world is just wind. It might blow hard and it might be loud, but it can never move you.

Beyond the work, my family and my friends are the ones who truly carried me. They are that quiet strength and unshakeable presence. Their unconditional love is the daily reminder of what actually counts at the end of the day.

I am ending 2025 with so much gratitude.

The year wasn’t easy, but it gave me a level of clarity that I wouldn’t trade for anything. I am stepping into the new year with my feet on the ground and my eyes wide open. There is so much beauty in the work ahead.

I truly believe that everything we have been through has just been preparing us for something even better.

This is what a prosperous Africa means for Africans: steady electricity, clean cooking, safe water, working hospitals, medicine supply chains, and trained staff. Vaccines stay cold, operating rooms stay open, fewer children die from preventable disease, and less people die from indoor air pollution (especially women and children).

A richer Africa also reduces pressure to migrate out of necessity (aka illegal immigration), gets us larger consumer markets, stabilizes the region, and attracts investment.

When Africa prospers, Africans live longer and safer lives, and the rest of the world gains new partners, new products, and stronger supply chains.

1) Africa is far bigger than people think

Africa covers about 30 million square kilometers. You can fit the US, China, India, and more inside it.

Note: this is simply a fun fact. Geographic size by itself means little without prosperity.

2) It is the cradle of humanity

Modern humans evolved in Africa. Fossils and DNA evidence point to that.

3) Africa is the youngest region on Earth

The median age is about 19 years. By 2050, at least one in four people on Earth will be African.

4) Yet the region remains the center of extreme poverty

Sub-Saharan Africa holds about two-thirds of the world’s extreme poor today. On current trends, nearly 80 percent of the world’s extreme poor will live in the region by 2030.

5) Two key shortages explain most of this: energy and economic freedom

Low access to reliable, affordable, abundant energy AND weak economic freedom keep productivity low in Africa. That is the core problem.

6) The first shortage is energy

About 600 million people in Africa have no electricity today. Four out of five people in the world without power live in Sub-Saharan Africa. If current trends continue, hundreds of millions will still lack electricity in 2030.

7) The second shortage is economic freedom

The Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World report shows that countries with more economic freedom have much higher incomes, happier and healthier people, less poverty, and less corruption. Many African countries sit in the lowest quarter of the index.

8) Africa is the hardest region of the world to do business

Africa is the hardest region of the world to do business.

I’ve felt this firsthand: as an entrepreneur, basic steps that take days in the US can take months (years when I first did this!) in Senegal, with extra permits, unpredictable delays, and costly approvals at every turn.

Learn more here, here and here.

African nations rank in the bottom 20% globally for ease of doing business:

9) Foreign aid has been large, but it did not fix the core issues

Aid flows are big. Since 1960, cumulative aid to Sub-Saharan Africa is on the order of 1.2 trillion dollars.

Foreign aid did not remove the two main constraints – people still lack reliable electricity, and the rules still made it very hard to start a business or invest.

Note: I am not talking about humanitarian aid. By foreign aid, I mean long-term programs that kept dependent and also kills small businesses.

10) Colonialism and the policy turn after independence

After independence, many African leaders (they are called the “African liberators”) chose heavy state control and embraced socialism.

At the time, the West (mainly Europe and the United States) represented capitalism, which they associated with their former colonial rulers. Since the Soviet Union stood as the main rival to the capitalist West, many African leaders saw socialism as the natural “anti-colonial” choice — the ideology of resistance.

In practice, this often led to bureaucracy, corruption, and economic stagnation, as governments took over farms, factories, and trade that could have been better managed by free citizens.

11) Markets and trade are not foreign to Africa

Trade built great African economies long before colonial rule. Swahili city-states on the Indian Ocean, the Mali Empire’s trans-Saharan trade, Aksum’s coinage and Red Sea trade, and Great Zimbabwe’s gold and imports are well documented. Africa has deep commercial roots.

You can learn more here, here, here, here and here.

12) Today’s bright spot: African tech that solves real problems

Mobile money is a major African innovation: it turned basic phones into wallets for millions of Africans. Most of them never had a bank account (it is very hard to have one in most African countries).

Africa still carries the largest share of global mobile money value each year.

14) Why Africa matters (a lot)

If nothing changes, 80% of the world’s extreme poor will live in Africa. If we fix the bad laws that are keeping Africans poor, the opposite can be true. The continent could be the main engine of global growth in this century.

15) The way out is clear and practical

A) Build reliable energy at scale

You cannot run a modern factory, a hospital, or a high-tech business with a little solar panel on your roof. That’s an upgrade from darkness, but it’s not development.

• Big power plants. We need power that runs 24/7, year-round, that is cheap enough for me to run a factory and compete with China.

• Stop pushing energy poverty. For decades, wealthy nations used coal, gas, and oil to get rich. They can’t tell Africa, “No, you must skip directly to renewables,” when that technology is often expensive and unreliable for big industrial needs. We need to use whatever works to end poverty fast. Prosperity first, always.

B) Make rules simple and predictable

Poverty = lack of economic freedom. Right now, in too many African countries, the laws are set up to kill your business before it even starts.

My own experience shows the difference: I started a business with a sister company in the U.S. and one in Senegal. In the U.S., it took me just half a day online to register my company. In Senegal, it took me two years and all types of permits. This is the difference between a thriving economy and one stuck in poverty.

When I wanted cardboard boxes for my business, in the US, I could order them online for next-day delivery with no minimum order. In Senegal, I needed a 100,000 minimum order, 50% up front, and a four to eight weeks wait. And don’t get me started with the labor laws, high tariffs, and so on.

We need to change the rules so that any African with a good idea can start a legal business in a few days.

C) Trade, not Aid

When you give long-term aid, you often create dependency, and you hurt the local entrepreneur trying to sell the same thing. Aid is only for emergencies, not for economic development (watch Poverty Inc.!)

• What we need most is investment, not donations. We do not need a handout. We need business partners who see opportunity and expect a fair return. Investors bring capital, technology, management know-how, and networks, things that grants do not provide.

• Buy our products! The world should open up markets to African goods and services. There is a growing global appetite for African goods and services because many of them are premium, competitive, and already loved by customers. A customer spending money is a thousand times better than a donor giving money. Trade is how you get jobs, skills, and businesses that last. And it feels better too, because it’s earned!

Bill Gates recently said climate change isn’t the kind of threat that will end human life or destroy the planet. But long before that, some climate scientists were already warning that the situation was complex and that some policies meant to “fix” it could actually make things worse.

One of them, Judith Curry, was pushed out of mainstream climate circles after questioning the growing alarmism and calling out the politicization of climate science.

I spoke with Judith about this in my latest podcast episode on The Magatte Wade Show.

You can watch it now:

Whenever I talk about the fact that Africa is not poor today because of colonialism, someone inevitably interrupts me with the usual “Oh, are you this ignorant? Don’t you know about neocolonialism?”

Here’s my counterargument: we are neocolonized precisely because we remain poor, not the other way around.

As long as African nations remain economically weak and institutionally fragile, the rest of the world will continue to help themselves to our resources, influence our policies, and treat us as junior partners in global affairs. This is simply how power works, and China’s transformation proves that developing nations can break free from this cycle through strategic economic reforms.

Human Nature and Power

Before we delve into the economics, let’s address the elephant in the room. Many people love to paint colonialism as uniquely European evil, conveniently forgetting that Africans have a long history of domination and exploitation. Pre-colonial Africa was not a peaceful utopia — it was a continent of diverse societies, some cooperative and some expansionist, just like Europe, Asia, or the Americas. Our ancestors built mighty empires through conquest, trade, and yes, the subjugation of weaker neighbors.

Take, for example, the Luba Kingdom. As Isaac Samuel writes:

In the first half of the 19th century, Luba kings and their clients doubled the territorial extent of their kingdom over a mosaic of smaller societies between the Congo River tributaries and the shores of Lake Tanganyika [...] The Luba state achieved its greatest extent during [King Ilunga Sungu’s] reign, becoming a major rival of the Lunda empire.

During the last decades of the 19th century [...] Msiri, a Sumbwa trader from northwestern Tanzania, established a conquest state along the southeastern frontier of the Empire. Tippu Tip, on the other hand, moved to the Luba territory... and built a network of client states, including among the Songye that were previously under the Luba.

In addition to that, the narrative of colonialism that frequently centers on Europe is incomplete without acknowledging the broader spectrum of external influences that have shaped Africa’s political and economic realities (see full article here):

The hyper focus on European colonialism and ‘alleged’ subsequent Euro-Americano neo-colonialism leaves a consistent other ‘outsider’ inclusions mainly from Muslims powers like Oman, several Berber kingdoms, Ottoman Egypt, Arab peninsula kingdoms etc but also from Chinese commercial tributary expeditions in 1400s. In fact the only barrier to large scale invasions of the continent was mainly its inhospitable environments.

This is not to diminish the horrors of European colonialism — which was brutal and global in scale — but to remind us that conquest and domination were not unique to Europe. Across history, every continent has seen empires rise and fall, often through force.

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This is why the rule of law and the protection of life, liberty, and property are essential pillars for any society striving to overcome these “dominance” instincts. Without strong institutions that uphold justice and safeguard individual rights, the natural tendency toward dominance and exploitation goes unchecked, allowing those with power to prey on the vulnerable.

Even today, this pattern persists across Africa. In many of our countries, those with power — whether in government, military, or (crony) business — regularly exploit those without it. Police brutality is rampant, and ruling parties across the continent have transformed into authoritarian machines that suppress opposition through violence, intimidation, and election rigging.

The harsh reality is that you cannot judge the moral character of the powerless by comparing them to the powerful. Don’t confuse someone who cannot harm you with someone who chooses not to. If Africans had achieved widespread prosperity centuries ago, who is to say we wouldn’t have been the ones sailing across oceans to dominate and exploit other continents?

But What About Neocolonialism?

Many complain about foreign interference in African affairs — and rightly so in some cases. For instance, it saddens me that European influence still attempts to dictate African energy policy through funding groups that push for elimination of fossil fuels in favor of renewables, even while African countries struggle with massive electricity deficits. According to the latest data, over 600 million Africans lack access to electricity, representing about 80% of the world's unelectrified population. Yet many European countries rely heavily on fossil fuels, especially during crises — as demonstrated during recent energy shortages when coal and natural gas proved indispensable.

The reality is this: if we focus too much on complaining about European or Western meddling, this will never change. Never. Why not acknowledge our own shortcomings and fix them instead of pointing fingers?

Often the rhetoric around “imperialism” and “neocolonialism” serves as a convenient excuse for incompetent leaders and populists. They deliver grand speeches blaming foreign powers for their countries’ woes, when in fact they are the main architects of the persistent poverty around them (of course, they get incredibly wealthy). Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe often blamed “Western sabotage” for the country’s economic collapse, even though the real damage came from his own policies. The chaotic land seizures of the 2000s and layers of hyper-regulation destroyed commercial agriculture and strangled business. By November 2008, Zimbabwe was experiencing one of the worst cases of hyperinflation in history, with inflation hitting about 79.6 billion percent. Agricultural output had already collapsed by more than 50% after the land reforms, and the government’s reckless money printing compounded the disaster. Years later, Mugabe himself admitted the land redistribution had been mishandled — conceding that many of the farms given away were too large and that the new owners lacked the means to run them — yet he continued to deflect blame onto the West for decades.

This is why I remain skeptical about the Alliance of Sahel States (AES). The obsession with external enemies keeps us trapped in a cycle of dependency and grievance, while the examples of countries that chose responsibility over rhetoric stand before us. Rwanda has sustained impressive economic growth averaging around 7–8% annually over the past two decades, driven by political stability and institutional reforms; Mauritius stands out as one of Africa’s most stable democracies and achieved middle-income status through decades of economic diversification and open-market policies; and Botswana has consistently maintained high growth rates since independence, successfully reducing poverty by leveraging good governance and prudent management of its diamond revenues.

Together, these examples demonstrate that sound governance, economic freedom, and support for entrepreneurship are critical drivers of development in Africa.

The answer to “how to fight neocolonialism?” is, in fact, very simple: get rich and gain respect. For example, when the Chinese people faced widespread disrespect on the world stage, their leaders — famously encapsulated by Deng Xiaoping’s phrase about “whether a cat is black or white as long as it catches mice” — shifted focus toward pragmatic economic improvement. Rather than get bogged down in ideology and blaming everyone, they prioritized results by raising productivity, building industries, and integrating into the global economy. Today, it is impossible to have a serious conversation about the world economy without including China, a nation whose influence is now felt in nearly every sector, from manufacturing to tech and finance.

In an ideal world, people would respect you regardless of your wealth, but this is not how the world works. He who makes the gold, makes the rules. If Africans really care about making their own decisions and being seen as peers by other nations, we should focus more on building prosperity through entrepreneurial value creation, primarily by making it easier for African entrepreneurs to start and run businesses. Of course, this must be paired with a suite of foundational freedoms — what I call the entrepreneur’s toolkit (property rights, rule of law, free trade), and access to affordable, reliable, and abundant energy.

The wealthy nations all share secure property rights, rule of law, sound money, relatively unregulated economies, and free trade. The poor nations, for the most part, do not have these economic freedoms.

This is the only way to fight neocolonialism. Everything else — slogans, speeches, complaints, and playing the victim — is just a waste of precious time.

By prioritizing wealth creation and economic freedom, African nations can shift from being subjects of global charity or exploitation to becoming equal participants and rule-makers in the global system.

Here’s what frustrates me about rich kids like Mamdani selling socialism as the answer: if he actually cared about helping people, he’d study what creates prosperity and lifts people out of poverty.

Instead, he’s pushing the same failed ideas that destroyed economies across Africa, Cuba, Venezuela, and everywhere else they’ve been tried.

Mamdani has never been poor a day in his life. He’s college-educated, privileged, and completely disconnected from the reality of what poverty actually looks like. Yet somehow he thinks he knows how to fix it.

The irony is thick: Even Karl Marx was supported by Friedrich Engels, whose wealthy capitalist family owned textile factories. The founders of socialism literally depended on capitalist wealth to survive and spread their ideas. Now we have another rich kid following the same playbook.

If Mamdani genuinely wanted to help poor people, he’d look at the data. He’d study what actually works. And every single piece of evidence points to the same thing: economic freedom.

Rule of law (laws apply equally to everyone, no exceptions for the powerful). Free trade (letting people trade freely without government interference). Property rights (people can own things and build wealth). Ease of doing business (start a company in days, not years). Sound money (currency that holds its value).

AND reliable, affordable, abundant energy that powers everything (without it, there’s no prosperity, period).

These are the foundation of every prosperous society.

I’ve watched this movie before in Africa.

Our “revolutionary” leaders promised socialism would help the poor. Instead, it made everyone poorer except the political elites who stayed safe and wealthy while their people suffered.

When Mamdani’s policies fail (and they probably will!), he will still have his privileges and connections. It’s working families and aspiring entrepreneurs who will pay the price.

We don’t need New York to become another failed socialist experiment.

While everyone blames Africa’s poverty on corruption, colonialism, low IQ, and all the other “usual suspects,” they’re missing the real villains hiding in plain sight: our own legal systems.

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Picture this: A wealthy American sits in his comfortable office, probably sipping artisanal coffee, drafting plans to “save” Africa.

He has never started a business in Senegal, never waited months for a permit as an entrepreneur in Kenya, and never watched a talented young person choose street vending over unemployment because overregulation made formal jobs impossible to create.

But he has something better than experience: THE plan.

We’ve seen countless men like this before, each convinced they hold the key to Africa’s salvation. Now I’ve discovered a new one. His name is Michael Kitterman, and according to his own materials, he possesses “the ability, the experience, and the plan” to solve African poverty.

Oh, and he just sent me an email calling me, an African entrepreneur who’s actually creating jobs in Africa (and complied with the excessive regulations), “the problem.”

You can’t make this stuff up.

And here’s where the story gets truly wild...

Welcome Another White Savior

Michael Kitterman has a remarkable talent for self-promotion. In his organization’s materials, he describes himself as having “a long history of developing ground breaking information technology that has improved the lives of millions of Americans.” Now, he’s decided to grace Africa with his expertise.

The hubris is breathtaking.

ACI International’s website boldly declares that they are “the only organization in the world tackling the issue of poverty in Africa directly.” Everyone else is apparently just amateur hour. But Kitterman? HE has THE solution.

What makes this particularly interesting is that Mr. Kitterman openly acknowledges the spectacular failure of his predecessors. His own materials admit that “billions of dollars pour into the accounts of NGOs in Africa each year, and yet the suffering of the vast majority of Africans continues without relief.”

So far, so accurate. He has correctly diagnosed the problem with the aid industry.

But here’s where his analysis goes completely off the rails: he thinks HE’S different. He believes that where Jeffrey Sachs failed, where the World Bank failed, where sixty years of development experts failed, Michael Kitterman will succeed, because he built some technology in America.

He claims that “the global philanthropic community dare not mention words like poverty, corruption, or oppression.” It looks like he didn’t get the memo because these are actually their favorite words (see examples below), and last time I checked, using words like “poverty, corruption, or oppression” doesn’t really feed empty bellies. So no, ACI International is definitely not that special.

The real hubris becomes much more obvious when you see how ACI International explains their mission. Right there in their website FAQ, when asked why they’re working in Africa when their headquarters is far away, here’s their actual response:

In one of his papers, Kitterman lays out his vision for Kenya — and by extension, the rest of Africa.

Let’s call his blueprint “Kitterman’s Kenya,” aka the Kenya he wants.

He wants to create what he calls a comprehensive enforcement regime to ensure compliance with labor laws. His “solution” includes incentivizing police departments through financial rewards, establishing new government commissions to oversee labor compliance, and creating systems to track down small sized employers who violate regulations. He literally suggests that cracking down on employers like criminals is an economic development strategy. We’re talking about a country where officials are already demanding bribes just to let you operate. Now just imagine if we made that LEGAL and gave them hunting licenses? These people would be kicking down doors looking for expired permits, measuring the exact height of your signs, counting how many seconds your employees take for lunch breaks — anything to generate that sweet, sweet penalty money (as insane as this might sound, this is exactly his strategy.)

He also admits that “Kenya has laws that are even more comprehensive than in many of the more highly developed nations.”

Think about that.

Kenya already has MORE labor regulations than rich countries. So maybe, just maybe, that’s the reason why Kenya is not as prosperous as less regulated nations?! But no, for Kitterman, the solution is... more enforcement of those same job-killing regulations.

What makes this even more infuriating is that he knows exactly what he’s proposing to destroy. In his research, he acknowledges that the informal sector employs the vast majority of Kenyans. He understands that these are people working as “wood workers, metal workers, market vendors, street sellers, and small manufacturers.” These are small business entrepreneurs creating value and employment outside a formal system that has failed them.

They are not criminals.

Every day, small traders in Kenya work within a challenging system, paying various fees and navigating bureaucratic processes while receiving limited support in return.1 Despite these obstacles, they persist and play an indispensable role in the country's economy. To threaten them now with “heavy enforcement” would devastate livelihoods, deepen poverty, and suffocate the very spirit of entrepreneurship that keeps Kenya’s economy alive. Just imagine the destruction that heavy-handed crackdowns would inflict on these hardworking, resilient people…

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But instead of asking why these productive people are forced into informality, our savior wants to criminalize their survival strategies.

The personal attack he launched against me reveals the mentality behind this approach.

When an African entrepreneur who has actually created jobs, actually navigated African bureaucracy, and actually proven that African products can compete globally raises concerns about his regulatory agenda, Kitterman’s response is to declare that we are the problem.

In Kitterman’s world, his American technology expertise automatically translates into superior understanding of African economic development, evidence be damned. The possibility that someone who is living in and creating (legal) businesses in Africa might understand African challenges better than someone who has never done business there simply doesn’t compute.

His entire approach treats African workers as problems to be solved rather than people with agency who have already found solutions.

The informal sector isn’t a bug in the African economic system. It’s a feature. It’s how people respond when the formal system is broken. When permits take six months, people start businesses anyway. When labor laws make hiring too expensive, people create jobs in the informal sector. When regulations favor connected elites, ordinary people build parallel economies.

How "Worker Protection" Destroys Workers

Let me walk you through exactly what happens when Kitterman’s enforcement regime gets implemented. Spoiler alert: the very workers he claims to protect end up with no jobs to protect.

Kenya’s small entrepreneurs, the ones employing 83% of the workforce, operate on razor-thin margins due to competition, high operational costs, and limited access to capital. They can’t afford armies of lawyers or compliance consultants. When Kitterman’s enforcement police start threatening them with raids, fines, and jail time for technical violations of Kenya’s already “more comprehensive” labor laws, these business owners face a simple choice: reduce their legal exposure by firing workers, or shut down entirely.

The street vendor who employs three helpers will work alone rather than risk police harassment. The small manufacturer with twenty employees will cut to five to stay under regulatory radar. The restaurant owner will close rather than navigate the compliance nightmare where one innocent mistake triggers fines that bankrupt her business.

Meanwhile, investment flees.

Why would investors put money in Kitterman’s Kenya where police hunt employers like criminals, instead of choosing countries like Mauritius where labor laws are enforced in a way that balances protection with flexibility? In Rwanda and Mauritius, regulatory frameworks are designed to support small entrepreneurs by minimizing bureaucratic red tape and enabling easier compliance, so they thrive rather than survive.

When investing in Africa, Rwanda’s easier business environment or Mauritius’s streamlined regulatory framework would have much stronger appeal for both foreign and local investors than Kitterman’s Kenya.

Everyone assumes that developing nations are crawling with big multinational factories exploiting cheap workers, but the reality is that most firms deliberately stay small to avoid regulatory nightmares. In heavily regulated countries, those large employers barely exist — not because corporations don’t want to invest, but because regulations make scaling up economically impossible.

For example, let’s take India’s approach to “worker protection.”

The Industrial Disputes Act of 1947 requires any company with 100 or more employees to get government permission before firing anyone. Sounds reasonable, right? They just said “let’s protect workers from arbitrary dismissal.”

But here’s what actually happens: most Indian companies hire up to 99 people, then stop growing their workforce.

Why would any rational business owner cross that threshold and trigger a regulatory framework that makes workforce management a bureaucratic hell?2 You need prior notice, severance payments, and government approval for every personnel decision. Is it really worth risking your entire business, and the livelihoods of your existing 99 employees, just to navigate this legal minefield?

The main consequence of this “worker protection” is the systematic destruction of job creation itself. India’s manufacturing sector remains deliberately stunted because every rational business owner refuses to scale up. Those massive factories that activists spend their time protesting barely exist in the first place.

Meanwhile, China took a completely different approach. Instead of scaring employers with red tape, they created an environment where scaling up was the goal, not a legal risk.

In China’s booming years, especially in places like Shenzhen, labor laws were light-touch and growth-friendly. The government understood that jobs come from businesses, and businesses only grow when the rules let them breathe. Companies could hire and fire without begging for bureaucratic approval, which meant they weren’t afraid to grow past 100, 1,000, or even 10,000 employees.

The irony couldn’t be more striking. India’s “pro-worker” laws prevent the creation of the very jobs that lift people out of poverty while China’s more flexible approach created hundreds of millions of manufacturing jobs that transformed the global economy. When you have a growing industrial sector, companies compete for labor and drive up wages and working conditions — but only if those industries are allowed to grow in the first place.

The Chinese understood something very important: you can’t protect jobs that don’t exist.

And Kitterman wants Kenya to adopt India’s approach by creating regulatory barriers so thick that businesses stay small forever, then unleash underpaid policemen to enforce it in exchange for a cut of the fines.

As he wrote in one of his papers:

We believe that it is both appropriate and fair for law enforcement officers to retain a portion of the revenue they generate through fines, forfeitures, and penalties imposed on employers.

He calls this “worker protection,” but I call it “economic sabotage disguised as humanitarianism.”

Let People Build

The informal sector doesn’t exist because Africans love dodging rules. It exists because formal systems across Africa were never designed with ordinary people in mind. They were built for the connected, for large companies that can afford lawyers, and for insiders who know someone in government. When an honest market woman needs three months of paperwork and a dozen permits just to legally sell vegetables, she doesn't just give up and let her family starve. She finds another way.

But our American “expert” wants to impose even harsher regulations and aggressively enforce them, all in the name of worker protection. It should be obvious now that this literally means destroying the informal sector, the only economic lifeline keeping millions of Africans employed.

If his “plan” becomes reality, countless informal jobs will vanish, and the very people he claims to care about will find themselves unemployed and worse off than ever.

Kitterman belongs to a long line of foreign “experts” and do-gooders who show up convinced they understand Africa better than Africans ourselves. For sixty years, our continent has endured grand UN development plans that produced glossy reports but little real change, millennium villages that collapsed after spending millions, trillions of dollars of foreign aid that kept us dependent, and now enforcement regimes against “labor tyranny.” Each failure generates the same response: blame insufficient implementation rather than flawed premises.

Never do these experts consider that their top-down approaches might be the foundational issue (I talk more about this in my book, The Heart of a Cheetah.)

The evidence from successful economies worldwide demonstrates what actually works: make registering a business straightforward, cut unnecessary permits, simplify taxes, and create clear rules people can easily follow. Also, make it easier to hire and fire employees, because if employers fear legal nightmares every time they hire someone, they simply won’t hire at all.

The United States has at-will employment, meaning employers can hire or let go of employees without complicated legal hurdles. On paper, that might sound harsh to some people — but in practice, it creates an environment where employers are not scared to hire. Think about it this way: you wouldn’t marry someone if you knew you couldn’t divorce if things went wrong, right? If someone told you “okay, you can marry, but divorce is almost impossible,” you’d be much less inclined to get married in the first place. That’s exactly how restrictive labor laws work. When hiring becomes an irreversible commitment, entrepreneurs simply avoid hiring altogether. As I always say: “If I can’t fire you, I can’t hire you.” The flexibility in American labor markets creates far more jobs and economic opportunities, which explains why thousands of Africans migrate there every year, leaving behind the heavily regulated labor markets in their home countries.

We, Africans, are not some dumb people who need to be saved. We possess extraordinary intelligence, creativity, and entrepreneurial spirit. We don’t need another failed “outside intervention.”

We just need the freedom to build.

1

“This is the reason many manufacturers have closed shops in Kenya and fled to neighbouring countries.” (see original post). Look at this wall of permits just to run a small business. Every certificate is a barrier, and every approval process is months of lost opportunities.

Most of the time, you will have to pay bribes to navigate the system. This is why I say “corruption is a symptom, overregulation is the disease.”

USAID cuts are killing children, and everyone is blaming Luke Farritor. A 23-year-old is getting death threats for trying to fix America’s broken budget. But as an African, there’s an essential truth about this crisis that everyone is missing.

Let me be absolutely clear: every child who dies from these cuts is a tragedy that breaks my heart. Their lives matter. Their families matter. This is truly heartbreaking.

I read the Bloomberg piece by Jason Leopold and colleagues. Farritor comes across as genuinely sincere - a brilliant young man who takes America’s fiscal crisis seriously and wanted to help, even when he could have stayed comfortable in the private sector making serious money.

Now he’s being called a child killer by keyboard warriors who have never left their comfort zone to tackle hard problems.

DOGE was heading in the right direction - America’s fiscal crisis is real and aid dependency has failed Africa for decades.

If I were making these decisions, I’d identify what actually saves lives (which is only a small portion of USAID) and keep that, while cutting the rest that creates dependency and keeps our leaders comfortable. And even with that small portion, I’d work with recipient countries toward complete self-reliance. But amid all this outrage about these cuts, no one is asking the fundamental question: why, in the first place, do we have children who need healthcare from the outside world and will die without it?

What about the millions of children who have died over decades because aid money protected incompetent leaders from ever having to solve problems? What about the kids who died crossing the Mediterranean because their countries couldn’t provide basic opportunities? What about the many more children who will die if we continue this cycle of aid dependency?

The evidence of this failure is everywhere. Our leaders don’t even trust their own healthcare systems.

When African presidents get sick, where do they go?

They flee abroad to places like UAE, Singapore, and Switzerland - countries that focus relentlessly on economic freedom, attracting massive investments, and building world-class institutions through competitive markets and business-friendly policies.

They won’t die in the systems they created.

Ken Opalo nailed it - this crisis might finally force Africa to build what we should have had all along: systems that belong to us. Instead of perfecting the art of begging, we could be building business-friendly frameworks that attract massive FDI, create jobs, and generate wealth that actually stays in Africa.

Share Africa’s Bright Future

Every African child deserves healthcare that survives political changes in foreign capitals. Every African mother deserves to sleep peacefully knowing her country has built the prosperity needed to develop reliable healthcare that can't be erased.

Farritor and DOGE didn’t create this broken system. Decades of leaders who chose comfortable dependency over actually governing did.

If you truly care about African lives, advocate for ending aid dependency - not bailing out the faceless leaders who benefit from this broken system while ordinary Africans suffer.

The answer is not more foreign aid. It’s African prosperity built by African hands that no foreign politician can ever take away.

The dream of monetary independence burns bright across francophone Africa. From Senegal to Burkina Faso, voices rise demanding freedom from the CFA franc and its colonial-era monetary arrangements. 

But here’s what everyone misses: Simply replacing one government-controlled currency with another solves nothing.

I’ve spent years watching how governments handle money, and the pattern is crystal clear: every single government, when given control over money printing, eventually does the same thing: they spend more than they earn and print their way out of trouble.

This happens because of human nature and political incentives. Politicians need money to fund their promises. When tax revenues fall short, the printing press looks like an easy solution. The inflation that follows takes time to hit, often showing up after the next election.

How Every Government Abuses Money

Take the United States, supposedly the gold standard of fiscal responsibility. The national debt now exceeds $37 trillion, and annual deficits routinely surpass $1.5 trillion. The Federal Reserve keeps printing money to buy government bonds, and ordinary Americans pay the price through higher prices at the grocery store.

If the most powerful economy on earth can't maintain fiscal discipline, what makes anyone think smaller nations will do better?

France controls the CFA franc used by 14 African nations while lecturing us about monetary policy, yet France violates European Union deficit rules repeatedly. French public debt keeps climbing while inflation eats away at citizens’ purchasing power. In other words, the “master” can’t even manage his own house.

China built its economic miracle on reckless credit expansion and government spending. Local government debt now exceeds $9 trillion, and the property sector is collapsing. Beijing’s money printing created asset bubbles that threaten the entire system.

Greece spent years overspending until it triggered a sovereign debt crisis. The government couldn’t print euros to solve their problems, so they needed painful bailouts instead. Argentina has suffered chronic inflation and repeated currency crises because the government keeps printing pesos to fund deficits. Turkey’s lira collapsed recently due to unorthodox monetary policies and deficit spending.

And what about Africa? 

Where our governments control their own currencies, the results speak volumes. Zimbabwe’s hyperinflation reached an incomprehensible 89.7 sextillion percent in 2008. That’s 89,700,000,000,000,000,000,000 percent inflation (no, this is not a typo!) They printed banknotes worth 100 trillion Zimbabwean dollars that couldn’t buy a loaf of bread. People’s life savings became worthless paper overnight.

Nigeria’s naira has lost over 70% of its value in recent years despite having oil wealth, with inflation reaching over 28% in 2023. Ghana’s cedi kept falling with inflation hitting 54% in 2022 despite IMF interventions.

Even when African countries tried to escape colonial monetary control, the results were disastrous. Mali under Modibo Keita withdrew from the CFA franc zone in 1962 and created their own currency, the Malian franc. Within five years, reckless government spending and money printing destroyed the currency. Mali was forced to return to the CFA franc in 1967, admitting their monetary experiment had failed completely.

Meanwhile, countries using the CFA franc have maintained relatively stable prices despite the colonial baggage. That should tell us something important about the difference between monetary sovereignty and monetary discipline.

The pattern is universal. Governments cannot resist the temptation to manipulate money. They will always choose short-term political gain over long-term monetary stability.

It happens in rich countries, poor countries, democratic countries, and authoritarian countries everywhere.

Why Another Fiat Currency Won’t Save Us

I completely understand the anger about the CFA franc. 

French monetary control over African nations is modern colonialism, plain and simple. We should absolutely end this arrangement.

But most people think the solution is creating another government-issued currency controlled by Senegal, ECOWAS, or some other African institution. This misses the fundamental problem. The issue stems from the printing press existing at all, regardless of who controls it.

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Think about it this way: if I gave you a machine that could print money whenever you needed it, how long would you resist using it? Even with the best intentions, the temptation would eventually become irresistible. We put our governments in exactly this situation with fiat currencies.

Simply replacing the CFA franc with another government-controlled currency means changing masters while keeping the same flawed system. The new currency would face the same political pressures, the same emergency excuses, and the same debt traps that have destroyed every other fiat currency in history.

We need a completely different approach.

Incorruptible Money

Africa has a unique opportunity right now. Instead of repeating the mistakes of every other continent, we can leapfrog directly to truly sovereign money that no government can manipulate: Bitcoin.

Bitcoin’s supply is mathematically fixed at 21 million coins. 

No politician can promise to print more. No central bank can manipulate its value for political purposes. No government can debase your savings to fund their spending. Mathematics and code enforce this, making it completely immune to human corruption.

Think about what this means. 

For the first time in human history, we have money that governments cannot touch. No more watching your savings evaporate because politicians needed to fund their latest project. No more currency devaluations that make imports unaffordable. No more inflation that hits the poor hardest while the connected get richer.

During the transition, stablecoins can serve as practical bridges. They offer price stability for daily transactions while the Bitcoin ecosystem develops; there are essentially stepping stones to true monetary sovereignty.

Bitcoin solves the real problems that plague every fiat system. Governments cannot debase citizens’ savings. There’s no wealth confiscation through money printing. International trade and remittances become seamless. Financial services become available to everyone without needing government permission.

And by the way, Bitcoin isn’t some anonymous tool for shady actors — it’s actually one of the most transparent financial systems in the world, with every transaction recorded on a public ledger. Governments cannot debase citizens’ savings

This revolution is already happening. El Salvador made Bitcoin legal tender and is building a Bitcoin-powered economy. Other countries are watching closely. The question becomes whether Africa will lead or follow.

We can follow the same path as every other region in history, trading one flawed fiat system for another and watching our savings disappear through government incompetence and political manipulation.

Or we can choose something unprecedented: money that no government can touch, no politician can manipulate, and no central banker can print.

The evidence is overwhelming. From Washington to Beijing, from Paris to Abuja, governments cannot be trusted with monetary control. They will always choose political expediency over monetary stability.

Monetary sovereignty without monetary discipline means changing which politician gets to steal from your savings account. 

True sovereignty means they can’t steal at all.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Inspired by Bastiat's famous satirical piece, “The Candlemakers' Petition”, which humorously criticizes protectionist policies by suggesting that the sun be banned to protect candle makers, this petition uses the same style to highlight the absurdity of excessive bureaucracy in Africa.

A PETITION

From the Manufacturers of Red Tape, Bureaucratic Forms, and Long Lines, and from Producers of Permits, Licenses, and Official Stamps, and Generally of Everything Connected with Government Authorization.

To the Honourable Members of the African Governmental Institutions.

Dear Esteemed Leaders,

You are truly the guardians of tradition, the upholders of the noble art of bureaucracy. You've shown great commitment to making sure nothing happens too fast or too easily. We respect your dedication to keeping our beloved continent safe from the chaos of progress and efficiency.  We respect your longstanding commitment to perpetuating African poverty!

We, the hardworking makers of official stamps, red tape, long forms, and countless regulations that keep life orderly, have a simple request. Please protect us from the new threat: business-friendly reforms. These reforms, promising to cut red tape and speed up business processes, threaten our way of life.

Imagine a world where entrepreneurs start a business in a day – online, no less – without waiting for our stamps of approval! Or where they have digital property rights on the blockchain, making it impossible for us to demand bribes or hand over the property to the highest bidder. Imagine if efficient private courts could solve disputes in less than 60 days. Imagine if labor laws could actually serve both workers and employers instead of just creating more paperwork and unemployment.

Imagine if businesses had the freedom to set prices without government interference, allowing them to adapt to market demands and thrive. Imagine if residents had the power to hold local leaders accountable through direct democracy, forcing votes on critical issues and recalling officials who failed to deliver.

Imagine if roads, schools, and hospitals were built and managed efficiently through a vibrant private sector, cutting costs and actually delivering quality services. And worst of all, imagine if businesses had to compete to offer better products and services, leading to higher quality, lower prices, and more choices for consumers! The horror!

Imagine if young Africans could learn digital skills online without needing to attend our outdated schools that don't teach 21st century skills. Imagine if local markets could operate freely without constant harassment from tax collectors looking for their “share”.

If we allow these reforms, we risk returning to the Africa of the past, a time when cities like Mombasa, Kilwa, and Timbuktu thrived through free enterprise. We might once again see vibrant, self-reliant communities built on trade, innovation, and local governance. Who would want that? The past should remain in the past, and we must not risk reawakening the spirit of freedom and entrepreneurship that defined precolonial Africa.

It would be utter chaos. The careful process of filling forms, waiting in lines, and paying fees would disappear. Our dedicated workers in the Ministry of Permits and the Office of License Renewal would have nothing to do. What would become of our skilled form checkers and queue organizers?

Think of the consequences. If businesses thrive without our oversight, where will the funds for our committees come from? What about the consultants hired to improve the inefficiencies we maintain? An Africa with fewer rules and less bureaucracy would surely fall into disorder!

We must protect the tradition of overregulation. We propose a new law: any new business proposal should be reviewed not once, but three times—by separate committees, each with the power to reject it over any minor issue. Also, any attempt to reduce paperwork should require a 50-page proposal with ten senior officials' signatures.

By doing this, we ensure that Africa remains a place where only the most persistent and well-connected succeed. This will preserve the natural order and uphold our proud legacy of bureaucracy. We urge you to resist the tempting ideas of efficiency and innovation.

Thank you for your continued service in keeping Africa stable and gloriously complicated.

With great respect,

The United Association of Red Tape Manufacturers and Bureaucratic Excellence.

When discussing economic systems, I often highlight how Marxist socialism devastated Africa and other regions of the world, leading to the deaths of millions of people. Inevitably, someone responds: “But what about the deaths caused by capitalism?”

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This response reveals a fundamental misunderstanding that needs addressing. It blames capitalism not just for greed, but for all of humanity’s darker instincts, as if free markets somehow invented human flaws.

Let's get something straight: greed, exploitation, and cruelty have existed throughout human history, long before anyone conceived of property rights or free enterprise.

Greed Predates Capitalism

Long before Adam Smith put pen to paper, humans had already committed unspeakable acts of greed, conquest, and exploitation:

• Genghis Khan ran a brutal empire that expanded through violence and rape. According to genetic studies, around 8% of men in a large region of Asia carry DNA linked to him.

• The Atlantic Slave Trade was powered by kings, empires, tribal chiefs, and European monarchies, most of whom operated under imperial and monarchical structures.

• In pre-revolutionary France, the monarchy, nobility, and upper clergy lived in great privilege and luxury, while the vast majority of peasants (about 80% of the population) endured poverty, heavy taxation, and frequent hunger.

There have always been selfish, greedy, and rapacious people — and there always will be, as long as humans exist. Every economic and political system has had greedy people in it. The difference is whether that system limits their power or lets it run wild.

The Enemies Invented “Capitalism”

The word “capitalism” was coined by socialist critics in the 19th century, including Louis Blanc, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Karl Marx. They used it to criticize the system they believed would inevitably collapse. Since they coined the term, it means whatever socialists want it to mean. That’s why the socialism vs. capitalism debate is often a Trojan horse to avoid admitting that free markets actually work.

Adam Smith, who’s often called the “father of capitalism,” never actually used the word. Instead, he described natural liberty, where:

Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way. (The Wealth of Nations)

John Locke, whose ideas heavily influenced America's founding documents, focused on natural rights to “life, liberty, and property” in his Second Treatise of Government (1689). He argued these rights existed prior to government, which was instituted specifically to protect them.

When the American Founders created the U.S. Constitution, they didn’t use the word capitalism either. The Bill of Rights protects individual freedoms like freedom of speech, religion, assembly, property, and due process, all of which protect individuals from both tyrants and mobs.

In other words, the core principles we now associate with “capitalism” were never about enriching the few — they were about protecting the many from power, whether it came from kings, mobs, or bureaucrats.

Voluntary Socialism

Here’s the thing: if a group of people want to live communally, they should absolutely have that freedom. Such voluntary arrangements don't require state coercion or enforcement. For instance:

• The Amish live simply and share resources, but joining is voluntary, and people are free to leave if they choose.

• Kibbutzim are intentional communities in Israel, traditionally based on agriculture and collective ownership. Membership is voluntary, and individuals are free to leave at any time.

• Monasteries and religious orders have lived communally for centuries and continue to operate around the world, with monks and nuns sharing resources, labor, and prayer.

This is voluntary socialism, and no free-market advocate has a problem with it.

Marxist socialism is something else entirely. It calls for revolution, the abolition of private property, and stateless dictatorships with no respect for individual rights. It caused 65–94 million deaths, with some estimates exceeding 100 million.

It’s worth noting that capitalism even gives people the freedom to experiment with Marxist ideals.

In a free market, you’re allowed to create worker-owned businesses based on Marx’s labor theory of value if you want to. Cooperatives, mutual aid societies, and communal living models can and do exist under capitalism.

Every system has greedy people, but only free market capitalism, rooted in individual rights and the rule of law, limits their power through competition, transparency, and choice.

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The internet has crowned a new savior for Africa: Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast. His massive YouTube empire has expanded into Africa with mega-projects that generate billions of views and floods of digital praise.

Let me be clear about something first: I believe his heart is in the right place.

Jimmy seems sincere. However, good intentions don't automatically create good outcomes.

“One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.” - Milton Friedman

Since 2023, MrBeast has constructed over 100 wells across Cameroon, Kenya, Somalia, Uganda, and Zimbabwe, claiming to provide clean water to nearly half a million people. He distributed medical supplies, launched AI-powered Strep A testing initiatives to provide accessible and affordable diagnostic solutions to underserved regions, and started a free breakfast program targeting 1.5 million children working on cocoa farms in West Africa.

These intiatives all follow the same formula: identify a problem, implement a Western solution, capture tearful gratitude of locals, upload, watch views explode. The world cheers. Donations pour in. Repeat.

But here's what everyone misses:

This model of philanthropy, however well-intentioned, is fundamentally flawed. Even worse, it's dangerous to Africa's future.

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The “MrBeast” approach is everything but new. It's the same broken playbook Western aid organizations have used for decades, just repackaged for the social media age.

Take TOMS Shoes. Blake Mycoskie built an empire on the promise: “Buy one, give one.” For every pair you bought, he gave one to a child in Africa. It felt good. It sold well. But it failed.

I’ve spoken to many entrepreneurs in Meckhé, Senegal who make shoes for a living. They had to cut staff (meaning hundreds of people lost their jobs!), and some of them had to shut down entirely. Why? Because no one can compete with free.

Giving away shoes might come from a good heart. But if you care about the poor, you need more than a heart. You also need a mind. A mind that understands how the world works, incentives, and dignity.

(Watch this documentary we made a few years ago that actually shows how TOMS Shoes put people in Meckhé out of business, and also which solution I’m working on to create prosperity there.)

As someone who has built manufacturing businesses in Senegal and fought against suffocating regulations across Africa, I've seen firsthand how this "helping hand" often becomes a barrier to real prosperity.

Since 1961, USAID has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on projects in Africa: building schools, clinics, wells, and roads. The result? Well, Africa is still the poorest region of the world TODAY.

Before trying to fix Africa’s problems, MrBeast could’ve just thought from first principles by asking himself: 

“Why is child labor happening in the first place?”

He said that after handing out free breakfast, one school’s attendance went up by 10% in a week. But does that mean kids left the cocoa farms? Or are they just showing up for the food?

If MrBeast really cares about this problem, the real metric to be measured here isn’t attendance, but whether child labor is actually decreasing.

This is what happens when we treat poverty like a YouTube algorithm, something you can figure out with 2,000 hours of research and advice from “the greatest minds.” Most of the people considered “experts” in this space have spent decades promoting the same top-down, charity-based solutions that haven’t worked (and in many cases, created a culture of dependency that traps Africa into poverty). 

Some reports have already emerged that some of MrBeast's wells are failing due to maintenance issues. This mirrors precisely what development experts have observed for decades: infrastructure projects without robust local maintenance systems eventually collapse.

Each well requires approximately $1 per person per year for proper upkeep. Who pays these costs once the cameras leave? Who repairs the pumps when they inevitably malfunction? Who manages water resources to prevent contamination?

Handpumps deployed by NGOs in Africa often last less than five years. By the mid-2000s, 36% of about 350,000 installed pumps were non-functional, and this number increased to 300,000 abandoned pumps by recent counts. This has led to a $5 billion wasted investment due to the "build, break, and rebuild" approach.

When MrBeast or foreign NGOs step in to provide services that could be delivered by local entrepreneurs and businesses, they unintentionally distort the incentive structure of a healthy market economy.

Why build a business solving real problems when foreign actors offer those solutions for free? Why invest in infrastructure when someone else is giving it away?

And worse, why should governments bother creating a business-friendly environments when these saviors are already trying to meet people’s basic needs? It gives them every reason to sit back, stay inefficient, and let outsiders do the heavy lifting.

It creates dependency and crowds out local initiative, which obviously weakens self-reliance instead of encouraging it.

"Show me the incentive, and I'll show you the outcome." - Charlie Munger

And most damaging of all is the narrative these interventions reinforce. MrBeast's videos, with hundreds of millions of views, portray Africans primarily as passive recipients of foreign generosity rather than capable agents of our own destiny.

I will never forget the day a young woman working in my manufacturing facility in Senegal confessed something that broke my heart. She told me she had come to believe Black Africans must be inferior because of how consistently we're portrayed as helpless and dependent.

Only after participating in creating great products that meet international quality standards and are sold at Whole Foods Market did she recognize this lie for what it was.

This psychological damage is the invisible cost of viral philanthropy that no one talks about.

What They NEVER Tell You

While MrBeast drills wells for viral content, the actual barriers to African prosperity remain largely unaddressed. 

Let me share what I face daily as an entrepreneur trying to create sustainable businesses in Senegal.

When I launched my skin care manufacturing company in Senegal, I needed proper packaging. But the problem was that local manufacturers required minimum orders of 1,000 boxes of each size when I only needed 50 to start. With two box sizes needed, that meant ordering 2,000 boxes total, paying 50% upfront, waiting 4-8 weeks after sample approval, and finding ways to store excess inventory that would deteriorate in our climate.

And guess what?

When I considered importing boxes instead, I had to pay a 45% tariff just to get started.

No, that's not a typo. I had to pay nearly half the cost just in government fees to import those materials that I needed to improve my product.

Meanwhile, for the part of my business that operates in the United States, I go online and get any supplies I want for my products almost instantly via Amazon, Home Depot, specialized suppliers such as Uline, or one of a thousand others, with no special permissions of any kind required.

Share Africa’s Bright Future

This isn't unique to Senegal. According to the World Bank's Ease of Doing Business rankings (before they were discontinued), 13 of the 20 worst-ranked countries globally for starting a business were in Africa. That’s 70% of the bottom performers.

In Singapore, which was only twice as wealthy as Senegal in 1960 but is now ~52 times richer, starting a business requires one procedure, half a day, and costs virtually nothing.

Then you have the labor laws… 

African labor laws often create exactly the opposite effect of what they intend. With mandatory lengthy notice periods, substantial severance packages, and near-impossible dismissal processes, formal employment becomes too risky for most businesses.

The result? ~90% of employment in many African countries exists in the informal sector, where workers have:

• No legal protections

• No benefits

• No job security

• Typically much lower wages

When hiring for my manufacturing facility, I was constantly warned by lawyers about the risks (and I was lucky enough to afford lawyers). Each formal employee represented a potential financial liability rather than a productive partner. Not because of their abilities, but because of counterproductive regulations that make it nearly impossible for entrepreneurs to operate effectively.

This is why unemployment remains catastrophically high across the continent, especially among educated youth. In some African countries, nearly 50% of university graduates cannot find formal employment.

The Mauritius Miracle 

Mauritius, a small island nation off Africa's east coast, ranks among the global top tier for ease of doing business. Its GDP per capita now approaches European levels. Its citizens enjoy far higher living standards than most of the continent.

What made Mauritius successful? It wasn't foreign charity. And it definitely wasn't viral philanthropy.

It was creating an environment where businesses could thrive.

By implementing market-friendly reforms, establishing reliable legal systems, and creating conditions where entrepreneurship can flourish, Mauritius transformed from a sugar-dependent colony into a diversified upper-middle-income economy.

The lesson is obvious to anyone willing to see it: economic freedom, not foreign aid, is the path to prosperity.

What Would Actually Help Africa?

If MrBeast genuinely wants to help Africa, he could redirect his enormous resources and influence toward enabling African solutions rather than importing Western ones.

Because we think Jimmy really wants to do good, we even reached out to his team. We told them, “What if instead of one-off giveaways, we build cities in Africa where it’s actually easy to do business? Places where people can start companies, create jobs, earn a living, and build real wealth?”

We explained how they could even launch African-made chocolate bars, energy drinks, or whatever they would want to build. Those products could all be sourced in Africa, made by Africans, and sold to the world.

This wouldn’t just create jobs for millions. It would eventually restore Africa’s dignity.

Because when people work and create value, they gain pride. They don’t feel like passive recipients. They feel like equals. And when Africa gains dignity, the world’s perception of black people will change too, because over 80% of the world’s black population lives in Africa.

So in a very real sense, helping Africa rise through business and production would not only fight poverty, it would help fight racism.

Unfortunately, his team’s response was, “Oh, we already have our Africa project.”

Naturally, we were curious. What was it? Something bold? Transformational?

Turns out… it’s digging wells. Again.

The same thing that’s been tried for decades and never actually moves the needle…

Instead of just repeating the same mistakes over and over again, this is how to really help Africa:

1. Use resources to support African organizations working to reduce bureaucratic barriers, corruption, and regulatory obstacles. Partner with local think tanks, business associations, and reform-minded officials who understand the specific challenges in their communities.

2. Treat Africans as legitimate business partners, not charity cases.

3. Several investment funds already focus on African startups because they see the continent's enormous untapped potential. MrBeast's platform could spotlight these efforts rather than perpetuating the charity model.

4. Many of Africa's social challenges can be addressed through market mechanisms more effectively than through charity. Clean water, healthcare, education, and other basic needs can be provided through innovative business models that deliver affordability, quality, and sustainability. Envirofit, for example, have been working in Kenya and Ghana. They created SmartGas, which is a clean cooking system that uses LPG (liquid petroleum gas) instead of wood or charcoal. It works with a pay-as-you-cook plan. Their smart meter connects to an LPG tank and lets families pay small amounts when they can afford it, similar to adding credit to a phone. This gives families cleaner air and better health while letting them choose when to cook, without needing donations

Perhaps most promising of all is the concept of Próspera Cities which are special economic zones with world-class legal systems designed specifically for entrepreneurs. These zones can provide islands of excellence where African businesses can thrive, free from the regulatory burdens that plague much of the continent (here’s how they work in practice).

Dignity > Dependency

I don't want another generation of African children growing up believing they are inferior because all they see are images of themselves as helpless recipients of foreign generosity.

I don't want another generation of Western children growing up believing Africans are incapable of solving our own problems.

I want a future where Africans are recognized globally as co-creators of innovation and prosperity.

The young woman in my manufacturing facility who discovered her own capability, who realized she isn't inferior after all, didn't find that transformation through charity. She found it through participating in creating something valuable, seeing her work appreciated in the marketplace, earning her success rather than receiving it as a gift.

That is the dignity all humans deserve. 

And it's precisely what's missing from MrBeast's model of philanthropy.

When Libyan authorities discovered mass graves containing 50 people near Al-Kufra last month, the world barely noticed.

These people weren't just anonymous migrants.

They were dreamers who died in pursuit of something most of us take for granted: the chance to work and build a decent life.

I imagine who they might have been. Perhaps a young woman with a talent for design who couldn't register her business back home. Maybe a man who simply wanted steady work to feed his family. Or possibly a university graduate who found his degree worthless in a country with 70% youth unemployment.

While I don't know their specific stories, I do know this: they died because staying home felt as hopeless as crossing a desert and risking their lives.

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Their bodies lie unclaimed. Nobody singing their funeral songs. Nobody telling their stories. Nobody remembering the light in their eyes when they once spoke of their dreams. Just 50 more bodies in unmarked graves, their blood soaking into foreign soil while their mothers wait for calls that will never come.

This breaks my heart. It should break yours too.

We've all seen the images of overcrowded boats on the Mediterranean. But what happens before migrants reach those shores remains largely invisible.

Last month's discovery revealed the grim reality: 50 bodies, shot or abandoned by traffickers in the Libyan desert. Police also rescued 76 others being held captive nearby.

This isn't rare. According to recent data from the International Organization for Migration (IOM), more than 22% of recorded migrant deaths and disappearances in Libya in 2024 occurred on land routes.

Look at your children tonight. Your brother. Your sister. Look at their faces as they sleep.

Then imagine them so desperate that crossing a desert with murderous traffickers seems like their best option.

Across Europe, far-right politicians have gained power by promising to "keep the migrants out." They win votes by stoking fear rather than addressing root causes. It's a simple but misguided formula: blame migrants for economic problems, promise tougher borders, and watch your poll numbers rise. Italy, Hungary, Sweden, the Netherlands - country after country has seen this pattern play out.

But here's what these politicians never acknowledge: walls don't work when people are desperate enough. No border patrol, no detention center, no policy will stop someone who sees no future at home.

People will tunnel under walls. They'll climb over fences. They'll risk death at sea. They'll cross deserts.

Why? Because humans will always seek opportunity elsewhere when denied it at home.

Instead of just building higher walls, how about we open up real trade? No handouts. No pity. Just business on equal footing so people can build prosperity where they are instead of running from broken economies.

Because trust me, when people have a choice to stay home, they will stay.

People want to eat their traditional foods. They want to speak their own languages. They want to celebrate their cultural holidays with family and friends. Migration isn't a first choice. For most people, it's a last resort. If people had opportunities at home, most would choose to stay. They'd build businesses, create jobs, and contribute to their communities. They'd raise their children in familiar surroundings among extended family.

But that choice has been taken from them by economic systems that make prosperity nearly impossible.

When I started my skincare company in Senegal, I spent months dealing with paperwork, bribes, and bureaucracy before selling a single product. Just finding cardboard boxes meant navigating a system that made importing them 45% more expensive than necessary.

This isn't just my story. It's every African entrepreneur's nightmare.

In many African countries, starting a business takes months and costs more than a year's average income. Importing basic supplies requires mountains of paperwork and excessive tariffs. Getting anything done often means paying bribes to officials who see their job as extracting money rather than enabling business.

Meanwhile in New Zealand, you can start a business in half a day with one simple procedure.

The rage I feel about this injustice burns in my chest every day.

And by the way, here's something you probably didn't learn in school: Africa once had thriving trade networks connecting the continent with the world.

Before colonization, cities like Timbuktu and Mombasa were major commercial hubs. Market women – the backbone of local economies – traded freely without government interference.

Traditional African societies had their own legal systems that protected property rights and enabled commerce. Trade routes crisscrossed the continent, bringing prosperity to regions now trapped in poverty.

What happened?

When colonial powers left, many newly independent African nations adopted socialist economic models that gave government enormous control over business. These systems failed, but their legacy remains in the form of crushing bureaucracy and corruption.

I've talked with many young Africans considering the dangerous journey to Europe, and I can tell you one thing: they don’t want welfare or handouts. It's embarrassingly simple: they want jobs. They want to use their talents, earn money honestly, and build something for themselves and their families. They're not lazy. They're not criminals. They're human beings facing a system designed to prevent economic progress.

I've looked into their eyes. I've seen the pain of unrealized potential. I've seen the humiliation of begging for jobs that don't exist. I've seen the courage it takes to wake up every day in a system designed to crush your dreams.

When a young man in Senegal can't get a permit to start a small shop without months of paperwork and bribes, when a woman in Nigeria faces harassment from officials for selling goods without "proper authorization," when university graduates can't find work because there are no companies hiring – migration starts looking like the only option.

I believe Africa's future lies in creating "Próspera Cities" – special economic zones designed to give entrepreneurs the freedom to thrive, attract investment, and generate millions of jobs in world-class business environments.

The bodies in those Libyan graves represent a double tragedy: the immediate horror of their deaths and the larger tragedy of lost potential. They died seeking what most of us take for granted – the freedom to work, create, and build a decent life.

We can prevent these tragedies. Not with more patrols or harsher policies, but by removing the barriers that prevent Africans from creating prosperity where they already are.

I dream of an Africa where our children don't need to flee to survive. Where our greatest minds build businesses at home instead of cleaning toilets abroad. Where our villages and cities vibrate with the energy of entrepreneurship instead of the emptiness left by those who felt they had no choice but to leave.

This is possible. But only if WE change the rules that keep us poor.