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Tag: Capitalism

  • The rise, rise and rise of capitalism (IV)

    The rise, rise and rise of capitalism (IV)

    The impetus for the voyages of discovery after the fall of Constantinople was to find a way to get to India with the solid purpose of having access to the exotic products of the East. The appetites for these luxuries had been developed when the Crusaders, in an effort to ‘deliver the Holy land’ from the Muslims whom they regarded as infidels, sent waves of Christian armies into Palestine. Over a period of four hundred years of so, or as far as many inhabitants of that region are concerned, up till the present time, armies from Europe have marched into Palestine to wreak havoc on the indigenous people of that region in the name of their Christian God. Although the crusaders seized a lot of land from Islamic forces and even captured Jerusalem and ruled from there for some time, they did not succeed in making that city wholly theirs. Their eyes were however open to all the wonders of the Orient which could not be found for love or money in any part of their partially frozen territories. One example will suffice. Before the Crusades, all European textiles were woven from flax of wool, materials which were heavy, scratchy and not amenable to fashion statements. The Crusaders were introduced to cotton in the Holy land and from then were not satisfied with their ugly woollen clothes.

    When the Ottomans finally closed the land routes to the rich markets of the East, the Europeans, desperate to continue with the tradition of dependence on the luxuries they had become used to, responded by taking to the open seas in an attempt to continue to be supplied with all the tid bits that their pampered pallets could not be deprived of.

    The situation in which the Europeans found themselves was a classical case of finding a way because they had a will. Within half a century of the fall of Constantinople, the Europeans led on the one hand by the Spanish and the Portuguese on the other had succeeded in reaching the New World and on their own the Portuguese had managed to sail all the way to India. In doing so, another vista was opened up for European exploitation.

    The first Europeans to arrive in India were the Portuguese who had to sail all the way around what they called the Cape of Good Hope and after that, up the east coast of Africa and on onto the Indian Ocean. By the time the Portuguese arrived in the Indian Ocean, in the closing years of the fifteenth century, they found that the peoples in that region had been trading with India and places further east for several centuries if not millennia. Indeed the last stage of their journey to India was with the help of an experienced pilot who was taken on board at Malindi in present day Kenya. Upon arrival in India, the Portuguese found that there was a great deal of trading between the Muslims and Indians and this led to a great deal of rivalry between the two groups.

    The real penetration of India by Europeans did not start for another hundred years and it started with the formation of the British East Indian Company which received its charter from Queen Elizabeth I in 1600. This charter permitted the company to carry on trade with India virtually on its own terms, terms which were developed along the way and at the pleasure of the share holders of the company. Their pleasure was in no short measure as the shareholders were soon reaping a 30% yearly profit on their investment. The English were not the only ones trading in the Far East as both the Dutch and the French, not to talk of the Spanish and Portuguese had a very active interest in the trade of the Orient. The Dutch were however not much interested in trade with India as their focus was primarily on Indonesia and other such places further east. It needs be said that the Dutch were as vicious in the East as they were in the West where they held Surinam in a vicious grip. Their undiluted viciousness was however reserved for their colonies in South Africa where they spoilt their name forever with their cruel system of apartheid, a system they refined and practised in the Republic of South Africa until the liberation of that country in 1994. But that is another story entirely.

    The English traders set up their stalls in the coastal cities of India and began to take in spices, textiles of many kinds but principally of cotton and jewellery. Further east, they were trading in tea with China and making humongous profits in both places. Some of their tactics were brutal as their control of trade was maintained by a huge army which at one time consisted of a quarter of a million men, larger than the British army of the time. This army was also put in the field against the French who wanted part of the action against the wishes of the British traders to maintain a monopoly of both trade and sharp practices. The British under the leadership of Robert Clive finally broke the power of both the French and powerful local empires around 1760 to set up a monopoly of violence and naked coercion over increasingly large portions of India, especially the area around the Bay of Bengal which at that time was regarded as the richest region of the world.

    Read Also: The rise, rise and rise of capitalism (III)

    Once British hegemony was established in many parts of India, the rape of the sub-continent began in earnest. Such was the rapaciousness of British East India Company in that region that the newly independent countries of India and Pakistan had to restart their respective economies in 1947. This is sharp contrast to their economic situation in 1760 when British exploitation began. At that time, the GDP of India was calculated to 23% of global GDP. By the time the British left in 1947, the figure had been deflated to 4%. The Indian sub-continent had been systematically looted by the British. Incidentally, even the language was not spared as loot is one of the words in the English language which was stolen from India! Perhaps their most egregious item of theft was however the destruction of the extensive, innovative and rich textile culture of the people of the Bay of Bengal. Their ability to produce high quality textiles, developed over many centuries was cynically destroyed by the policies of the British East India Company which broke up their looms and made laws to prevent Indian weavers from plying their trade, the centre of which was subsequently transferred to the Northwest of England to set up the cotton mills of Manchester. The inferior but lurid textile products of Manchester and surrounding towns ruled the world for more than a century, sending millions of yards of their cheap products all over the world including Africa where the large scale local production of textiles was stopped in its tracks.

    The conduct of the British East India Company was so corrupt and brutal that her holdings in India were forcibly taken over by the British government in 1857. For the next ninety years, India was a British colony and part of the vast British empire on which the sun was said never to set. At any given time of day or night, the sun was shining on part of the empire.

    At the height of its powers, the British East India Company shifted it’s attention to China from where it was exporting tea to Britain. The Chinese insisted in being paid in silver for their tea, a commodity which the company could not provide in sufficient quantities to cover costs. This vile Company then took to smuggling opium into China to pay for the tea with which they tried to satisfy customer demand in Britain. Tea became such a key aspect of British tradition right until now so much so that the evening meal is referred to as tea. With sugar pouring into Britain from the Caribbean and tea from China, the British soon developed the (disgusting) habit of adding sugar to their tea and compounding their heresy by adding milk to the brew. Tea drinking became such an abstraction that the British were comfortable with committing despicable crimes against humanity in two global hemispheres. They forced Indian farmers to switch from growing food crops to producing opium which was smuggled into China. Thus they spread hunger in India and debilitating drug addiction in China. The situation in China was so bad that millions of people became incapable of contributing anything to the Chinese economy which went into a steep decline. The Chinese government took steps to stop this illegal trade but the British responded by declaring war against the Chinese in order to force them to continue allowing the importation of opium which was destroying the very fabric of their society. In trying to enforce her own laws, the Chinese not only banned the importation of opium but confiscated all the opium held by British traders. The opium seized was then destroyed and this led directly to a declaration of war. Using superior weapons and tactics, the British won a decisive victory forcing the Chinese to allow the entry of opium to their country in addition to paying compensation for the destruction of their opium. For good measure, the British seized Hong Kong and surrounding islands which were not returned to Chinese control until a hundred years later under what is referred to as the one nation, two systems arrangement. China must wait until 2047 to regain full control of the territory she lost in the First Opium war.

    The Treaty of Nanjing which ended the First opium war was manifestly unfair to the Chinese who out of desperation abrogated the treaty. As they had done before, they seized and destroyed the opium stocks held by foreign traders and as before, they were attacked, this time by a joint task force made of troops from Britain, France, USA and Russia. The outcome was the same this time as the Chinese were properly screwed up yet again.  Not only did they have to pay a hefty compensation for the opium destroyed but they had to open up their country to trade with virtually all countries on terms which were injurious to the Chinese. In the course of fighting, the Summer Palace was expertly looted and then burnt down to the ground by British and French troops. Some of the artefacts carted away from the palace are still classified as missing. This can be regarded as some sort of rehearsal for the sacking of the Benin palace in 1897 when thousands of irreplaceable art works were carried off, many of them never to be seen again. The Chinese found their experience so traumatic that the period of the Opium wars is still referred to in China as the century of humiliation.

    All the activities mentioned above led to an unprecedented accumulation of wealth mainly by Britain at a time when such wealth was not seen anywhere else. What more, this wealth was concentrated in private hands to be used as the owners damned well pleased. As an illustration, it has been calculated that Robert Clive arrived in India without a penny in his pocket but by the time he finally came back to Britain he was worth in contemporary terms more than £350 million, gathered within a twenty year period. This money was available for launching the Industrial revolution which lit all those fires under capitalism. This is why for more than a hundred and fifty years, Britain was far and away the most powerful nation on earth with power enough to create the entity called Nigeria, virtually on a whim.

    • To be continued  
  • The rise, rise and rise of capitalism (III)

    The rise, rise and rise of capitalism (III)

    The North American colonies were peopled predominantly by the English although the available spaces were contested with the French in the North and the Dutch in the North East. For example, the city we now know as New York was originally called New Amsterdam as it was originally a Dutch colony, the island of Manhattan having been purchased from the indigenous people for the princely sum of $24 in 1626. In time however the Dutch were supplanted by the English who developed the island into a trading centre and now the centre of global trade. These colonies were part of the emerging British empire and were ruled from London until they famously won their independence in 1776.

    Immediately eastwards of the British colonies, in the Caribbean ocean, the European powers of the day settled on the islands which dotted that area. There, they set up another form of colonies, the slave colonies on which European settlement was limited. As a matter of fact, these islands represented the limit of Columbus penetration as that explorer did not go beyond them. The original inhabitants of those islands now collectively and derogatorily referred to as Caribs and described as cannibals were quickly disposed of. It is interesting to note that the cannibals which gave Robinson Crusoe in the eponymous novel by Daniel Defoe an almighty fright were supposed to represent these unfortunate people in literature. Beginning in the sixteenth century, various European powers including the British, French and Spanish began to squabble among themselves for the mastery of those islands some of which changed hands as the Europeans made this region the centrepiece of war and diplomatic activities over several centuries. The rivalry was so fierce because it was realised quite early on that the soil of that region was particularly suited for the planting of sugar.

    Sugar cane was first domesticated in both Papua New Guinea and parts of India and gradually spread through Arab conquests to Southern Europe in areas around the Mediterranean sea, into Portugal and Spain. As with several other commodities, the use of sugar was introduced into Europe during the Crusades even though both the Greeks and the Romans had a familiarity with sugar but only as medicine.

    Sugar cane is a very demanding crop as it requires high temperature and humidity for growth. In addition, its cultivation is highly labour intensive and over the years was only profitable with the availability of slave labour. These conditions were admirably met in the West Indian islands and parts of the American mainland. All the usual European suspects starting with the Dutch got in on the act and started producing sugar in the New World with Columbus planting the first sugar seedlings on the island of Hispaniola in 1493. These sugar islands were supplied with slaves from Africa for hundreds of years and it is instructive that Cuba, the leading sugar producer in the Caribbean was also the last to abolish slavery in 1888. The lives of the slaves that had to plant, hoe sugar, harvest the cane and produce sugar was extremely brutal with the life expectancy of a slave that was landed on the island of Barbados at the height of slavery being only four years. Being transported to that island from Africa was therefore a short life sentence with extreme hard labour. When the slaves died, their dry bones were ground up and mixed with animal bones and used to whiten the sugar produced on the plantations. Slaves were not even allowed to rest in peace after their labours!

    Another aspect of slave sugar production was mechanisation. Sugar cane is very bulky and therefore very difficult to transport over long distances. This meant that sugar was produced on each plantation by the slaves who had grown the crop in the first place. All the pieces of equipment; crushers, rollers, and evaporators used in refining sugar were either moving or very hot and accidents leading to the loss of lives and limbs were frequent. Each machine had a machete within easy reach so that when a finger was caught in the machine, the band of the unfortunate slave was simply chopped off so that it was not necessary to stop the machine for the offending finger to be extricated from the machine. That mutilation was as good as a death sentence because from that point on,  the slave in question was no longer productive and had become expendable and well, slaves never retired. Those who could no longer work were surplus to requirement and were quickly disposed of. Their bones were then ground up to bleach sugar. Sugar fuelled the trans- Atlantic slave trade as no other commodity was able to do but in the end sugar also contributed to the end of the slave trade and ultimately, the emancipation of slaves on all British ruled territories in 1834.

    The central importance of slavery to the rise of capitalism is illustrated by the story of the voyage of the Zong, a British slave ship which sailed from Accra in present day Ghana with a cargo of 442 slaves bound for Jamaica in 1781. In the first place the Zong, in order to maximise profit was carrying more than double the number of slaves she was allowed to carry even by the terrible standards of the day. In addition, the substantive captain of the ship was incapacitated by illness and command fell to the ship surgeon who had no practical sailing experience. There came a time when through all manner of navigation errors, the ship faced a devastating water shortage and the response of the crew was to begin to throw the slaves overboard in an attempt to stretch the availability of water. It was reasoned that the cost of the slaves murdered in that manner was covered by insurance but that if they died of thirst, they would not be able to collect insurance of £30 for each dead slave. In the normal course of events, no less than 62 slaves had died of ‘natural causes’ during the voyage before the decision to execute other slaves by drowning was taken. All in all, 132 slaves were drowned over three days and ten others jumped into the sea of their own accord in protest at the inhumane conditions they were being subjected to. All other slaves were eventually safely delivered to Jamaica and sold on average for £36 each.  In addition, the ship owners put in a claim for the drowned slaves and won their claim. However, the insurers refused to pay up and the case ended up in court. Judgement in favour of the ship owners was predicated on the fact that the slaves were in fact items of cargo and did not deserve to be treated like human beings. The second trial ended in triumph for the insurers on the ground that the crew of the ship had been negligent and that was what led to the death of the enslaved people on board. An attempt to try the negligent crew for murder was however unsuccessful.

    Read Also: The rise, rise and rise of capitalism (I)

    The man who brought the issue of murder on the Zong to public notice was Olaudah Equiano  a former slave of Igbo descent. He joined forces with Grenville Sharp, an abolitionist who insisted that what took place on the Zong was murder but virtually nobody agreed with them since the victims were just Africans on their way to a short life of slavery. Eventually however, the Zong incident was a catalyst for ending British participation in the slave trade some thirty years later and the emancipation of slaves more than fifty years later.

    The point to be made here is that without the humongous profit made by the enslavement of Africans in the Americas, the capital needed for fuelling the Industrial revolution would never have become available. An example will help prove this point. The home port of the Zong was Liverpool, a town which owed its economic importance to the slave trade as it was the home port to many slave ships. One of the owners of Zong was Gregson, at that time the mayor of Liverpool. It has been calculated that Gregson was personally involved over a lifetime of slave trading in the transportation of at least 58,000 Africans into slavery in the West Indies. The man built up a mountain of capital to bring about the rise and rise of capitalism. There were many others like him who built up their capital in the same way. Some of these men were, in the manner of Gregson, individuals but others were formidable institutions like the Royal African Company and its Dutch counterpart, the Dutch West Indian company which had control of the sugar plantations in Surinam which remains a Dutch colony today.

    The slave trade was a massive commercial, and even municipal enterprise as we have seen with the city of Liverpool which was once a lowly fishing village but became a city, complete with a Cathedral within a short period of her involvement in the slave trade. Today, Liverpool is one of the largest cities in Britain, her murky past in the slave trade all but forgotten completely.

    The slave trade was very profitable. Commodities were brought to Europe in ships which were loaded down with sugar, cotton, indigo, rice and other commodities which were sold at an immense profit. The ships then took on the tawdry trade goods so beloved of African slave traders and sold again at great profit. Finally, the ships were overloaded with human cargo and transported across the Atlantic for yet another round of profit taking. But things did not always work according to plan as the case of the voyage of the Zango clearly shows. These traders needed trading capital which they got from banks as well as insurance cover which insurance companies readily provided. Some of these institutions which facilitated the slave trade are still in business today. For example, Lloyds of London is still very much in business but fully 40% of her business in those days was provided by slave trading activities. Barclays bank is another institution which has survived to the present day. Like Lloyds, Barclays bank was involved in the slave trade as she provided loans to slave traders thereby facilitating their trade. It cannot be overstated that without the slave trade, capitalism could not have engineered the Industrial revolution which over the years has changed the world profoundly.

    • To be continued.
  • The rise, rise and rise of capitalism (II)

    The rise, rise and rise of capitalism (II)

    When Adam delved and Eve spun Who then was the gentleman

    The very long drawn out agricultural revolution which dovetailed into the Industrial revolution four hundred years later began in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic which has come to be known to history as the Black Death. Beginning in 1346 until 1354 the plague raged all over Europe, reducing the population of the continent by as much as 50%. The number of workers was also reduced by a similar figure leading to a marked shortage of labour, both skilled and unskilled. The consensus of opinion at the time among the workers of England was that their labour should attract higher reward. But their overlords did not agree with their workers in this regard. To make matters worse, one of the interminable wars with France was raging and the king and his counsellors decided that they had to impose additional taxes with which to pay for the war.

    By 1371, the workers had decided that the situation had become intolerable and revolt was in the air; led by an activist preacher, John Ball, who went around England rousing the peasants to revolt against the Lords of the land. His ringing rallying cry was in the form of a question which went back to the beginning of Christian time.

    When Adam gentleman delved and Eve spun

    Who then was the gentleman

    In other words, there were no Lords or Peasants at the beginning of time so how come there was then a group of people lording it over others? The situation was as intolerable as it was unnatural and had to be changed and they were determined to change it. This is what led to the Peasants Revolt during which Wat Tyler, acting on behalf of the peasants, presented all sorts of demands to the king who gave in to the demands of the peasants. However, the nobles prevailed upon the king to repudiate this agreement, a situation which caused Tyler’s death and the continued oppression of the peasants and further concentration of wealth in the hands of the ruling class. If anything, the following couple of centuries led to more trouble for the peasants. Over the years, the Lords succeeded in alienating the poor from land which was hitherto accessible to everyone. This situation forced an increasing percentage of the peasants to abandon the rural areas and congregate in urban centres which grew quite quickly as a result. These former peasants on becoming increasingly pauperised formed the recruiting group for an emerging group of persons who had no attachment to the land and could therefore be recruited into an emerging group of workers who could be herded into the factory work force which was to create wealth for the emerging capitalists of the eighteenth century and beyond.

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    The immediate consequence of the exploitation of the New World by the Spanish Conquistadors was the enrichment of the Spanish crown. The indigenous peoples of those lands in the western hemisphere were immediately enslaved and made to work extracting gold and silver from what was once their land. The toll on those people was horrendous and their population collapsed spectacularly. Hunger, overwork and imported diseases made frightful inroads into the indigenous population of the New World to the extent that within thirty years of Spanish colonisation and exploitation, genuine fears were expressed that the indigenous people were on the verge of extinction. Rather than damping down on the rate of exploitation, it was suggested by a monk that Africans be imported all the way from Africa to take up the slack created by the population collapse of the indigenous peoples. This suggestion paved the way for the most dastardly crime against humanity in the two hundred thousand years history of the existence of our species on the surface of the earth.

    As early as 1493, only a few months after Columbus arrived in the New World, a series of bulls emanating from the Vatican had effectively divided the world as it was known at the time into two spheres of influence. The western portion was given over to Spain and the eastern portion ceded to Portugal. The two Christian (Roman Catholic) countries were charged with bringing all the people in their respective spheres to the knowledge of the redeeming power of Jesus Christ. In other words, they had complete power over the millions of people residing in their respective domains. At that time, the Pope was master of the kingdom of Christ on earth until the Reformation reared its ugly head and started to make a mockery of the authority of the Pope. That story is worthy of further interrogation.

    All Spanish colonies were in the New World but the hapless souls who were to spend their lifetime slaving in those colonies lived in Africa under Portuguese authority. To solve this problem, the Spanish drew up a contract for the supply of slaves from Africa. This contract called the Asiento was issued annually to slave traders mainly from England, Denmark, Holland and of course Portugal. The nationals of these countries built forts along to the so called Slave coast and over the next three hundred and more years extracted and conveyed to the Americas, more than twelve million Africans. An unknown number of Africans also perished in the process of being captured, marched to the coast and shipped in the most atrocious conditions imaginable. What we have not yet factored into this infernal equation is the dislocation which accompanied the activities of slave catchers all over the continent of Africa. If the truth be told, Africa has not yet recovered from the depredation inflicted on her over this dark period. For all that time, slaves toiled under wicked conditions to provide unpaid labour which created wealth and the capital on which the Industrial Revolution was launched.

    The Spanish colonies in North, Central and South America were outright slave colonies which existed to produce precious natural resources which were taken to Europe for consumption. In the wake of the Reformation in Europe when the power of the Roman Catholic Church was effectively challenged a new kind of colonists fetched up on the eastern seaboard of the Atlantic in North America. What they were looking for was the freedom to practise whatever form of religion that took their fancy. The first of these groups arrived in America in 1607 in what is now Massachusetts. As expected, life in those early English colonies was precarious to say the least. Without help from the indigenous people the colonists would not have survived for more than a few months. This is the origin of the tradition of Thanksgiving which as with all things American has been commercialized out of all meaning and precious tradition. Its true meaning has collapsed under the weight of dollars thrown at it.

    It is fashionable these days to think that all that Africans have contributed to the USA is two hundred years of unpaid labour during slavery but in reality, without African input, the USA would not have developed beyond subsistence level. The journey from Africa was unquestionably traumatic but the Africans came over with a plethora of skills, farming techniques, foods, social skills in terms of music, dance and other civilising influences which enriched America in a way which no other group of immigrants has been able to do.

    The first group of Africans to be landed in America consisted of twenty odd Angolan captives who landed in Virginia in 1619. Their arrival marked a change of fortune for the colonists as their various skills especially their understanding of agriculture not only guaranteed their freedom from hunger but it was possible for them to produce commercial crops through which fortunes were built. Using slave labour, they produced tobacco, rice and finally cotton on which the economy of the Southern states were built. So much so that they were willing to go to war to preserve their way of life. The slave owners may have surrendered to superior forces in 1865 but they are still fighting a bitter rear-guard action in protection of their criminal privileges. The level of institutional racism remains so high that it is still a distinct disadvantage to be born black in the USA.

    Today, there is a North-South divide in the USA and more than anything else, it is a geographical divide. The economy of the North is distinctly industrial whereas it tends to be agricultural in the south. Whilst cotton was king in the South, finance and industry ruled the North and this being the case the industrialists must rule. The surplus necessary for industry to thrive existed in the North and naturally, capitalism took root in the North. Long before the slaves were emancipated in the USA, successive waves of immigrants were mercilessly exploited in the USA. For example, the railway which opened up the country from east to west was built by imported near slave labour from China in the east to Irish gangs in the west with blacks squeezed out of the picture. Be that as it may, one group or the other was being screwed by the capitalist machinery that was being installed by the so called robber barons who were squeezing every ounce of goodness out of the economy which they were setting up. More than anything else, what this means was that there was no free lunch or offer for any group of people other than the capitalists.

    To be continued.

    When in February 2023, Jimmy Carter elected to enter home hospice care, I wrote an appreciation of a very useful life. He was not expected to live long after that but with a burst of indomitable life wish, he lived for another twenty-two months. A man of towering intellectual and moral stature, it says a great deal about him that he accomplished more out of office than when he was the President of the USA. He has now died as the longest lived POTUS at the round old age of one hundred years old. Under the present edgy circumstances, he will be much sadly missed.

  • The rise, rise and rise of capitalism (I)

    The rise, rise and rise of capitalism (I)

    Although the consensus is that the Industrial revolution is said to have taken place in 1759, the events that led to it began at least two centuries or even more before. It is therefore more of an evolution because the processes associated with it’s grounding went on for a long time before and after that date. It can even be said that it is still going on for good or ill as the case may be.

    What separated capitalism from all that came before it is the use of machines which have become increasingly sophisticated. Before the coming of capitalism, man had succeeded in many parts of the world in creating many wonderful artefacts  which were traded round the world. These goods were produced by master craftsmen who had learnt the secrets of production over many years. These goods were perfectly fit for purpose but could not be produced in sufficiently large quantities to be made available to a large portion of any group of people. We may now think of the dazzling civilisations of Egypt, Sumeria, Babylon, Greece, Rome and others around the world. Museums are full of the wonderful things produced  by these civilisations and we cannot but marvel at them. What we forget as we marvel at these priceless artefacts is that the vast majority of those who lived in those civilisations had little or no access to those wonderful things as only those at the very top had the wherewithal to purchase those products of human ingenuity and dexterity, some of which were brought over vast distances often under difficult and or dangerous circumstances. For example the silk produced in China came to Europe through the famous Silk Road in small quantities at such a price that only the very rich could afford to buy them. The same could be said of the spices, gun powder, cotton materials and other such things which added spice to the lives of the rulers and the movers and shakers. The vast number of the members of the vast under class were strictly excluded from partaking in these riches. They lived, suffered and in time, died unsung, leaving nothing to those coming in their wake.

    The first revolution that put man on the path of development was the agricultural revolution. This is what made it possible for surpluses of food  material to be built. This is what made it possible for the class of dedicated artisans to emerge and produce materials which were designed not just to support life but enhance it through the production and utilisation of luxury items. The continued appreciation of items of sheer luxury is shown by the riches which even now, accrues to the purveyors of luxury items.

    Before we had these surpluses virtually everyone was a farmer and nothing else. In many parts of the world the agricultural revolution led to the formulation of laws which supported the growth of agriculture and human civilisation. In this period of time, life jogged on, changing only a little over the centuries. This was until human linear projection was violently shot into another orbit precisely on the twelfth of October  1492  when a small band of Europeans  led by the Italian, Christopher Columbus in three small ships blundered into an island in the group of islands we now call the Bahamas. By doing so, they changed the trajectory of human history for ever.

    It is pertinent to ask why Columbus was blundering around in that part of the world at that particular point in time. The answer is that he was looking for a way to get to India by sailing west. A few decades before, in 1453 to be exact, Constantinople, capital of the Eastern portion of what remained of the once mighty Roman empire fell at last to the Ottoman Turks who at that time had the most powerful army in that region. The capture of Constantinople was said by the Muslims to have brought the Crusades which had begun more than four centuries before to a close, at least for that era. The Turks were Muslims and were determined to prevent Christians from getting to Jerusalem, the piece of real estate that was fiercely contested by the two groups over close to four torrid centuries. In capturing Constantinople, the Muslims now had an unassailable position and could do whatever they wanted. And what they wanted at that point in time was to block  access to Jerusalem with the added bonus of cutting off access to the trade routes to the East. They duly did so thereby barring European access to all the luxurious items which the Europeans had become more or less addicted to. To go back to the subject of the Crusades. It can be said that another leg of the Crusades was brought to an end when the British captured Jerusalem to knock the Ottoman Empire out of World War I on Christmas day 1917. The aftermath of that capture is still being felt in the Middle East where the Israeli state created when in fulfilment of the Balfour declaration, part of Palestine was turned into a Jewish state with tragic consequences for Muslim Palestinians. An example of history being an unending process, albeit with numerous twists and turns.

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    After centuries of learning to sail on the rather tranquil inland sea which is the Mediterranean sea, the Europeans were at that time ready to tackle the unknown that the Atlantic ocean represented and could cast their eyes on sailing west.

    Before that time there was no compelling reason to sail west from Europe and nobody bothered to do so. But, because the overland route to the east was closed, some crazy Europeans started thinking that since the earth had been unequivocally determined to be round, it was at least theoretically  possible to get to the East by sailing west. Yes, whilst this thinking was on the face of it correct, their ignorance of just how big the earth was made sailing west to get to India a mad cap idea. Now we know that a vast continent, the largest ocean in the world and half the width of Asia separated Europe from India by sailing west, the possibility of reaching India by sailing west was incredibly stupid and never likely to happen. In this case, ignorance was certainly bliss. Columbus did not get to India even though he tenaciously held on to the belief, to the end of his life that he did but all he did was to show to the world that another world existed, the New World that was going to be ruthlessly exploited for the next five and a half centuries right down to the present. Without the opportunity that this exploitation presented to the world, it is most unlikely that there would have been an Industrial revolution, at least not in 1759.

    As soon as Columbus set foot on the New World, he set the tone for what was in store for the inhabitants of that region by stealing needed food supplies from them and kidnapping those of them who had ventured onto his ships. Those captives were described as Indians because Columbus was sure that he had indeed reached India, were taken back with their captors to Spain to begin a trend which survived for four hundred years. Unknown to everyone at the time this marked the beginning of the trans-Atlantic slave trade even though the direction was going to be overwhelmingly east to west.

    The Columbus expedition was a commercial enterprise from which a profit was not just expected but demanded. The crowned heads of the houses of Castile and Aragon whose recent amalgamation had brought about the joint kingdom of Spain had reluctantly commissioned the voyage of discovery which was to enrich the new kingdom. Subsequent voyages undertaken by various conquistadors showed that the newly discovered lands had excellent potential for exploitation. The explorers immediately set about mining the newly discovered lands of their treasures in a way that had never been seen in human history. This is because all the indigenous people inhabiting the newly discovered lands were turned into slaves in situ. The Spaniards were convinced that there was a great deal of gold and other precious minerals to be dug up from the soil of their newly discovered territories and wasted no time in tearing up the soil in their quest for gold. But first, they destroyed civilisations which were at least at par with anything that existed in Europe at the time. They achieved this objective with their far superior weaponry and their use of horses which their opponents had no knowledge of nor any experience with. But their most destructive weapons were the diseases they brought with them on their bodies. Many population studies have been conducted to try to put a figure to the number of people who lived in pre-Columbian America but estimates have varied so wildly that it is difficult to quote any of the numbers available with any degree of confidence. What is clear however is that the population of that area was reduced by as much as ninety percent. This made it possible for the Europeans to claim that the land was empty of people when they arrived to colonise it in the largest wave of migration known to human history.

    There is overwhelming evidence that before the coming of the Europeans to the Americas, the indigenous peoples had not only domesticated a wide variety of food plants but had developed the agronomic techniques to grow them extensively. Thus the whole world owes the global access to tobacco, cassava, cocoa, potato, squash, several varieties of corn, tomato, peppers and other plants which were brought over to the Old World and grown widely as commercial crops. Many of these crops are now the mainstay of food production in many parts of Africa including Nigeria where cassava has become a staple and cocoa a very significant cash crop even if we  don’t partake of the pleasures of consuming chocolate. A quick look at the above list will confirm the debt owed to the New World in terms of the food we eat and cultivate for sale in this part of the world today. The importance of this phenomenon goes far beyond food availability. Even though this is very important, the importance in the context of this article is that these crops played a vital role in triggering or at least catalysing the agricultural revolution which has been recognised as being a prerequisite to the Industrial revolution of 1759.

    • To be continued.: It’s time for a rethink
  • The rise, rise and rise of capitalism

    The rise, rise and rise of capitalism

    There is little doubt that the debate about world economy that is raging now is of vital importance as its outcome is likely to determine the trajectory of human survival for the foreseeable future. 

    When in 1849, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, his friend and benefactor published their seminal work, The Communist manifesto, one of the highlights of the book was the observation that Europe was being haunted by the spectre of socialism. This conjured up the picture of a ghostly apparition flitting around Europe spreading fear and apprehension. At that time all the countries of Europe were under the rule of their respective royal families, all of them related to each other in a web of family relationships which had been spun over several centuries. Even the French who a couple of generations before had chopped off the heads of king and queen had reinstated some form of monarchy under the house of Napoleon, the warrior who had crowned himself emperor of the French at the turn of the century. After several conquests, he then went on to place his brothers and military protégés on various thrones around Europe and Mexico, on the other side of the world. This notwithstanding, there was  general unrest throughout the continent as workers began to flex their fledging muscles and struggled to make their voices heard over the pomp and majesty of their kings.

    A century before the publication of the Communist manifesto, a quiet revolution which has since been described as the Industrial revolution took place in Britain and created a brand new world driven by wonderful new machines powered in equal measure by human ingenuity and greed. The capitalists driving this revolution were to destroy the monarchs in their castles in less than a century and rule in their place making the Industrial revolution the most profound social movement the world had ever seen.

    The population of the world is now racing towards the nine billion mark, albeit with enough resources available to sustain this large population and more. That many people living predominantly in Africa, Latin America and parts of Asia are living in poverty is not due to a global lack of resources but the failure of the equitable distribution of those resources. It is looking increasingly likely that the future of the world depends on the resolution of this problem.

    Read Also: New trajectory of NNPCL under Kyari’s leadership

    Given the extant human condition, it is clear that humankind has been phenomenally successful, at least in strictly biological terms. She has come to control all earthly resources in a way that has not been seen since the dinosaurs were wiped out some sixty-five million years ago. So total was dinosaur domination in their time that without their having been taken out of the terrestrial equation, we certainly will not be here today as masters of all earthly creation. The dinosaurs, it should be pointed out, ruled the earth for a hundred and fifty million years. It is important to amplify this fact because the length of human domination is so far so short as to be insignificant.  Everything considered however,  it is hardly conceivable that our dominance will last for many more millennia, given the nature of the discharge our dominance. This subject is worthy of further consideration.

    The oldest human ancestor to be recognised as such so far, was a female who lived and died somewhere on the plains of East Africa just over three million years ago. She has been described as a member of the Australopithecus afarensis species, still very far in evolutionary terms from Homo sapiens our own species which now rules the world into which she was born only two hundred thousand years ago. That ancestral fossil, now irreverently named Lucy, would not be recognisable as human to anyone living today as the journey to full human status had only just begun. The precarious existence of Lucy and her tribe is shown by the manner of her death. Studies have shown that she fell out of a tree in which she had slept in order to escape the unwelcome attention of one of the big cats which constantly prowled around her neighbourhood seeking what to devour. In other words, her position on the food chain was low and she was open to predation all the time. Today, man is the apex predator and all other predators however physically powerful come a distant second to man who rules the world with an iron fist and has the power to cage any other predator.

     Man has come a long way, so long that it is now inconceivable to think that there was a time when there were fewer than a million men, women and children striving hard to extract some measure of sustenance from the unyielding earth. At that critical time, the watchword was cooperation, each person bringing something to the common table and taking up his fair share of whatever was available. In the face of ever present danger, cooperation rather than competition was the means by which the right to life was guaranteed or at least, preserved in those dark days.

    Homo sapiens arrived on the scene about 200,000 years ago but even with his large brain, he was still having to battle continuously with all manner of challenges. He still had to roam over large areas of his world chipping out a precarious existence from wherever it was possible. He had to cope with large swings in climate, seasons and other such phenomena far beyond the level of his understanding but which determined the level of comfort in which he lived. His continued existence was precarious to say the least and it was not possible for him to thrive. Those early men lived in Africa but there came a time when conditions were so harsh that some bands wandered right out of Africa, presumably through a passage through where we now call Yemen and spread through to the rest of the world. This migration or waves of migration occurred some sixty thousand years ago. Studies suggest that of the number of the several hopeful bands which left Africa at this time, only two survived the odyssey as shown by the observation that all non-Africans are descended from one of two women who got out of Africa and thereafter spread right round the world. This is an interesting observation given that no such stock mothers have been identified in Africa. Rather there were many of them and as a result of this, Africans now exhibit far greater genetic diversity than non-Africans. Should the world population be wiped out by a pandemic for example, the only survivors will be some Africans who are genetically disposed to be intrinsically resistant to the event which killed off all others. In other words if we had to start all over again future generations will be Africans, the oldest human stock and the omega outed by genetics to restart the process of human evolution should the need arise.

    Some ten thousand years ago, mankind took a giant step on the road to social evolution when quite fortuitously, the science of agriculture was revealed to man in three far flung places at the same time. It took man the better part of five thousand years before coming to terms with the demands of agriculture and start to produce excesses of agricultural products. From then on the global population grew and centers of human civilisation began to emerge all over the world. Egypt was one such node of civilization where society was stratified and class formation started to develop with attendant new and in many cases, destructive tendencies to the social cooperation without which man would not have survived in the very early days.

    Any serious study of genuine human civilisation must begin on the banks of the River Nile delta. As everyone who has gone to school knows, fertile soil is annually deposited on the banks of the Nile which when cultivated yielded abundant harvests and created the platform on which Egyptian civilisation was built. The situation was more or less duplicated in the fertile crescent between the Rivers Tigris and Euphrates, another node of human civilisation. From these regions the Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians built wonderful civilisations in the form of laws which supervised all forms of human conduct and physical structures which provided comfort and justifiable pride to their builders. These magnificent structures, according to the iron law of nature have crumbled to dust. It is perhaps to be expected that religion was also invented and developed at this time, developed to such an extent that it pushed for the building of magnificent structures such as the pyramids of Egypt which are an enduring legacy to this exciting period of social development. For the sake of completeness, it must be said that all the magnificence lighting up the area we now call the Middle East was replicated and in some areas surpassed by what was going on in China at the same time. By this time, the global population had grown far beyond the one million people to hundreds of millions thereby guaranteeing the continuing existence of man. Indeed by the time Marx and Engels were exhorting the workers of the world to unite, global population passed the one billion mark and less than a hundred years later another billion was added and today there are more than eight billion human beings on earth. And all these without any biological evolution having taken place. The first Homo sapiens born two hundred thousand years ago is genetically identical with anyone born today anywhere in the world. His economic status is however miles away from what is the lot of anyone alive today. In the time that separate these two human beings, mankind has conquered the earth in a manner that is impossible for the first humans to think about. Apart from all the creature comforts now in such abundance as to be taken for granted by several billions of people, life expectancy is going up all the time. Many of those born today are confidently expected to live for ninety years, whereas our ancestors lived no longer than thirty arduous years even though like us they had the potential to live for seventy years.  They could not fulfil this potential because too many of them succumbed to the ravages of malnutrition, disease, accidents and death during child birth. Today, all those problems have more or less been solved. There are wonderful drugs to intervene in the progression of diseases, powerful vaccines to prevent diseases; all these backed by a plethora of gadgets looking out for our creature comforts. Our capacity to produce these gadgets is increasing all the time and on the face of it, man should be able to face the future with eyes undimmed by the fog of doubt. Capitalism is associated with the production of all kinds of material goods on an industrial scale such that the rise in human comfort and population must be tied to this earth shaking phenomena which continues to shape our lives and destiny.

    • TO BE CONTINUED

  • Compassionate capitalism economic system launches CEO forum

    Compassionate capitalism economic system launches CEO forum

    Compassionate Capitalism Economic System created by King Charles Lambert has launched The Pan African CEO Forum.

    Being the first of its kind, the forum aims at ending foreign brand imperialism and the importation of goods into Africa.

    The goal of the Pan African CEO Forum is to empower African business leaders and allow them to become pillars in the 28 sectors of basic human needs that they operate in. 

    “It’s all about giving them the opportunity to make a significant impact and contribute to the well-being of their communities. Together, we can create a stronger and more prosperous future,” Lambert said.

    The CEO Forum is designed by the continents leading innovator, creator of the Compassionate Capitalism Economic System and designer of 28 mobile applications and countless Softwares, King Charles N Lambert.

    The CEO Forum will offer business owners amazing benefits like lifetime monthly dividends of up to $3,400 through ownership of 34 prime stakeholder slots.

    CEOs and business leaders will also have access to $1 million dollars in production capital.

    They will also have endless access to more funding when required once they join.

    On top of these benefits, the forum will also help in turning members’ businesses into franchises spreading across Africa. Trust me, this certainly will guarantee access to larger markets.

    Technology support, celebrity endorsements, media exposure and public relations, legal support, access to quality human resources and job creating capacities, access to community of like-minded entrepreneurs among others are some of the other benefits CEOs and business owners stand to gain after joining the Compassionate Capitalism CEOs forum.

    After 20 years of development, Compassionate Capitalism is being implemented through a five- phase blueprint.

    The blueprint will see it host 1 billion Africans under one platform and become valued at over $1 trillion dollars per annum.

    Read Also: Capitalism as structural genocide? (1)

    This can be supported through purchase of 500 Tshirts and 250 face caps with one’s company logo for distribution (resell or give for free) to your customers and workers.

    Once supported, execution of the long awaited Compassionate Capitalism Economic System 5 phase plan will be easier and more effective.

    The 5 Phases blueprint for Compassionate Capitalism execution shows clearly the pathway to generating $1 trillion dollars per annum through the new economic system.

    Additionally, the members of the CEO forum will be the major beneficiaries of these revenues in the economic transformation of Africa via industrialization.

  • Cowboy capitalism

    Capitalism is a two-faced animal. Never mind looking that up, it’s a Hardball original. Imagine for a moment, a fellow who bears two heads – one of the faces wearing a smile and the other grim and mean looking.

    This is Hardball’s nearest estimation of capitalism as a human. Here is another dimension of the same theme. A salesman is trying to sell you a commodity: take any hot deal – a beautiful mansion for instance. He is all gay and full of beautiful words as he makes his pitch. You are an Arab sheikh for instance or a Nigeria looter and you have so much cash to offload.

    And here’s someone offering you a grand mansion, taking you in with much sweet words while he is ripping you off remorselessly. There and then, he has devised all sorts of schemes to make you pay more than double the price. And there you are paying with a smile.

    Capitalists kill by stealth; they suck your blood and infuse you with syrup. The capitalist character is bloody-mindedness, exploitation, wanton accumulation and maniacal aggrandizement. No compunction.

    Of course wealth is created rapidly and innovations are done speedily. Indeed, capitalism brings out the best in man – and the beast tool.

    Hardball has been roused on to this well-worn path by Forbes magazine which has its slogan as ‘The Capitalist Tool’. Of course, Forbes is an American citizen, the home of capitalism. Though still largely a family business, the 101-year-old journal has become a global media conglomerate with over ten international editions among numerous other media offshoots.

    But Forbes Africa operations have been most yeomanly in its arch-capitalist tendencies. It major activities portray it as nothing but a capitalist predator that couldn’t care about the negative outcomes it invokes on its operating environment.

    Some examples: Forbes current offering, which it calls ‘research’ presents Nigeria as the best economy in Africa today. How could that be unless the so-called report is terribly compromised?

    Secondly, a few years ago, Forbes handed a most dubious award to the then Petroleum Minister, Mrs. Diezani Alison-Madueke; a megalomaniac fingered for earth-shaking graft. Another questionable award went to the do-nothing current Group MD of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Mr. Maikanti Baru. Yet between these two, in nearly a decade, Nigeria’s oil and gas sector is still a mess of inefficiency and graft. Nigeria still imports most of her petrol products. She is at sea about crude oil exports and stumped by subsidy payouts on products imports.

    How could Nigeria’s economy be best in Africa: an economy roiling in negative growth, with double-digit inflation, a net food importer with massive youth unemployment? It’s also touted as being the new misery capital of the world.

    Isn’t this a case of a cowboy capitalist foraging the offal of a prostrate country?

  • Has capitalism of the worst kind become permanent in Nigeria? – Resuming a forgotten debate (2)

    Has capitalism of the worst kind become permanent in Nigeria? – Resuming a forgotten debate (2)

    “You may know how little God thinks of money by observing what bad and contemptible characters he often bestows it.”
    A popular saying attributed to many people among them
    Alexander Pope and Dorothy Parker

    In ending the discussion last week with an observation that the leaders and all the members of our National Assembly ought to be in jail for openly and egregiously defying the clause in our Constitution that expressly forbids the concentration of the wealth of the nation in the hands of a few individuals or a group, I stated that this was both a half-serious and a half-playful suggestion. Why did I say this? Well, the serious part is that I actually and rather fervently believe that all our legislators, in all the political parties should be in jail for flouting this particular Constitutional provision. Compatriot, please look at the humungous salaries, emoluments and allowances our legislators pay themselves. And then on top of that look at the unconscionable “jara” of billions on naira that they also illegally obtain by padding the Budget sent them by the Presidency. Is this not arrant in its overconcentration of the wealth of the nation in a tiny group? That is the serious part of my suggestion that they all belong in jail right now and for a long time!

    The half-playful part of this suggestion comes from my recognition that the relevant section of the Constitution I am invoking here belongs to that part of the Constitution that lawyers call “non-justiciable”. What does this mean? Simply stated, it means that no matter the positive moral force and the degree of public good in the “non-justiciable” clauses of the Constitution, they cannot be enforced by law. In other words, as desirable as a constitutional clause in this “non-justiciable” parts of the Constitution may be, if you take those who flout it to the law courts, your suit on behalf of the nation and its peoples will be thrown out without even being heard. Bearing this in mind, I am almost certain that members of the National Assembly reading this piece and coming across the suggestion that they should all be in jail will be laughing and laughing hard.If that is the case, what then am I making of this fact in the context of this series on the very worst form of capitalism reigning in our country at the present time? Basically, it is this point: in capitalism that is so decadent, so filled with utter impunity as the type that we are now compelled to live under in great sufferance, there really is no distinction between what is justiciable and what is non-justiciable in the unregenerate consumption and wastage of the wealth of the nation by a few at the expense of the vast majority of our peoples. In the main, that is what I wish to discuss this week. But before going into it in detail, first I wish to make some further observations and reflections on why we need to resume the forgotten debate that we once had on good and bad capitalism in this country not too long ago.

    Of this I am absolutely certain: most of those reading this piece who are self-declared and sincere socialists and Left-of-center radicals are wondering why I am “wasting” my time in this series talking about “good” capitalism. In equal measure, of this I am also certain: to most readers who are not socialists or Leftists, talking about capitalism of any kind is so rare, so unusual in our country at the present time that they, too, must be wondering what I am about in this series. To both sides of this divide, I say that anyone who thinks that talking about capitalism in its various types is unusual or amounts to a waste of time suffers from both historical amnesia and ignorance of the fierce contemporary debates going on within capitalism in many nations and regions of the world, not least in the heartland of capitalism itself, the United States. Socialists and Leftists in particular must remember that socialism was founded on debates between reform of and revolutionagainst capitalism. Often, the two were posed in the form of a complete antithesis as reflected in the well-known phrase, “reform or revolution”. But in the most significant debates and developments, globally and in our own country, reform was not separated, not shut out from revolution; one was seen as connected to or leading to the other. And for all the non-socialists reading this, it is important to remind them that from its very beginnings, the struggles to reform capitalism, to give it a genuine human face has never stopped, with the exception perhaps of a few countries in the world like our own unhappy homeland, Nigeria, first under the PDP and now under the APC. On this note, let us return to the main line of our observations and reflections in this piece, this being the telling details of the extremely bad type of capitalism, of a capitalism that is absolutely without a human face and utterly devoid of the milk of human kindness in force in our country at present time.

    The form of capitalism reigning seriously unchallenged or perhaps seemingly unchallengeable in our country at the present time is so bad that in some of its main structural features, it seems not to be a “true” capitalism at all. In Economics 101, the most elementary level of university courses in the science of economics, students are routinely told that the consolidation and expansion of capital is so crucial that any entrepreneur, any capitalist that always cuts into and perpetually diminishes his or her operating capital will not last long as a businesswoman or man, a capitalist. And indeed, what is capitalism without capital? But this is exactly what Nigerian capitalism, PDP and APC mode, is in its essence. The major structural feature of this reality is as widely known as it also seems to defy anyone, any ruling party being either able or willing to do anything about it: year in year out, in the actual operation of our national and state budgets, recurrent expenditure far outweighs capital expenditure by a magnitude of the order of more than 3 to 1. Moreover, even the little that is left for capital expenditure is for the most part often looted through contracts that are both overinflated and barely ever satisfactorily executed, all with an impunity that can only mean that there really is no difference between “recurrent” and “capital” expenditure in the “capitalism” in force in Nigeria.

    Dear reader and compatriot, if you take nothing else away from the dire and unhappy musings of this series, please do take away and bear in mind this particular feature of this virulently thieving, looting and inhumanCapitalism Nigeriana of our predators’ republic: no economic and financial crime against the nation and its peoples, no matter how heinous, is really “justiciable” anymore since the difference between justiciable and non–justiciable as established in our Constitution has been effectively abolished. The worst and simply unbelievable expression of this reality is the fact that ours is the only country in the world, repeat the only country on the planet, in which interlocutory injunctions can be “legally” invoked and accepted in criminal proceedings in order to prolong them indefinitely. In every other country in the world interlocutory injunctions and applications for stay of proceedings are recognized and granted only in civil cases. Those calling for the arrest and prosecution of Speaker Dogara for the budget-padding mega-scandal – and I join my voice to their voices – should bear this crucial point in mind: arrest and prosecution is only the start of what typically almost always effectively proves to be in the end “non-justiciable”. For example, how close to, or how far from conclusion are the cases against Dasuki and Saraki? Ask the courts, ask especially the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court who, in the final analysis, must be held accountable for the terrible miscarriage of justice in our law courts with regard to the unique privilege enjoyed by the mega-looters. In particular, ask the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court why he and his colleagues on the highest court of justice in the land have been remarkably reluctant to comply with and enforce the provisions of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act of 2015 (ACJA) which, if done would significantly do away with all the obstacles to the successful, timely and just prosecution of the alleged mega-looters. I have on the pages of this column myself asked the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Mahmud Mohammed (who happens to be the first indigenously trained CJN in Nigeria) this question before and ask it of him again today: why is he personally and professionally unembarrassed and unashamed by the fact that we are the only country in the whole world that permits the application of interlocutory injunctions in criminal cases?

    Lest it be thought that I am overstating and over-dramatizing things in this series, let me hasten to admit that the effacement of the distinction between the justiciable and the non-justiciable is not total, not complete in our law courts. Many offenses and infringements that are “justiciable” are still successfully prosecuted in our justice system and in their ordinary or routine operations, the law courts of the land still function, even if some of their administrative operations are so outdated and labyrinthine that it sometimes feels that one is in a medieval and not a modern court of law in present-day Nigeria. But I do hold strongly to my argument that in the most important areas of the economic order in force in the country, the distinction between the justiciable and non-justiciable does not exist because in the end, the huge mega crimes are effectivelyif not legally non-justiciable. This is what slowly – and hopefully wisely – Muhammadu Buhari and his AGF, Abubakar Malami, are gradually finding out in their declared war against corruption and the mega-looters. With most Nigerians,Buhari and Malami are also finding out that the looting has not only continued by and within sections of the leadership of their own party, the ruling APC but also appears to be tending towards the “non-justiciable” legacy left by the PDP. Every formof capitalism has the judicial-administrative superstructure necessary for its functioning and survival. Our criminal justice system, with regard to the open and defiant protection it gives to the unjustly rich and powerful, is one of the most unjust and irrational criminal justice systems in the world precisely because Capitalism Nigeriana is one of the worst forms of capitalism in the world. The epigraph to this piece states that if you wish to know what God thinks of money all you have to do is look at the evil and vile characters to whom he bestows wealth. I say that if you wish to know how really evil and vile our judicial-administrative superstructure is, look at the kind of capitalism that it endows with the protection of legality. This will be our starting point next week.

    Biodun Jeyifo                                                                                                        bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Has capitalism of the worst kind become permanent in Nigeria?– Resuming a forgotten debate (1)

    Has capitalism of the worst kind become permanent in Nigeria?– Resuming a forgotten debate (1)

    Thou shall let nothing be wasted John 6:12

    Indeed, has capitalism of the very worst kind become permanent in our country? I hope not! I have a personal, existential stake in expressing this hope. With other members of my generation, I am in the last “phase” of my physical existence. Certainly, like all human beings, I hope for a long and relatively healthy life. But I am realistic enough to know that when you are a septuagenarian, you have lived considerably far more of your life than the time left for your existence to run out of its allotted time. The oligarchic, thieving capitalism that is in full control of our political economy at the present time is the worst form of capitalism there is. If it has come to stay permanently in our country, it means that for the rest of my life, the hope for a better, more humane and just society in Nigeria will remain precisely that – a fatuous hope with absolutely no possibility of fulfillment. What is even worse is the possibility that this form of capitalism will survive well beyond my life and the lives of all presently living generations in our country. Heavens help us!

    The terror of this nightmarish prospect is underscored by the fact that in my lifetime, indeed in the collective lifetime of my generation of Nigerians, we have seen and experienced capitalism of a better, more productive and transformative kind. Because the median age for Nigeria is 18 years, close to about three quarters of the present aggregate of all living Nigerians did not experience that kind of relatively benign capitalism. And so for the most part, what the majority of Nigerians alive now know and have almost come to regard as “capitalism” is the barawo-jaguda-onyeoshi(apologies to Wazobian popular lingo) variety now in full force in the land. In a series of three or four essays that begins with this week’s column, I wish to reflect on this profoundly disturbing fact of our political economy. But first, in a few paragraphs, I wish to say a word or two about the whole issue of “good” and “bad” capitalism, beginning with why the form of capitalism in Nigeria, first under the PDP and now under the APC, is the very worst kind of capitalism.

    What is the essence of this kind of capitalism? It is consumption as the be all and end all of “production”. In other words, in this kind of capitalism, consumption becomes so unrelated to production that it extends voraciously to products and services that your nation, your society doesn’t and cannot produce. Moreover, and quite significantly, thisfrenzy of consumption is available, not to everyone in the society but only to a few that are paradoxically typically the least productive members of the society. If we recognize that we are using the term cannibalism metaphorically here, we can describe this kind of capitalism as being profoundly cannibalistic, in essence implying that part of what the few consuming lords of the land consume are the lives of the vast majority of the peoples. Perhaps the single most frightening feature of this kind of capitalism is the fact that production in general, and virtually all productive processes in particular become so battered, so endangered that everything valuable is wasted on a monumental scale. This observation leads us to the relevance of the epigraph for this essay.

    John 6:12: Thou shall let nothing be wasted. This is our epigraph for this essay. [Actually the rendition of this quote in the Yoruba Bible is more poetic, more stunningly evocative: Eyin ko gbodo je ki ounkoun ki o s’egbe!] Think of the kind of capitalism in force in our country at the present time – and apparentlyfor the foreseeable future – as a complete reversal of this injunction of Christ to his disciples thereby giving us the following monstrosity: Thou shalt let everything, everything, go to waste! In the biblical story that serves as the narrative and theological context for this quote, Christ was referring specifically to the leftovers that remained from the huge feast with which he had fed the multitudes, a feast miraculously conjured out of only two loaves of bread and a lump of fish. Theologians have for ages speculated that the literal leftovers that Jesus was referring to in this quote was actually a symbolic representation of spiritual sustenance. In other words, it has been argued that Christ was really saying that if you can apply yourself to the practice of not wasting leftovers of food, you will position yourself well for preventing all forms and sources of sustenance from going to waste. It was Wole Soyinka who, right after the Nigerian-Biafra Civil War, first talked of the “wasted” generation. Since then, the metaphor of waste has been applied to just about every asset and resource that we possess, not only physical and material ones like crude oil and human labour, but human life itself. Waste on this scale and of such widespread dispersion causes untold hardship, suffering, violence, corruption and insecurity. We shall come back to this form of capitalism that is regnant in our country and has been so for a few decades, but for now let us move to the second of our opening reflections, this being the very question of types of capitalism, some “good”, others “bad”.

    A confession: one “inspiration” for my use of the term “good and bad capitalism” is the fact that there is indeed a book of roughly that title that is not only in print but has been in wide circulation since its publication in the year 2007. Here’s the full title of the book: Good Capitalism; Bad Capitalism: The Economics of Growth and Prosperity. The authors of the book are William J. Baumol, Robert E. Litan, and Carl J. Schram, all professors of economics at prestigious American universities. The book identifies four types of capitalism in a list that goes from the worst to the best. Here’s their list: oligarchic capitalism; state guided capitalism; big firm capitalism; and entrepreneurial capitalism. Not too long after this book came out, I discussed it in a series when this column, in an earlier incarnation, was written for and published in The Guardian. For this reason, I will not go into a lengthy or sustained discussion of the book. For our current purposes in this discussion, here are the four things I wish to say about the book’s postulates about “good” and “bad” capitalism.

    First: discussions of varieties of “better” and “worst” forms of capitalism are not new and have been around ever since the emergence of capitalism as the dominant form of modern economic production.Second: most theorists and commentators,both of the Left and of the Right, agree with the authors of this book that the oligarchic form of capitalism is indeed the worst kind. Third: however, barely a year after the publication of the book, the global economic meltdown of 2008 completely disproved and debunked the authors’ claim that “entrepreneurial capitalism”, American-style, is the “best” form of capitalism the world has ever known. And there is also the quite significant fact that in this year of American presidential elections, devastating critiques of the injustices and inefficiencies of entrepreneurial capitalism constitute perhaps the single most dominant theme of the candidates of the two main parties. Fourth: we must look at other sources for a more productive discussion of “good” and “bad” capitalism, sources that are indeed more relevant to our present historic circumstances. In the present context, I will cite and briefly discuss only two of such sources, one foundational and international, the other quite local to our own recent economic and political history.

    It is hard to imagine now, but younger Nigerian socialists and progressives on the Left need to be reminded that Karl Marx and other founding leaders of modern socialism actually considered capitalism a profoundly transformative and indeed “revolutionary” force in modern economic and political history. Indeed, some sections of nothing less canonical than The Manifesto of the Communist Party, read like hymns to the progressive vocation of capitalism in general and the bourgeoisie in particular! Simplifying a little bit, here is the underlying idea of this view of capitalism in its “revolutionary” phase: it was releasing and it will continue to release powers of production on such a gigantic scale that, for the first time in human history, scarcity will become a thing of the past. Consequently, so goes the argument, there will be enough for society on a global scale to be able to undertake a massive redistribution of wealth that will forever abolish poverty and want and the degradations they impose on millions, billions of human beings. Of course Marx and others warned of evolving types within capitalism that would seek to blunt or even stop the progressive and transformative tendencies within capitalism. The chief of such negative, “regressive” types of capitalism is the monopolistic or oligopolistic kind, especially in its tendency to lead to war and a perpetual sharpening and deepening of the gap between the rich and the poor.On this view, the “best” form of capitalism would be that which pays attention to the vital links between the production of wealth and the fair and just distribution of the wealth produced. As a counter to this, the worst form of capitalism is that in which whatever wealth actually or potentially exists is kept away from both the generation of more wealth and fair and just distribution.

    It might perhaps come as a shock to many reading these words to learn that much of these things that have been historically and internationally discussed about “good” and “bad” capitalism have not only been very widely discussed in our country but indeed went into the writing of the 1999 Constitution. This is particularly true of Chapter 2 of that Constitution which deals specifically with economic production and the role of the State in ensuring justice and fairness to all. What is more pertinent here is that this Chapter Two of the 1999 Constitution is in fact the product of widespread discussions throughout the country that had gone into the production of both the 1979 and the 1993 Constitutions. Indeed, the so-called “Preamble” to the 1993 Constitution specifically raises the challenge of simultaneously pursuing economic growth and distributive justiceat the same time. In this, there is a suggestion that you cannot pursue distributive justice on scarcity, on undeveloped productive powers. But the discussion makes it plain that the best form of government and economy is that which pursues both objectives simultaneously: growth through expanding productive forces and fair and equitable distribution of the wealth of the nation. Thus, though the term “capitalism” does not appear in the 1993 and 1999 Constitutions, there is not the slightest doubt that the idea of a “good” or benevolent capitalism is at the core of these documents.

    Let me end this opening essay in a series that will continue next week on a half-playful and half-serious note: on the basis of Section 16, subsection 2, paragraph c of the 1999 Constitution, Saraki, Dogara and indeed all the members of the National Assembly should be in jail right now in defiance of the nation’s governing Constitution. What exactly does this paragraph state? Here it is: “The State shall direct its policy toward ensuring that the economic system is not operated in such a manner as to permit the concentration of wealth or the means of production and exchange in the hands of a few individuals or of a group”.  We will take this observation as our point of departure in next week’s continuation of the series.

    Biodun Jeyifo                                                                                                         bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Why economic philosophy matters: Capitalism and the wealth of nations (4)

    Why economic philosophy matters: Capitalism and the wealth of nations (4)

    A professor of Practice in International Business & Public Policy at the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy at Tufts University, Massachusetts, United States (U.S.) Kingsley Moghalu, has an idea of what Nigeria should do to reap full benefits of a market  economy. In this concluding part of a series, the ex-Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN)  Deputy Governor has recommended the adoption of enterpreneurial capitalism as the best model to the Federal Government.  

    Capitalism is not just an economic system, in the sense that investment in, and ownership of how we produce, distribute and exchange wealth is vested in the hands of private individuals and companies, and that prices are determined in the marketplace. Capitalism is also an economic philosophy because it is based, at least in its purest form, on individual rights. This economic system and its markets have faced many criticisms, several of them valid. But, it is beyond dispute, and is supported by empirical evidence, that capitalism remains the greatest creator of wealth and progress the world has seen. It has lifted billions out of poverty around the world, including some 600 million people in China, as well in India, Brazil and South Korea.

    This is possible only because capitalism is an economic system that largely appeals to basic human instincts such as competitiveness, and thus to the differences in the abilities of individuals. This is why it has been so enduring, roundly defeating communism, which collapsed in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe under the weight of its own contradictions. Yes, capitalism is imperfect, and we will discuss its imperfections shortly. But it remains, to paraphrase Winston Churchill’s famous quote about democracy as a political system, the worst economic system except for all the others!

    The question for Nigeria is whether capitalism can achieve for its 180 million people what it has done in the western world, Asia and parts of Latin America. As we have seen, given that trickle-down, neo-liberal market policies in Nigeria have yet to make any real dent on poverty, we cannot blithely assume that capitalism will create national wealth for Nigeria except our leaders approach it not with hostility, but from a world view standpoint that interrogates the concept and bends it to our unique national objectives.

    State capitalism

    Nigeria needs to make a clear, conscious choice between four types of capitalism or combinations from among them. These are state capitalism, welfare capitalism, crony capitalism, and entrepreneurial capitalism.

    State capitalism, with China as its leading light, is a variant of capitalism in which state spending heavily drives growth, and the private sector creates wealth. It is not just regulated by the state, but rather, it is strategically directed by the government as agents of overarching state strategy.  State capitalism presumes a state with high levels of bureaucratic and high-level decision making and execution capacity.

    Can Nigeria adopt this system of capitalism? It would not work here, certainly not in the pure Chinese form. Nigeria lacks the internal cohesion, discipline and organisational and technological skills of the Chinese society.  However, despite what looks like a level of uniqueness that makes it hard to replicate in Africa, we cannot dismiss the hardiness of state capitalism, elements of which are practiced in softer forms in several countries including some that we would find surprising. It therefore remains a strategic threat, in the countries that have the state capacity to adopt and adapt it, to the liberal capitalism whose legitimacy was dealt a heavy blow by the global financial crisis of 2008.

    State owned companies continue to play a surprisingly dominant role in industrialised Western countries, despite the philosophical penchant for privatisation and deregulation that began in the 1980s. The French government has an 85 per cent stake in Electricite de France, the country’s main power company, Japan’s owns 50 per cent of Japan Tobacco, and the German government owns 32 per cent of Deutsche Telekom. According to the news magazine The Economist, state-owned companies in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries had a combined value of $2 trillion and employed six million people as of 2012.

    Some emerging markets have developed sophisticated forms of state capitalism, using the corporate form of organisation in modern corporations to drive their phenomenal growth. They have selectively reduced the direct role of the state in unproductive enterprises while retaining it in businesses with strategic significance. Having learnt lessons from the failures of communism and socialism, state capitalism in some countries takes forms Nigeria would hardly recognise when compared with the direct, heavy (and virtually always unprofitable!) hand of the state in our “government parastatals”. In China, Russia, Malaysia, Thailand, Saudi Arabia and in the Arab Gulf countries, many state-owned enterprises no longer report to government ministries. The government controls them only through significant shareholdings while allowing these firms to be run on a competitive basis as “national champions” that must nevertheless meet merciless efficiency and profit targets.

    This is the only manner in which state capitalism could conceivably work in Nigeria. But, that is only if a culture of mediocrity, ethnic irredentism, corruption and political patronage reward systems that progressively killed Nigeria’s public enterprises can possibly be overcome. This analysis is relevant most explicitly to the policy options facing the Nigerian government in the reform of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) through the commercialisation or privatisation of its refineries and other operations, as well as the removal of fuel subsidy.

    State capitalism certainly brings up the need for a more original approach to economic philosophy and economic reform in Nigeria, utilising our traditional value systems and perspectives on which business and the economy can be run. And, it has implications for the commercial competitiveness of Nigerian companies because the state-owned enterprises of the Asian economies enjoy full advantages of that strategic support while running as commercial enterprises in the core sense of the term. Nigerian companies, on the other hand, make their way in the world without similar strategic state backing, making their road rougher.

    Welfare capitalism

    Welfare capitalism is an effort to balance the worst tendencies of the free market, which often create monopolies, oligopolies and exclusion as large parts of society fail to benefit from wealth creation. In welfare capitalism, businesses and the state seek to smoothen out the free market’s rough edges by creating minimum entitlements for workers in a capitalist economy. These entitlements may also be negotiated with labour unions. They may include social housing, healthcare, or free education at various levels as was the case in several African countries in the 1950s and the 1960s. In European countries such as Finland and Switzerland, this has meant social security to meet the needs of workers in their retirement years as in the United States (U.S.), or unemployment benefits – “welfare” in the U.S., or “the dole” in Britain.

    Social safety nets are necessary for social, economic and political stability in capitalist societies. But, welfare capitalism is expensive, and therefore controversial. There are questions about how effectively it benefits the really poor. It is a huge liability on government resources, and in the Nordic countries of Europe, welfare capitalism is funded in part – and sustained – by very high levels of income taxation.  It can be constrained by factors such as uncontrolled population growth and inefficient management of public finances, including the inability to effectively generate public revenue and economic growth because these are what economists call “exhaustive transfers” rather than investment and corruption.

    Welfare capitalism has faced difficulties even in Europe and the U.S. These difficulties stem from a wide perception that welfare capitalism reduces competitiveness in today’s world economy by focusing on basic entitlements while the skills and productivity of welfare-state workers decline in the face of competitive innovation that is the real source of wealth in all industrial societies. In the U.S., elements of the welfare state such as healthcare reform and social security have also become a lightning rod for bitter political divisions over the size and role of government versus free enterprise in a capitalist economy.

    It is, in fact, shocking to see how welfare-oriented the “free market” U.S. is. America’s budget for 2015 was $3.8 trillion dollars, broken down into three broad segments – mandatory spending (65 per cent), discretionary spending (the part appropriated by the U.S. Congress, including military spending, which is 29 per cent) and interest on debt, which is six per cent of the budget. Of the $2.45 trillion of mandatory spending, $895 billion is for social security for senior citizens, $986 billion is for Medicaid and other healthcare, $366 is for unemployment, while $104 billion is for food assistance. Thus, roughly 50 per cent of America’s budget is spent on social security and healthcare!!

    Whatever form of capitalism Nigeria might choose to follow in the years ahead, a restricted element of welfare capitalism is necessary. The real question is the scope, which should be narrow, and the timing, which should be realistic because the structure of the Nigerian economy for now (with a large portion of it an informal, “shadow” one) does not generate the kinds of revenues that make a country such as the U.S. spend so much on welfare.  But, any interpretation of capitalism that expunges an appropriate role for the government and relies solely on market forces is doomed to fail as a path to development, for development must be measured in terms of living standards and not just consumerism or economic growth statistics.

    Besides, the absence of a social safety net in Nigeria is part of a corresponding absence of a social contract between the state and its citizens, and is a contributing factor to the reluctance to pay taxes as well as to corruption. The challenge for policy-makers is to first restructure the economy and create the right revenue streams, and then find the right balance between social safety nets and creating an undesirable disincentive to national productivity by creating a massive culture of entitlement for able-bodied men and women who are not of retirement age. South Africa made this mistake coming out of the Apartheid era, based on notions of social justice for the black majority. The country’s economy is weighed down as a result.

    Oligarchic capitalism

    Oligarchic or crony capitalism has been dominant in Nigeria since the return of democratic rule in 1999. It is the Russian model, in which a few men called oligarchs control most of the country’s economy because they obtained ownership of large portions of the wealth of the industries of the former Soviet Union by questionable means as communism went into its death throes. The economic power of the oligarchs is sustained by their connections with governments.Crony capitalism took root in Nigeria not just because of the wave of privatisations that took place in the country over the past three decades, which were broadly necessary because of the failure of state enterprises, but especially because of how several of the privatisations were undertaken. To ensure true market competition, privatisations are not enough. They must be accompanied by deregulation to avoid monopolies, which can, in turn, defeat the presumed intention of creating a more efficient market.

    While crony capitalism could conceivably be utilised by a very strategic government in Nigeria to create huge conglomerates that are national champions in interlocking areas of manufacturing and the real economy, it has in fact encouraged political corruption and rent-seeking behaviour by the private sector.

    Entrepreneurial capitalism

    A final model of capitalism is what has been described as entrepreneurial or small-firm capitalism. Here, many small firms founded by individuals dominate the economic landscape. This is the secret behind the economic success of the U.S. But, entrepreneurial capitalism on its own cannot realise an economy’s full potential. As in the U.S., it must form part of a larger business landscape with numerous large firms. What’s more, to take an economy to its full potential, this model must be predicated on innovation.

    This would be a viable model of capitalism for Nigeria’s current stage of development, largely because it is the modern version of what could be termed the subsistence capitalism that was prevalent in pre-colonial Nigerian society, but commercialised innovation is still lacking in the continent. It would be viable because it would build on what we have on the ground at present. Approximately 90 per cent of businesses in Nigeria are small and medium enterprises which, as a result of the weakness of essential economic structures such as taxation and inclusive financial systems, and low literacy levels, mainly remain outside the formal economy and dominate a thriving informal economy.Entrepreneurial capitalism also keys into something that is unique to our society: the historical role of women in our marketplace.

    The limits of capitalism

    Inequality is inherent in free market societies, and is a core aspect of capitalism. It is also the greatest threat to the legitimacy of market-based economies. While the very nature of free markets means that not everyone will, or can, be equally prosperous, a system that spawns a plutocracy of islands of wealth amidst seas of poverty may be unsustainable because it can lead to a breakdown of social order. This is where the role of public policy and regulations comes in, and this is why inclusive economic growth matters.

    This is why the periodic redistribution of wealth has also become a part of the fabric of capitalism, and indeed necessary, if free markets are to be saved and maintained. The Great Depression and the New Deal that followed that period in the U.S.; the recent global financial crisis and the bailouts that sought to prevent social upheaval by saving major global corporations such as General Motors; and the bailout of banking systems in much of the Western world (and in Nigeria!) after extreme greed led many banks to ruin (a classic privatisation of profit and a socialisation of losses) are all pointers to why African countries should give deeper thought to the rise of the free market even as it remains the path to wealth creation in the continent. Understanding and determining the limits of markets is important for Nigeria, and this is a world view and public policy question that we must confront. As former U.S. President Bill Clinton once asked: “How do we change course, to merge social and economic progress?”

    Then there is the major matter of a supposed “invisible hand” that, according to the capitalist economic philosopher Adam Smith, regulates markets and imbues them with efficiency. This is a central tenet of laissez-faire capitalism and has been used to demonstrate the appeal and superiority of free markets and to resist regulation. If this were true, periodic cycles of boom and bust, which has been a major feature of capitalism, would not exist. The great Austrian-American economist Joseph Schumpeter called this process “creative destruction”, and predicted that it would lead to capitalism’s demise.

    The problem with the invisible hand is that there is, in fact, nothing of the sort. This does not detract from the position that, despite its imperfections, capitalism remains a superior form of economic organisation. As the economist Jagdish Baghwati and other scholars have been quick to observe, all economic systems known to man, rely on morally questionable foundations. Capitalism relies on the instincts of selfishness, greed and vanity; and communism on coercion.The absence of the presumed invisible hand is a problem that is, in fact, part of the very fabric of free markets, and has been demonstrated by various studies and scholars. A study by the U.S. academics Hendrik Van den Berg and Mathew Van den Berg found that the percentage of human economic interactions that take place in truly competitive markets is less than 20 per cent. “The invisible hand”, the study concluded, “is a myth; there are not enough markets”.

    All of this is a pointer to the centrality of regulation and the role of the government in managing the free market, determining what type of markets should exist within the domain of its political authority, the purpose for which those markets exist, and setting the limits of acceptable behaviour. This approach is what makes capitalism worthwhile. In other words, markets, whatever the type, must serve societal priorities, and not the reverse. In order to do so, a capitalist system should be able to evolve and adapt to changing conditions.

    How capitalism creates wealth

    Although we have embraced free markets since the introduction of Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP), this embrace is unlikely to lead to transformative growth if the fundamentals of how capitalism creates wealth are not addressed as a matter of public policy. As the Peruvian scholar Hernando de Soto has noted, these first principles, without which no nation can truly prosper, are innovation, which we have discussed earlier, property rights, and finance and financial markets. None of these fundamental factors is present to any significant extent in Nigeria. Innovation is neither systematised nor commercialised. Property rights are weak, with land ultimately belonging to the state and trapping a key resource that needs to be put to work to create wealth. And capital is still not present in the quantity, and more important, forms and costate which it can foster a truly productive economy.  Our world view task as the Nigerian nation is to create the fundamentals that comprise these three elements before we can reap the real benefits of a market economy.

    Other fundamental obstacles to the success of Nigeria’s capitalist economy include deficits of infrastructure, a difficult environment for doing business in terms of cumbersome processes and formalities, as well as governance and regulatory reforms. Nigeria has made real progress in regulatory reform since 1999.  Effective regulation is vital for a truly functioning free market because, as Raghuram Rajan and Luigi Zingales have argued in their book  – Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists, “incumbent industrialists” have historically sought to protect their wealth, power and other advantages by rigging the supposedly “free market”. This challenge remains with us.

    Raging corruption is another aspect of weak governance of business environments. Whether a businessman or woman must pay a bribe to obtain a permit or secure a government contract, corruption distorts the business environment by creating unfair advantage and making the business space truly uncompetitive. This is a global phenomenon and so is by no means limited to Nigeria. But, it poses a fundamental problem for our country because corruption has prevented the real take-off, let alone development, of free markets. A major part of the problem is the role of the government as the main source of business.  Governments in African countries must combine building strong regulatory capacity with supervising their own exit from several areas of the economy, while creating a level-playing field for private sector players and maximising State’s revenue generation from private sector-led economic activity.

    The strategic bottom line

    Nigeria needs to undertake careful study and introspection, backed by effective public policy, in order to arrive at models of capitalism that will work for it. Such models must encompass an appropriate role for the State in terms of enabling policy environments, regulation, and a balance between free enterprise and wider societal objectives.

    Most importantly, it must ask what the ultimate objectives of economic policy are. Is it double-digit growth, which far has not tackled widespread poverty? Or is to ensure that growth is not pursued merely for its own sake, but rather ought to be based on stronger fundamentals such as job creation? If that is the case, the strategy to be adopted in developing Nigeria’s private sector is the one (or the ones) that ultimately creates jobs and growth that outpace our demographics. In that case, it seems logical that of all the variants of capitalism discussed above, entrepreneurial capitalism would be best for Nigeria. This appears to fit most into the prevailing historical and cultural mode of production and commerce in our country.  Since that model will give more people direct opportunity for expansion and inclusion, the logic points in its direction as the one that will create the most jobs and spread the wealth around, assuring longer-term societal stability.

    The Nigerian government’s role in what should be a modified developmental state is to create appropriate incentives for transformational economic activity in areas such as manufacturing and entrepreneurship through venture capital, direct engagement of labour for public infrastructure for works and sanitation, all of which create jobs. But, the government cannot, and should not, replace the role of the marketplace.

    •Concluded