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The REAL reason for African poverty, with Magatte Wade
2.3k Plays1 year ago
Australiana is now Fire at Will - your safe space for dangerous conversations.
Why is Africa poor? There’s a series of trendy answers to that question, that are almost taken as read amongst the progressive elite that dominate our institutions. Racism, slavery, and colonialism.
Magatte Wade has called BS on this narrative, and she is uniquely qualified to do so, being widely regarded as the world’s leading African prosperity activist. She is an entrepreneur, speaker, and author. Her latest book is titled ‘The Heart of a Cheetah: How we have been lied to about African poverty, and what that means for human flourishing’.
Follow Will Kingston and Fire at Will on social media here.
Subscribe to The Spectator Australia here.
Follow Magatte here.
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Transcript
Introduction to Fire at Will
00:00:20
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Fire at Will from The Spectator Australia, your safe space for dangerous conversations. I'm Will Kingston.
Why Do Societies Prosper or Fail?
00:00:30
Speaker
Why are some societies rich and some societies poor? There's a series of trendy answers to that question that are almost taken as read amongst the progressive elite that dominate our institutions. Racism. Perhaps if you are being generous, not out and out racism, but the more nebulous systemic racism.
00:00:51
Speaker
If you're an academic in Australia or the UK, you'll likely add the lingering effects of colonisation into the mix. And if you're an academic in the US, you'll likely add slavery. Pseudoscientific terms like intergenerational trauma are employed to connect these sins of the past with the problems of today.
00:01:09
Speaker
Australia got a taste of this mentality during the voice referendum when difficult conversations around the root causes of indigenous disadvantage were avoided in favor of the easy and fashionable rationale of its white Australia's fault. This discourse has dominated African studies, though, for much longer, decades and decades.
Magaat Wade on African Poverty Perspective
00:01:30
Speaker
When responding to the suggestion that racism was the reason for Africa's problems in a recent interview, my guest today simply replied, bullshit.
00:01:40
Speaker
Magaat Wade is widely regarded as the world's leading African prosperity activist. She has a different diagnosis for Africa's ills, and she is uniquely placed to help with a cure, being an entrepreneur, speaker, and author. Her latest book is titled, The Heart of a Cheetah, How We Have Been Lied to About African Poverty and What That Means for Human Flourishing. Magaat, welcome to Fire at Will. Thank you so much for having me, Will. It's a pleasure.
00:02:07
Speaker
It's a pleasure to have you
Wade's Personal Journey from Senegal to Germany
00:02:08
Speaker
on. We will get to that bullshit in a moment, but there's a pretty extraordinary personal story that I'd like to discuss first. You were born in the Senegalese town of Imbor. You now are speaking to me from Austin. I did a quick Google. There's about 8,000 kilometres between those cities and no doubt an extraordinary story in between those cities. Tell me that story.
00:02:31
Speaker
Yes, thank you. Well, yeah, I was born in Senegal in Bour, a little fisherman's town, 80 kilometers south of Dakar, the capital city. So there I was, obviously, and right around age two, because, you know, many Senegalese families breastfeed their children until two. So that's, you know, right around that age, my parents made the decision that so many African parents before them have made and continue making to this day. They made the decision.
00:02:58
Speaker
to leave but in this case they left me behind not because they were irresponsible parents you could argue the opposite because they actually needed to make a better life for me right and in this case they would have to emigrate meant they had to leave and because they did not know
00:03:14
Speaker
how the immigration journey would work. It was better for them not to take me along and have me go through that uncertainty. Because as you know, children, the last thing you want is uncertainty. So they left me behind with my grandmother while they took on that journey. And so
00:03:30
Speaker
So I was with grandma, you know, just living my life. And a few years later, when my parents decided that their immigration journey was successful, then they called for me to be reunited with them, which means me being separated from my grandma. Right. And so it was it was definitely a traumatic experience. But you have to be resilient. In any case, I went to join with my parents.
00:03:52
Speaker
You were seven at that point? Yeah, I was seven. And at that point, I went to meet up to be with my parents. They were back then living in Germany. When they first moved, they went to France, but somehow from France, they went to Germany. And by the time I got together with them, they were in Germany. So here I am in the middle of the winter, having never, I don't know what cold weather was, let alone snow. Here I am arriving in Germany. And it's just like, it's like shock everywhere you look. Culture shock, everything shock, shock, shock. It was like, what? And
00:04:22
Speaker
But I remember, among, I mean, we've been amidst all the shock. The biggest thing that I remember as a little girl was like, how come they have this and we don't? And the question was not, oh, why do we have Maseratis? Or for me, it was as simple as, you know, back home when grandma says, my God, it's time for your shower.
00:04:42
Speaker
It would take 45 minutes to an hour between the moment that decision was made and the water actually touching my skin. And why? It's because grandma had to get a charcoal stove going, fan it for it to really catch on, put a pot of water on it, waiting for it to boil. Then she transfers it to a bigger bucket, adds more cold water to it for a safe temperature for me. And then somebody stronger than her would have to drag this thing over to the shower area.
00:05:07
Speaker
And there at last, with a smaller little plastic pot, I could finally proceed to take my shower. But here, mom, in Germany, mom is saying, I got time for your shower. I'm like, I am not going to make it in this cold weather. And she's like, come on, you silly, just jump in the shower. So I jumped there and I turned the knobs on and the water is coming down and the temperature I wanted, the pressure you want. I was just like, wait, what? You know, you feel like you've been cheated out of life forever.
00:05:29
Speaker
And then it was like about everything, the roads, the supermarkets that were, you know, like beautiful, lining up of all types of goodies, you know, with AC in the summer and heat in the winter. Just amazing. Yeah, the paved roads. Back home, I'm always going home with dusty, ashy feet because of the, you know, the dust. And I was just like, wow.
00:05:52
Speaker
And I guess all I was referring to was this ease, this ease of life. And eventually, you know, how much more productive you are when you don't have to spend 45 minutes to an hour just getting a shower ready. I mean, that leaves you time for so many other things. So anyway, so I became obsessed with that question of how come they have this and
Reassessing African Poverty Theories
00:06:12
Speaker
we don't. And eventually,
00:06:14
Speaker
The question because it was so obsessive became, how come some countries like mine, most of these African nations are poor while others are rich? That's what the question became. How come some countries are poor while others are rich? And it's just a question that needed to be answered.
00:06:31
Speaker
And along the way, so here I am, meanwhile, you know, growing up, running my little life at some point, you know, family decides to move from Germany to France, because if we're going to stay in Europe and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And as I'm growing up, trying to answer this question. And of course, I've heard it all. I've heard the IQ theory. I've heard the recent theory. And as a matter of fact, I don't know if I told this to Konstantin on his show, but what you have is when you ask why
00:07:00
Speaker
is Africa, the poorest region in the world. And I like to do this experiment. Line up 100 people here and line up 100 people over there. This first set of 100 people, they're Africans for the most part and or they're allies, they're traditional allies. We're talking about usually people maybe on the left. Those who have hijacked the concept of we care about Africans. So you line up 100 Africans and the allies over here, you line up 100 non-Africans
00:07:29
Speaker
And the people that are traditionally viewed as not very sympathetic to Africans, you're going to have two sets of answers. So the Africans and their allies were poor because of racism, slavery, they're stealing our natural resources, and you name it, and so on and so forth. I'm sure you've heard a bunch of those usual suspects. So that's what that first group comes up with.
00:07:53
Speaker
Second group comes up with, oh, it's because they have such a low IQ. These people are savages always fighting each other. They are lazy. So you name it. And what these two groups have in common that they usually will bring up both is corruption and the leaders are corrupt. There you have it. But there I am sitting and thinking to myself,
00:08:15
Speaker
This absolutely makes no sense, because let's take the IQ or any other stuff. How come the same person, in this case my parents, the minute they move from this place and they go to another place, all of a sudden they're starting to be able to self-actualize? That's kind of weird. So some of this theory does not really make sense.
00:08:34
Speaker
And then you have people who say, oh, it's because of colonialism slavery. Then if that was the truth, if that was the case, how come nations like Singapore today, almost, you know, around the same time, I mean, we have almost the same journey in terms of, you know, when end of colonization and where we are to end up, you know, to present day, how come, you know, Singapore was colonized before. And today, fast forward, Singapore is richer per GDP capita.
00:09:00
Speaker
GDP per capita, sorry, then it's ex-colonizer Great Britain. At the same time, and then you have the same situation with many other previously colonized nations that are ahead of the colonizer, then you look at a country like, conversely, you have a country like Ethiopia that has never been colonized.
00:09:20
Speaker
And Ethiopia, sorry, but for the longest time, they were the poster child of poverty in Africa, of famine in Africa due to poverty. We even have this joke of when I was a kid, what is a chubby Ethiopian? Oh, it's an Ethiopian showing off. That was the joke. You know what I mean? So it just goes back to tell you how they were the poster child, yet they've never been colonized. So when I'm looking at all of this, it's just not making sense to me. It's just simply not making sense. None of this is making sense. But I'm hearing that. So I keep going.
Opportunities in the US vs France
00:09:50
Speaker
So family moved from Germany to France and eventually me after business school in France, I decided that France would be too small for my ambitions. So I decided to move to the United States because really it was the country where, you know, we talk about this American dream. When the American dream truly is, it's just this concept of social ladder. This is the place where the social ladder works at the maximum speed and at the highest heights. So that's where I wanted to be.
00:10:14
Speaker
I've heard you say before that you actually don't think that that holds to the same extent in, say, Germany or France. You think it's much more set in terms of the social hierarchy. Absolutely. I feel like in France and especially France, I feel that the social ladder, that elevator is very old and stuck at only five stories high, you know, compared to the hundreds of stories high that it is in the US.
00:10:40
Speaker
It moves super slow. I mean, let's face it, someone like me, coming from where I came from, in France, could never, ever have accomplished what she did in France that I was able to accomplish in the US. We just have to be honest about it. It doesn't mean that France, you know, cannot do better. It just means that when you, there is an issue, you have to put it on the table so you can address it face on. Now, if you tell me, no, we're happy with the way we are, that's fine. But let's at least put it on record so that the rest of us know where it's going to work or not.
00:11:09
Speaker
So in any case, after business school, I moved to the United States for those reasons. And of course, you know, the American dream started to happen for me. There I was starting to, you know, working with companies like Google, Netflix, before they became a household name brand, it was just rather amazing. And watching all of these companies that today we take for granted, I mean, literally at this little creamery, Palo Alto creamery, you know, where you had these people who would be building these companies that the rest of us would
00:11:36
Speaker
only know later, on the back of a napkin, literally, I mean, it sounds very cliche, but on the back of a napkin, coming up with their ideas with their co-founder, then, you know, the next week you see them, now there is VCs that are probably going to be investing in them, probably broad for lawyers that are going to, corporate lawyers that are going to help them, you know, put together the, you know, the whole thing and maybe their first employees, whatever, but it's just happening. I'm watching the magic of
00:12:01
Speaker
entrepreneurship happening, which is entrepreneurship is the magic of creating something out of nothing, literally. It's just rather mind-boggling. In any case, so that's where I got that bug of entrepreneurship, and I was doing extremely well for myself as a headhunter in the finance industry. That's the type of talent we were finding for companies like that.
00:12:22
Speaker
and doing really well. Like I said, I was not even 25 years old by the time I bought a beautiful home with pool in California in one of the most expensive zip codes in America. Definitely, it was definitely, I think, if not the most expensive zip code in California, it was probably close to in the top three or five.
00:12:42
Speaker
And the story there just goes to explain what happened because so I was having my American
Wade's Commitment to Africa
00:12:48
Speaker
dream. I've been living my American dream. And oftentimes, you know, so this one special day I was driving down Big Sur thinking to myself about how far I've come, how far
00:12:58
Speaker
the little girl that grandma would look in the eyes and say in your eyes I can see the universe thinking about how far she's come and feeling so proud of the journey and feeling so much gratitude for those who have helped me being very thankful to God for the life I was afforded and you know what I've been able to do with it.
00:13:16
Speaker
But that day something did not go as usual because every time when I had those moments of pure euphoria and joy and gratitude and abundance, almost invariably, the very next second, a switch would happen in my head and everything would go dark.
00:13:34
Speaker
And the reason that would happen is because at that precise moment when I was celebrating the life of abundance that I was afforded, I was also reminded almost instantly of the life of scarcity that I had left back home. And in moments like that, what is it? This is this very overwhelming
00:13:52
Speaker
feeling of sadness and grief and anger all mixed together because it's the time at which these stories come back to you, you know, of people packing themselves into little fishermen's boats trying to cross over to Europe, people hiding in the landing gears of planes trying to cross over to Europe and then the body drops somewhere above England, people trying to use land routes to
00:14:15
Speaker
migrate to Europe and then they get stuck in Libya. And there when they get stuck in Libya, they get sold as slaves. It is still very much happening to this day. Someone like me is sold between $300 and $500. You know, when you grow up with stories like this, and they're not just nameless people.
00:14:32
Speaker
But they're your fellow country men and country women. Now even babies are in these boats. And it's also people that you know. It's family friends. It's friends of friends. It's just so close. Even if they were not too close, they're human time human. That brotherhood alone in humanity should make you stop and feel something.
00:14:54
Speaker
But on top of that, when it's your people, when it's, you know, it just, it just gets so close. And so that day, normally the next step of the process should have been, okay, the anger, the grief, everything, but you know, my God, seriously, what can you do about this? This was here before your birth and it's probably going to be here long after you're gone. This is too big for you. This is something that no one, what can you do about this? So girl, just live your life, live your life.
00:15:20
Speaker
If you can manage to build a good life for yourself and those around you, you should be darn proud and it should be good enough. And that's usually normally what I would do, right? So the euphoria moment followed by this grief, sadness, crazy, overwhelming feeling of just like, I don't want to be here anymore to the next phase of just pushed into the rug.
00:15:40
Speaker
And focus on yourself. Do what you can for yourself. Everything else is just not yours to fight. Too big. But that day was not happening. The feeling just stayed there. It stayed there. My little coping mechanism did not work. Did not work. I had a failure. I had a failure. A failure. Failure was happening everywhere. You know, the red lights were going on. Boom, boom, boom.
00:15:58
Speaker
No, it's not, it's not. And so much that my body physically manifested. In this case, I did it this way because the water was down this
Restoring Cultural Pride in Senegal
00:16:10
Speaker
side. I stopped the car as soon as I could. I was shaking. I got out of this car and it was just like, I fell on my knees. My legs could not carry me anymore. I just fell. And the only way I found
00:16:25
Speaker
soulless and appeasement was just to Surrender literally and say God from here on I promise you I just I I promise that every breath that you'll grant me I will put it towards a betterment of my country of my continent of my people and I don't know what to do for but you're not to show me the way but me I my God wait promise to show up and from there very very I mean it started to happen it just a few months later took my husband back then Emmanuel to
00:16:55
Speaker
my country of birth and so just realize that this hibiscus that i was raised with had disappeared because you know if you were it's not that it disappeared but you had been completely weakened and it's because you know if you are just anybody the way you show your status and you know how humans are all about status right so many of us it's just it's just something we share
00:17:14
Speaker
You know, you show your status by drinking these Western sort of pop brands, you know, and the people at the bottom of a pyramid, the way they fake their status is by drinking, you know, the knockoff brands of those, you know, Western brands. In between, my beverage is squeezed out, and more than a beverage, it's a part of my cultural identity, because Bissap is known as Taronga. Taronga means hospitality. That is what the people of Senegal are known for.
00:17:38
Speaker
But all of that squeezed out the women who used to grow the hibiscus and rely on that as their livelihood no longer have a livelihood. Now they're leaving the countryside, packing themselves into cities, turning into maids that are being poorly paid, poorly treated, almost like you have a slave in the home so often. I mean, it's just horrible, right? And so anyway, so when I saw that, I was pretty upset for a couple of days or three.
00:18:02
Speaker
And eventually, at some point, I remember to myself, look, my husband who said that back then, he said, my God, this anger of yours, because I was really, I was, I was very angry. I was very disappointed. I was very, very upset with what we have allowed to happen to ourselves. Why do we have such a low self-esteem that anything that is indigenous to us must be perceived to be inferior? Why? Why are we doing this to ourselves? I was very upset with that.
00:18:27
Speaker
Can I pause you there? Because that's a real inflection point, I think, in this story. And I think the thing which is so powerful listening to this is when you feel that anger, there's two ways that you can choose to respond to it. You can either say, this is unfair, we are victims, woe to me, or you can do something about it. Now, a lot of the
00:18:49
Speaker
Problems that are associated with the way we talk about Africa at the moment are because of taking that first path. There have been terrible things that have happened in the past, slavery, colonialism, whatever, and therefore that is an excuse for the problems of today. You have a very different mentality and we'll get to what you've actually done to take ownership of both your life and some of the problems that you see in Africa. Before we do, I do want to almost knock out some of those fake reasons for African poverty today.
00:19:19
Speaker
And what comes to mind for me, I'm really interested in the way that young people in Africa think about this.
Challenges in African Education Systems
00:19:27
Speaker
So when you think about history, when you're taught history in schools in Africa, I'm conscious that it is not just one monolithic blob, but is that victimhood narrative prevalent in the way history is taught? Is it a different narrative? What are young people in Africa being taught to believe today?
00:19:43
Speaker
Yes. So I think there are a couple of things. When you look at our education system in many African nations, and here for the sake of it, let's stick to Francophone Africa, right? Which is still a big chunk of African nations. The problem you have there is that our education system is very much French style. So you're talking about our education system for those of us who were lucky enough to go to school in those countries, basically you're, you're trained to become a French bureaucrat.
00:20:11
Speaker
And as we know, last time I checked, it's not the bureaucrats that build an economy, the economy that then sustains everything, right? I said it one day at the UN, you know, when I was addressing the UN, the French ambassador to the US was right there. And I said that in front of her and she was looking down and I'm like, look, no offense to what you do, but if all is fine, there's room for bureaucrats, just not too many of them, please.
00:20:34
Speaker
But other than that, you know, you surely could agree with me that you can't build a nation with bureaucrats only. So that's the number one issue, the first issue we have, which is this education system that's very much top-down a la Française. And on top of that, with us, you have a little bit of a, on top of that, you have sprinkled colonialism everywhere. So you have young people who don't really learn
00:20:57
Speaker
about who don't get to learn really in school about the bravery of their own ancestors. You know what I mean? As they say, he who wins the war, you know, writes the books. And it's true. In any case, so you have that, but so you have an education that doesn't really train people to think for themselves necessarily. And I think in France today, they're starting to see it. See, the French train
00:21:22
Speaker
amazing mathematicians, engineers, that's great. But in terms of entrepreneurs, Americans are kicking their butts. Even when you bring back the percentage of population, because we have a much larger population, but it's just what it is. So the entrepreneurs are going to be mostly Americans.
00:21:43
Speaker
And then, yeah, of course, they can hire the engineers, the French, and all of that. That's great. But there's a reason why that is the case for the most part. So we inherit that type of education. And the people who get to go through that, it's really a small part of our population, right? Who go through that journey. But you can see all of a sudden how all of a sudden our educated people are among the least, would be among the least entrepreneurial people.
00:22:06
Speaker
And think about what is an entrepreneur. For me, if you ask me, at its best, an entrepreneur is someone who criticizes by creating. His or her act of starting a company is just that. Something sucks. Something does not work. I hate this stuff. Or something is not here that I should be here.
00:22:27
Speaker
That's my complaint part. What's the next step? I criticize. I criticize by creating. And so I'm building this as my answer to this problem that I just perceived. That's what entrepreneurs are. If you don't have that mindset, it's just not going to work. So that's for our educated people who for the most part are not going to be your most entrepreneurial people. Then you have the rest of the people who are not really
00:22:49
Speaker
You know, they had to leave school in middle school or whatever because, you know, we have a high failure rate education wise and that's still out of illiteracy. I don't care. Sometimes I hear some of our students, you know, they're like, oh, yeah, yeah, I went to the university and everything. And if they have to line up three words in French, you just want to run for the hills because that's how horrible it is for your ears.
00:23:06
Speaker
But hey, I got an education. So in any case, otherwise, what you have is many people that are have not necessarily gone to school or done the whole K to 12 there where you're finding that you have more people who can still
00:23:21
Speaker
actually still have the entrepreneurial attitude and mindset.
Youth Mindset: Africa vs the West
00:23:25
Speaker
That's very interesting. But in their case, what they might lack is all the technicalities that one might need in order to really be able to be good at business, whether it's financial literacy, all of those things. But when it comes to really being able to
00:23:40
Speaker
think critically and say, I'm going to do something different. We kind of have that. And that's what I would say is the difference that I'm seeing today between the American youth as I see it and a lot of the Western youth. And I'm talking about youth 3.0. What I mean by youth 3.0 is the youth of today, basically, that was born into this prosperity that the West has managed to build. And so the complacency that came with it, instead of thinking about
00:24:10
Speaker
we made you very, we made you, you were lucky to come into a very prosperous environment. Instead of thinking about how can I keep pushing forward and bringing more people in the fold and building a better world, now I'm looking inwards, thinking about all the things that my body is supposed to have, not have. You have clubs where people are literally cutting a limb because, oh, gee, I don't think I was supposed to be born with two arms.
00:24:36
Speaker
this stuff is happening right now so or in the US I was very upset during the time when you know we have a fight over who gets to use which bathroom you know I'm looking at both sides I should be able to use your bathroom I should be able to use that bathroom and I'm thinking to themself and being like wow just wow do you know that while you're complaining about who gets to use which bathroom me I have to solve problems where children
00:25:03
Speaker
When going to the bathroom, when going to the bathroom means you might be bit by a snake, a venomous snake. And, or you are in a situation where there is no privacy or anything like that, opening yourself up maybe for, you know, sexual molestation or who knows what. And you are sitting here and telling me that the only thing you fight for right now is who gets which bathroom to home. And when I drop that, just to see both sides being like, oops,
00:25:29
Speaker
yeah oops oops oops what you got should be working towards fixing those problems rather than just i'm gonna look at my you know nasal navel and see what else can be done there oh i don't like that it has a heart shape it should have a square shape whatever meanwhile people are dying meanwhile children are at risk
00:25:50
Speaker
please come on so this is what happened so but us in africa our youth our youth is not like that our youth is still very much on because the needs are there they're real they're all real that's why even while the world the west is complaining about you know talking about bitcoin well bitcoin not enough bitcoin is not enough of this it's too volatile is this is that they have completely forgotten the intrinsic characteristics
00:26:17
Speaker
an essence of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin and Economic Solutions in Africa
00:26:20
Speaker
We're talking here about a means of exchange and having to go back to sound money and real money. While you all are arguing with each other here because you are frankly too distracted
00:26:34
Speaker
in the noise to see the signal. We, Africans, see the signal. This is why Bitcoin, Africa is one of the region with the fastest adoption of Bitcoin in the world. Why? Because we have real problems. We see them. We don't have a luxury that you have to not see it. So just on that.
00:26:54
Speaker
There's a wonderful line from a team leader in your business that I read in your book. Ibu? Ibu, yes. And he said on this, he said, we may not have the experience right now, but we're not stupid. And it was a line that affected you very deeply. And you were talking about it in the context of a cultural inferiority that some Africans still feel relative to the West. Explain that mentality to me and explain to me, I guess, how you as a leader,
00:27:21
Speaker
look to try and break down that feeling of cultural inferiority. Yes. Look, at the end of the day, Will, you have somebody in England. His name is Remy Adekoya. I don't know if you've read his book or if you've had him on already. I haven't, no. You should probably reach out to him. His name is Remy Adekoya. He's a Polish Nigerian author as well. And his book is called, It's Not About Whiteness, It's About Wealth.
Cultural Inferiority and Economic Disparity
00:27:50
Speaker
See, I remember when I told you that humans are all about status, for many of them. It really requires you to reach a level of enlightenment where you kind of leave at least the bogus status aside. But even among the people who are elite and all this, there's still something there about us. We're just not perfect.
00:28:11
Speaker
In any case, when it comes to, I do believe that because some cultures have been traditionally dominated, and there I would put the caveat of, even traditionally, the caveat of understanding that cultures around the world, societies around the world, humans around the world,
00:28:30
Speaker
It's the human history that we have been always sometimes of our history oppressors, sometimes of our history oppressed. It's been the very, you know, we definitely are equal in that madness in terms of how that went. Equal opportunity offenders. Exactly, exactly. Now, the problem you have is when Africa, which is, I mean, look at the size of that continent,
00:28:55
Speaker
which is home to, it has the specificity of, it's home to 90% of a representative of those of us with a black skin on this earth. So when you think Africa, you think black people for the most part, although there are other skin-colored people, right? So it's this massive, gigantic mass of land. We're not as populated as other parts of the world, but by 2050, we will be one quarter of the world's population.
00:29:24
Speaker
So you're looking at this huge mass of land with us on it, mostly black. And we seem to have in common things that are not really good, poverty, famine, wars, diseases. When Ebola came out, I was just like, oh my God. All of that, we have that in common. So basically, these realities
00:29:48
Speaker
They're not the only story of Africa, but they are the facts of Africa that travel the most and the best, to the point of making it almost look like this is the only facts of Africa.
00:30:00
Speaker
that's wrong, but it is. And so eventually these go on to feed stereotypes, right? Stereotypes, as we all know, stereotypes always have their roots in something very real. And then the problem with stereotypes is normally it should just be an average of a reality, meaning that you have people above it, you have people underneath it, and it's really, it should be, then it means it's going to be, you never should go and try to judge one person based on the, on a so-called average. It just
00:30:29
Speaker
you go wrong right away, almost. So this is what happens. And I think so those stereotypes have gone on to feed not only the outsiders, but it also affects you. Of course it can affect you. So because of that, I definitely do believe that there is a complex of inferiority.
00:30:46
Speaker
And in some of us, it is very, it is very on the table. It is very, it's conscious. You can see it, but many it's not. And for those of us for whom it is not, oftentimes I also feel that it manifests in resentment, in racism also towards others. It's almost like this natural visceral reaction of, oh, you don't like me? Well, I don't like you either.
00:31:10
Speaker
You know what I mean? Like, I remember when I was in school, it took forever for my parents to work on me, but when people call me, oh, la negres, la negres, the nigger, the nigger, you know, in school, for me to not reply back with, oh, and you, your melanin did not work out, like come up with a worse name, like, oh, and you pig, oh, something like that. That's what I would reply back because, you know, pink skin.
00:31:31
Speaker
You pick so you call me nigger. I call you pig. That's what I was doing when I was a kid. My parents had to really work so hard for me to get to the point of, you know, I look at you and almost and I feel sorry for you because when you say something like that, I only see ignorance and ignorance really an enviable place. And for me to even waste my time with it.
00:31:51
Speaker
As they said, if you try to fight with the pigs, not only you'll never win, but you also get dirtied and taken down. So it's hard. But I feel like for a lot of us, we're still stuck at that level of very much primary reaction. And it's hard not to be there when it's constant that you're always hearing yourself looked at this way. And so for me, though, it is where it is important to go back to something like Remy is saying. It's not about whiteness, it's about wealth.
00:32:18
Speaker
The reason in a way why these white people, you know, enjoy the status image that they have is because it's not that all white people are rich. It's not that all white people are, you know, like living a healthy family's family lives. It's not that all white people are perfect angels and never committed a crime in their lives. It's not that all white people, like you don't have diseases break out in some white people's society. It's because on average, they have better numbers than we do.
00:32:47
Speaker
especially about something that matters the most, economics, because economics allows you to build everything else. So for me, if you were to ask me, that's how I would respond to this.
Brand Creation for Cultural Revival and Livelihoods
00:32:56
Speaker
And so you and your book put forward three reasons why it is so difficult for Africa to catch up when it comes to wealth. You put forward government overregulation, corruption and Western charitable efforts that create dependency. And I want to look at each of those. Tell me about the challenges of on regulation. Tell me about the challenges of setting up a business in Africa.
00:33:16
Speaker
Yeah, so on regulations, this is where, you know, after going to Senegal with Emmanuel, taking him there, I saw that issue with the hibiscus, then I'm like, okay, if I'm not happy with the fact that Pepsi is taking over our bellies, and Coca-Cola and Fanta, it's going to be up to me to create an alternative to this situation. So I criticized by creating, but literally what I, that was, I was not thinking about it myself as an entrepreneur or anything like that. I said, I have an issue with this. What can I do about it?
00:33:44
Speaker
OK, I'm going to do this. I'm going to build a brand that has embedded in it the very best of my DNA, of my DNA, in this case, my Senegalese culture. So we're bringing back recipes, the whole cultural thing. And in doing so, we're going to put these women back to work. See, that was it. I have an issue with my culture disappearing.
00:34:04
Speaker
And I have an issue with women losing their jobs. Okay. What's my solution? A brand. And when you do a brand, you bring the culture back and you put women back to work. That's exactly what we did. And so, um, there, when I was doing that back then, it was in 2003 that I started doing that. And in 2003, 2004 is when, uh, by 2004, we had set up, you know, the legal entity in the U S and I'm looking around and I'm just like, we had a sister company in Senegal, a sister company in France, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in America.
00:34:34
Speaker
And then I look around and at first I'm like, this can't be real. What I was talking about is, was the discrepancy of what I could only call, even I, who had no concept of economics or anything like that back then, the word came out easily from my mouth saying the discrepancy in the ease of doing business. Cause over here, my sister company in Senegal, almost a couple of years back then to finally get through all the hoops and everything to legally register it. In the US, less than a half a day.
00:35:02
Speaker
And later when people, things were on computer, I mean, today in 15, 20 minutes, depending on how fast to type, you can register your LLC online. Over there, you know, you needed a few thousand dollars to open a bank account. In the US, 20 bucks, you're good to go. Not even. Over here, labor laws that are so complicated that it's worth truckloads of rules and regulations, which means you better hire an HR person to do things right. And even him or her is going to make mistakes because it's so complicated. Complication breeds mistakes naturally.
00:35:31
Speaker
Yeah, and which means raise of doing of my cost of doing business, because I have to hire these experts. But across the board, when you look at the US, will employment at will? Okay, we want to work together, the sun will move on. If we if we're done, two weeks notice, you're gone. Over here, I have to go to an office called aspect solute Hawaii, labor inspection office.
00:35:51
Speaker
get their approval to be able to hire you. They borderline even tell me how much I'm supposed to pay you because of your worthless degrees, but have nothing to do with the job I have for you. And so on and so forth. The tax code is also so complicated. It's also worth truckloads. This was mind blowing to me because I guess I naively would have assumed that it would have been laissez-faire.
Overregulation and Informal Economy Challenges
00:36:10
Speaker
Anything goes when in fact, it is the opposite. It is the most over-regulated market, arguably on earth.
00:36:17
Speaker
Africa is the most over-regulated region in the world. And the reason why people have this sense, and I have it too, once this video comes out, you're going to see. There's a reason why Jordan Peterson is like, we have millions and millions of views, tens of thousands of comments. I mean, people are talking because of what I said. And you'll probably, you might get the same issue because they'll be like, don't you see me so so fair? Anything goes.
00:36:41
Speaker
I'll explain to you why we got to this perception. Because if you make it so hard for people to start and run a business, and it's not just about starting it, it's about running it, all the rules and regulations that rule the life of a business in this place. And everywhere you look, there are chains. Choke, choke, choke, choke, choke, choke, choke, choke. So when you do that, you're going to limit the amount of would-be entrepreneurs who will be setting up a business. If they don't set up a business,
00:37:11
Speaker
You don't have those jobs that come with it. The income that come from those jobs and having an income means you ideally go into the middle middle class where you're no longer poor. And if many people do that, critical mass of people get that in your country, you go from being a poor nation to a middle income nation and all of a sudden, you know, you're part of the prosperous nations of the world.
00:37:31
Speaker
Here, what happens is if you make it so hard for people to start and run a business, then very few people will be having these official formal businesses. There's a reason why in my country, 95% of the companies' businesses are in the informal sector. Technically, they don't exist.
00:37:47
Speaker
They cannot have a bank account. They cannot get investments. The employees cannot get a retirement at the end because where is your employment? Are you going to be to be employed to have a contract? It has to be between you and an entity. That entity does exist. That's what it means to be in the informal sector.
00:38:04
Speaker
You cannot build an economy along these lines. But most sub-Saharan African nations are operating along that line. So what does it mean? It means that very few people, very few companies, legit companies are going to exist, which means very few jobs are going to exist, which means what happens is then all of a sudden the few jobs that exist, people there are going to be treated like shit. Because guess what? Hey, you have a problem with how I'm treating you, Magat?
00:38:31
Speaker
The door is right there. This is how you get people waiting on, they have not been paid for eight months, nine months. Then you could say technically, why don't you take them to court? What do you want them to take them to court for? So people are just saying, I'm not going to go, I'm just going to stay and I'm going to take the abuse. But the reason why that's happening is not because we're, and then you look at that from the outside.
00:38:51
Speaker
And you're looking at all the informal sector, all of these things happening everywhere. Nobody really has real legitimate, you know, like legit companies, no real jobs. It seems like it's a jungle. It looks like a jungle, which in your term you use, it seems like it's laissez-faire. There are no rules on that regulation. People do whatever the hell they want to do, whatever. And because what happens, people stay in the informal sector, every time they might be smacked on the
00:39:15
Speaker
on the hand because maybe a cop tells them, I don't know, the load that you have of bread for your bakery, it should be packaged this way, this way, that way, you give them a little bribe and you move on. So from the outside world, you look at all of this and you're thinking, oh my God, there's no rules, there's no regulation, it's a jungle. And I'm saying, no, no, no. The reason why that is the case is because things are so over-regulated in the first place that no sane entrepreneur wants to set up shop.
00:39:43
Speaker
And when you don't have an enough critical mass of entrepreneurs setting up legitimate businesses, you end up with very few jobs and adverse few jobs and also the informal jobs. People are always in a precarious situation. That's what people need to understand.
00:40:00
Speaker
I've heard you say that to try and reform at a national level, those regulatory frameworks would take too long. What's the alternative?
Startup Cities in Africa: A Proposal
00:40:10
Speaker
What's the solution to this problem? Yeah. Thank you. Because you now, by now, you know, I work problem, solution, criticise, creating, right? So good. Yeah.
00:40:19
Speaker
the reforms that we need are just too many and for many of them you would have to touch different ministries, different parts of government and each time it's an opportunity event for the opposition parties or who knows who has a whatever issues with the current party in power to like stick to you you know because as we know politicians don't work for us they work to get reelected you know what or to be elected so the way you get reelected is just
00:40:47
Speaker
and or elected is just to tell us or us the world what you want but they're not here working really working and this is not just African nations it's it's politics in general around the world politicians around the world you know so and people what because when they say okay i hear you when you say in the business environment okay my god what do we start with the problem is it's not what you start with
00:41:08
Speaker
The best way to think about it is, you see, if I was to say to you, like Italy, Italy is I think they're giving these homes for the one dollar for the one symbolic euro because there's so many of these homes that are crippling falling down and everything. Think about it. You come and you say, oh, yeah, and now you don't have to spend the real money on the on the house. You know, instead of a home, but normally it should cost five hundred thousand euros or a million euros. We're giving it to you for a symbolic euro.
00:41:34
Speaker
your first reaction might be oh great oh but wait for those of us who are really smart and they know that okay what else
00:41:41
Speaker
You're like, okay, one euro, but my God, you have to renovate it. And you have to renovate it within the first six months. And worse than renovating, you have to restore it. We want you to restore it to historical, to what it was historically, whether you like it or not. It's going to have to be this paint, it's going to have to be this arches, it's going to have to be this garden. Everything has to be restored to its glory days. And on top of that, once that's done, your taxes on this, it's going to be, I don't know, 75%.
00:42:09
Speaker
you know, like property taxes, you're going to have to pay on this stuff. And it's going to be based on what it costs because you have renovated it. Oh, and by the way, you cannot have more than two children in this home because you know, the plumbing, by the way, you're not allowed to bring this type of plumbing or whatever. It can only take two people, so no more than two people.
00:42:29
Speaker
Oh, and by the way, your friends can never visit for more than five days at a time or never more than 10 people in your home at any given time. And it better be people that you're in family with. We all have gone through this during COVID. So we know this is all very, could be very rare. So imagine now all of a sudden will that one Euro home, is it looking that great to you anymore?
00:42:49
Speaker
No, it's not. Then you say, okay, fine, my God. One euro plus, you can take your time, only five years to renovate it. So you have a little bit more time. Is that six months? Five years. Oh, and you can have as many kids as you want in it, but everything else stays. Are you still doing it? No. So you see, you have to have a critical mass of reforms that need to happen together.
00:43:11
Speaker
for it to make sense. But the problem with piecemeal legislation is that already to change even one thing, it takes forever. But on top of that, if I tell you have to address 20 million of them at the same time, I mean, almost literally, it's that many, because people don't spend time to look at laws and regulations. But we're talking, it's almost like about like code, you know, like when you look at Twitter, the lines of code involved in making Twitter one,
00:43:34
Speaker
It's millions. And everybody would argue that's what Elon did when he came. The best ones are the ones that require the least code. A clean code is less lines.
00:43:45
Speaker
Same thing with law, eventually, because when things are so messy, all of a sudden, when there's a problem here, it affects everything else. And before you can find it, it's like you have to go through 20 million of them. And so here, this is a work you really have to do. We have to weed out, weed out, weed out, weed out with people who are not really the best engineers in the world. Let's face it. Government people. So you can imagine why that would be a cumbersome process. That takes time and you're making like little incremental
00:44:12
Speaker
no progress at a time where literally you need to be running because every year you have millions of new of young Africans who are entering the job market in a job market that definitely does not have a number of jobs that's needed this is a problem and then what happens is that surplus of people who need a job but don't have it
00:44:32
Speaker
They are in those boats going to Europe. They're in those places going to your country, Britain. And then all of a sudden you turn around and you're having your country say, you know, we're going to go Brexit or whatever. Whether you think it's a good thing or bad thing, it doesn't matter. What I'm saying is all of this is affecting the very face and also the very reality of
00:44:51
Speaker
of European nations. Georgia Maloney, whether it's, you know, Viktor Orban in Hungary, all of these places, the political spectrum is changing radically. Why? Because of that very phenomenon I just talked about. The other regulation in Africa is getting to decide who gets elected in power all the way on the shores of Europe. If it remains that way, we're going to keep on influencing your policies. Your policies, because politicians come with policies, ideally.
00:45:20
Speaker
So you see how all the way from Africa, we're going to start to mess with you guys. Because there, when you have these very right wing groups coming in and them saying they're starting to put some different type of policies because they're like, in trying to get rid of us or in trying to making it harder for us to find jobs, the immigrants coming from our shores, they're starting to crack down on some rules and regulations in your country, all of a sudden making your industries
00:45:45
Speaker
and your environment less viable. You see, it's all linked. It's all linked. Let us see this. And so in our case, I'm like, I don't have time for this piece of legislation. It's going too slow. And so this is why, inspired by situations like Dubai, Singapore, because what they all have in common
00:46:01
Speaker
China is the latest to have done this, is to say, look, as a nation, we run on the worst business environment software in the world. That's why we're poor. But let us see if we can use special academic zones. So big countries will go for special academic zones, because you know, you're doing pocket at a time, a small nation like Singapore can do it all at once, or Dubai all at once, if you call it a nation, you know, nation states, small ones, all at once, and then the big ones, they do special academic zones by one by one. So here, the solution is, hey,
00:46:29
Speaker
the startup cities. Startup cities are basically next generation special academic zones that have their own law, their own governance when it comes to business. We touch only business. You don't touch immigration law or defense law, family law, all of those that are really, should be only the preview of the sovereign nation. You don't touch those. You're dealing with a business environment because that's what it is. That's what we're talking about. And so within these zones, city size, you have
00:46:56
Speaker
Number one, you have a choice of law. So like in the US, and multinationals enjoy this everywhere all the time, you get to choose which jurisdiction you're going to be judged by. So choice of law, on top of that you have, my brain is going too fast. So choice of law, I'm trying to break it up for your audience so that I don't confuse people all over the place. So you have choice of law and arbitration. So here you're deciding, as a multinational, you already have it, you're saying, we are going to be obeying the law of Delaware, even though you're in California,
00:47:25
Speaker
And because when there is a problem, you know that you're going to you want to be arbitrated along those laws. Multinationals get that every all the time. We are saying how come small and small, medium sized enterprises should not have that because it's a very, very good thing to have. Right. It's really super business friendly to have that. Then the other thing is that we also have full choice
00:47:47
Speaker
of the regulatory body that you want to obey. So let's say you're a medical device company or you're a drug treatment company. If you're in the US, you have no choice. You're subjected to the FDA. If you were in any of the OECD countries, including, you know, Japan, Australia, and places like that, also because they're part of the OECD, you are subjected to the OECD regulatory when it comes to those things, right? And if you're in Brazil that doesn't obey any of those things, you're under the Brazil one or Senegal, Senegal one.
00:48:15
Speaker
where here we're giving you full choice of regulatory system, which means you get to decide which other regulatorys you're going to subject yourself to. It's cool, isn't it? So it's things like that. And also on top of that, you can have a custom regulatory framework designed specifically for your industry.
00:48:33
Speaker
And in this, that's how you always stay on top of innovation building because when you do that, you're very much attracting the most innovative companies in the world because you're creating a sandbox for them to operate from within. Another thing is we use a lot of liability insurance.
00:48:52
Speaker
So in many countries, the way they're going to try to, you know, supposedly care for you, it's like, let's put one more regulation. Let's say, you know, you cannot do this, you cannot do that. Or us, we try to only leave what we have to leave within law and regulation and everything else.
00:49:09
Speaker
We tried to take it to the insurance, through insurance liability. Knowing that insurance liability is a much more flexible way for the business and the economy in general to respond to new realities. I put this argument in place where, do you remember the lead pipes that they were using back in construction back in the days? Then they discovered that it was causing serious, it was having some really great precautions in children, like causing brain tumors and damages and things like that.
00:49:38
Speaker
Well, we argue that if that was left within the realm of liability insurance, A, we would have caught it earlier. And once it's caught, also find the solution much faster. Because as a matter of fact, in Chicago, the unions were actually the ones standing against the winding down of the lead pipes because it made them more money to use that than it was to move to plastic pipes.
00:50:05
Speaker
you know, which did not have those issues. See, if you were, and because it was law, all of this is protected. No one is going to go to the Union or anything like that because the law hasn't said yet, blah, blah, blah. Where in our case, we don't get to enjoy this concept of sovereignty where you cannot be sued. So us, we would have been sued, rightfully so. And because of that risk of being sued, you're going to do the right thing, won't you? And you're going to be much more on the ball in terms of innovation, adopting innovations, and most importantly, letting go of bad things.
00:50:34
Speaker
So this is all the type of things that you see within these startup cities. And again, as you can see, it's not just like free zone, typical free zone, or even typical special economic zones. It's not just about, oh, can we just have the lowest taxes? As a matter of fact, we argue it's not about the lowest taxes, but it's about as a whole.
00:50:51
Speaker
what makes the most sense for a business environment. And so this is what I'm working on. This is what we're going to Africa. I am very excited. I have, I'm talking to Six Nation going on eight and out of those eight, two are light years. I think the, I think, I think the Westerners have something coming for them, which also is great because I think in the West, the complacency has set in. And the only way you're going to wake them up is to put some fire under their butts.
00:51:19
Speaker
So for me, instead of fighting and arguing with what the legislators are doing or not in the UK or in America, I'm like, you guys will all thank us later. We're going to go create competition on this other side of the world, but also has the youngest population in the world. We're going to give you a run for your money. And at some point we're going to bring competition back.
00:51:40
Speaker
which means if you want to compete with us, you're going to have to dust off and clean up your business environments as well and stop being so crazy and really, you know, go back to basics. So I think this is also how we're going to be able to help the West eventually get its act back together. And so that's really what's going on and it's really, really
Emotional Dedication and Strategic Economic Initiatives
00:51:58
Speaker
exciting. I'm very, very excited.
00:52:00
Speaker
I reflect on what you've said, Magat. The start of this conversation was all heart and soul. And then it ends with such strategic creativity and insight. And it's the way that you marry those two things together is really inspirational. And that is all there in your book, which of course I strongly recommend along with your podcast. You are such an important figure for.
00:52:22
Speaker
Get the fuck in the heart of the cheetah. Get it from all good bookstores and all bad bookstores where we get anywhere. It is a wonderful read and you are doing absolutely wonderful things. Thank you for your time today and also thank you for everything you're doing. Thank you. I appreciate you.