In the Foreword to Magatte Wade’s book, The Heart of a Cheetah, the late Ghanaian economist George Ayittey wrote that the hope for a prosperous African future requires that young Africans take the “Cheetah pledge” – to seek their wealth in the private sector, shunning government service.
After decades of frustration despite creating successful African-based businesses, Wade has learned that African Cheetahs must overcome the world’s most laborious and most corrupt regulatory bureaucracies. In far too many African nations, those in power benefit from the status quo, as it gives them near-total authority to decide who can make a profit, usually for a price.
The good news, according to the African Youth Survey, which found that 76 percent of the 4,200 young Africans polled from over a dozen nations want to start a business within the next five years. Moreover, young Africans are challenging the establishment and demanding change that, should it not come, will ensure their departure for friendlier business climates.
In the book, Wade chronicles the ups and downs of her efforts to promote African prosperity, most of which, to date, have been coopted by investors more interested in the bottom line than Wade’s goal of unlocking Africa’s great riches for its own people. In her opening statement, Wade poses the question, “Why Is Africa Still Poor?”
Surprisingly, her first response is that centuries of colonization are not the cause of current African poverty. Singapore, the UAE, South Korea, and even China were all poor nations until recently, when they adopted market economics.
Africa is poor, says Wade, primarily because its business environments are “the worst in the world.” The chief reason? Wade says, “The laws that make it possible to do business in Africa are literally among the worst in the world.”
She continues. “The infrastructure is a mess; the regulations are absurd; and the bureaucracy is overwhelming. It’s nearly impossible to start formal/legal companies, hire employees, and grow.”
There is, however, a path forward that does not have to wait for nations to reform their laws, upgrade infrastructure, and streamline bureaucracies (or even end bureaucratic bribery). Moreover, this pathway has proven successful in nations around the world.
Wade proclaims, with evidence, that “the path to prosperity in Africa is through Startup Cities,” which can be chartered to have their own law and governance designed to provide friendly and enabling environments where businesses can take hold and thrive.
Born in Senegal but raised largely in Germany and France, Wade returned to her native home with the intent of creating a brand whose products would be based on the indigenous beverages flavored with hibiscus, bissap, and ginger, all grown by Senegalese women. She called it Adina, which in the Wolof tongue means “life” in its philosophical dimension.
After trying various combinations of flavorings, Wade found a bottler and eventually took on a former Odwalla executive as a business partner. Three years later, despite personal hardships and the very complex process of obtaining Organic and Fair Trade certifications, Magatte cut a deal with the wife of the Senegalese President that enabled 400 women to begin growing crops for the beverages.
But just a few years later, after winning one proxy fight to retain control of Adina, Wade took on another partner who brought Pepsi executives into the business. Shortly afterward, the new partners dismantled the culturally relevant branding she had carefully developed, redesigned the bottles, and – worst of all – replaced the delicate hibiscus beverage with a “lightly hibiscus-flavored tea.” That ended the jobs of the 4,000 Senegalese women whose prosperity was the primary purpose behind Wade’s original plan.
Wade says this experience taught her a mighty lesson, one summarized by economist William Easterly. Commenting on the failure of Millennium Villages, Easterly said the real problem related to Western aid to Africa is “the patronizing attitudes …. That the poor are helpless victims and it is up to foreigners with superior expertise and funds to rescue them.”
Later, while lecturing at Cal Berkeley, Wade walked a group “interested” in solving African poverty through a simple mantra. When she asked them, “Why are people poor?” the group was silent. Then she asked, “Where do your parents get their money from?” And someone piped up, “A job?”
The next question was trickier: “Where do jobs come from?” Again, crickets. So she slow-walked them through, explaining that even government jobs rely on taxes paid by businesses and their employees. Shouldn’t we, she posited, focus on ensuring that a poor country has the right business environment to foster job creation? So how, she asked, do you expect to solve poverty in Africa by attending UN conferences with almost no one from the private sector in attendance?
While living in the Bay Area, surrounded by tech entrepreneurs and self-styled intellectuals, Wade says she concluded that their ideas for Africa were tainted by their hatred of capitalism. This blindness to the benefits of job creation led her to conclude that such people were not morally serious and of no real use to African empowerment.
What is most offensive, says Wade, is that during its entire pre-colonial history, Africa was a market society. Yet, in the early days of liberation, freed African states adopted the Marxist ideologies that emanated from the same Western nations who had robbed Africa of its wealth for centuries. Somehow, “socialism” was framed as “anti-colonialist,” while “capitalism” was condemned as “imperialist” (another term for colonialist).
Wade returns to the wisdom of George Ayittey in quoting from his seminal book, Africa Unchained, that “markets were not invented by Europeans and transplanted into Africa…. Free village markets thrived across Africa long before the first colonist arrived. Free village markets, free enterprise, and free trade “constitute the roots upon which the future of Africa must be built.”
It was during a 2007 TED Global meeting in Tanzania that Ayittey first coined the term “The Cheetah Generation.” There, he described them as “a new breed who brook no nonsense about corruption. They understand what accountability and democracy is… they’re not going to wait for the government to do things for them. Africa’s salvation rests on their backs.” What a contrast to the post-colonial ruling class, most of whom have their hands out crying for more foreign aid they can then redirect for their own purposes.
Nearly two decades later, the words of another speaker at that conference still ring true. Andrew Mwenda compared their gathering to the concurrent G-8 meeting in Berlin, where more aid was put forth as what Africa needed. He called upon the international aid community to revise its priorities from poverty reduction to jobs and wealth creation. The cure, he said, for African poverty is private investment for Africa-based businesses.
Yet even today, Wade points out, it takes 17 documents, 55 days, and US$5,555 per container just to import goods into the Central African Republic. It takes 44 procedures requiring 1,296 days to enforce a contract in Angola, eating up 44 percent of the claim. In Eritrea, it takes 13 procedures, 84 days, and – nearly a year’s total income to start a business.
Though she does not say it specifically, Wade points to the true solution for poverty in America’s inner cities. She cites Ghanaian President Nana Akufo-Addo’s proclamation that “The destiny of Black people, wherever they area in the world, is linked to Africa. As long as Africa is not respected, Black people will not be respected.”
Wade’s proposal for Startup Cities is a more refined concept than the “enterprise zones” dating to the Reagan Administration or even President Trump’s “opportunity zones,” both of which relied on tax incentives to encourage investment in low-income communities. Those programs did not fully address the larger issues of public (and private) corruption and overwhelming bureaucracy. Nor were they limited to aiding entrepreneurs from within the targeted communities.
As African industrialist Ivor Ichikovitz, whose foundation funded the African Youth Survey, puts it, “This is the first generation of Africans 18 to 24 years old who have never experienced colonialism … apartheid … or extreme oppression.” They are “in a space where they’re connected to the world … to the global society, to the global economy.”
“This is a generation,” he continued, “who believes they have their future in their own hands; that they have the power and the capability to create their tomorrow as they want to see it. It is also a generation that believes in democracy … that they should have a say.”
This is, as Ayittey and now Wade would describe it, “the Cheetah Generation.”