The age-old sharing economies of Africa -- and why we should scale them | Robert Neuwirth

48,504 views ・ 2018-06-07

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Translator: Reviewer: Daban Q. Jaff
00:12
So what I'm doing
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is a thought experiment.
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Now you may know of or have read
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this book by this guy.
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It's probably the first and maybe the only bestseller
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ever written about economics.
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And you probably know a bit about what it says.
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It talks about how nations all over the world will prosper
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through the individual pursuit of individual profit.
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Individual profit will be the mechanism for the prosperity of the world.
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But the funny thing about Adam Smith
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is that he was a stay-at-home kind of guy.
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He actually never went further from Edinburgh
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than France and Switzerland.
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So my thought experiment is to imagine
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what would have happened if Adam Smith had visited Africa.
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And fortunately, there's actually an easy answer,
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because the Arab lawyer and traveler Ibn Battuta
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traveled down the east coast of Africa in the 14th century,
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and what he found when he got to Mogadishu was a market,
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and he wrote about it.
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And basically, merchant ships came to the harbor,
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and they weren't even allowed to land.
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They had to drop anchor in the harbor,
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and boats came out to them,
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and locals picked them and said, "You are my guest, I am now your broker."
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And they had to do business through the local broker,
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and if they went around that and didn't do business through the broker,
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they could go to court, and the deal would be canceled,
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and they would be thrown out of town.
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And through this mechanism, everyone prospered.
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And so if that was Adam Smith, he might look like this guy
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and say, "Ah! That's a mutual aid society.
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That's a share-the-wealth free market."
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And when I put this question to Christian [Benimana],
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who had the stage at the beginning of this session,
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he responded that if Adam Smith had come to Africa,
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there would have been a sharing economy long before Airbnb and Uber.
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And that's true.
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So if we put this to work today,
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it would be very interesting.
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There would be a lot of money flowing into the countries.
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These are just figures of 10 percent of exports in these countries.
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So the interesting thing is that this mutual aid economy still exists,
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and we can find examples of it in the strangest places.
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So, this is Alaba International Market.
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It's the largest electronics market in West Africa.
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It's 10,000 merchants,
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they do about four billion dollars of turnover every year.
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And they say they are ardent apostles of Adam Smith:
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competition is great, we're all in it individually,
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government doesn't help us.
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But the interesting reality is that when I asked further,
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that's not what grew the market at all.
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There's a behind-the-scenes principle
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that enables this market to grow.
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And they do claim -- you know, this is an interesting juxtaposition
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of the King James Bible and "How To Sell Yourself."
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That's what they say is their message.
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But in reality, this market is governed by a sharing principle.
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Every merchant, when you ask them, "How did you get started in global trade?"
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they say, "Well, when my master settled me."
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And when I finally got it into my head to ask, "What is this 'settling?'"
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it turns out that when you've done your apprenticeship
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with someone you work for,
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they are required -- required -- to set you up in business.
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That means paying your rent for two or three years
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and giving you a cash infusion
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so you can go out in the world and start trading.
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That's locally generated venture capital. Right?
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And I can say with almost certainty
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that the Igbo apprenticeship system that governs Alaba International Market
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is the largest business incubator platform in the world.
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And there are other sharing economies that we look for --
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merry-go-rounds, which are found in almost every shantytown.
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They have different names in other cultures; this is the Kenyan name.
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It's a way of generating cash.
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It's a kitty -- people throw money into a pot once a week,
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and once a week, one member of the group gets the money,
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and they can spend it on whatever they need to.
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And there's also something called "acequias,"
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and that is a Spanish word, but it comes from the North African Arabic;
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"saqiya" means "water wheel."
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And what the acequia is is a sharing system for scarce water.
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It's migrated from North Africa to Spain,
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and from Spain to the west of the United States,
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where it still is used.
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And it shares water by need
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rather than by who was there first.
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And contrary, with all due respect, to what Llew [Claasen] said
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when he talked about blockchains and cryptocurrencies yesterday,
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there is no tragedy of the commons.
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People in acequias have been commonly managing scarce water resources
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for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years.
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So taking this thought experiment, I wanted to go a little bit further
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and suggest that these things are managed communally,
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and they are taking care of scarce capital, scarce cash
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and scarce resources.
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And it seems to me that we have actually two kinds of capitalism.
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We have the capitalism of the top up.
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And these are really interesting statistics,
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because three one-thousandths of one percent of the Nigerian population
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controls wealth equal to one-fourth of the GDP of the country.
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One one-hundredth of one percent of the Kenyan population
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controls wealth equal to 75 percent of the GDP of the country.
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That's the capitalism of top up.
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And everyone else is with this guy,
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selling board games and bodybuilding equipment
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in a go-slow on the highway in Lagos.
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And when you're selling board games and bodybuilding equipment in a go-slow,
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that traffic jam is really, really, really bad, right?
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Those of us in this sphere of the economy
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are caught in what I call "the capitalism of decay,"
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because there's no way to rise up and get out of it,
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because they're lacking the resources that we talked about
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in those sharing economies.
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And they're tripped up
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by the thesis of cassava and capitalism,
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that cassava has to be processed in order not to be poisonous,
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and I would argue that, similarly,
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the market economy needs to be processed in order to be fair to everyone.
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So we have to look at what I call the "bottom down economy."
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These are these sharing models that exist out there
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that need to be propagated and used and scaled.
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OK?
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And if we propagate these things,
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we can begin to bring infrastructure to everyone,
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and that will ensure that communities
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are leading their own development,
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which is, I believe, what we need in the world,
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and, I would suggest, what we need in Africa.
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I wanted to quote Steve Biko,
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and I thought it was really important to quote Steve Biko,
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because next month, September 12 to be exact,
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is the 40th anniversary of his murder by the South African state.
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And you can read the quote.
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He basically said that we're not here to compete.
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And I love this quote: "... to make us a community of brothers and sisters
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jointly involved in the quest for a composite answer
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to the varied problems of life."
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And he also said that "the great powers of the world
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have done wonders in giving us an industrial and military look, ..."
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and we don't have to copy that military-industrialist complex,
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because Africa can do things differently
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and restore the humanity of the world.
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And so what I want to suggest here
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is that we have an opportunity,
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that we are all here in the mutual landscape
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to be able to do things,
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and that the journey starts now.
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Thank you very much.
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(Applause)
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