Mutumwa Mawere

On 18 July, 2008, President Mandela celebrated his 90^th birthday. 

The world has acknowledged and recognised President Mandela's magnanimity, courage, humility, and generosity of spirit and he now finds himself as a global brand celebrated for what the brand represents to humanity. 

Our generation is privileged to be alive and relevant as free Africans at this historic moment in the continent's development. Despite the transition to democracy, South Africa remains an unjust society.

We live amidst some of the extreme disparities in the world. The social contract on which the democratic order in South Africa is premised gave a central and key role to the constitution and the rule of law.  That put the law at the very centre of the struggle for social and economic justice.

History has bestowed upon this generation a responsibility of building a better Africa that can live up to the promise of all its peoples. We all have a valid stake in Africa's future and yet we must never forget the words of Mahatma Ghandi who said: "Be the change that you want to see".

History has taught us that you can never trust a third party to invest in the change you want to see. Many of us are still slaves trading money for time day-in-and-day-out until death. Yet without selling time for money, the majority of the African people would perish. The role of money in nation building is an issue that we need to debate openly and frankly.

Every poor man's dream is to be rich one day and yet the ideology that informs economic policies of post colonial Africa is antagonistic to wealth accumulation. There are many Africans who believe that being rich is necessarily evil and anti-poor. The poor need the rich in as much as the rich need the poor. Would it be healthy for Africa to have no rich citizens?

In pre-Colonial era, wealth was directly linked to physical resources and people received compensation for their labor in food and meterial goods. 

Colonialism replaced barter effectively blurring the definition of "wealth". The abstract concept of money allowed principally the settler community to become rich through resource depletion, manipulating land prices, engineering financial data, trading disposable goods, deliberately rendering products obsolete, and putting in place legal and extra legal measures to depress the price of African labour.

Even in the post colonial state, millions of African workers are still kept employed by money itself, not something physically tangible.

Although the monetary (virtual) economy may grow indefinitely on paper the real (physical) economy can only support a finite level of consumption. As we grope for solutions to the challenges that confront Africa, it is critical that we understand that as human beings we do not have the capacity to create matter where none exists before. We just manipulate existing African resources into forms that are useful to us.

It is true that the volume of usable matter in Africa actually decreases each day as we extract minerals, clear forests, burn oil and throw away goods manufactured from minerals.  When we deplete minerals resources for instance nothing is actually being "produced," but we see it that way because people draw salaries and wages from such activity.

The same applies to any productive economic activity in which products are converted from one form to another. We have come to believe that because money is exchanged for work performed, the said work is somehow adding to the available pool of resources.  Paper-money constitutes a form of compensation, not something with intrinsic value.  Examples of money distorting innate value are endless.

Share-ownership creates paper wealth that can rise and fall dramatically on a whim and may have little to do with the fundamental value of a company or its products.

The stock market crash of 1929 precipitated the Great Depression even though the U.S. remained unchanged in terms of material resources. Money alone is clearly a false measure of wealth, and largely speculative.

One man can be lucky to win lotto and make a fortune that would support dozens of families, while another can work like a donkey and have little to show for it. An African farmer may eke a living while a doctor can profit from the illness of that same farmer and accumulate great wealth is so doing.

The perception that brain-power is race-specific often leads to distorted rewarding arrangements and the misdirection of wealth while the rest may be condemned to low paying and menial jobs.   The insurance industry profits greatly from perceived risk but produces nothing but debt for the majority of Africans.

Land-ownership is an artificial legal construct in the sense that nature put no price tags on land for billions of years, treating it as a commodity, like air and water.  Land reform does not change the quantum of available land.  The transfer of title from one person to another does not result in any compensation going to nature but leads to more acreage loss each day.

Banks generate cash from financial intermediation through charging people to lend money and paying them for deposits in form of interest. Intellectual property rewards the inventor highlighting the fact money's value is very subjective.  Passive income from rental properties and royalties is also an abstraction. Salesmen make money with the simple act of raising a price but the underlying physical product remains unchanged.

The price of a new car that drops immediately after it's purchased provides a good example of inflated value.  A man-made price is a poor measure of a resource's true (or future) value. If resource prices are set by people with no grasp of limits, the market can't be trusted to predict the future. Money plays a catalytic and facilitative role in human civilization.  A better understanding of how money can be used to promote social cohesion and justice is required. 

The concept of property and the role money plays in the trading of rights should form an integral part of the conversations among Africans. 

The only sustainable mechanism of empowering the majority of African working people is through an investment in financial literacy.  At Africa Heritage Society we have committed ourselves to improving financial literacy and we believe that a conversation on the role of money in post colonial Africa is a good starting point.