at TED Global, Arusha, Tanzania (June 5, 2007)

First of all, let me thank Emeka for a, as a matter fact TED Global, for putting this conference together. And this conference is going to rank as the most important in the beginning of the 21st century.

Think African governments will put together a conference like this? Think the AU (African Union) will put together a conference like this? Even before they do that, they will ask for foreign aid.

I will also like to pay homage and honor to the TED fellows -- June Arunga, James Shikwati, Andrew, and the other TED Fellows. I call them the Cheetah Generation.

The Cheetah generation is a new breed of Africans, who brook no nonsense about corruption. They understand what accountability and democracy is. They are not going to wait for government to do things for them. That is the Cheetah generation. And Africa’s salvation rests on the backs on these Cheetahs.

In contrast, of course, we have the Hippo generation. The Hippo generation are the ruling elites. They’re stuck in their intellectual patch, complaining about colonialism, and imperialism. They wouldn’t move one foot. If you asked them to reform their economies they are not going to reform it because they benefit from the rotten status quo.

Now, there are lots of Africans who are very ANGRY – ANGRY at the condition of Africa. Now, we are talking about a continent which is not poor but is rich in mineral resources -- natural mineral resources. But the mineral wealth has not been utilized to lift its people out of poverty. That’s what makes a lot of Africans very angry.

And in a way Africa is more than a tragedy in more ways than one. There is another enduring tragedy and that tragedy is there are so many people, so many governments and so many organizations who want to help a people in Africa they don’t understand.

Now, we are not saying don’t help Africa. Helping Africa is noble. But helping Africa has been turned into a theater of the absurd. It is like the blind leading the clueless.

There are certain things that we need to recognize. Africa’s begging bowl leaks.

Did you know that 40- percent of the wealth created in Africa is not invested here in Africa? It is taken out of Africa. That’s what the World Bank says.

Look at Africa’s begging bowl. It leaks -- horribly. There are people who think that we should pour more money – more aid -- into this bowl, which leaks. What are the leakages?

Corruption alone costs Africa $148 billion a year. Put that aside. Capital flight out of Africa: $80 billion a year. Put aside. Let’s take food imports. Every year Africa spends $20 billion a year to import food. Just add that up. All these leakages – that’s far more than the $50 billion Tony Blair wants to raise for Africa. Back in the 1960s, Africa not only fed itself but also exported food. Not any more.

We know that something has gone fundamentally wrong. You know it, I know it. But let’s not waste our time talking about these mistakes because we will spend all day here. Let’s move on and flip over to the next chapter. That what this conference is all about: The Next Chapter.

The next chapter begins with first of all by asking ourselves this fundamental question:

Whom do we want to help in Africa? There is the people, and then there is the government or the leaders. Now the previous speaker before me, Idris Mohamed, indicated that we’ve had abysmal leadership in Africa. That characterization, in my view, is even more charitable.

I belong to an internet discussion forum -- an African internet discussion forum – and

I asked them that since 1960, we have had exactly 204 African heads of state – since 1960. And I asked them to name me just 20 good leaders – just 20 good leaders. Maybe you may want to take this leadership challenge yourself. I asked them to name me just 20.

Everybody mentioned Nelson Mandela, of course. Kwame Nkrumah, Nyerere, Kenyatta. Somebody mentioned Idi Amin. I let that pass. Fact is, they could not go beyond 15. Even if they had been able to name me 20 what does that tell you? 20 out of 204 means that the majority – the vast majority of the African leaders failed their people. If you look at them, the slate of post-colonial leaders is an assortment of military fufu-heads, Swiss bank socialists, crocodile liberators, vampire elites, quack revolutionaries. Now, this leadership is a far cry from the traditional leaders Africans have known for centuries.

The second false premise we make is that, sometimes we think there is in Africa something called a “government” that cares about its people, serves the interest of the people and represents the people.

There is one particular quote. A Lesotho chief once said that: Here in Lesotho we have two problems: Rats and the governments.

What you and I understand as “governments’ doesn’t exist in many African countries.

In fact what we call our governments are “vampire states.” Vampires states because they suck the economic vitality out of their people. Government is the problem in Africa.

A vampire state is government which has been hijacked by a phalanx of bandits and crooks who use the instruments of state power to enrich themselves, their cronies, and tribesmen and exclude everyone else.

The richest people in Africa are heads of state and ministers. And quite often the chief bandit is the head of state himself. Where did they get their money? By creating wealth? No, by raking it off the backs of their suffering people. That is not wealth creation; that’s wealth redistribution.

The third fundamental issue that we have to recognize is that if we want to help the African people we must know where the African people are. Take any African economy. An African economy can be broken up into three sectors: There is the modern sector, there is the informal sector and the traditional sector.

The modern sector is the abode of the elites. It is the seat of government. In many African countries, the modern sector is lost; it is dysfunctional. It is a meretricious fandango of imported systems which the elites themselves don’t understand. That is the source of many of Africa’s problems -- where the struggles for political power emanate, and then spill over onto the informal and traditional sectors, claiming innocent lives.

Now, the modern sector, of course, is where a lot of the development aid and resources went into. More than 80 percent of Ivory Coast development went into the modern sector

The other sectors, the informal and traditional sectors, are where you can find the majority of the African people. The real people in Africa – that’s where you find them. Obviously it makes common sense that if you want to help the people you go where the people are. But that’s not what we did. As a matter of fact, we neglected the informal and traditional sectors.

The traditional sector is where Africa produces its agriculture, which is one of the reasons why Africa can’t feed itself. And that’s why it must import food. Alright . . .

You cannot develop Africa by ignoring the informal and traditional sectors And you can’t develop the informal and traditional without an operational understanding of how these two sectors work.

These two sectors, let me describe to you, have their own indigenous institutions. The first one is the political system. Traditionally, Africans hate government; they hate tyranny. If you look into their traditional systems, Africans organize their states in two types. The first one belongs to those ethnic societies who believe the state was necessarily tyrannous. So they didn’t want to have anything to do with any centralized authority. These societies are the Ibo, the Somali and the Kikuyu, for example. They have no chiefs.

The other ethnic groups which did have chiefs, made sure that they surrounded the chiefs with councils upon councils upon councils to prevent them from abusing their power. In the Ashanti Kingdom, for example, the chief cannot make any decision without the concurrence of the council of elders. Without the council, the chief can’t pass any law. And if the chief doesn’t govern according to the will of the people he would be removed. If not, the people will abandon the chief. Go somewhere else and set up a new settlement.

And even if you look into ancient African empires they were all organized around one particular principle: The confederacy principle, which is characterized by a great deal of devolution of authority, decentralization of power.

Now, this is what I have described to you -- this is part of Africa’s indigenous political heritage. Now compare that to the modern systems the ruling elites established upon Africa, on Africans. – a total far cry [from the traditional system].

In the economic system, in traditional Africa, the means of production are privately owned -- owned by extended families. See, in the west, the basic economic and social unit is the individual. The American would say: I am because I am and I can damn well do anything I want anytime. The accent is on the “I.”

In Africa, the Africans say I am because we are. The “we” connotes community-- the extended family system. The extended family system pulls its resources together; they own farms; they decide what to do; what to produce. They don’t take any orders from their chiefs. They decide what to do. And when they produce their crops, they sell the surplus on markets places. When they make a profit, it is theirs to keep; not for the chief to sequestrate from them.

In a nutshell, what we had in traditional Africa was a free market system. There were markets in Africa before the colonialists stepped foot on the continent. Timbuktu was one great big market town. Kano, Salaga, – they were all there. Even if you go to West Africa, you will notice that market activity in West Africa, has always been dominated by women. So it is quite appropriate that this section of the conference is called the Marketplace. The market is not alien to Africa.

What Africans practiced was a different form of capitalism. But then after independence, all of a sudden, markets, capitalism became a Western institution and the leaders said Africans were ready for socialism. Nonsense. And even then what kind of socialism did they practice? The socialism that they practiced was a peculiar form of “Swiss bank socialism” which allowed the head of state and his ministers to rape and plunder Africa’s treasury for deposit in Switzerland.

That is not the kind of system Africans have known for centuries. What do we do now? Go back to our Africa’s indigenous institutions. This is where we charge the Cheetahs to go into the informal sectors and traditional sectors. That’s where your find the African people

I would like to show you a quick little video about the informal sector, about the boat-building I myself am trying to mobilize Africans in the diaspora to invest in.

Could you please show that?

[Video runs]

Here is a Ghanaian entrepreneur, using his own capital without any assistance from the government and is building bigger boats. Bigger boats means that more fish can be caught and landed. It means that he would be able to employ more Ghanaians. And it also means that they will be to generate wealth. And then have, what economists call, “external effects” on the local economy.

All that the elites need to do is to move these operations into something that is enclosed so that the operations can be made more efficient.

Now, it is not just this informal sector, there is also traditional medicine. 80 percent of Africans still rely on traditional medicine. The modern health care sector has totally collapsed. Now, this is an area, I mean there is a trover – trover treasure of wealth in traditional medicine area. This is where we need to mobilize Africans in the diaspora especially to invest in this.

We also need to mobilize Africans in the diaspora, not only to go into the traditional sectors but also into agriculture and also to instigate change from within.

We were able mobilize Ghanaians in the diaspora to instigate change in Ghana and bring about democracy in Ghana and I know that with the Cheetahs we can take Africa back – one village at a time.

Thank you.