“Free cities” can save Africa from poverty
The search for a recipe to solve poverty is as old as humanity itself. Poverty is destructive. It shortens people’s lives and makes it a living hell; it erodes quality of life; it suffocates hope; it leaves children and old people hungry and cold. When politics create expectations that the economy cannot provide for, it leads to protests and civil wars.
A poor majority with political power who governs a minority with relative economic power creates a recipe for tension. Therefore, solving poverty is in everyone’s interest – rich and poor alike. The short-cuts of government-powered socialism brought us to dead ends, poverty and oppression. But there is hope.
Over the past decades, economic growth in countries such as China and India has helped hundreds of millions of people to escape poverty. The question remains, however, whether or not Africa as a whole will discover the correct recipe for prosperity, especially since many African countries like Mauritius have been showing rapid economic growth for a while now. The challenge is that the standard recipe for success, which entails free markets, property rights, the rule of law, entrepreneurship and the downscaling of the State’s role remain too high a hurdle for historically leftist governments such as the ANC.
Therefore, smaller pilot projects that can be expanded are more economically viable. The Head Economist and Vice President of the World Bank Dr Paul Romer’s imaginative idea of free cities could be such pilot projects, especially since these played a significant role in the economic emergence of communist China.
Free cities