During my sojourn as a freelancer, I had a few notable run-ins with colleagues during the heated Slack conversations that are commonplace in newsrooms. In each of those altercations, what masqueraded as a difference of opinion quickly shed the disguise and revealed itself as personal dislike.
This dislike was not based on any significant work issue, seeing as none of us had ever actually met each other in person. It always came down to the fact that someone felt that I was somehow not sticking to “my place” as an African.
In 2019, I wrote an opinion piece deconstructing the extreme right wing ecosystem on the western political spectrum, and how it effectively nurtures domestic terrorists like Christchurch shooter Branton Tarrant, from “innocent” gateways like Swedish YouTube celebrity Felix Kjellberg AKa ‘PewDiePie.’. This analysis was so well received that I was interviewed for an hour on Swedish public service broadcaster P1 Sveriges Radio.
On the internal Slack channel however, I was angrily attacked by two Trump-voting American colleagues, one of whom openly identified as a white supremacist. They wanted to know, what gave me the standing to write on Western political issues? Shouldn’t I be writing about Boko Haram or Female Genital Mutilation or something? Who did this African think he was? A few slurs accompanied the thoughts. In my characteristic style, a few choice words from me made it such that the ‘argument’ ended very quickly and to date, I would imagine the mention of my name inspires terror in the heart of anyone called
Samatha Chang.
What if the minute Africa starts to rock the international trade boat by moving up the value chain, its products are simply knocked back by a world that is already struggling to deal with the economic rise of Asia over the past 30 years?
Sparring victory notwithstanding, that and other exchanges eventually led me to a realisation.
If Africa produces – who buys?
When we talk about Africa improving its productivity and improving its global trading power by moving up the value chain, something we often neglect to account for is that a vision for an Africa that engages in
high tech service and material exports automatically requires a world that is willing to pay for such things. What if the existing international trade paradigm simply does not have enough space for a prosperous Africa?
What if like my former colleagues at CCN.com (not to be confused with CNN, which I have also worked for), the world simply does not expect Africa to ever export anything other than cheap natural resources? What if those of us on the continent who are fortunate enough to be relevant in global terms are simply intended to be a privileged everlasting minority? What if the minute Africa starts to rock the international trade boat by moving up the value chain, its products are simply knocked back by a world that is
already struggling to deal with the economic rise of Asia over the past 30 years?
The problem with my written analysis had nothing to do with its quality – in fact it was so extensively researched and convincingly presented that it was cited as a resource by multiple established media
platforms and journalists. The entire problem was down to who wrote it – the international journalism world did not have space for an African based in Africa writing from a global perspective on specific Western issues without making any reference to Africa. That particular market for perceived liberal
analysis and commentary belonged to middle aged British men with names like Tim McSweeney and Anthony Verheijen – not 28 year-old Nigerian men called David Inyene-Obong Hundeyin. What was the world supposed to do with me?
It may sound trite, but I believe there could well be a parallel between that instance and a hypothetical scenario where Africa suddenly out of the blue stops exporting raw materials and starts manufacturing
consumer goods for export instead. The preponderance of cheap consumer goods made in Asia has already created a real political crisis – typified by Donald Trump – in the Western world, as its erstwhile industrial economies have been hollowed out and shipped to the Far East. While the giant Asia problem remains unresolved, what would an export-oriented industrial Africa do to the world economy?
As more than 2 billion Asians have risen out of poverty over the past 40 years, the Western world has reached the limits of its political stability. It has balanced the loss of industrial jobs with the emergence of cheap and plentiful consumer goods and experiences. The Asian world in turn has placated its restive populations with consistent economic growth led by exports to the Western world. This delicate balancing act would be completely destroyed if 1 billion+ Africans suddenly joined the party and offered potentially even cheaper goods than Asia. Is such a global economy even feasible?
My approach to African economic growth
I believe that the scenario described above is not practical and could very well lead to armed conflict between nuclear-armed world powers – or the end of the world as that could otherwise be called. I think that the impact of over 1 billion new people entering the global arena to jostle for export market space would be nothing short of disastrous. Africa might benefit in the short term if such a thing were to happen, but in the long term the entire global economic balance would be destroyed as the world would
regress into a fearful race to the bottom.
In my case, my solution to the conundrum was to redirect my efforts away from trying to disrupt the global commentary space with a geographically dislocated pitch-perfect liberal viewpoint and become more Africa-focused. It is important to point out that this does not mean that I essentially took a racist’s words to heart and ran back to play on my familiar local turf, leaving the global turf for them. What it does mean is that I thought it through and concluded that there was no point fighting for new “export share” in a market already saturated with similar products.
For one thing, the only way I would ever be able to compete would be price. Despite my portfolio and list of awards, which significantly exceeded most of my colleagues, I was rarely paid the same, and only once was I paid more – a state of affairs that did not last long. The harsh reality is that as an African producing a high quality processed material or service export for the global market, you have very little control over the
price you are given, and you are constantly expected to be grateful for even being there. It is a market dominated by people who are not used to seeing Africans doing anything other than being on the bottom rung of the ladder – it may not be a winnable fight.
My solution would be to focus all productive and export efforts on Africa itself. If we think of Africa’s 1.3 billion people as an economic opportunity rather than just mouths to feed, it is possible to leverage this huge potential continental economy to achieve scale in such a way as to render the global game secondary. If – and this is a very big ‘if’ – the AfCFTA implementation segments different African regions by productivity, and assigns each region specific export quotas for certain products and services to
be traded exclusively across the continent, it is possible to accumulate wealth in a manner not too different to how the USA accumulated wealth in the late 19th and early 20th century – a time when exports to the world played a distinctly secondary role in its economy.
This does not mean that Africa should go the Juche route and shut its doors on the rest of the world petulantly -global cooperation is key to research and development- but it does offer Africa a way out of raw material-exporting and permanent poverty, without being subjected to the whims of a world that simply cannot conceive of Africa not being a basket case.
I personally adopted that strategy, and the article you have just read is one of the results.
