BUY BLACK?—African States should spend the first shilling

The ultimate success of any protectionist measures—economic, intellectual, cultural and otherwise—in Africa, lies with the state.

It is the all-pervading nature, leviathan anatomy—to use Thomas Hobbes’s 200 year-old instructive phrase—and substantial resources of the state that can turn BUY BLACK or LIVE LOCAL campaigns on the continent into the victories they urgently need to become if our people are to survive the depredations of the carnivorously ruthless globalism we subsist under.

And yet present policy has seen the few governments on the continent that pay the issue any attention relegate it to a fringe side-dish served merely to supplement the laissez-faire breakfast of national conversation(s).

We cannot continue on this path, and if we have the faintest care to safeguard the future of our people and their children—then we ought to swing around the index finger of duty-apportioning to point squarely at the men and women reclined on the ostentatious sofa of state government.

Yet instead of doing just that, the hubbub around ‘Buying Black’ places the individual African consumer at the center of the arena of responsibility—and in a language redolent with neo-classical rhetoric—our political economists, social scientists and sundry intelligentsia absolve the state of its burden as a necessary, indispensable actor in the undertaking to secure Africa’s markets and stem the hemorrhage of her wealth.

To expect the individual in any economy to shoulder decisions that are meant to have structural impact on the workings of the market is to strap a Brobdingnag baby on the back of a Lilliputian mother.

And this situation becomes even more acute in Africa—where the entrenched deficiencies of our people render them particularly ill-suited to bearing the intellectual and fiscal crucifixes that are rightfully their governments’.

All shades of economic theory are agreed on the notion that individuals make spending decisions on the basis of self-interest. This is the central idea in game theory, which lends its conclusions about this predictable human selfishness to decision-makers in public and private lending, investment and regulatory institutions.

States on the other hand—make (or are expected to make) decisions based on collective interest. They are supposed to plan for everybody’s interest, rather than any given or particular someone’s objectives.

For explanations ranging from evolutionary predisposition to Edenic iniquity—these two ends happen to be perennially parallel, and just like many Ugandans’ current economic fortunes, are unlikely to be made to easily meet.

So the interesting thing about collective interest is that it often, if not always, flies in the face of self-interest.

To illustrate—let’s say that a national highway is planned to be built straight through my clan’s burial grounds. In that case, I’d retain every right, as an individual market-actor, to resist the government’s attempts to build that road—even if it means, as is often the case south of Africa’s Sahara, resorting to the defenses of symbolic heirloom and taking up my grandfather’s spear to chase the road contractor from my village.

Conversely, the state as a ‘‘collective person’’ is duty bound to disregard any endearments I may harbor toward my dead ancestors’ bones and, with the brusque, remorseless help of a few emotionally uninhibited excavators—cart the skeletal debris away before placing a tarmac carpet over the site; which development should rightly expedite the next market trip for the old woman in the village after mine.

The moral in this is to say that macroeconomics must precede microeconomics in the movement to ‘Buy Black’—through policy instruments engineered by the state, to effectively limit the options available to the individual consumer, whose perceived ‘competition’ with fellow individual actors in the same economy may compel them to buy clothes or raw materials for their factory from Guangdong or Mumbai to teach their ‘citizen competitor’ a ‘‘lesson’’.

The choices made at a microeconomic level cannot be relied on to be entirely rational and wholly objective—susceptible as they are to the trivialities of jealousy, ill will, outright sabotage etc.—among citizens operating in the same market who inevitably (even understandably) see each other as direct competition for the same finite resources.

As an average African consumer of this ilk—I’d thus rather buy my child’s plastic schoolbag from a distant, anonymous Yemeni importer than from the hand-woven stock of a Ugandan neighbor whose clan is famous for witchcraft, or whose daughter may be doing better than mine in the classroom they share.

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In continuing to consider these issues, perhaps the final argument would/should be that of sustainability.

Economies—in seeking to redistribute (for better or worse) the finite resources present in them, work in transactional loops and market cycles. If money eventually leaves the system, it doesn’t matter how it exited circulation, or at what stage of the loop it was expropriated.

Let’s say I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Pan-African who doggedly wears bark-cloth underwear and suits tailored from Kanga and Vitenge fabric. And to seal the bargain, I insist that these my indispensable items of apparel be made by seamstresses in a needy women’s group working out of a hole-in-the-wall workshop in a slovenly Kampala suburb. Let’s allow for Bwaise.

So after I’ve done my part in purchasing her Uganda-made Kanga product, let’s then say the poor seamstress—in seeking to look beautiful for her Taxi-driver boyfriend, then takes the money and uses it to do the only appropriate thing imaginable in an African female’s context, in this case buying Brazilian hair extensions and Thai mascara.

Do you then see how all my (microeconomic) Pan-African pretensions—starched smallclothes notwithstanding— become a sorry joke?

If on the other hand, though, Ugandan macroeconomic policy made it impossible through import restrictions—for the hair of Brazil’s female corpses to find its way onto the heads of Ugandan women—then perhaps our Pan-Africanism wouldn’t be the ridiculous pantomime it’s currently been made out to be.

© Surumani Manzi