As a young man growing up in colonial-era Ghana, George Ayittey would confirm what he observed or how he felt with his mother. What he noticed was an intrinsic connection between women like his mother and the marketplace.
When George died earlier this month, we were reminded of a story he liked to tell about price controls. Normally, price controls are not an exciting topic, yet his story gripped us: Ghanaian soldiers used to ransack women’s market stalls and shave their heads — hair is very important to African women — as a form of humiliation. Their crime? The women were accused of overcharging according to the government price schedule.
This observation left an indelible mark on George. He made it his life’s work to call out corruption in all its hydra-headed forms. A common metaphor he liked to invoke was that of the complacent, greedy bureaucrat wallowing in the muck and setting the continent back, which he called “hippos,” pitted against the plucky African shopkeeper — fast-moving, entrepreneurial, overwhelmingly female — who were its saviors, the “cheetahs.”
That made him an early evangelist of free-market economics, but one led by native Africans and not imposed by outside investors, governments, or bureaucrats. He sought funding for African entrepreneurs, especially those working in natural industries such as palm oil and fishing.
His views on economics, though nowadays conventional wisdom, were considered radical among African Marxist intellectuals of the 1970s and 1980s. They won him few friends but many silent admirers and young students of economics such as the both of us.
Back then, almost nobody in Africa was talking about free markets as a path to prosperity. The discourse was around the African philosophy of ubuntu, or “I am because we are,” which naively held that Africans were by their very nature socialists and collectivists.
“Wait, no, they aren’t,” George thought. “Look at the African women in the market.”
The key point that George noticed yet nobody dared say aloud was that long before white men arrived, Africa was a bastion of free enterprise. No, it was not a panacea, but the common perception that African institutions had always been corrupt was false and, in his view, a foreign import. In fact, among pre-colonial African society, chieftains could not dominate their people, or the masses would simply kick them out and create a new tribe.
Even the one-man, one-vote style of democracy imposed from afar, George feared, would lead to tribal takeovers of government factions, impose winner-takes-all dynamics, and stimulate civil wars. He was correct.
His observations of the inner workings of African society made him the continent’s first, and perhaps harshest, critic of foreign aid long before the “dead aid” debates of the 1990s. His biggest bugaboo was military aid used to prop up despots and dictators.
Such iconoclastic views, delivered with passion and clarity, won him invitations to forums such as TED and other hubs of the jet-setting elite. We’ll never forget a heated discussion George got into with Bono back in 2007 at TED Global in Tanzania. They were arguing about the benefits of free trade. By the end of the debate, he had convinced the pop singer that free trade was more effective than foreign aid.
Never content to be just a boring technocrat or a tenured professor, he used his newfound soapbox to be a scourge of strongmen, champion of the dispossessed, and chronicler of government corruption. He liked to describe the African state as a “leaking begging bowl,” a “vampire” that sucked the lifeblood out of the economy.
His unorthodox views and moral passion won him many converts but also made him many enemies. That he lived to the ripe old age of 77 is almost a miracle. He spent multiple stints in prison for speaking his mind. His office was often ransacked and once received a bomb threat.
More so even than Nelson Mandela, George Ayittey transformed how Africans saw themselves and encouraged them to embrace their inner entrepreneur. If he were alive today, he would have fumed about the failure of price controls to deal with the continent’s current inflation problems. Yet it was his ability to observe human behavior, not crunch economic models, that gave him the foresight to see that Africa’s economic potential rested on the back of its cheetahs — the entrepreneurial women like his mother who ran its bustling markets.
Now if only the continent’s hippos would get out of the way, George’s vision of a prosperous Africa could take shape.
Magatte Wade is the director of the Africa Center for Prosperity of the Atlas Network. Michael Strong is the lead author of Be the Solution.
