This article below was first published on June 4th 2009, and is republished as a tribute to the late Prof. Wangari Maathai. Founder of the Green Belt Movement as well as the first African Woman Nobel Laureate, Prof. Maathai was indeed a trail-blazer. Her life and courageous achievements will always serve as a role model for us all. Let us continue to fight Disempowerment. R.I.P. Prof. Wangari Maathai - Ed
An ethical business revolution is emerging
Prof. Maathai writes that as a result of the G20 London meeting where leaders pledged more funds for development aid to Africa, she was concerned that this injection may not be effective in enabling Africans to rise out of the poverty, as the money may not in this case be spent effectively.
Prof. Maathai goes back to one of the root causes of poverty naming powerlessness or disempowerment as a key factor in its perpetuation. African leaders in the past (and some today) have been deified to the point where they took all the power, leaving the common African dependent on them to make all the decisions.
This resulted in a feudal scenario where the common man was beholden to the ‘mweshimiwa’ (Honourable person) for almost everything ranging from allocation of relief food, to obtaining jobs for relatives and school fees handouts.
Prof. Maathai posits that this disempowerment has infected the psyche so that even one’s self esteem and dignity have been derogated. She writes:
“Disempowerment - whether defined in terms of a lack of self-confidence, apathy, fear, or an inability to take charge of one's own life - is perhaps the most unrecognised problem in Africa today. To the disempowered, it seems much easier or even more acceptable to leave one's life in the hands of third parties (governments, aid agencies, and even God) than to try to alleviate one's circumstances through one's own effort.”
She terms this as a syndrome that has been so far neglected by policy makers and development pundits. And it is this same alienation of the common man, that has allowed corruption to seep right down to Africa’s (grass)roots.
A matter of survival
Prof. Maathai in the Open Democracy article tells the story of the macadamia nut farmers in her constituency (pre-2008 when she was a Kenyan Member of Parliament) who approached her for assistance. The macadamia nut industry is indeed a lucrative sector, and not only for the nut’s edible attributes. The nut’s active ingredients have been used for many products ranging from cosmetics to sexual dysfunction aids. Kenya is in the fortunate position of being climatically suitable for growing macadamia trees, so of course it was not surprising that many farmers have entered this sector.
This should have been the vehicle to prosperity for the farmers who approached Prof. Maathai when she was their Member of Parliament. However and this also applies to the plight of Africa’s youth entrepreneurs, disempowerment is what caused their macadamia nut project to flounder and is also what causes enterprise death amongst the majority of young enterprises.
Brokers, middle men and “connections” agents
Due to their lack of resources, most small enterprises have to go through brokers, middlemen or whatever other names they go by. For the macadamia farmers they had to go through a broker to link them to an exporter. In the case of the young entrepreneur starting out, if they want to get work from a large company or even the government, they too need a middleman who sub-contracts the work out to them. They are thus not masters of their own business, having to share profits with these brokers, who for the most part hardly incur any costs of their own.
However, as is also the case in the macadamia nut farmers story, asymmetry of market knowledge in the broker’s favour translates into a higher “brokerage” fee which if not paid means the end of that enterprise.
The green eyed monster
Prof. Maathai’s macadamia farming constituents also complained that as their standard of living began to overtly manifest the effects of increased household income, they became targets for theft from neighbours. This theft had serious repercussions. She writes:
“… the farmers were unhappy. When we met, they explained that, because there was so much money to be made in the macadamia nuts, their neighbours, also farmers, had begun to steal. Now, macadamia nuts need to be fully ripe to be ready for processing, and they are not fully ripe until they fall to the ground. But some people (the farmers told me) had started shaking the trees before the nuts were ripe, in order to make them fall … In the end, the greed had become so enormous that some individuals had simply crept onto the farmers' land at night, cut down the trees, and hauled them away, so they could harvest every single nut for themselves.”
This same avarice and wanting to reap where one has not sown is what has brought many young businesses to come to an abrupt end. In a scenario where an entrepreneur is climbing the financial ladder, they also have to face their peers ostracising them. Comments such as “I wonder how so and so made so much money in such a short time … they must have stolen it ...” begin to emerge.
Jump aboard and hijack the product
Eventually as even the macadamia thieves started selling poor quality nuts, the middle-man told the farmers he wouldn’t buy any more nuts from them. So what began as a very promising income generating activity that would have eventually enriched the entire community simply died.
Taking a walk through African cities, one notices that the enterprises operated by the youth tend to fall within a narrow category of retail business types. There is hardly any manufacturing and even more disturbing is the lack of innovativeness on the part of youth entrepreneurs. Just how many pirated DVD shops can a city have? The answer to that question depends on how many young entrepreneurs there are. This may sound cynical, but if one just strolls through Africa’s business districts patterns of mobile phone accessory shops, small clothing stalls and the emerging number of cramped cyber café’s tell the story of an over-saturation of enterprise but no individual firm growth. It’s no wonder most of these outfits hardly last a year.
The failure of a colonial developed education system
Education has also failed Africans. In countries such as Kenya and Nigeria, the education system was geared towards creating employees and not employers. Farming and agriculture have also been variously frowned on as backwards. Prof. Maathai writes:
“Such farmers may have little or no formal education, and may therefore be functionally or actually illiterate. Even if they are able to read or write, they lack access to written materials or the internet to inform themselves about the crops that are their primary source of income.”
Likewise, the formal education system has let down young entrepreneurs. By not inculcating financial literacy, business and personal management skills, how then can a person of say 19, 25 or even 35 years be expected to start and grow a profitable enterprise?
Working together for the greater common good
Apart from institutional challenges the macadamia farmers faced, ultimately Maathai writes that it was “own failure to understand the consequences of its self-destructive actions. Instead of working together to further the common good of their communities, each person pursued his individual interests - and all lost.”
Just as the macadamia thieves ruined this entire industry, so have unethical entrepreneurs also sullied the name of business. So often cases are brought to our attention at Yipe of ruthless middle-men who give out work to young entrepreneurs and yet do not pay them their just dues.
Similar to the macadamia thieves, as Prof. Maathai writes this is corruption, nothing else. It doesn’t matter whether it is at the farm level, the local kiosk or State House. Living off the sweat of another is corruption.
However there is a ray of light beginning to emerge. Groups are now being formed leveraging social media to fight this corruption by raising awareness of these rogue entrepreneurs.
So as Prof. Wangari Maathai writes, there is an ethical revolution in the making. And young entrepreneurs are sure to be in the fore-front of this change.
