(Article: Guest Writer)
First of all, before any word can make sense about the system we may think of as global citizens generally, and African people particularly, we must at least understand what is going on in the world today. According to Oxfam international, in January 2016 only 62 people possessed as much wealth as half of the world, one year later Oxfam reported that half of the world’s wealth was now owned by only eight men. We can thank the Professor Peter Phillips with his book Giants (2018) in which he emphasized that, the wealth concentration under the current capitalist system has been happening so rapidly that it is feasible that someday soon one man will hold more wealth than half the humans in the world. Actually, we can take this further and warn you that the end goal of the Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC) is that one day one individual must own the entire planet as his private property. This is certainly the objective, or one of the objectives of the engineers of capitalism, they have come all the way from being millionaires, today they are multi-billionaires and are busy racing for trillions and finally what? According to sociologist William I. Robinson, the TCC no longer have many sectors to invest their excess capital with a potential of maximum return, the only three options available to them currently are: risky financial speculation, wars and war preparation, and the privatization of public institutions.
Currently, we are living in a time and a world of overabundance, with the world’s total wealth estimated to be close to $255 trillion, the world has never been as rich as it is today, but how this wealth is redistributed is a matter of the economic system people design. Actually, despite how wealthy our world has become 80 percent of the world’s people live on less than $10 per day, the poorest half of the global population lives on less than $2.50 per day, and more than 1.3 billion people live only on $1.25 per day. Let’s not talk about 795 million people on the planet who are suffering from chronic hunger, 3.1 million children under the age of 5 who are dying each year from hunger or twenty-five thousand per day. Meanwhile, the capital concentration still happening between the top 1 percent of the pyramid, even during the pandemic crisis that has exacerbated the economic situation of the world and destroyed many businesses, the TCC continues to accumulate wealth. To illustrate this according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the world’s 500 richest people added $1.8 trillion to their combined net worth in 2020.
At the core of all these problems and many other challenges facing the human family is “inequality” which itself is structured within the capitalist system. In reality almost everyone agrees that there is a problem with capitalism as an economic system, and since the problem has been identified it is every person’s responsibility to think about the solution. Hence, it is an intelligent move for Africans to think about the economic solutions respective to the manner in which the current system affects them, and also in terms of the resources available to them. However, we cannot trust the engineers of the capitalist system to solve the economic problems if we really need to change the narrative, only we can suggest the solution and our solution is in the following lines.
Proposed Name: Kati-kati economic system, (Kati-kati is a Swahili word that means in the middle)
Definition
The proposed alternative African economic system is called the Kati-kati economy, which bases its theory on the African philosophy of Ubuntu, and on the shortcomings of the capitalist system which mainly are: inequality and environmental degradation. The Kati-kati economy is a system that maintains a social balance to ensure that the use of natural resources in a society is equal to a calibrated accumulation and distribution of wealth in that society.
Operation
Every society has natural resources on which rely its economy, the exploitation of resources results in the creation of wealth in the society. However, most natural resources are limited, thus the wealth accumulation by members of a society should also be limited to ensure sustainability. In other words, every society should have a top-limit of the wealth one individual can amass, and when that limit is reached the revenues made by the same individual should be redirected to create opportunities for other members of the society.
There are principally two structural changes the Kati-kati economic system aims to achieve in society, one is to reduce extreme economic inequality and the second is to reduce environmental degradation, and to maintain a balanced utilization of natural resources between the current and the future generations.
Firstly, in the current economic system (capitalism) the gap between poor and rich is continually widening as we have seen in the above statistics. By setting a limit on the amount of wealth one person can have in the society it will result in a truthfully trickle-down economy to the rest of the people. It means that whenever an individual reaches the limit, the excess he or she makes will be directed to other investments that will be aiming to create economic opportunities for other members of the society.
Secondly, the motto of capitalists is growth by all means, and this puts the environment under heavy pressure. In order for the wealth to be created people have to exploit natural resources which are also in limited quantities, and they get depleted as people exploit them. Since the capitalists are racing to have trillions in their bank accounts they must triple the exploitation of oil, gases and other natural resources, the massive exploitations and transformations of resources pollute the water and the air, the process also creates the greenhouse-effect gases. The most devastating effect of massive exploitations is the depletion of minerals, oil, gases, arable lands and other resources our societies depend on and the difficulty of future generations to live with scarce resources. It is convenient that we must by law limit the wealth expansion by one individual, and that will also limit the massive exploitation of resources and release some pressure on the environment.
Application
Certainly, this presentation provides a model or skeleton of the economic system that we are promoting through ACUP, but the application of it is a matter of broad studies and discussions in respect with natural resources that every country possesses. However, it is not difficult to find an estimated monetary value of the wealth limitation in a particular society, because it easy to estimate the amount of resources the land possesses and the demographic development of a society for a given period. Based on those estimations a number can be designed for a particular society of how much wealth people are allowed to acquire in that society.
Conclusion
We must shamelessly realize that unlimited wealth accumulation is the core of many conflicts that have cost many lives in this world. Wars, ruthless competitions and monopoly have been all necessary in the economic system that allows a few individuals to own the entire planet as their private property. We must also realize that everything is limited in this world starting from the resources that produce the wealth, but how should it be not logical to limit also the wealth accumulations?