Week 20: Crafting an alternative ideology - What African systems can teach the world

Neo-liberalism is not a physical tower that we can tear down and wish away. Its an ideology - a set of dominant ideas and beliefs that we use to make sense of and propagate the social order. No one really "owns" it but consciously and subconsciously we abide by it, often because we do not know any better....the lesser evil so to say. It is the lens through which we craft new solutions to new problems reinterpreting the core neo - liberalism tenets of individualism, privatization and market solutions to incentivize solutions to human problem.

The calls for a different trajectory are now deafening as it becomes clearer that humanity is threatened by the resultant destabilizing structure of toxic inequality, unstable financial and political systems and a world that is heating up, literary.

The same conditions that precipitated the evolution from Keynesian to neoliberal economics are now manifest - massive unemployment, inflation and slow (to negative) growth. The center can no longer hold.

However, it is not a question of turning back the clock to a 'glorious past' (only in the fantasy). Rather it is critically reflecting on the present to design the future. Further, an ideology does not come about as a "big bang" "before and after" event - rather replicated small-scale real-world social experiments. For instance before the world finally settled on the big word "neoliberalism" the common words used were "thatcherism" and "Reaganism" signaling the early adopters in Britain and USA in the 1970's who championed what were then radical and highly unpopular policies of cutting down on social welfare, reducing minimum wage and making the public pay for education and healthcare, a stance which was hitherto was sacrosanct. Seeing the immediate wins realized by these two leaders especially in flipping out of stagflation, many other political leaders played copycat to their states hoping to reap the benefits - one key player in the replication was Deng Xiaoping the Chinese leader credited for the transformation of China to the powerhouse it is today.

In a similar fashion the neoliberal alternative will not result from the "big - bang" but early adopters whose working formula will diffuse to the critical mass to define the new way of crafting social order. Again, similar to the neoliberal transition - the early adopters often stem from the locations that are in the deepest pain in the current hegemony. Arguably, that situates Africa as the genesis of the foot soldiers for the new sense making... and the experiments have been underway since the 1990's with luminaries of Nobel Laureate Wangari Maathai, Rwanda president Paul Kagame, Johannesburg Right to the City, Constitutional changes centered on devolution and participation. Black lives matter (inclusionary) breaking down the tenets of imperialism that politicize differences and instead realizing the "moments" of deracialization, detribalization and de-ethnicization

These are rooted in defining conditions that will transcend socially constructed differences (of race, religion, tribe, ethnicity or gender) and facilitate the possibility of sustainable humanity.

1. Wangari Maathai - challenging the position of man at the center and showing the way for the Africentric holonic approach in the Green Belt movement

2. Rwanda president Paul Kagame - challenging the idea of justice through individual responsibility by presenting an alternative of the Gacaca restitutive justice. Conflict was a reality in the African context, as was in the famous "world wars" that were really European wars. The major difference from the western justice was that if and when a resolution was negotiated in Africa (till today), the objective went beyond abstentation from collisions and individual punishment. It sought attainment of reconciliation. Reconciliation is a form of consensus that dominates African social order. In African political and justice system there is no dominant and lesser - all had a voice and its strength was not defined by the stamping the mob desire, but according the minority their voice and place in creating a resilient society.

3. M-PESA success and the resilience of the informal small scale "Kadogo" economics - challenging the structure of social security and financing. The human economy - oikonomics is back in fashion - a gift from Africa to the world.

The moment of change is never a time stamp but a gradual progression and awakening to the realization of a better more dignified world.