By Ray Youssef, CEO of P2P marketplace, NoOnes
When I went with some of the NoOnes team to Kenya to make the keynote speech at the Catholic University of Eastern Africa, I never thought I’d be dodging tear gas canisters and water cannons on the streets of Nairobi a few days later. I’d been in those situations before, but it was a shock to see Kenyans come out in huge numbers. They were protesting a finance bill by the government that included tax hikes on various goods, including basic necessities like bread. The cost-of-living crisis is already out of control in Kenya, and that bill was going to make it much worse.
The President, William Ruto, campaigned on reducing taxes and lowering the cost of living, and some Kenyans thought he had broken his promises. Many, particularly the Kenyan youth, said they’d had enough. It’s a familiar story we hear all the time, and one I’ve been talking about for years, but maybe things are finally about to change in Africa because the speed with which the Kenyan youth took to the streets was astonishing.
For years, I’ve been advocating an end to financial apartheid in Africa because when you say ‘your money’s no good’ or ‘we won’t trade with you,’ the end result is a failed economy and chaos like we saw on the streets of Nairobi. The global financial system has tied us down and kept us down, and I know how we can fix the problem. The solution is to focus on Pan-African trade, and the keys to making it work are a universal currency like crypto and peer-to-peer marketplaces like NoOnes. This revolution must be driven by the African people, and the thousands of Kenyans who took to the streets showed me that changes are happening already.
Africans have had enough of the West telling them what to do for 400 years.
We are now in the final phase of the P2P revolution – we first got the Internet and then the portable P2P devices we all keep in our pockets. After that, a wave of startups disrupted everything from transportation, hospitality, communications, and every other industry except money – until we got Bitcoin P2P electronic cash in 2008. That final step is now in its final phase, and, when it’s complete, Africa will be the first continent to reap the benefits.
Africa leads the world in resources, youth, population growth, and crypto adoption, and it will ride the wave that follows after we break the financial stranglehold the West maintains over the continent. But we have to be smart. We have to play the same game the rest of the world is playing. Most people think the West goes into Africa to plunder their resources and use Africans for slave labor, but that’s only half-true. The real reason the West wants to control Africa is because it is a great market for their products. It’s always been that way.
The Western colonization of Africa 150 years ago – called “The Scramble for Africa” – was mostly about European nations selling their ‘colonized peoples’ goods, and they did it with very little capital investment. They invested just enough to get what they wanted, and today they do the same thing. Africa’s biggest trading partner is the EU, followed by China, and their combined trade with Africa is more than double the trade ALL African nations have with each other. In 2020, only 18% of African exports and 15% of African imports were with other African nations (intra-trade).
Why don’t African nations trade with each other? Could it have anything to do with the global financial system making intra-trade difficult? Could it be the WTO, the World Bank and the IMF influencing African political leaders and economic policy? Do we grow, build, service and manufacture what Africans need, or do we do what the West tells us to do? It used to be that Western colonizers put a gun to our heads and told us what to do. Now, the gun to our heads is loaded with financial consequences instead of bullets.
The global elites pull levers to force African leaders into doing what benefits the West. This has been happening for years. The structural adjustment programs (SAP’s) at the beginning of the 1980s were supposed to help African countries free themselves of debt. Instead, they made the problem worse because African countries were forced to borrow money to pay-off debt. Below is an example of what happens when you follow these IMF diktats:
In 1980, the combined debt owed by African nations was USD$567 billion
These countries paid back over USD$1,600 billion (almost 3 times the amount owed) between 1980 and 1992 – 12 years
By 1992, they still owed more than USD $1,400 billion
All those policies are wrong, they are the essence of financial apartheid, and I’m calling for a Pan African trade revolution. This revolution is not a battle of armies, or even a series of pitched battles in the streets – many people were injured during the protests in Kenya and one person died while we were there. Many others have since died as the protests continue. We don’t want people to die, and that’s part of the reason I am writing this article. This revolution is about trading with each other and keeping the wealth created by Africans in Africa, and we can achieve it with the tools we already have. We don’t need to put our bodies on the line in the streets.
The first version of Bitcoin included protocols to build a marketplace, and I’ve honored Satoshi’s original vision by building CivKit, a decentralized, open source protocol we are giving away so people in Africa can compete with me. Any African entrepreneur with almost any business idea can use crypto as a means of exchange and create a marketplace with CivKit to sell their goods and services globally and it will cost them nothing.
Satoshi created Bitcoin to start the ball rolling, and we want to keep it rolling by building more marketplaces that can unleash crypto’s full potential. I want competition because it increases trade, and we need trade to make sure we are all prosperous and masters of our destinies. If we conduct this revolution the right way, we will end our reliance on the USD and the Euro, the Western banking system, the IMF, the World Bank, and all the charities that come here and don’t really change anything. We don’t need charity – we need freedom and the opportunity to build our own future.
I used to say that Africa had a self-esteem problem – that we believe the myth that says the continent is full of poverty, disease, and corruption. I’m sure there is still some way to go on the self-branding front, but I am filled with hope when I see the Kenyan youth rise up like they did a few days ago. They communicated on social media, they mobilized on the streets, and they acted. The hashtag #RejectFinanceBill2024 crossed 2 million posts in a few days, and the government was first forced into a partial backdown by scrapping parts of the proposed tax hikes, and now they scrapped the bill entirely. It’s not a major victory, but every step on the road to freedom counts.
The people who control us won’t be able to beat an army of mosquitoes.
Contributed by:
Ray Youssef, NoOnes CEO
𝕏 @ray_noOnes
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