AN OPTIMAL WORLD FOR AFRICA

It’s a goal worth pursuing by the world, argues

 OLUSEGUN AYO ADEBANJO

I have pondered this subject for a long time as a worthy goal for the world to pursue, and wondered if such an agreement could be negotiated between the West and Africans and what it would look like. So I asked Claude AI the following question and got the subsequent answer. It says it all:

Model a world in which the western world gets all the access it needs to the resources of African countries at the price it currently pays, but in which African countries are not undermined politically and economically such that they are free to elect good leaders and provide economic development and welfare meeting the basic needs of food, clothing, shelter, quality education and primary health for all their people.

This is a genuinely interesting thought experiment essentially asking: can resource extraction and African flourishing coexist, and what would that require?

The current system is not accidental. Low commodity prices for African resources are structurally maintained through political instability, debt dependency, currency manipulation, and support for corruptible leaders. You can’t simply keep the prices and remove the mechanisms that enforce them so this model imagines a world where the West voluntarily accepts a different bargain, or where African states gain enough collective leverage to demand one without the usual punishment.

In this reimagined world, African states are free from externally sponsored coups, IMF and World Bank conditionality that forces privatization and austerity, and foreign interference in elections. African populations, freed from engineered instability, elect governments oriented toward public welfare as they have repeatedly tried to do when given the chance. Sankara, Lumumba, Nkrumah all removed externally.

On trade, African states retain the right to add value domestically refining oil, processing minerals, manufacturing goods rather than exporting raw materials at low margins. The price the West pays stays similar, but they’re buying more processed goods, meaning more value stays in Africa. Royalty and tax regimes are set by African governments at levels that fund public services, without capital flight enabled by Western tax havens. Debt is renegotiated to levels that don’t require resource revenues to service loans instead of funding development. Multinationals pay full taxes locally, don’t engage in transfer pricing to shift profits offshore, and comply with environmental standards comparable to those in their home countries. In exchange, they get stable, long-term resource access arguably more reliable than today’s, which is periodically disrupted by the very instability the current system generates.

With resource revenues actually reaching public budgets, countries like the DRC, Nigeria, Zambia, and Guinea would have fiscal bases comparable to Gulf states relative to population. Governments invest in universal healthcare, free quality education, social housing, and agricultural infrastructure. The brain drain reverses as domestic opportunities expand. Democratic institutions consolidate because leaders become accountable to tax-paying citizens rather than foreign patrons. The so-called “oil curse” gets broken, the curse was never really about oil; it was always about who the revenues served.

For the West, resource access becomes more stable and uninterrupted than today, since it no longer depends on propping up fragile regimes. Commodity prices remain similar and long-term supply security improves. The political cost is real Western governments lose a tool of foreign policy leverage, corporations lose the ability to externalize costs onto African populations, and tax havens lose significant business. But a prosperous Africa is also an enormous consumer market. The current system extracts short-term rents while foreclosing a much larger long-term economic relationship that would benefit the West as well.

This world is technically coherent. African countries are not poor because they lack resources they are among the most resource-rich regions on earth. The poverty is a governance and distribution problem, and the governance problem has as many external causes as internal ones. What makes this world difficult to reach is purely political: it requires the West to accept a redistribution of the surplus from African resources, surrendering rents that currently flow to Western corporations, financial centers, and governments. The closest real-world analogs already prove the model works Botswana negotiated better diamond terms with De Beers and built a functional state. Norway built a sovereign wealth fund from oil. The components are proven. Only the political will is missing.

My conclusion is simple. The West gets what it wants and Africans get what they need. Less orchestrated conflict, substantially reduced poverty and misery, and a genuine win-win resulting in a happier, more prosperous and peaceful world. A grand bargain that is enforceable under the World Trade Organization and other international frameworks. What’s not to like? We simply need to psychologically break from the “Hunger Games” mentality old habits born of scarcity and dog-eat-dog survival that have served their time and are no longer optimal. Especially now, as the AI age permits new thinking and a renewed humanity.

 “Rex” Ayo Adebanjo is a venture capitalist, Entrepreneur, and a Managing Director of Rearden

Capital IMG, an incubator firm that founded and developed some of the leading innovative

commercial firms and creative enterprises in Africa such as Starsight Energy, a leading commercial solar

energy company