Money as a Weapon: How Monetary Economy Undermines African Development — and Why Non-Monetary National Systems Are the Path to Liberation
BY: OMOLAJA MAKINEE
Introduction: When Abundance Produces Poverty
Africa is poor not because it lacks resources, labour, intelligence, or history of economic organisation. Africa is poor because it has been forced to measure abundance through a foreign monetary lens that converts self-sufficiency into scarcity and cooperation into debt.
The tragedy of the African condition is not material deprivation; it is monetary alienation. Resources that originate on African land—oil, minerals, food, labour, energy—now require foreign currencies to access, process, and distribute. What once functioned as a cooperative economy governed by entitlement, reciprocity, and communal obligation has been weaponised through money.
Here I argue that monetary economy is not a neutral tool of exchange in Africa—it is a mechanism of control. I further argues that non-monetary national accounting systems, grounded in cooperative entitlement and commicratic organisation, are not a collapse of economic order but its restoration.
1. The Great Paradox: Owning Resources but Needing Dollars to Use Them
In no other region of the world does this paradox appear as starkly as in Africa:
- Resources originate locally,
- Labour is local,
- Environmental cost is local,
- Yet access requires foreign currency.
An African State may sit atop gold, oil, cocoa, lithium, or fertile land, but cannot develop these resources without sourcing dollars, euros, or pounds. Even when the resource never leaves African soil, its extraction, processing, and circulation are priced externally. This is not market efficiency. This is monetary enclosure.
The monetary system transforms natural endowment into licensed access, controlled not by African communities but by foreign currency regimes.
2. Monetary Economy as a Debt Engine
Monetary economies function through a simple but devastating mechanism: debt expansion.
Western States:
- Print their own currencies,
- Carry debt denominated in currencies they control,
- Roll over debt indefinitely,
- Absorb inflation internally.
Their debt exists largely on paper.
African States:
- Cannot freely print global reserve currencies,
- Borrow foreign currencies to fund development,
- Must repay in those same foreign currencies,
- Service debt through resource extraction and austerity.
African debt is paid in real material value, not accounting abstractions. This asymmetry ensures perpetual dependency.
3. Currency Importation as Economic Subjugation
Most African currencies are not sovereign in any meaningful sense. They are:
- Pegged,
- Backed,
- Restricted,
- Or structurally dependent on external reserves.
In effect, Africa imports foreign money to access its own economy. This is unprecedented in human economic history. No civilisation can develop when the medium of exchange is externally governed. Monetary sovereignty determines whether an economy serves its people or serves creditors.
Africa’s monetary systems serve foreign credit architecture, not African social provisioning.
4. How Money Displaces Cooperative Order
Before colonial monetary imposition, African economies operated through:
- Entitlement to land,
- Communal labour obligations,
- Shared harvests,
- Reciprocal exchange,
- Social accounting of contribution and need.
These were not chaotic systems. They were non-monetary orderings, governed by obligation, reputation, kinship, and communal law. Money did not organise production; community did. Colonial and post-colonial monetary systems displaced these structures by:
- Individualising access to resources,
- Monetising survival,
- Turning cooperation into competition,
- Replacing entitlement with affordability.
The result was not efficiency—it was economic fracture.
5. Cooperative Economies Still Exist — Despite Suppression
A significant baseline study, “Cooperatives in Africa: The Age of Reconstruction” (ILO, 2009), surveyed cooperative movements across Botswana, Ethiopia, Kenya, Lesotho, Rwanda, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia. The findings were revealing:
- Cooperative presence remains significant,
- Approximately 7% of Africans remain affiliated with primary cooperatives,
- Cooperative traditions persist culturally,
- Yet they struggle with legitimacy, financing, and institutional coherence,
- Most lack capacity to influence national economic planning.
Kenya stands out as an exception, demonstrating stronger cooperative protection and citizen economic voice—proof that commicratic structures thrive when institutionally supported. This confirms a critical point: cooperative economics is not dead in Africa—it has been systematically marginalised by monetary dominance.
6. Monetary Economy Forces Artificial Scarcity
Monetary systems create scarcity even where abundance exists. Food rots because people lack money—not because food is unavailable. Homes remain unbuilt because funding is scarce—not because materials or labour are absent. Hospitals underperform because budgets are tight—not because knowledge or need is lacking.
Money becomes the gatekeeper of survival. In this sense, monetary economy disconnects production from need, replacing social logic with financial logic.
7. Non-Monetary Economy Is Not Chaos — It Is Higher Order
Contrary to fear-based narratives, non-monetary economy does not abolish order. It redefines accounting. The manifesto proposes:
- National-level non-monetary accounting,
- Entitlement-chips instead of currency,
- Resource-based provisioning,
- Cooperative production quotas,
- Planned distribution aligned with social need.
Entitlement-chips card and provisioning CSP cards are not “free handouts.” They are claims backed by contribution, capacity, and social role. They are more transparent, programmable, and auditable than fiat money. Unlike money, they:
- Cannot be hoarded for power,
- Cannot be speculated on,
- Cannot be siphoned offshore,
- Cannot be weaponised through debt.
This is economic order without extraction.
8. Money as the Engine of Brain Drain
Monetary deprivation does not only impoverish communities—it exports talent. Africans migrate not because they reject their homeland, but because:
- Their skills cannot be provisioned locally,
- Monetary scarcity limits opportunity,
- Foreign currencies promise access to life.
Thus Africa trains its best minds only to lose them to the very economies that enforce monetary dependency. Non-monetary national provisioning would reverse this logic by anchoring talent to social contribution, not currency accumulation.
9. IMF, Conditionality, and the Strangulation of Development
IMF programmes enforce:
- Currency discipline,
- Austerity,
- Tax expansion,
- Reduced social spending,
- Privatisation of commons.
These conditions presume monetary economies as universal and inevitable. They are not. They are historically contingent tools of power that collapse cooperative systems into debtor States. Non-monetary national economies remove the leverage upon which such institutions depend.
Conclusion: The Cry of the Manifesto of African Corporatism
Africa does not need more money. Africa needs freedom from money as domination.
The non-monetary economy proposed in this manifesto is not nostalgia—it is post-monetary realism. It recognises that economic order precedes currency, that cooperation precedes markets, and that development precedes debt.
This is the cry of the manifesto:
- To extricate African life from foreign currency rule,
- To restore cooperative entitlement,
- To reclaim economic sovereignty handed down by our ancestors,
- To end the cycle of debt, poverty, and forced migration.
Money has failed Africa. It is time Africa stopped serving money—and made the economy serve life again.
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