Taxing Scarcity, Not Survival

Taxing Scarcity, Not Survival: How Africa Can Build Development Infrastructure Within the Monetary Framework While Preparing for Ethno-Corporatist Transition

Africa Does Not Suffer from Poverty — It Suffers from Economic Mismanagement

BY: OMOLAJA MAKINEE

Africa’s crisis is not an absence of wealth; it is a failure of economic orchestration. Scarcity is not natural—it is manufactured by disjointed production, fragmented capital, underutilised resources, and governance models imported without adaptation.

If Africa must, for now, operate within the global monetary framework, then the urgent task is not to expand taxation on citizens and small businesses, but to tax scarcity itself by deliberately engineering abundance through coordinated production. Development does not begin with revenue extraction. Development begins with economic management.

Here I proposes a practical, transitional strategy: Public Interest Companies (PICs)—corporate-cooperative alliances designed to build infrastructure, retain value locally, and transfer productive assets into national ownership over time.

1. The Fatal Error: Taxing People Before Building Productivity

Across Africa, governments are expanding taxation regimes under IMF-guided frameworks:

  • Revenue Mobilisation Thematic Funds (RMTF),
  • Broadening VAT bases,
  • Informal sector taxation,
  • Digital taxation.

This approach assumes what does not yet exist: a productive economic base capable of sustaining taxation. Taxation before productivity is not revenue mobilisation—it is developmental strangulation.

You do not tax a village into prosperity. You build infrastructure first, then tax its yield.

2. The Core Principle: Tax Scarcity, Not Survival

Africa must reverse the logic of governance:

  • Stop taxing income where productivity is low,
  • Stop taxing consumption where infrastructure is absent,
  • Stop taxing small businesses struggling to survive.

Instead:

  • Identify scarcity zones (energy, transport, housing, healthcare, food),
  • Organise capital to eliminate scarcity,
  • Then tax the abundance generated.

Taxation should be the harvest, not the seed.

3. Public Interest Companies: The Missing Development Instrument

What Are Public Interest Companies?

Public Interest Companies (PICs) are purpose-built corporate alliances formed by:

  • Large corporations,
  • Medium enterprises,
  • Cooperatives,
  • Institutional investors,
  • Sometimes State participation.

Their mandate is not short-term profit extraction, but long-term infrastructure creation for national development. They operate under clear contracts:

  • Build strategic infrastructure,
  • Operate for a fixed period (10–25 years),
  • Recover investment plus profit,
  • Transfer ownership to the State through nationalisation.

This is not privatisation. It is time-bound corporative stewardship.

4. The Dangote Refinery: A Case Study in Value Retention

Nigeria’s Dangote Refinery provides a real-world illustration of this logic.

For decades:

  • Nigeria exported crude oil,
  • Refined it abroad,
  • Imported finished fuel at inflated prices,
  • Entrenched energy dependency.

The Dangote Refinery reverses this:

  • Refining occurs locally,
  • Value remains domestic,
  • Supply chains shorten,
  • Energy security improves,
  • Government gains a taxable industrial base.

This single project demonstrates what economic intelligence achieves when development is prioritised over revenue extraction.

5. Scaling the Model Across Africa

A. Transport Infrastructure

Multiple corporations can jointly:

  • Build high-speed rail networks,
  • Connect regional trade corridors,
  • Reduce logistics costs.

After 10–25 years:

  • The rail system transfers to government,
  • Becomes a national asset,
  • Generates public revenue indefinitely.

B. Energy and Electricity

Energy scarcity cripples African productivity. Public Interest Energy Companies can:

  • Build power grids,
  • Invest in renewables,
  • Stabilise national energy supply.

Energy abundance multiplies:

  • Manufacturing,
  • Services,
  • Employment,
  • Tax base.

C. Housing and Urban Development

Corporate-cooperative alliances can:

  • Mass-produce housing,
  • Develop planned cities,
  • Reduce informal settlements.

Housing stability drives:

  • Health outcomes,
  • Labour productivity,
  • Urban order.

D. Healthcare Infrastructure

Rather than taxing citizens to “fund” healthcare:

  • Build hospitals first,
  • Operate them at scale,
  • Nationalise them later.

Free healthcare becomes sustainable after infrastructure exists, not before.

E. Food Production and Supermarket Chains

Food scarcity is logistical, not agricultural. PICs can:

  • Build storage facilities.
  • Coordinate farm-to-market logistics.
  • Establish national supermarket networks.

Food abundance stabilises:

  • Prices.
  • Nutrition.
  • Social cohesion.

6. The Role of Government: Orchestrator, Not Extractor

Under this framework, government does not behave as:

  • A tax collector,
  • A donor-dependent administrator,
  • A bureaucratic regulator of scarcity.

Instead, government becomes:

  • An economic coordinator,
  • A contract enforcer,
  • A long-term national asset accumulator.

Taxation emerges naturally after infrastructure exists.

7. Cooperative Alliances: Including Small and Medium Enterprises

This model is not exclusive to elites. Small and medium enterprises can:

  • Form sectoral cooperatives,
  • Pool capital,
  • Access State guarantees,
  • Participate in national projects.

This restores Africa’s communal economic heritage, updated for modern corporate coordination.

8. Strategic Acceleration: Leveraging Chinese Industrial Capacity Without Surrendering Sovereignty

A crucial advantage of the Public Interest Companies (PICs) model is that it does not require African governments to wait for ideal geopolitical conditions, concessional loans, or Western development approval. The mechanism allows indigenous corporate alliances themselves—not the State—to initiate infrastructure acceleration through direct, project-specific partnerships with foreign industrial actors, particularly Chinese engineering and construction firms.

Under this model, African governments do not borrow, do not guarantee foreign debt, and do not surrender strategic assets. Instead, PIC consortia—formed by African companies—enter unilateral, time-bound contractual agreements with Chinese construction and technology firms to design, build, and in some cases co-operate infrastructure projects.

A. Temporary Partnership, Pre-Agreed Exit

The architecture of these agreements is critical:

  1. The African PIC remains the primary project owner.
  2. Chinese partners provide:
    • Engineering expertise,
    • Construction capacity,
    • Technical systems,
    • Speed of execution.
  3. Profit-sharing ratios are explicitly time-limited (e.g., 10–25 years).
  4. All parties operate with full knowledge that:
    • The project will eventually be nationalised,
    • Ownership will transfer to the African State at contract expiry,
    • No perpetual concession exists.
    • No taxation regime during the contract period.

This clarity aligns incentives. Both African and Chinese partners work with urgency, efficiency, and discipline to recoup investment and profit within the agreed window, knowing that indefinite extraction is not available.

B. Why China Fits This Model

Chinese infrastructure firms are uniquely compatible with PIC-based development because they:

  • Are accustomed to large-scale, fast-execution projects.
  • Operate effectively under fixed-term contracts.
  • Prioritise construction over political interference.
  • Focus on return on investment rather than territorial control.

Unlike Western development frameworks—often tied to policy conditionalities, debt restructuring, and political leverage—this model is transactional, transparent, and finite.

China builds. Africa owns. Time determines transition.

9. The Government’s Only Immediate Responsibility

For this model to function, African governments do not need new ministries, foreign embassies, or international negotiations. What is required is far simpler and far more decisive:

  1. Establish a National PIC Registry:
    • Open formal registration for companies willing to form PIC consortia.
    • Define minimum capital, governance, and accountability requirements.
  2. Declare Priority Development Zones: Governments must publicly specify:
    • Which sectors are open for PIC formation (transport, energy, housing, healthcare, food, water, digital infrastructure, manufacturing),
    • Which regions or corridors are prioritised,
    • Expected transfer timelines.
  3. Guarantee Legal Certainty
    • Enforce contracts,
    • Protect PIC autonomy during the operational phase,
    • Honour nationalisation clauses at maturity.

Nothing more is required at the initial stage. No taxation regime. No IMF negotiations. No foreign aid dependency.

10. Why This Preserves Sovereignty Rather Than Undermining It

Critically, this framework reverses historical dependency patterns:

  • Foreign firms do not own the infrastructure permanently,
  • Governments do not carry sovereign debt,
  • Citizens are not taxed to repay loans,
  • Nationalisation is built into the contract, not imposed retroactively.

This is development without submission. The State becomes the final beneficiary, not the guarantor of foreign profit.

11. From Extraction to Construction: A New Development Ethic

The tragedy of post-colonial Africa was not foreign involvement—it was foreign permanence. PIC-based partnerships replace extraction with temporary collaboration. Infrastructure becomes:

  • Built by global expertise,
  • Owned by national institutions,
  • Sustained for public benefit.

This approach allows Africa to compress decades of infrastructure delay into a single generational cycle, even within the monetary system, while laying the groundwork for eventual transition into the non-monetary ethno-corporatist framework articulated in this manifesto.

12. Why This Works Under the Monetary Framework

This approach:

  • Retains value locally,
  • Reduces foreign dependency,
  • Builds future taxable assets,
  • Avoids IMF austerity traps,
  • Prevents premature taxation.

It uses money as a tool, not a master.

13. The Honest Limitation: Why This Is Slower Than Ethno-Corporatism

This pathway is:

  • Fragmented by colonial borders,
  • Subject to political instability,
  • Dependent on contract integrity,
  • Slower to scale continent-wide.

Under a non-monetary, united African ethno-corporatist framework, similar development could be achieved within a decade continent-wide.

Under the monetary framework, it may take generations. But it remains preferable to stagnation.

Conclusion: Build First, Transfer Before Taxation, Prosper Permanently

Africa’s development failure is not a failure of ambition—it is a failure of sequencing. Africa does not lack partners. Africa lacks architectures of control.

You cannot tax what you have not built. You cannot redistribute what you have not produced. You cannot govern scarcity into abundance.

Public Interest Companies offer a transitional development architecture—one that works within current monetary constraints while preparing the ground for a future beyond them. Public Interest Companies—augmented by time-bound Chinese construction partnerships—offer a clean, disciplined, and sovereign pathway to infrastructure-led development.

Africa must stop taxing survival and start engineering abundance. The invitation is open. The contracts are finite. The ownership is African.

That is how nations rise—whether under money today, or beyond it tomorrow. All that remains is the political will to begin.

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