Arguments over the nature of the global economy have never been so pressing or so complex, especially in this time of doubt, uncertainty and shattered illusions. Those of us that fancy that we are political commentators have had to recognise that, to understand what is going on in the world, politics and economics, and even geography, are all intertwined. Hence the rise of compound subject-matter like ‘geo-politics’ or ‘political economy.’
My own induction came when, in the year 2001, I came to work in Lagos for two years under the aegis of the private equity company Capital Alliance. There I learnt a whole new way of looking at the world, under the tutelage of my old friend Stanley Egbochuku, and that guru among gurus Dick Cramer, both eminent practitioners of a deeper way of communicating about business matters. In the Lagos capitalist forest in which I found myself, I came up against not just novel forms of business journalism, but also the new language gestated in that holy of holies, the Harvard Business School. I sharpened my pen and opened my mind, first at the short-lived newsletter Business Confidential, and then in the pages of the still infant BusinessDay.
The Nigerian economy was the main field which we ploughed, discovering Nigerian stand-offs (a variation of lose-lose Mexican stand-offs) in such well known subjects as power supply, not so much short-circuiting as no-circuiting): revenue allocation and its ugly sister resource control; and the obscure relationship of generator suppliers to refineries, referred to by that favourite Nigerian media expression ‘epileptic. One phrase which was run as a cover story at the newsletter was: ‘The Sector Beneath’. This described the vast hidden network known to economists as the informal economy, a special subject of a colleague Isaac Okorafor, who was later translated to the Central Bank of Nigeria.
The informal economy, although a global phenomenon, is particularly strong in West Africa. When one has been around that part of the world for as long as I have, it tends to be taken for granted, but it is not just the basis for economic survival in otherwise impossible situations, but also helps to sustain one of the best invisible systems of social security in the world. As an economic layman myself, I am still bemused at the inability of economic analysts to take into account the imponderable effect that it has on the reliability of statistics. In Africa, many people have told me it is much more prevalent in the whole of the western side of the continent stretching from Mauritania and Senegal down to the Congo (which operates almost entirely in the informal sector). Eastern and Southern Africa, and above all the great hegemon South Africa have attempted to have more ordered economies and even, dare one day it, a more structured approach to tax which many in West Africa, as for example in Lagos, are trying to change, not least because of the need to bring the countries of the region more into alignment with the globalised (or globalising) economy and the encourage grassroots development by ‘banking’ the ‘unbanked’.
I have been thinking recently quite a lot about of Business Confidential and my early days in Icon house, that thirteen-story building covered in flaking blue mosaic, on Idejo St, Victoria Island and the way in which we contrived to put a new form of business journalism together. Funnily enough, it came from reading a book called Dreams of a Patriot, which I was to review at a launch in a basement near Liverpool Street. The author Oluneye Oluwole, herself originally a geographer with a smart awareness of geo-politics, titled each chapter as different sorts of dreams, and, at the beginning of each, cited a number of salient quotes. One, I used in my review, came surprisingly, from US President Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt whom I had always dismissed as one of the first American imperialists and builder of the Panama Canal. She quotes him thus: “Labour is prior to, an independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labour and could never have existed if labour had not existed. Labour is superior to capital and deserves much higher consideration.”
To me this looks like a lucid demonstration of Karl Marx’s ‘labour theory of value’. So very far from Icon House in 2001. Now I know that Marx became seriously out of fashion with the collapse of the Soviet Union’s version of communism towards the end of the last century. He was seriously erratic in his predictions such as the coming “dictatorship of the proletariat” to be followed by “the withering away of the state”. But his broader idea that history needs to be seen in the grand sweep of economic movements has surprising vitality, especially at this time when capitalism itself is perceived as being in crisis. A subject, I suspect, to return to.
