African Freedom Project is a networked-community endeavor to bring the opportunity, freedom and peace of enterprise to the people of Africa.
Why Africa?
Africa comprises a unique set of peoples and places that awaits the hope that must one day come to its deserving shores. A critical mass of the various peoples of Sub-Saharan Africa has not deliberately chosen their current condition of inequities. In many ways, Sub-Saharan Africa represents a tabula rasa, on which a valid plan for change can be written.
How?
How can such lofty goals be achieved in a region that is so notoriously entangled with factious, mercenary interests? It is from the cauldron of those very interests, and the painful lessons it has wrought, which the people of Africa will somehow resolve to create a future of equity and opportunity.
From a tortured history of tribal dynamics and external abuses, the people of Africa will eventually awaken to the call for an integrated culture of enterprise. A common and overwhelming desire for governance that is founded upon equitable property rights, open trade, and fair, efficient justice will eventually take hold.
The ancient Greeks taught us that two non-parallel lines on a common plane must eventually intersect. As interests and ideas continue to collide on Africa's dynamic plane, systems will be transformed and will, in turn, interact with each other. We cannot usefully predict the timeline nor the array of perturbations associated with this continuum - we can, however, facilitate an effort to expedite and smooth the process through a highly networked global support community.
The Golden Opportunity of Enterprise
How does African Freedom Project propose to influence this process? The first priority of African Freedom Project is to serve as an information forum and networking medium. AFP will do so by serving the agents of change and enterprise as a medium for exchanging and fusing information, processes, and plans as they diligently and heroically continue to transform Africa's cultural-political environment. The AFP community will supplement these efforts by sharing our message of truth and hope directly with the people of Africa's rich and varied human terrain: the merchants in the streets, the cart-pushers, the beggars, the public school teachers and the beautiful children. AFP will strongly represent Africa's only real hope for sustainable wellness to the global community: the golden opportunity of honorable, free enterprise.
There remains a latent critical mass of Africans who would rise to the occasion of transforming their respective sub-cultures into a unified, sustainable system of equity and opportunity. The challenge is for this mass to evolve into the desired unified, kinetic system, while minimizing the degree, frequency and duration of resulting set-backs and destructive permutations.
It is critical, therefore, that actors be allowed to build their consensus and strength through autonomous, decentralized networks. We can take a stark reminder here from the ill-fated experience of the Tienanmen Square activists - they did not have the required depth, breadth and inertia to protect their movement against the establishment's directed response.
Hard Lessons Learned
It is important here to note that the events at Tienanmen did indeed help sow the seeds of China's inevitable, yet glacial movement into a more open system of governance. African Freedom Project seeks to enable actors to analyze, prepare for and balance their plans and actions for optimal outcomes. If this leads certain actors in certain areas to take incremental actions in a calculated effort to 'prime the pump' of their respective movements, then so be it - hopefully their choices will result in a more optimal blend of cost/benefits/expediency.
There are innumerable entities in Africa whose interests are at cross purposes with the concepts of open markets, equitable systems of property law, criminal justice and the competent, transparent management of common resources. Many of those same entities will respond with the tactics of tribal despotism that will make Tienanmen look like kindergarten rivalry.
Naturally, there is no single, tailor-made protocol for nurturing the concepts of freedom and equity throughout Africa. The complexities and dynamics of each situation vary widely throughout the continent's cultural collage. If there is a best-fit protocol for seeding the fruit of opportunity in such a varied human terrain, it is one that must be founded upon core, universal values and concepts accompanied with an application method that is universally scalable.
Networks, Autonomy, and Increments
African Freedom Project will provide a collaborative forum for a decentralized, grass-roots promotion of open and equitable markets and governments. AFP accomplishes this by hosting to Africa's pioneers of change with the following critically needed tools and support:
- The exchange and coordination of concepts, information, plans and actions for the latent and aspiring entities that will sow the seeds of equity and opportunity throughout Africa.
- A continuous, decentralized campaign of grass-roots clinics conducted autonomously by AFP volunteers throughout Africa's street corners, cafes, schools, beaches and bazaars.
- A network of informal, custom tailored support/coordination cells, to collaborate with emerging efforts and entities across respective locales and cultural/political nodes.
- Global, high profile, and zealous advocacy of the attributes that are truly required to bring sustainable vitality to Africa's people:
- Gradual, scalable integration and management of equitable property rights.
- Scalable transitions into robust open markets across the entire intranational and international spectrum.
- Equitable, scalable, and transparent management of common resources with emphasis on transitioning toward fair, competitive and soundly regulated free enterprise licensing/charter methods.
- The development of robust, simple, yet scalable equity laws, courts and processes.
- The development of critical infrastructure through transparent, equitable, and scalable methods.
- Scalable implementation of stringent, thorough systems for the proscription and punishment of fraudulent business practices, in both domestic and international transactions.
- All of the above attributes should co-exist with the continuation of certain types of laudable incentive-based programs, such as the Mo Ibrahim Prize, and other well-crafted, high leverage programs which are tied to certain best practices and metrics. Micro-loans, which can be powerful, agile tools of change should also continue to be developed, refined, and wisely used.
With focus on the above concepts and principles, the evolution and integration of all other commonly desired forms of harmony, equity and opportunity will eventually follow. Tribal, racial, and religious dissonance, as well as women's and children's rights will gradually improve. In fact, a general, if very gradual conditioning of the overall human rights landscape will emerge.
The Golden Challenge
The real challenge to the realization of this immensely ambitious project does not lie in the myriad of accompanying political intrigues, agreements, protocols and inevitable recurring disappointments.......it lies within our belief in and commitment to representing the key ingredient of Western Civilization's relative prosperity: The Golden Rule. Without the eventual assimilation of this precious cultural kernel, an otherwise complete model would merely become a frame work for more oblique, yet still pernicious channels of exploitation and despotism.
In summary, AFP will do its part to sow the seeds of change within Africa's vast, deserving humanity that has for too long suffered for the want of simple, precious opportunity.
