Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and Vice President for International Programs at the Atlas Network, Dr. Tom Gordon Palmer has emphasized that there is no logical reason that can justify the prevalent poverty on the African continent.
According to the American libertarian author and theorist, it is unfathomable for a continent with so much potential to remain the poorest in the world.
Dr. Tom Palmer made this argument on Monday, July 24, 2023, when he delivered a memorial public lecture on the legacy, scholarship, and ideas of Ghanaian economist and author, late Prof. George Ayittey at the campus of the University of Mines and Technology (UMaT), Tarkwa.
The George Ayittey Memorial Lecture on Freedom, Prosperity, and Youth Empowerment is an initiative of the Africa Center for Entrepreneurship and Youth Empowerment (ACEYE) aimed at igniting the potential of Africa and pave way for a freer and more prosperous continent.
Speaking to the media at the maiden edition of the event which is a series of public lectures, Dr. Palmer eulogized the late Prof. Ayittey and further stressed that his ideas, teachings, and scholarship are very lasting legacies that can help Ghana and Africa in general to find sustainable solutions to the many problems the country and the continent are grappling with.
“I wanted to share with this audience the tremendous power of Prof. George Ayittey’s scholarship, his thinking his teaching and I want to help to open the eyes of the people to the agency, the rationality, the capability of the Ghanaian people and the African people in general to solve their own problems. I think that this is a lasting legacy. His book, “An Indigenous African Institution is a brilliant work and his most recent one before he died, “Applied Economics For Africa” is extremely powerful and set out the path for African prosperity,” Dr. Palmer noted.
Commenting on the prevalence of poverty in Africa, the libertarian and theorist partly attributed the underdevelopment of the continent to the many restrictions to trade and the numerous controls by governments. According to Dr. Palmer who alluded to the work of Prof. Ayittey that exchange creates value and wealth, Africans are not able to create the needed value through trade even among themselves.
He, therefore, called for a relook at the continent’s trade policies adding that the policies must be able to liberate the African entrepreneur to operate freely in order to ensure continuous value and wealth creation.
“It’s sad in some way when you look at how Africa is the most controlled continent. Trade is more difficult in Africa than in any place else in the world; trade barriers block people in one African country from trading with their neighbors in another African country. …. Prof. Ayittey showed that exchange creates value. Exchange just by itself is wealth creation but then entrepreneurship, the freedom to open a business, is kind of littered with the failures of socialist ideologies, foreign aid,” Dr. Tom Palmer indicated.
He further recommended that “what is needed is to liberate the African entrepreneur to do amazing and wonderful things. … There is no good reason for Africa to be poor. Africa ought to be rich and Professor Ayittey said if we get the institutions right, Africa will be rich and the key to getting the institutions right is to draw on the institutional strengths of African societies in the formal and the traditional sector.”
