Clearing a Field of Dreams in Africa

I can see the attraction of aging rock musicians to the Live 8 project.  Wouldn't it be cool if any of us could help Africans just by doing what we are good at and like to do?  Performers perform. After years of practice they learn how to make song and spectacle.

Wouldn't it be great, rockers think, if they could help save Africa just by playing music? 

In a sense they have the right idea, just the wrong profession.  Turns out Africans already have music skills and accomplished bands, both young and aging. 

Far more gain might follow the Live 8 rockers doing month-long concert tours in Africa and selling the videos of music and scenery to television, cable, and pay-per-view around the world.  At least they and the world might learn something real about Africa that way.  What’s in store with Live 8, many suspect, is more music and emotion mixed with empty bowls and imploring looks to the camera.

They could try a "play for the people, stay with the people, help the people" tour, promising to stay out of western hotels and away from western aid projects. Between performances, rockers could invest time learning about the life and culture of everyday working Africans.  If they could bring the images and stories of everyday Africans to the attention of the world, that would be a great service.  Americans, for example, would be surprised to learn that the majority of Africans don't spend their lives scrambling for bags of rice when western aid trucks appear. Or rockers could tour refugee camps full of people eager and fully capable of leaving and getting on with their lives, if only there weren’t surrounded by U.N. “peacekeepers” (and troops from various governments) enforcing arbitrary restrictions on the freedom of movement.

A "Live 8 Reality Tour" would reveal that most Africans, like most people everywhere else, invest much of their lives making a living either from the hard earth as farmers, or fashioning the fruit of the earth into foods and fabric, and these into meals and clothes. People in Africa and elsewhere work at drawing minerals from the earth and mixing these metals and other materials, and in shaping these into useful products.

It is here that our Live 8 Reality Tour would stumble upon an hard reality. Most everyday African’s do everyday things very differently than workers in America and Europe. Hopefully rockers and their audience worldwide would wonder why working African’s lack the tools and equipment Americans and Europeans take for granted.

Far more useful to Africans in Africa would be a tour of folks who know about tools and machinery, rather than just about music. Tools and machinery, roads and power lines, factories and warehouses, don’t just spring from the ground. They require first a detailed infrastructure of rules and enforceable contracts that assure investors (either Africans or others with saved funds to invest), that the tools and machinery sent to Africa or built in Africa will be protected from theft or confiscation.

Do people have rights to economic freedom, to produce what they choose as long as they don’t infringe on the equal rights of others? If people have rights to be secure in the use of their arms and legs and minds, do they have equal or similar rights to produce goods and services with tools and equipment? Do they have rights to hire others to make use of their tools and machinery? If not, why not?

In the movie “Field of Dreams” a farmer has a vision that if he builds a baseball field, spirit players from the past will come to play a game and right a wrong from baseball history. The baseball field was built with great effort and expense by the farmer. And with great ridicule, since no one in the farmer’s small town could imagine people far away just waiting for the right field to be cleared and prepared so they could come. But the farmer reasoned that until the field was well-build and equipped the spirit players would not appear. He built it and they came.

Millions of Americans and Europeans with billions of investment dollars are like spirit players waiting to right the great wrongs of African history. Just as baseball players can’t play in a cornfield, entrepreneurs and businessmen can’t play their game of ingenuity and enterprise without a clear field, without a field where rules are enforced, and don’t change after the game has started, or when one team gets ahead.

So, pick your metaphor, rock concerts or baseball games. Neither is quite like the daily work and enterprise each of us engages in. But a rock concert is a few people up on stage making lots of noise for a large audience. The rest of us just watch and listen. It is a top-down sort of enterprise. A baseball game can as well be a few playing while many sit and watch. But with baseball, football, basketball, and other sports, players engage in a symphony of cooperation and competition, all with established rules and swift sanctions for rule-breakers.

I suspect most Africans can make enough of their own music, and would be happy to attend their own concerts. And they would prefer to supply donations for their own charities. But as so many posts on CoolestAfricans and the Uhuru Ni Haki (http://uhurunihaki.blogspot.com/) make clear, what is needed is a faith in economic freedom, a faith that just clearing the cornfields of government red tape and regulations would open vast fields of dreams for African entrepreneurs.

Build these fields and Africa's future enterprises and capital investments will come.