“Stop Begging”
Technology, Transformation, Developing Political Economies & The End of Consultants
I recently watched a speech from Ghana’s President, Nana Akufo-Addo made on December 18, 2022, at the US Africa Leaders Summit in Washington, DC. Where he bluntly urged Africa to “Stop Begging!” The President’s message, from my vantage point and being from and working in the Caribbean, rang true as also being highly relevant to that region. His message is straightforward — bold moves are needed towards economic self-determination, and lasting prosperity and power in the global community. Breaking the paternalistic and dependent existence of Black developing countries in Africa and the Caribbean. This represents the first step to take, and where intelligent technologies must be an underlying driver. Away from the legacy remnants of colonialism…neocolonialism…to ride the 21st-century prosperity growth curve.
President Nana Akufo-Addo’s passionate speech was a plea to break the vicious cycle of dependency culture, which has manifested suffering, in both the African continent and the Caribbean region. Wilful ignorance about power and the global economy has served an adherence to white supremacy culture in many of those Black countries. There is no more time, money, and energy to be wasted on useless conferences and the endless overuse of consultants and technical advisors. We are intelligent enough to manage ourselves. So the time has long passed for us to be solving our own problems, and to be our own leaders and visionaries, with our own ideas. No longer being suckered into the same old stale ideas passed down from the West.
Innovation and the entrepreneurial spirit to drive for self-determination and dignity is the push! We must ultimately do and lead ourselves — from the bottom up. So we should get on with it, said President Akufo-Addo.
Africa’s existence can’t no longer be one of always “Begging” the West, and we Africans must recognize that begging is not a path to earning global respect. It’s never going to work. It doesn’t even make any logical sense and only serves to reinforce negative stereotypes and poor perceptions about the region as a whole. Whether you want to hear it or not, if we stop being beggars and spend African money inside the continent, Africa will not need to ask for respect from anyone, we will get the respect we deserve. If we make Africa as prosperous as it should be, respect is bound to follow
— President Akufo-Addo.
In short, growth and sustainable prosperity can only authentically come from the inside out — bottom-up! This requires people to lead themselves and not sit around waiting for money from outside UN-type aid agencies. We don’t need charitable fish, we must build our own fishing rods and fish for ourselves, process it and use the surplus for wealth creation. All successful economies or civilizations evolved and grew this way. There’s no secret to this.
The begging culture in both Africa and the Caribbean has been debilitating to motivation and growth outcomes. And if the COVID-19 global vaccine crisis has not taught us, that everyone takes care of themselves first, then you must wake up to the reality of how the world works. In the global political economy, countries always put their mask on first and then forget about you. This extends to nation-states — the sophistication of self-preservation.
Leaders of African descent have been particularly bad; incoherent and weak in managing their economies to a sustained and acceptable level of prosperity. Instead, the time has been wasted with organizations like CARICOM, engaging in unproductive and distractive talk-shops. More concerned about celebrating its 50th Anniversary in 2023 than objectively examining why it has been an utter failure to the people of the Caribbean.
CARICOM, like many other similar organizations in the region, is filled with no-nothing academics and UN-type consultants who just write useless papers that no one ever reads. Going to conferences all over the world and collecting high salaries in doing so. The organization has come to be identified with a bloated academic-infused bureaucracy, marred in irrelevance and failure. It essentially relies on Western governments, multinational aid agencies and institutions to fund it. It has become an elite organization of talking heads wholly detached from the people it is supposed to serve.
Further, the funding received flows right back to Western economies via consulting contracts to Western firms like McKinsey &Co., PWC, Boston Consulting etc., — all the usual suspects. It’s been estimated that over half of the funding/aid given to various ‘development’ organizations and initiatives comes back via consultants. Both foreign and local consultants are tied to this hierarchical structure, with refinements of the triangular trade days that ran during slavery and colonialism. And the rest of the money is usually squandered through acute corruption and mismanagement.
Very little if any at all ever make it into the local economies to generate any meaningful and measurable real GDP. This is nothing less than classic organized crime, cartels, mafia-like, which local Caribbean populations continue to be victimized by.
The Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) is a similar entity; funded mainly by the same types of foreign outfits. Among the biggest funders of CDB is the European Investment Bank (EIB), mainly in the area of funding climate mitigation projects. These projects, however, are initiated and led by the EIB for compliance purposes with their signed climate change accords and agreements. They are not in the primary interest of the local economies, nor are they geared to spur green economy growth. Nor does it push local entrepreneurship growth because the funds are divided amongst the elites tied to the government in power — aka cronyism!
All financing, i.e., green bonds, etc, are done in America and Europe, so there is never any chance of fostering local capital markets in the region. Robust regional capital markets create confidence for global investors, but without it, the region stays dependent on the West and without your own capital markets it is hard to attract large foreign institutional investors with big capital to spread around. Therefore, this is simply neocolonialism or colonialism 2.0.
Back to EIB, EIB projects on climate mitigation do not promote a zero-emissions-based economy in the region. The projects are all one-sided and in the interest of Europe’s climate agenda alone, and run big Western consultants like McKinsey & Co., subcontracted by ECB. Again, money flows back to the European Union economies and the consultants get richer.
The European Investment Bank (EIB) furthers the objectives of the European Union by providing long-term project funding, guarantees and advice. It supports projects both within and outside the EU. Its shareholders are the Member States of the EU. EIB Website, statement, Sep 30, 2023.
Therefore, sustainable growth and prosperity can’t ever be achieved through top-down ‘development’ led by others. It can only be achieved authentically, via a bottom-up, internalized…doing it ourselves, entrepreneurship-led development.
In the 21st century, doing it yourself has never been easier but it requires intelligent technologies to supercharge knowledge and know-how acquisition with speedy execution with accuracy. So developing economies must utilize big data ecosystems and artificial intelligence combined and coherently in their economic interests, first!
HOW
All levels of developing societies must engage in knowledge acquisition, and execute based on evidence and analysis with clearly identified and defined growth objectives. If everyone is “doing their jobs,” essentially, entire nations can rise and do better holistically. Bottom-up, self-leadership and entrepreneurship, through knowledge, historically, have proven to be the most effective approach for innovative and sustainable growth outcomes.
In the classic bestselling book titled: WHY NATIONS FAIL — The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Power; authors Daron Acemoglu of MIT, and James A. Robinson, Harvard. Explain how successful economies and societies have nothing to do with culture or geography. Instead, their research shows that political leadership and the socioeconomic political economy policies and strategies put forward by leadership, and underpinned by inclusive democratic institutions. Together form the strategy foundation to build better societies.
Through their significant historical survey — from ancient to modern civilizations, Why Nations Fail reveals that fundamental political economy strategy decisions are the paramount deciding factor for success. Therefore, if leaders want to succeed for their economies and people, strategy, above all must be the cornerstone of informed development decisions. A first principle to economic self-determination.
Many may know of the phenomenal growth story of Singapore. Singapore after independence was led by a clearly defined vision which aligned with a specific economic expansion policy. Relative to time and place. Singapore’s strategy spurred the creation of national wealth through economic performance for self-determination. And it’s been nothing short of remarkable!
In 1961 Singapore’s per-person GDP was only 20 percent of that of the U.S. By 2020 it was virtually the same, and by every economic metric, Singapore was an economic powerhouse which reflected in the per capita wealth of its citizens.
Singapore’s economic policies were internally driven! With no outside ideological theories or Western advisors, it determined its vision and executed it on its own. Singapore’s strategy was fundamentally based on the free market system, capital investment and export orientation, with a low corporate income tax rate at a flat 17 percent. It established a sovereign wealth fund and the government invested heavily in the private sector and provided financial subsidies and intensives to attract additional foreign business capital investment.
It also nationalized companies in several key industries that it found to be in its national interest. So an extensive state-owned enterprise sector developed and evolved. All while maintaining a free markets capitalist underpinning. Some of the biggest and most successful companies in Singapore are state-owned or the state has a significant interest in them. From oil/energy and financial services to the famous Singapore Airlines. The bottom line is they did it internally driven by practical self-leadership and determination.
South Korea is another good example of a self-determination-driven political economy. Only South Korea has outperformed Singapore in the rate of capital investment. Their growth strategy was export-oriented. There are differences between Singapore and South Korea relative to openness to inward foreign direct investment. However, the common denominator is that both built their vision and strategy from the inside out. and in their national economic interests first. Without the noise of Western neoliberal ideology and their army of consultants and technical advisors.
Botswana is another amazing internalized leadership strategy story. Many might not know about its spectacular growth and might know it better as the inspiration for the blockbuster movie Black Panther. But Botswana became one of the fastest-growing economies in the world after independence. Real GDP grew at an average rate of 7.10% between 1972 and 2022, and it ranks fifth among the fastest-growing economies in the last 50 years.
Botswana did not get caught up in Cold War ideology — capitalism vs. Socialism agendas. One particularly bold move was unlike many African countries after independence Botswana didn’t dissolve the White-run civil service immediately. Instead, it created a program of training Black workers to take over those jobs once they became well-trained to seamlessly take over. This avoided the chaos of transition and avoided the debilitating problem of corruption driven by tribal loyalties, which has plagued the African continent since independence. Botswana also developed several state-run enterprises; meat export being a very successful example of intelligent business and trade strategy. In short, Botswana negotiated its meat export deals on its own. That control helped to stabilize prices, growth, and profitability. Again, the strategy was the defining factor in export success and gaining hard foreign currencies.
Note: since independence, Botswana has had the fastest growth in per capita income in the world. Economic growth averaged over 9% per year from 1966–99. And growth and prosperity continue to remain solid to this day.
Finally, Rwanda, miraculous might be the best word to describe its economic growth over the last 20 years. Today, the country is unrecognizable from the one that emerged bruised and bloodied from the civil war and culminating 1994 genocide that claimed up to one million lives and destroyed the entire social and economic fabric.
Since the early 2000s, however, Rwanda’s political economy strategy has manufactured and driven an economic boom, which has improved the living standards of many Rwandans. The Government’s progressive economic vision has been the catalyst for one of the fastest-transforming economies ever. The President of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, has also noted his ambition to make Rwanda the “Singapore of Africa”.
Therefore, all these nations were able to thrive by building their own internal strategy first and executing it themselves. So, there is no reason why other African and Caribbean countries can’t aspire to do the same. However, in the digital age, intelligent technologies and big data ecosystems must be called upon to do so. It would be irresponsible or plain stupidity for these developing nations not to engage technology to help underwrite their growth and prosperity.
Power and Progress, Our 1000-Year Struggle Over Technology & Prosperity, by MIT Professor Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson. Here the co-authors explain, from research of the last one thousand years of economic history and contemporary evidence. That progress depends more on the choices we make about the technology we use, than the technology itself. In other words, everything rides on the choices and strategy.
A thousand years of history and contemporary evidence make one thing clear. Progress depends on the choices we make about technology. New ways of organizing production and communication can either serve the narrow interests of an elite or become the foundation for widespread prosperity.
— Power and Progress
Good decisioning matters most to effectively compete in the 21st century/digital age and requires fact-based information and insight gathering to build a reliable strategy. So, aligning with intelligent machines to augment human thinking and ingenuity becomes imperative.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a crucial foundational asset for business decisioning. AI is revolutionizing the future of work and global business relations, so if developing nations are not staying in stride with the rest of the technology-driven world they will be left even further behind. As a tool, therefore, AI-driven software can dramatically speed up the strategy development process and factual precision. Policymakers can utilize the awesome processing power to aid them in drawing insight from information and turning it into reliable strategies. In record time.
A recent International Monetary Fund (IMF), titled Gen-AI: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work, says that Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to reshape the global economy, especially in the realm of labour markets.
“In this evolving landscape, advanced economies and more developed emerging markets need to focus on upgrading regulatory frameworks and supporting labour reallocation while safeguarding those adversely affected. Emerging markets and developing economies should prioritize developing digital infrastructure and digital skills.”
There is little chance for ‘developing’ political economies (DPE) to survive, much less succeed in the digital era without the use of intelligent and efficient decisioning frameworks and technology solutions to utilize and sprint off of.
Solution
6ai Technologies offers leaders that transformational framework and infrastructure to learn quickly and lean into the future confidently. Policymakers will be able to make the most critical political economy strategy decisions effectively because they are backed up by the scientific process.
Decisioning is highly complex and in the digital age with so much information, accompanied by all those moving parts it is impossible for the human mind alone to effectively process it in comparison to the intelligent processing power of machines. The human mind can’t process and verify contextually, the plethora of information in the universe and turn it around rapidly for good leadership decisions. This would normally take leaders months on their own or with consultants and would be extremely costly. With technology, it could happen in seconds, hours and days, depending.
So AI and big data ecosystems can be an extraordinarily helpful resource to anyone or any organization looking to transform their situation, to effectively compete and win in the digital age. 6ai serves the human purpose by offering tools that can build human capacity to do better for themselves, organizations, and their country.
AI is rapidly democratizing access to technical capabilities once dominated by consultants and technical advisors. 6ai Technologies leverages that democratization of capabilities and empowers human capacity. To work with machine power, purposefully, and responsibly, in designing the future they want.
The 6ai applied intelligence | ai process offers an easy-to-use intuitive platform for policymakers and business owners alike, to align for high-performing strategy development.
For too long, DPE’s leaders have acquiesced their responsibilities to foreign consultants and advisors, making themselves willfully ignorant of the awesome economic generating power of technology and systems.
6ai changes the game by transferring change power from Western consultants to local stakeholders. 6ai is a disruptor of the status quo, a cultivator and countervailing force for economic development and entrepreneurship in ‘developing’ economies. The applied intelligence scientific methodology calls for the use of data science and AI as augmenting tools for human purposes.
By perceiving things in comprehensive complexes of empirical facts, 6ai finds certain general features and examines, contextualizes and extracts them for insight-building and useful formulations for actionable strategies.
In brief, the process intrinsically interweaves human intelligence with artificial intelligence to maximize value creation. Solving the proverbial development and transformation gaps, by providing technology that allows real people to bridge the gap and cross over to a self-directed future. AI and human collaboration represent the future of work; which is called the 5th Industrial Revolution. The 5IR encompasses harmonious human and machine collaborations, with a specific focus on the well-being of multiple stakeholders (i.e., society, companies, employees, and customers).
6ai democratizes the critical value functions available from big data and artificial intelligence and pairs them with the executive decisioning functions of general intelligence. Leaders are then guided through a disciplined six-step (6ai) applied intelligence process that retrieves relevant information from verified, reputable, and reliable sources.
It comprises data science and AI-powered research capabilities and harnesses computational engines that can identify a corpus of information: i.e., emerging innovations, research reports and journals, scientific and academic publications, financial information, investment news and research. It discovers mega-demand trends, ways and systems, supply chain optimization opportunities, and more!
6ai is built on basic mathematics, on finding the maximum utility of an idea across all possible future worlds. It is scenario and predictive analysis-driven and measures quantitatively, the idea’s most useful value function for any business, organization, government, or person. Maximum utility helps the decision maker determine which choices will maximize the idea the most, with the least amount of risk. This is important because how the world unfolds is independent of the idea. Then 6ai moves leaders over to the design canvas (DC) to construct strategies based on the insights.
The End of Consultants
The first principle for success is leadership, so the better informed a leader is the greater the probability of successful strategy. The 6ai process builds knowledge and confidence simultaneously, improving decisions through data science.
Acclaimed professor Mariana Mazzucato in her most recent book, titled THE BIG CON — How the Consulting Industry Weakens Our Businesses, Infantilizes Our Governments, and Warps Our Economies — explains how the overuse of consultants has dramatically harmed developing economies and their people. Consultants, for both private enterprise and government, stunt innovation, obfuscate corporate and political accountability, and impede efforts to fight climate change, says Professor Mariana Mazzucato.
All of which have been plaguing developing countries’ political economies since independence. The cumulative effect has stifled human capacity to generate new ideas, innovate, and create for oneself. Preventing many from achieving their desired growth objectives and standards of living.
- Local governments have been left hollowed out and democratic accountability has become a mirage of obfuscated responsibility.
- Big consulting firms have become harmful predators of development, hoarding and purposefully keeping knowledge away, to promote instead their financial self-interests above all else, and in a ruthless fashion.
- According to Forbes: Businesses are better off internalizing their strategy
process, consultants are basically telling you what you already know, and much of the information we can find ourselves. - Consultants have no skin in the game. Make consequential errors in judgment with harmful execution.
The Forbes article goes on the say that the consultants who are doing the bulk of the work know absolutely nothing about the country or business, and have no shared pain points. Consultants can never make the tough decisions. No outsider can ever truly understand the needs of the various stakeholders. This one group of actors particularly, has ridden the wave of this, the underlying depletion of capabilities, to earn huge sums of money: the consulting industry.
Western governments work in tandem with UN-type institutions and organizations when handing out Western loans and grants, making it a requirement to hire big Western consulting firms before funding can be released for ‘local projects.’ So developing nations are essentially cornered. Either take those conditions or no money. It’s a vicious circle relationship of power and dependency which keeps developing countries and a never-ending highway. But 6ai has an off-ramp ahead.
Consultant contracts span across the entire value chain with developing countries and continents and touch all levels of society. The industry has directly contributed to creating dysfunction in government and businesses and the fabric of societies. It plays a significant role in cronyism and corruption through the nefarious relationships developed between consulting various local elites and markets.
Big consulting firms are effectively proxies for their Western powers, in maintaining hierarchy power structures supportive of economic dependency. Which serves Western economic interests in the neoliberal tradition.
Technology, therefore, can be the catalyst of leaving dysfunction and corruption behind and putting authentic bottom-up growth at the forefront. The applied intelligence process brings transparency, compliance and governance. Its dashboard interface allows for constant monitoring and realignment, which measures performance and manages risk simultaneously.
The applied intelligence process provides a unique framework that allows developing political economies to develop their own climate action strategies, independent of consultants. It provides tools to take them from idea conception to investment fundraising and ongoing management, compliance, governance and reporting.
6ai will show governments how to revive their public sector by investing in its capacity and implementing technology properly, rapidly, and responsibly. 6ai is not technology to get rid of people as much of the AI technology market is today. Instead, 6ai is Technology for Human Purposes.
Harvard Business Review (HBR) has pointed out that one of the major factors for digital transformation failure has been that Organizations that seek transformations (digital and otherwise) frequently bring in an army of outside consultants who tend to apply one-size-fits-all solutions. Harvard says that it would be better to “leverage insiders” — local staff who have intimate knowledge about daily operations and effectively have their skin in the game.
Adam Smith (the Father of Capitalism) wrote way back in 1776 — that enterprises and societies do better when they pursue their challenges themselves, through innovation, and strive to make things better for their society. To improve one’s lot in life is fundamental to capitalism Smith once wrote in his seminal work The Wealth of Nations.
The consulting industry goes against the very core tenets of capitalism, and and Adam Smith. The basic principles of the human spirit are to better oneself not to be kept down, and to gain security through wealth creation. The consulting industry runs perversely opposite to that, however.
The African continent and the Caribbean region must get their acts together. And begin to write their own stories and pursue their own global trade and investment deals that benefit them. They must have a clear and practical ideological vision when it comes to climate mitigation, recognizing the massive game-changing zero-emissions-based economy opportunity that awaits.
President Akufo-Addo tells us the hard and uncomfortable truth;
- About it being our responsibility to make our countries attractive to outside investment.
- That we must build a place where others want to immigrate to and not want to leave.
- Be seen as a place of economic opportunity with stable and efficient political and justice systems.
- New applied intelligence thinking to action with underlying technologies is the future of winning. It will renew enthusiasm and the spirit to generate more ambition to win.
- High-growth sectors like AgTech, Fintech, Biotech, and Zero-emissions economy, must lead the way and draw in serious and legitimate global investors.
So, if we work at it, President Akufo-Addo said, if we stop being beggars, we’ll not need to ask anyone from any country for respect, it will happen naturally.
AI has brought the world to an inflection point, so Africa and the Caribbean must make well-informed decisions at this critical juncture in time. Investing in much-needed knowledge and capacity-building systems, for both business and government sectors. Building purposefully and ethically into the public sector, and flushing the system of inefficiencies and costly and useless consulting, is job #1.
The End of Consultants
Freeing the human mind…to learn and do better by doing it for themselves is fundamental to human progress. Government departments and the most denigrated of workforces must become better through intelligent learning ecosystems, where vast amounts of knowledge can be accessed and utilized for strategy at the click of a mouse.
The end of consultants is the beginning of authentic self-determination!
History has taught us that when we rely on ourselves and not others, the magic of life happens! This is fundamental in the human condition, the human spirit, which needs the security of self-empowerment to thrive in the universe. To create authentic happiness.
6ai Technologies seeks to bridge the knowledge and know-how gap by utilizing and maximizing data science and generative AI functions, in a single easy-to-use platform solution for political economy strategy development. For societies to help themselves and compete to win, with confidence and dignity. Because when you know better you can do better.
