Grid-locked African Economic Sovereignty

edited by Tapiwa Victor Warikandwa, Nkosinothando Mpofu, Artwell Nhemachena and Howard Chitimira

Decolonising the Neo-Imperial Socio-Economic and Legal Force-fields in the 21st Century

The emergent so-called “Fourth Industrial Revolution” is regarded by some as a panacea for bringing about development to Africans. This book dismisses this flawed reasoning. Surfacing how “investors” are actually looting and plundering Africa; how the industrial internet of things, the gig economies, digital economies and cryptocurrencies breach African political and economic sovereignty, the book pioneers what can be called anticipatory economics – which anticipate the future of economies. It is argued that the future of Africans does not necessarily require degrowth, postgrowth, postdevelopment, postcapitalism or sharing/solidarity economies: it requires attention to age-old questions about African ownership and control of their resources. Investors have to invest in ensuring that Africans own and control their resources. Further, it is pointed out that the historical imperial structural creation of forced labour is increasingly morphing into what we call the structural creation of forced leisure which is no less lethal for Africans. Because both the structural creation of forced labour and the structural creation of forced leisure are undergirded by transnational neo-imperial plunder, theft, robbery, looting and dispossession of Africans, this book goes beyond the simplistic arguments that Euro-America developed due to the industrial revolutions.

Tapiwa Victor Warikandwa

Tapiwa Victor Warikandwa holds a PhD in Laws from the University of Fort Hare in South Africa. He is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Law at the University of Namibia. He has researched and published on various aspects of Law in Namibia and Zimbabwe.

Nkosinothando Mpofu

Nkosinothando Mpofu holds a PhD in Communication Studies and is a Senior Lecturer at the Namibia University of Science and Technology.

Artwell Nhemachena

Artwell Nhemachena holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cape Town. He has lectured at a number of universities in Zimbabwe. Currently he lectures in Sociology at the University of Namibia. He has published journal papers, book chapters and books on violence and conflict, relational ontologies and resilience, environment, development, democracy, research methods, humanitarianism and civil society organisations, anthropological jurisprudence, mining, society and politics, religion, industrial sociology, decoloniality and social theory. He is a laureate and active member of CODESRIA since 2010.

Howard Chitimira

Howard Chitimira is a Professor of Law at North-West University, South Africa.