This policy paper demonstrates that Africa’s fixation on mineral resources as the engine of economic development is not a naturally occurring strategy but a deliberately engineered framework. Promoted by and for Western interests, this model has led to misguided policies, chronic stagnation, and deepening dependency. This externally imposed narrative serves four strategic purposes: (1) distract African policymakers from adopting sound, liberating economic models, (2) maintain Africa’s role as a cheap commodity supplier, (3) sustain neocolonial control and repression through autocratic governance, and (4) perpetuate economic underdevelopment and Western domination.

The mineral-resource model not only perpetuates economic instability, stagnation, and dependency but also sustains authoritarian regimes and statist systems that repress Africa’s greatest asset: its people, particularly the youth and their productive, entrepreneurial capacity. These coercive and confiscatory systems entrench structural injustices while suppressing human flourishing.

Africonomics offers a principled and liberating alternative grounded in structural justice, human dignity, and productive agency. Through free enterprise, sound money (the Nilar), and continent-wide economic integration, African nations can move beyond mineral dependency and statist economics to build integrated, stable, and thriving economies, thereby restoring African sovereignty and dignity.