The Afrindependent Institute is a pathbreaking think-tank dedicated to liberating African economic thought from the grip of Western statist models and intellectual hegemony. The core of its purpose is the advancement of Africonomics—a school of philosophical, economic, and civilizational thought grounded in natural-moral law, truth, liberty, and human dignity.
We exist to offer principled frameworks as alternatives to the ethics-free, statist doctrines that have dominated African policy since the colonial era, Western models that continue to produce coercion, corruption, repression, and economic ruin.
Our Vision
A free, prosperous, and structurally just Africa—built on truth, liberty, sound money, and respect for natural individual rights.
Our Mission
To advance African intellectual and economic sovereignty through original research, principled frameworks, and public education grounded in Africonomics. We challenge prevailing models, expose systemic injustice, and promote sound ideas to empower African nations and humanize global systems.
Why Africonomics?
Africonomics is the African approach to economics, jurisprudence, and the social sciences grounded in natural-moral law. It recognizes the transcendental Creator (God) as the source of universal moral order, natural individual rights, human dignity, and the oneness of humankind. It stands in categorical contrast to the philosophical materialism, utilitarianism, and Darwinian conception of humans and human relations that dominate Western models.
Where Western economics justifies monetary inflation, coercive taxation, and centralized control, Africonomics begins with moral clarity and anthropological accuracy: people are moral agents with inherent dignity rather than mechanistic units or advanced animals, possess natural rights, and flourish through natural-moral law, voluntary cooperation, sound money, and structural justice.
Africonomics affirms a powerful and transformative truth: objective, universal moral principles exist, which are encompassed in the ethical principles of truth, justice, and nonaggression. These principles form the foundation of a structurally just and civilized social order.
Africonomics is consistent with the theist and principled African worldview. It rejects the Western materialist Darwinian worldview, which is racial, rivalrous, animalistic, and aggressive. Africonomics also rejects the Western emphasis on technocratic control and centralized management of human societies. This approach is dehumanizing, unjust, and uncivilized, involving coercive and oppressive practices enforced through state aggression.
Correcting the Postcolonial Betrayal
As I point out in The Scale of Statism, Africa did not transition from colonialism to liberty; it transitioned from colonial control to postcolonial tyranny. The tragic reality of postcolonial Africa is that, instead of experiencing liberty after colonial rule, African societies have endured coercive, confiscatory, and repressive governments. The oppression of Africans by African governments based on Western statist models is one of the greatest tragedies of postcolonial Africa.
From single-party socialist regimes to military dictatorships to electoral autocracies, postcolonial Africa has been governed almost entirely by autocratic systems that replicate, and in some cases exceed, the oppression of colonial regimes. This has been the tragedy of contemporary Africa: freedom in name, repression in practice.
Precolonial African kingdoms and polities were not perfect, but they widely practiced free enterprise, free trade, sound money, just governance, and natural law ethics. This heritage must be restored and modernized, not overwritten by tyrannical Western doctrines disguised as development policy.
Africa must abandon Western statist models. They have proven arbitrary, repressive, and destructive. Africonomics provides a fundamentally different paradigm, a principled framework for restoring African sovereignty and dignity.
Why Western Models Have Failed Africa
The postcolonial embrace of Western statist economics—underpinned by central planning, fiat currency, heavy taxation, and foreign aid dependency—has devastated Africa. These systems have delivered not prosperity, but persistent and destructive cycles of tyranny, poverty, stagnation, and instability.
The failure is not technical or technological. It is philosophical and moral.
Western models are ethics-free, rooted in utilitarian and positivist approaches that rest on flawed philosophical assumptions about human nature. The prevailing Western economic paradigm reduces people to mechanistic units to be managed, resources to be redistributed, and societies to be controlled through coercion and repression. The result is arbitrary governance, structural violence, and the sophisticated barbarism of modern statism.
Africonomics rejects the Western mechanistic-animalistic paradigm categorically. It affirms that people are distinctly human and moral agents created with dignity and natural rights, and thus capable of peaceful relations, enterprise, and justice.
African nations must shift their philosophical outlook, abandon Western statist models, and embrace Africonomics to build integrated, stable, and thriving African economies—the foundation of a sovereign, free, and respected postcolonial Africa.
Africonomics presents a principled path to African economic integration, stability, and prosperity.
Our Work
The Afrindependent Institute is devoted to producing research, policy papers, academic publications, and educational media that:
- Develop and advance Africonomics
- Uphold truth, justice, and human dignity
- Promote sound money and expose fiat monetary injustice
- Defend natural individual rights and foster structural justice
- Restore Africa’s heritage of free enterprise, free trade, and sound money
We engage scholars, students, policymakers, and civil society in building an integrated, prosperous, and structurally just Africa.
A Global Mission with African Roots
While our work centers on transforming and liberating Africa, its implications are global. The world suffers greatly under the current racist, statist, and militarist global order established by Western imperial states. With Africonomics, Africa has the capacity—and the burden—to lead the world toward a more just, peaceful, and civilized order. Only Africa can humanize and civilize the world from an Africonomics foundation.
Africonomics is more than a school of thought. It is a moral and civilizational framework for African liberation, global civilizational renewal, and genuine human flourishing. And the Afrindependent Institute is its home.
Liberating African Thought. Restoring African Sovereignty and Dignity.
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About the author
Manuel Tacanho
Manuel Tacanho is a social philosopher and economist; and the founder and president of the Afrindependent Institute.
See author's profile