Workers Deserve More Than Symbolism: How Africonomics Empowers the Many

Today, on International Workers’ Day, the world pauses to honor the dignity of labor. From factory floors to farms, from offices to market stalls, workers power society. But while slogans and parades offer symbolic appreciation, most workers across the world—especially in less economically developed countries—continue to face economic hardship, insecurity, and systemic injustice.

Why?

Because the very systems meant to protect workers are the ones undermining their freedom, income, and economic wellbeing.

The Problem with Statist “Worker Protection”

Statist systems—whether socialist, corporatist, or protectionist—claim to champion workers. In reality, they entrench:

• Confiscatory taxation that reduces take-home pay, siphoning off significant chunks of their buying, saving, and investment capacity. This constitutes direct economic dispossession.
• Monetary inflation (currency debasement) that erodes purchasing power, defrauding and directly yet secretly dispossessing the majority of buying, saving, and investment capacity. Fiat monetary systems are a confiscatory structural injustice in existing statist socioeconomic systems that more incisively harm wage-earners while benefiting governments, the political class, and financial elites.
• Overregulation that kills entrepreneurship and job creation, and restricts the availability of goods and services for workers and the broader public to access. This constitutes indirect economic dispossession.
• State monopolies and oligopolies that suppress worker mobility and wage competition, artificially reducing or stagnating wages. To worsen the situation, salaries are paid in a currency that is being systematically debased, which compounds the economic dispossession and exploitation of wage earners.
• Political patronage systems that reward loyalty over merit. Government bailouts and favors for corporations that entrench corruption, inequality, and injustice in statist societies.

These are not hypothetical problems. They are daily realities for workers in most countries throughout the world. Postcolonial states, modeled on Western statist and autocratic development models, have built economies around bureaucratic control, central planning, monetary inflation, and coercion—not freedom, enterprise, sound money, or dignity. These statist systems systematically disenfranchise and dispossess workers—the very people politicians and state officials claim to represent and serve.

Africonomics: A Principled Framework for Workers and Society

Africonomics offers a fundamentally different vision. It is a moral and economic framework grounded in natural-moral law, liberty, sound money, and structural justice. It does not treat workers as tools of the state or cogs in a bureaucratic machinery, but as human beings endowed with dignity, agency, and natural rights by the Creator.

In my paper, The Moral and Philosophical Structure of Africonomics: A Framework for African Economic Sovereignty, I point out:

Africonomics defends the free market not merely as an efficient allocator of resources but as the only moral and civilized socioeconomic system. Free markets respect individual rights, enable peaceful cooperation, reward productivity, and minimize coercion and injustice. They also reflect the African economic heritage of voluntary exchange, free entrepreneurial activity, and free trade networks. In contrast, statist systems—whether socialist, corporatist, or otherwise—rely on force, involve systemic fraud, create oppression, and result in structural injustices and widespread corruption.

What does this mean for workers?

1. Higher Real Wages

With sound money (like the Nilar), monetary inflation is eliminated, preserving workers’ purchasing power reliably. This steadily increases their buying, saving, and investment capacity. A sound monetary system is the principal element of a structurally just, prosperous, and civilized society.

2. More Jobs and Opportunities

Free enterprise, open market, and low regulatory barriers lead to robust entrepreneurship and job creation—especially in informal and rural sectors. This empowers workers and populace with a larger pool of goods and services, higher wages, wider access to job opportunities, greater mobility, and higher living standards.

3. Less Exploitation

Workers are free to negotiate, contract, and move across industries without being trapped by state-run monopolies, political interference, and bureaucratic hurdles that suppress employment opportunities and wages. Workers are empowered with secure property rights, sound and honest money, and greater freedom to choose. A free-market economy liberates workers and society from the coercive, exploitative, and oppressive nature of statist systems.

4. Just Labor Relations

Legal systems grounded in Africonomics’ natural-moral law jurisprudence uphold self-ownership, property rights, contracts, and protect both workers and employers from arbitrary political power and repressive regulations. This fosters structural justice, peaceful relations, and prosperity.

5. True Economic Empowerment

Africonomics doesn’t promise handouts—it guarantees a system where value creation is respected, savings are preserved, and prosperity is earned through peaceful, voluntary exchange. In other words, Africonomics provides the principles and frameworks for structurally just, stable, and civilized society.

On This Workers’ Day, Ask this Question:

Are our current statist systems truly serving workers and the majority?

Or are they maintaining structures of state control, natural rights violations, systemic inequality, economic dispossession, and hidden exploitation that benefit the top few?

Statist systems do not empower workers—they disempower them. They do not reduce inequality—they institutionalize it. They do not promote prosperity—they suppress it.

If we are serious about justice for workers—not just rhetoric—then we must reject statist systems that disenfranchise and exploit them and embrace economic frameworks that empower them by upholding sound money, voluntary exchange, free markets, and minimal taxation.

Africonomics is not about abstract freedom. It’s about truth, peaceful human relations, and real freedom—the kind workers can feel in their wallets, their workplaces, and their lives.

This Workers’ Day, let’s go beyond slogans. Let’s build a society that truly honors work—with sound money, liberty, structural justice, dignity, and respect for natural individual rights.

African nations are called to abandon Western statist models, which have proven confiscatory, exploitative, and oppressive. Africonomics offers principled frameworks for building a new reality of integrated, stable, and prosperous African economies. This fundamental shift would empower African workers and transform and liberate the continent, leading to a structurally just, sovereign, and dignified postcolonial Africa.