Edwin's Corner

China retraces its interaction with Africa to the slave era when the Kunlun (or dark skinned people) were brought into the Chinese Peninsula by Arab traders during the Tang Dynasty era and also from tales based on Zheng He’s travels to coastal East Africa. A few centuries later, the Opium Wars seared a certain mental caricature about western hegemony, which was further exasperated by the military dominance of the Japanese Empire who aped Western methods in their control of Chinese Machurian territory. It is imperative to note that the China we know today is not the China of the 1940’s -1950’s when the mind set then was of a common enemy i.e. poverty and a Western colonial influence. In retrospect, this “common” past has aided China in forging an impressive relationship with Africa. While the West and Bretton Woods institutions have taken a big brother approach of giving stringent political and economic conditions in order to turn on the aid taps in ...

A lot has happened since Fredrick Winslow Taylor stated in his monograph The Principle of Scientific Management , “the principal object of management should be to secure the maximum prosperity for the employer, coupled with the maximum prosperity for each employee”. For one, we have had two world wars, which essentially polarized the world into the divergent East-West dichotomy during which millions died protecting either viewpoint. Capitalism is no longer what it used to be in the days of Andrew Carnegie. It softened, gained integrity and its pure state became offensive.   More so, corporate leaders nowadays defend and agitate for green initiatives despite the fact that they rarely have a foreseeable return on investment.   While Taylorism failed when it was tried and tested in various companies, in the early 20 th Century, due to its utopian expectations, it successfully became the precursor to a universe of current management theories whose epicenter is powered...

The 17 th century was a watershed period for North America as European immigrants boarded ships and crossed the Atlantic Ocean in order to escape the servitude, abject poverty and hunger that was prevalent in Europe at that time.  A principle that travelled these many miles was one borne out of the need to bring the working classes together while dragging them out of poverty through commerce. More than 200 years later, with many unsuccessful attempts and subsequently the unearthing of the “Rochdale Principles” the cooperative movement is firmly entrenched around the world. There is nowhere this movement has found such success as in North America, with more than 45% penetration and figures exceeding 1 trillion dollars in savings and shares. It almost seems like the cooperative was invented in America and not in the Scottish City of Aberdeen. Why so much success in North America and where does Africa sit with all this? According to the 2012 statis...