Confessions of an Economic Hit Man: What can we learn from its Revelations?

In 2004 John Perkins authored the Confessions of Economic Hit man – a professional used by multinational corporations to seduce poor countries so that they agree to the so called foreign direct investment. Indeed this book has insightful revelation about US’s foreign economic policies and unfair exploitation of US corporatocracy – an empire of connected companies benefiting on unjust trade and contract deals with developing countries.

Referring to his engagement with MAIN – a US consultancy company, Perkins confesses on account of his involvement on how they manipulated a number of developing countries in framing them to debts they could not afford to honor. In the end these poor countries found themselves enslaved by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). The sad part of the deal is that even when those deals involved infrastructure development, every penny went back to US through Construction Companies which won such infrastructure development contracts; in the end it was US companies reaping money from world bank and IMF through the shadow of poor countries’ exploitation – Perkins calls this a modern slavery

Though Perkins claims on the US government connection to Corporatocracy cannot be justified, the mention of US Companies in stirring conflicts in Middle East and South America, and the mention of Osama Bin Laden’s connection corporatocracy cannot be ignored. In fact Perkins’ predictions about the fate of South American countries like Venezuela are close to reality considering what happened to Hugo Chavez and what is likely to happen to Nicolas Maduro.

 While reflecting on Perkins’ confessions, it worth questioning the role of developing countries in global economy and what the future holds for developing countries like Tanzania. For decades now we have been made to believe that, Foreign Direct Investment is the real deal for Tanzania. When we made major economic reforms to embrace private sector prosperity in the early 1990’s we were optimistic of meeting the target of middle income economy by 2025. Today, almost nine years from the deadline there are still a number of undelivered targets.

Looking at industrialization, the level of our industries both in terms of technology and capacity are far from reality and incapable of competing with advanced economies like China and India – who have taken over our local market for manufactured products. I don’t want to dwell deep on why we are still in that level but I cannot understand why many of us still hold to FDI as the main savior of our industries even after all these years of its inability to materialize.

It is also surprising that some of us have even gone to the level of criticizing government allocation of 40% of its budget to development expenditure; arguing that we cannot do it on our own unless we get financial help from outside – albeit FDI. With the revelations in Perkins’ “Confessions of Economic Hit Man” and Erik Reinert’s “How Rich Countries got Rich and Why Poor Countries are Still Poor” how on earth can we dream of some foreign companies or donors agency to come and do all the industrialization for us for free or minority share of whatever return expected to be earned.

For industrialization to live to its expectation both the government and its citizens need to make hard decisions. To avoid the possibility of corporatocracy we need to gather our own resources while cutting down unnecessary expenditure. We must realize that in most cases both reforms and quest for development endeavors are painful. We need to embrace pains and hold ourselves together in our quest for just development – development for all.

While our government has shown willingness to embark on infrastructure development projects in a way that our country benefits the most, we must get prepared to fight and adopt any attack from corpotocracy. We must not forget that, corpotocracy can take any form you can imagine – from political destabilization to economic sanctions and grants denial.

In this critical moment therefore we must stop criticizing everything coming from the government for the sake of criticizing and join our efforts together in pursuing our own sustainable development. We must offer constructive criticisms while applauding positive government decisions and move forward.