By Ray Youssef, CEO of NoOnes, a P2P marketplace I never imagined that a few days later, I would be fleeing water cannons and tear gas canisters on the streets of Nairobi, Kenya, when I travelled there with some of the NoOnes team to give the keynote address at the Catholic University of Eastern Africa. Although I had experienced similar circumstances previously, it nevertheless surprised me to see so many Kenyans turn out. They were against a government financing package that raised taxes on a number of products, including bread and other necessities. That law was likely to exacerbate Kenya’s already out-of-control cost-of-living crisis.

The President, William Ruto, campaigned on reducing taxes and lowering the cost of living, and some Kenyans thought he had broken his promises. Many, particularly the Kenyan youth, said they’d had enough. It’s a familiar story we hear all the time, and one I’ve been talking about for years, but maybe things are finally about to change in Africa because the speed with which the Kenyan youth took to the streets was astonishing.

I have been a proponent of ending financial apartheid in Africa for many years because, as we witnessed in Nairobi’s streets, sayings like “your money’s no good” or “we won’t trade with you” lead to a failed economy and anarchy. We have been bound and held down by the global banking system, but I know how to untie the knot. Focusing on pan-African trade is the answer, and peer-to-peer markets like NoOnes and a universal currency like cryptocurrency are essential to its success. The African people must lead this revolution, and the thousands of Kenyans who came to the streets demonstrated to me that things are already beginning to change.

After 400 years, Africans have had enough of the West telling them what to do.

After the invention of the Internet and the portable P2P devices that we all carry about in our pockets, we are currently seeing the last stages of the P2P revolution. After that, a surge of entrepreneurs upended every sector of the economy, with the exception of finance, disrupting everything from hospitality and transportation to communications and bitcoin P2P electronic payment in 2008. Africa will be the first continent to benefit when that last step is finished; it is already in its final stages.

Africa is at the forefront of the global resource, youth, population growth, and cryptocurrency adoption curves. It is poised to benefit greatly from the eventual dismantling of the Western financial dominance over the continent. But intelligence is a must. The game that everyone else is playing is the one that we have to play. It is a myth that most people believe the West invades Africa in order to pillage its riches and enslave Africans, but it is not entirely accurate. Africa is a huge market for Western goods, which is the actual reason the West wants to rule the continent. That has always been the case.

Known as “The Scramble for Africa,” the Western colonisation of Africa 150 years ago consisted mostly of European countries selling the goods of their “colonised peoples,” and they did so with relatively little capital input. They made the minimal investment necessary to achieve their goals, and they still do it now. The EU and China are Africa’s two largest trading partners, with a combined trade volume with Africa that is more than twice that of ALL African countries with one another.

In 2020, intra-African commerce accounted for only 18% of African exports and 15% of African imports.

Why don’t African nations trade with each other? Could it have anything to do with the global financial system making intra-trade difficult? Could it be the WTO, the World Bank and the IMF influencing African political leaders and economic policy? Do we grow, build, service and manufacture what Africans need, or do we do what the West tells us to do? It used to be that Western colonizers put a gun to our heads and told us what to do. Now, the gun to our heads is loaded with financial consequences instead of bullets.

African leaders are coerced into acting in a way that serves the interests of the West by the global elites. This has been taking place for many years. The goal of the structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) implemented at the start of the 1980s was to assist African nations with debt relief. Rather, they exacerbated the issue by compelling African nations to take out loans in order to settle their debt. Here’s an illustration of what occurs when certain IMF directives are followed.

• In 1980, the combined debt owed by African nations was USD$567 billion
• These countries paid back over USD$1,600 billion (almost 3 times the amount owed) between 1980 and 1992 – 12 years
• By 1992, they still owed more than USD $1,400 billion

I want a Pan African trade revolution because all those policies are unjust and are the core of financial apartheid. This is not an army revolution, nor even a series of street fights; during the demonstrations in Kenya, numerous people were hurt, and one person lost their life while we were there. As the protests continue, many more people have since passed away. One of the main reasons I am writing this article is that we don’t want people to die. This revolution is about trading with each other and keeping the wealth created by Africans in Africa, and we can achieve it with the tools we already have. We don’t need to put our bodies on the line in the streets.

I’ve honoured Satoshi’s original objective by creating CivKit, a decentralised, open-source system that we are giving away so people in Africa may compete with me. The initial version of Bitcoin had protocols to construct a marketplace. Any African business owner can use cryptocurrency as a medium of exchange and use CivKit to build a marketplace where they can offer their products and services to customers around the world for free.

Bitcoin was developed by Satoshi to get things started, and we want to keep the momentum going by creating more markets that will allow cryptocurrency to reach its full potential. I support competition because it fosters trade, which is essential if we are to all live rich lives and be in control of our own destiny. We will no longer be dependent on the USD and the Euro, the Western banking system, the IMF, the World Bank, and all the charity that comes here and doesn’t actually do anything if we carry out this revolution properly. We want freedom and the chance to create our own destiny; we don’t need charity.

I used to claim that Africa suffered from low self-esteem because people there still bought into the illusion that the continent is plagued by corruption, disease, and poverty. Though I’m sure there is more work to be done in terms of self-branding, seeing the young of Kenya rise up as they did a few days ago gives me hope. They mobilised in the streets, exchanged messages on social media, and took action. In a matter of days, the hashtag #RejectFinanceBill2024 amassed 2 million posts, forcing the government to first partially back down by abandoning some of the proposed tax increases and then to completely reject the measure. Although it’s not a significant win, each step towards liberation is important.