Ep 400 - The Power of a United Africa with Fadhel Kaboub

** Come to Macro 'n Chill next Tuesday. We'll be discussing this, the 400th episode of our podcast! October 13th at 8pm ET / 5pm PT. Register here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/MKAXG1OQTIq2ly3Pu7B2sQ

This is our 19th episode featuring Fadhel Kaboub, so who better to bring back for our 400th? He joins Steve to explore whether the countries of the Global South can industrialize on their own terms now that the old order of debt conditionality, export dependence, and fragmented production is breaking apart? Fadhel walks us through the report, One Voice, One Strategy: A Continental Blueprint for African Strategic Minerals, Joint Industrial Policies, and Diplomacy, published by Southern Africa Resource Watch.

Fadhel begins with the moment itself, a structural rupture in the global economic order that opens a short window for the Global South to reposition. He explains why the usual development model of borrowing, exporting and courting foreign investment keeps countries at the bottom of global value chains, and why scale matters. From there he sketches a different way to finance transformation, built on cooperation across borders instead of debt. He also takes on the idea that working together costs a nation its sovereignty, tracing it to the neocolonial politics that followed independence and the fate of Kwame Nkrumah's vision of a united Africa. Along the way, MMT's understanding of currency-issuing governments is used to challenge the myth that Africa is simply short of money.

Steve presses on the hard questions. How does a bloc avoid building a new hierarchy of its own? Fadhel says ownership, profit and wage shares, labor protections, land rights, and environmental safeguards must be pre-negotiated, with trade unions and frontline communities at the table from day one. Majority ownership stays with governments, and profits flow into a joint sovereign wealth fund that evens out inequities between members. Along the way he traces how the African Union's emphasis on national sovereignty undercut Nkrumah's vision of a united Africa.

Then comes the question of blowback, from sanctions and false narratives to assassinations and invasions. Fadhel answers with broad public ownership of the vision, guaranteed food, fuel, and medical supply lines for vulnerable members, and a collective security pact with a BRICS bloc that includes China, a counterweight to NATO that does not exist today.

This is a conversation about what solidarity looks like at the scal