Government Has No Business Being in Business: Evidence to the Contrary

The capitalist business paradigm forecloses government involvement in the ownership and management of business ventures.It is a foregone conclusion from the capitalist's model that government's participation in the ownership and running of a business is a recipe for failure.In furtherance of this doctrine, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have canvassed vigorously across the African hemisphere for outright non-involvement of government in the business domain, beyond providing the legal cum regulatory framework and creating the enabling environment for promoting private ownership of the business world.Following which, the model and path to economic development sold to African nations is that, a private sector-driven economy is the ultimate path-way to socio-economic development and that government's direct involvement forecloses development.This submission by the International Monetary Agencies is supposedly well collocated based on the empirical evidence of the mass failure of State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) in most parts of the budding African economic hemisphere.The evidence provided in the existing literature about the commonality that characterised the early postindependence era in African countries was the setting up of massive SOEs across the African economic landscape.The prevalence of state promoted corporate entities was predicated as observed by (Obara & Ogoun, 2014), on the near absence of private ownership of investment funds to deploy for economic ventures.Arguably, the pattern of administration used in these economies by their respective colonial administrators did not foster the growth of indigenous private venture capital, which created a general scenario after independence, only the respective governments could harness the needed resources to commit on such large-scale investments.An extension of this colonial economic management strategy, was the design of the colonised economies as feeder economies, thus creating a business model that created space only for colonial venture capitalists to thrive.Developing local indigenous capacity was not on the table.Accordingly, upon attainment of independence, governments of the emerging nations all over the African continent became the prime investors in their respective economies.Some of the investments undertaken centrally were as a result of nationalisation policies initiated as a counteractive measure geared towards toning down colonial influence through the ownership of the strategic heights the national economies.Thus, the strategic heights of most newly independent African states were nationalised, following the independence struggle.Quite sadly, the African continental SOEs domain manifested a common viral disease by of way of massive failures of SOE(s).The available statistics from Nigeria to most other African countries is indicative of this massive failure trend.Discontinuation of SOEs constrained various studies and recourse to International Monetary Agencies like the World Bank and the IMF.The prescription and contrived anti-dot to the SOEs demise pandemic was that government should pull out entirely from business.A private sector-led model was prescribed as the panacea.With the mounting statistical evidence of the failure of SOEs, this prescription was applauded, and the era of reforms was ignited across the African globe, as