Preaching Free-Market Gospel to Skeptical Africa

The New York Times reports:

Lawrence W. Reed’s unusual line of work, coaching conservative policy groups, has left Mr. Reed, a Michigan economist, with acolytes across the globe. But none please him more than James Shikwati, whose unlikely rise offers a case study of how the right grooms foreign allies.

Mr. Shikwati was a young teacher in western Kenya when he came across an article by Mr. Reed on the genius of capitalism. In this isolated village where Mr. Shikwati was raised, life revolved around mud huts and maize, not smokestacks. Still he dashed off a note to Midland, Mich., where Mr. Reed runs a think tank that promotes conservative economics and offers a program teaching others to do the same.

“Do you assist individuals who would like to know more about the free market and individual liberty?” Mr. Shikwati wrote.

Over the next four years, Mr. Reed sent books, reports, magazines, tracts — even occasional sums of money — as Mr. Shikwati embraced capitalist theory with a passion. Then he started a one-man think tank of his own.

On a continent where socialists have often held sway, Mr. Shikwati is now a conservative phenomenon. He has published scores of articles hailing business as Africa’s salvation; offered free-market lectures on five continents; and, defying the zeitgeist of the Bono age, issued scathing attacks on foreign assistance, which he blames for Africa’s poverty. When Western countries pledged to double African aid last year, an interview with an angry Mr. Shikwati filled two pages of Der Spiegel, the German magazine.

“For God’s sake, please stop the aid!” he told the magazine.

Exporting the free market revolution world wide.