🔅 Africa Can’t Outsource Its Dreams
When a President Decides to Launch a Memecoin, Trump-Style
Good Morning from Burundi!
Why Africa Can’t Outsource Its Dreams
China recently greenlit a colossal $140bn dam on the Yarlung Tsangpo River in Tibet—a mega-project set to produce three times the power of the famed Three Gorges Dam.
Breathtaking? Absolutely.
Shocking? Not if you’ve watched how China operates.
They don’t wait around for someone else to bless their ambitions; they just get on with it—even if they need foreign capital or expertise.
That’s the wake-up call, says W. Gyude Moore (Liberia’s former Minister of Public Works), in this piece: Africa can’t keep letting outsiders—be they the World Bank or foreign “partners”—define the continent’s ambitions. Why? Because they’re often stuck in a mindset of “Nah, your economy’s too small” or “That’s unfeasible.” Meanwhile, China dreamt up the Three Gorges when they were poor and just kept doubling down on bigger ideas.
Take Moore’s anecdotes from Liberia:
Four-Lane Highway? After the civil war, the government asked a multilateral bank to fund a wide highway linking Monrovia’s airport to the city. The response? “No traffic to justify it.” They built two lanes instead — which is now, of course, totally overwhelmed.
HFO (Heavy Fuel Oil) Power Plants? Partners nixed it in favor of an all-renewable vision (nice idea, but painfully slow). Eight years later—surprise!—the World Bank financed an HFO plant anyway.
Same old story: proposals that push boundaries get dismissed or slow-walked to death. But if you rely on outsiders to imagine your future, you’ll stay stuck in their version of “practical.”
Sure, outside capital or partnerships can help. But the blueprint for your future? That has to be homegrown. Over a century ago, folks in China drafted plans for the Three Gorges Dam when their economy was a fraction of today’s. Fast forward, they’re building something even more ambitious on the Yarlung Tsangpo.
The moral? If Africa keeps letting external institutions tell it what’s “feasible,” they’ll inevitably settle for small potatoes. As Moore says, “The size of one’s economy today is not a definitive statement of one’s potential.”
Translation: dream big, build big—and keep that vision firmly in African hands.
When a President Decides to Launch a Memecoin (and Takes Notes from Trump)
We couldn’t help but scratch our heads when we first encountered this head-turning move from Faustin-Archange Touadéra, president of the Central African Republic (CAR), who recently unveiled $CAR—a memecoin that claims it will funnel a chunk of its proceeds into “country development.”
Cue the confetti cannons? Not exactly. Before anyone could blink, the token’s value plunged by 95%, turning the would-be financial fireworks display into a sad whimper of a sparkler.
Touadéra, once a mathematics professor, proudly declared on X that $CAR was “an experiment designed to unite people.” The hype quickly deflated, however, after crypto-watchers noticed the memecoin’s market cap sliding from a brief $350 million peak down to roughly $31 million as of this article’s writing.
If that weren’t enough, the government’s freshly minted social media account for $CAR got suspended—right when folks were already chattering about how legit (or not) this all was. Some even claimed Touadéra’s video announcement triggered “deepfake” suspicions.
If this scenario reminds you of a certain American ex-president’s foray into memecoins, you’re not wrong. Donald and Melania Trump jumped on the meme-crypto bandwagon last month, prompting a flurry of spin-offs and scams.
Here’s where things get trickier: the Central African Republic is among the poorest nations on Earth, with minimal internet coverage and mobile phone usage. So, even if the memecoin idea were magical, most locals might not have the bandwidth—literally—to jump aboard. Not to mention, the government’s brief fling with making bitcoin legal tender in 2022 fizzled faster than day-old champagne, largely due to the IMF’s raised eyebrows and the cautious stance of a regional central bank.
Still, Touadéra is unwavering: he’s touting the memecoin launch as a “resounding success” and praising everyone—from local enthusiasts to global crypto speculators—who hopped on board before the crash.
Water Hyacinth: The Invasive Weed That’s Finally Meeting Its Match
If you think your morning commute is bad, imagine getting stuck in the middle of a lake for three days because of a plant. That’s what happened at Lake Naivasha in Kenya recently, where water hyacinth is smothering everything in sight—fish, boats, and whole livelihoods. This alien species originated in South America but now runs rampant worldwide, clogging hydropower stations, killing off aquatic life, and costing billions of dollars.
Enter: Bioplastic Made from the “Menace”
Kenyan innovator Joseph Nguthiru (henceforth hailed as “the hyacinth hero”) decided to tackle two problems at once:
Invasive water hyacinth.
Single-use plastic bans in Kenya (that haven’t exactly stuck).
His company, HyaPak Ecotech, dries the dreaded weed, mixes it with additives, and—ta-da!—out comes bioplastic packaging. It’s fully biodegradable in a few months, meaning your grocery bag can go back to nature rather than lurking in a landfill for 500+ years.
Fishermen are thrilled. On days when the lake is so choked with hyacinth they can’t catch fish, they can still earn money by harvesting the weed and selling it to HyaPak. Call it a side hustle with eco-cred.
HyaPak’s big win? Turning its bioplastic into seedling bags for Kenya’s reforestation project, which aims to plant 15 billion trees by 2032. Traditional plastic seedling bags create carbon emissions and end up as trash, but HyaPak’s version decomposes with the seedling, releasing nutrients and retaining water longer. Translation: greener forests, fewer plastic graveyards.
Now, HyaPak is exporting these hyacinth-based superhero products to the US and Germany, with future franchises planned for India and El Salvador—places also plagued by the “floating terror.”
In a world fed up with plastic waste and invasive species, HyaPak is a breath of fresh air—literally. By turning an environmental nuisance into biodegradable plastic, it’s helping local fishermen, fueling reforestation, and proving that one person’s weed can be another’s wonder material. Now that’s what we call a reel deal.
Food for Thought
“Nobody can do what an expert cannot do.”
— Mozambique Proverb
African people think big! Your continent is oversized, beautiful and rich.