The End of Scarcity: Metanomics and the Birth of African Monetary Sovereignty
| When: | Tuesday, 20 October 2026 - Tuesday, 20 October 2026 |
| Where: | Senate Room Braamfontein Campus East 2nd Floor, Solomon Mahlangu House, Braamfontein Campus East |
| Start time: | 17:00 |
| Enquiries: | Kelebogile Tadi | Kelebogile.Tadi@wits.ac.za> |
| RSVP: | RSVP: Professor Yegandi Imhotep Paul Alagidede's Inaugural Lecture – Fill out form |
The End of Scarcity: Metanomics and the Birth of African Monetary Sovereignty
Africa is rich. Yet it is priced poor, rated poor and financed poor by an architecture it neither owns nor governs. It holds the gold, the platinum, the cobalt and the land. What it does not hold is the system that values them. This lecture asks a plain question: why should a continent that owns the resources borrow someone else's money to develop them? Metanomics answers that scarcity is inherited accounting, not African condition. Where endowment is abundant, prosperity is a matter of design, and design can be rewritten. Wealth that is real, countable and auditable can back a currency of its own. This is Resource-Based Monetary Sovereignty, and the money it issues is an Endogenous Resource-Backed Currency: money grounded in what a country owns. The argument is carried into mechanism: the composition of the reserve, the coverage ratio that anchors issuance, the audit chain that makes the claim verifiable, and the conditions the design must withstand. Africa is already paying for monetary sovereignty. This lecture sets out how to own it.
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