2010-2020
Mali Up to the Modern Day
Chairwomen Kamissa Camara was selected by the Fourth Wave, and numerous other social liberal factions to be the first female leader of Mali. At 27 she was also the second youngest leader in Mali after Sankara himself. She had served as a foreign affairs analyst to Chairman N'Guessan, and minister of digital planning to Chairman Sissoko. She was a reformist and modernist within Mali and would pave new reforms for the state.
There was the matter of the economy and megacooperatives. Camara would institute Anti-Trust Laws for the first time in Malian history. The Malian Federal Trades Commission as a joint arm of the Economic Union and Federal Council would be founded to deal with preventing the formation of trusts and monopolies.
Anti Trust Laws of Mali:
I. has the power to regulate behaviour of large firms it claims to be abusing their dominant position or market power as well as, preventing firms from gaining the position within the market structure enables them to behave abusively in the first place. Mergers that have a “community dimension” in order for a merger to be declared compatible with the common market, it must not create or strengthen a dominant position where it could affect competition.
II. The MFTC would be able to penalize cooperatives abusing their positions of power:
(a) directly or indirectly imposing unfair purchase or selling prices or other unfair trading conditions;
(b) limiting production, markets or technical development to the prejudice of consumers;
(c) applying dissimilar conditions to equivalent transactions with other trading parties, thereby placing them at a competitive disadvantage;
(d) making the conclusion of contracts subject to acceptance by the other parties of supplementary obligations which, by their nature or according to commercial usage, have no connection with the subject of such contracts."
III. Some practices forbidden by the government would include:
•Exclusive dealing agreements
Whereby a customer is required to purchase all or most of a particular type of good or service from a dominant supplier and is prevented from buying from others.
•Granting of exclusivity rebates
Purported loyalty schemes that are equivalent in effect to exclusive dealing agreements.
•Tying one product to the sale of another, thereby restricting consumer choice.
•Bundling, similar to tying, whereby a supplier will only supply its products in a bundle with one or more other products.
•Margin squeezing vertical practices that have the effect of excluding downstream competitors.
•Refusing to license intellectual property rights whereby a dominant firm holding patented rights refuses to license those rights to others.
•Refusal to supply a competitor with a good or service, often in a bid to drive them out of the market.
•Predatory pricing where a dominant firm deliberately reduces prices to loss-making levels in order to force competitors out of the market.
•Price discrimination arbitrarily charging some market participants higher prices that are unconnected to the actual costs of supplying the goods or services.
•leveraging a dominant position by way of self-preferencing
Following this several landmark cases would see an American subsidiary cooperative Chevron-Taudeni and United Steel Cooperative would see both companies broken up into smaller pieces, and excluded from remerging in the future. This would open the market to many smaller groups, including even other nations, South Africa, Italy, and India would make inroads into the opening markets of Mali. The government would also in court challenge the idea of businesses owning mercenaries within Mali. The courts would rule in favor of the government and a massive scale back of scope, power, and jurisdiction of mercenaries within the northern territories.
The next part of equalizing the economy would come in the form of various government acts, the National Small Business Protections Act, in which the government would offer loans, grants, low cost legal advice, and even mentoring for small private enterprises, and small cooperatives. The next would be the Tax Simplification Act, which would make starting up and navigating the tax codes and bureaucracy of Mali easy and able to be completed in a few hours. Finally, the Tax Forgiveness Act would allow various tax concessions including a 7% discount on taxes for individuals in self-employed positions or in small cooperatives.
The last step of the economic reform plan would include social campaigns. The government would encourage localism within communities with the Community Supporter Agriculture plan being piloted in many major cities. Citizens would pay farmers a certain amount of money and be granted a share of their food crop at the end of the harvest, they would even be encouraged to pick which ones they wanted. This would also be used a bridge between farmer and city dweller, and the young and old.
Another part of the Fourth Wave platform was anti-corruption. It was believed that while Sankara was a great leader he had let corruption slide, and this only heightened in the later years after his departure. The Malian Anti-Corruption Act would see fines, jail time, and hard labor assigned to those caught within the act of corruption. An independent watchdog agency and increased media allowance would also foster government transparency and encourage the fostering of good governance within Mali. Also, a wage reform act would see pay adjusted for federal workers to the new realities of the Malian economy. With acceptable wages corruption would further be disincentivized.
2013 would signal the scaling down of the Boko Haram conflict with numerous of their leaders killed or captured, the Nigerian, Chadian and Malian Coalition declared victory. While there would still be low level conflict and isolated pockets that would have to be removed with force, the armies of the three nations would begin to be scaled back, and many refugees sent back to their respective lands, though Mali would make extra effort to recruit and naturalize those with an education who may be useful.
2020 would bring a new challenge to Mali, the start of the COVID-19 pandemic would ravage the global economy, as Mali’s economy tumbled to a sluggish 2% growth rate the lowest it had been since the 2008 recession. The government would take precautionary measures buying masks, and other medical supplies. This is when the Sankara reforms would come into their own. However, surprisingly Mali would not be as affected by the global pandemic like most African nations had much lower transmission rates. The emergence of the 2021 Omicron variant would present a new challenge to the government as it slowly began to spread around Africa.
Thus, our story closes on The Socialist Federal Republic of Mali. The largest economy in Africa and one of her largest nations. Democratic and socialist the Malian nation represented the burning flame of African socialism, and libertarian socialism in general. For all of Africa’s faults and lingering damage of colonialism a better future was at the end of the tunnel especially for those in West Africa.
Afterthought: So there we go story’s over. Thanks to everyone who read my story, and liked or provided any comments or feedback. Have a good day and be good to eachother.