No compassionate or business-savvy person should wish to stand idly by and witness the slow and certain demise of Africa, writes Liberia-born entrepreneur and marathon runner Monique Maddy.

She makes that assertion in her poignant and blindingly candid memoir, Learning to Love Africa, after having offered a satirical prescription for the eradication of the misery of the people of that continent over a 25-year span.

Maddy models her "Modest Proposal for the Euthanasia of a Continent" on Jonathan Swift's Modest Proposal for preventing poor children in Ireland from being a burden to their parents and their country. Swift's sardonic essay recommended that the majority of Irish babies be sold to the British for food.

Maddy's multifaceted proposal would rid the African continent of 50 million people by doing nothing about AIDS; having anti-globalization and anti-corporate activists adopt more than 100 million African children and take them to Europe and the United States; using Africa's natural resources to pay anti-globalization people for adopting Africans and to buy off corrupt African officials; and letting the remaining 200 million people perish in cross-border and regional wars.

This tongue-in-cheek prescription bears a striking resemblance, however, to what Maddy sees happening in Africa today. And she places an overwhelming amount of the blame on the United Nations and various redevelopment agencies that she believes are perpetuating rather than relieving poverty in Africa.

Maddy, who worked for the United Nations for several years in New York, Indonesia, Angola and the Central African Republic, refers to the United Nations and its development and aid affiliates as Laputa Inc. -- another reference to Swift, whose Laputa offered unrealistic theories and ideas for Bulnaria, an island of ruin, poverty and hopelessness.

"The leaders of Laputa, Inc., are chameleons who excel at the brilliant art of re-invention, illusion and self-preservation. If Africa did not exist, they would have invented it," Maddy writes.

The Harvard Business School graduate is convinced that the answer to Africa's problems is business and not more development aid to corrupt governments and their Laputa Inc. sponsors.

The effort to raise venture capital and overcome the daunting web of bureaucratic obstacles is really what stands in Africa's economic way.

"What we need are long-term solutions that view Africa as a potential new consumer market, rather than as simply a massive social welfare project," she writes. "Only corporations, not do-gooders, can look at Africa in this manner. Bill Gates needs to look at Africa and see not just vaccines, but Windows. Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft, should be as excited about Africa as Bill Gates is; until then, the continent will remain a sideshow."

Maddy's thinking was shaped by her upbringing in Yepeka, Liberia, a company town built by the Swedish mining company LAMCO. In this idyllic community, now devastated and reclaimed by the jungle, Maddy enjoyed most of the amenities and opportunities of upper middle-class American families. Her father was an enterprising businessman; her mother was a professional nurse and came from a line of enterprising Mandinka traders.

Maddy attended English and American boarding schools, graduated from Georgetown University and earned her master's degree at the Johns Hopkins University School of International Studies.

She then went to work for the United Nations, but when she became disillusioned with the organization she decided to attend Harvard Business School. After graduating, she and some Harvard friends went to Tanzania to start a telecommunications company, African Communications Group. The name was later changed to Adesemi.

The effort to raise venture capital and overcome the daunting web of bureaucratic obstacles provide the framework for Learning to Love Africa. Woven into that account are Maddy's reminiscences about her childhood in Yepeka and insightful reflections on ancient and modern African history.

Maddy's passionate recounting of tragedies that have overtaken Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast and other parts of West Africa are spellbinding because of the personal perspective she adds to the grisly headlines that emanated from those devastating wars.

Maddy and her friends succeeded in establishing an integrated virtual telephone network in Tanzania and expanded its reach into Ghana.

"The virtual phone was a seamlessly integrated platform of wireless public pay phones, electronic voice-mail boxes and beepers. It offered the subscriber a low-cost but highly effective alternative to basic telephone service, which was beyond the economic reach of the overwhelming majority of the people in Tanzania, Ghana and other countries that we would target eventually," Maddy writes.

Adesemi had plans to establish the service in Ivory Coast and Sri Lanka, but the company was forced to liquidate by an arm of Laputa Inc.: The British Commonwealth Development Corporation.

Learning to Love Africa should be mandatory reading for corporate executives seeking new international markets and resources. Maddy maintains that there are tremendous business opportunities on the continent. But she pulls no punches about the political rigors and other problems that make it exceedingly difficult to take advantage of them.






Contributed by Cecil Johnson. Reprinted with permission from Star-Telegram.com.

To read a Global Envision interview with Monique Maddy, see An Entrepreneur's Journey in Africa.