The following is the text of an address I delivered yesterday at the Cirrus Investor Conference in Swakopmund.
As investors, you are in the business of reading the future. You study a country’s geology, its politics, its legal system, its people. You weigh all of that against the risk of committing your capital. Then you make a bet.
The title of this talk is “Holding the liberal centre in a time of polarisation.” It contains a claim that investors should pay attention to: that there is a liberal centre, that it is under threat from polarisation on the left and the right, and that holding it matters for the future of your capital.
By the end of this talk, you will have a framework for judging whether a country’s political centre is holding, what that means for your investments, and how you can support the organisations that work to keep those conditions in place.
The framework rests on an idea that has been misunderstood for at least a century: liberalism. In the United States that word means something close to left-wing. In much of Africa it carries echoes of colonialism or Western imposition. But when I talk about liberalism I don’t mean either of those things.
I am talking about liberalism as a technology for organising societies so that people can live together in peace and build wealth.
You should care about this technology for the same reason you care about a drilling rig or a refinery: because it works, and the evidence that it works is overwhelming.
Consider the room you’re sitting in. Namibia is home to some of the most valuable mineral deposits on earth. It sits on oil reserves that could transform its economy within a generation. You are here because you see the opportunity.
But you also know that geology is only half the equation. The other half is governance. The richest geology in the world means nothing if the government can seize your assets, if the courts won’t enforce your contracts, or if the currency loses half its value overnight. Venezuela has more proven oil reserves than Saudi Arabia. Look at the state of it.
The difference between countries that turn natural wealth into broad prosperity and countries that squander it comes down, in large part, to the political and economic institutions they build. That is what liberalism is about. And we can measure it.
I will end with a practical proposition: that the organisations defending the liberal centre in countries like South Africa and Namibia deserve your support, because their work protects the ground your investments stand on.
Liberalism as a technology
Liberalism as a political tradition emerged in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thinkers like John Locke and Adam Smith advanced a claim that was radical for its time: that individuals possess rights that no state and no ruler may override.
That claim produced the revolutions in England, America, and France. It also produced the most sustained period of economic growth in human history.
The history is important, but the function is even more important. Think of liberalism as a technology, a tool that evolved to solve a specific problem.
The fundamental problem is this: human beings disagree. We hold different beliefs about God, about justice, about how wealth should be shared, about what the good life looks like.
Those disagreements are permanent. They will not be resolved by argument, and through most of history they were resolved by violence. The strongest group imposed its view on the rest.
Liberalism offered a different approach. It said: we cannot agree on the ultimate questions, so let us agree instead on a set of rules that allow us to live together despite our differences. Those rules centre on the individual. They protect each person’s right to think and trade and own property as they see fit, limited only by the equal rights of others.
Liberalism does not promise a perfect society, and it does not claim to have found the final truth. It starts from the honest admission that none of us possesses such a truth, and that anyone who claims to is dangerous. Philosophers call this epistemological humility. I call it common sense.
That humility is what separates liberalism from its competitors. On the left, socialism and communism promise a utopian future that human nature keeps refusing to deliver. On the right, reactionary conservatism promises a return to a golden past that never existed. Both ask you to sacrifice the present for a future that never arrives.
Instead, liberalism says: let us build the best rules we can with what we know now, test them against the evidence, and improve them when they fail. If that sounds like the scientific method applied to politics, it should. Those two intellectual traditions grew up together.
And, like any good technology, liberalism produces results you can measure. You do not adopt a technology because it is beautiful or because it aligns with your values, but because it outperforms the alternatives. The same test applies to political systems.
Liberalism asks to be judged on outcomes, and it is prepared to accept the verdict.
Freedom as the operating principle
The engine of this technology is freedom. Liberalism tries to maximise each individual’s space to act, while protecting the space of those around them. That principle, applied to political life, gives you freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion. Applied to economic life, it gives you something equally powerful: economic freedom.
The connection between the two is direct: if you are free to think but not free to trade, your freedom is incomplete. If you can vote but cannot start a business without a minister’s permission, the vote means less than it should.
Economic freedom is political freedom expressed in the marketplace. It is the right to work where you choose, to buy and sell on terms you negotiate, to keep what you earn, and to own property that the state cannot take from you on a whim.
The Fraser Institute, a Canadian research organisation, has published an annual Economic Freedom of the World index since 1996. It defines economic freedom as follows: economic freedom exists when individuals can make their own choices about work, trade, and property, through personal choice, voluntary exchange, freedom to enter markets and compete, and security of the person and their privately owned property.
The index measures 165 countries across five areas: the size of government relative to the economy, the strength of the legal system and property rights, the soundness of the currency, the freedom to trade across borders, and the quality of regulation.
Those five areas map onto the conditions that matter most to you as investors. You need a legal system that enforces contracts and a currency that holds its value. You need the freedom to move goods and capital across borders under regulations that are predictable and not captured by political interests.
The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), through its Democracy Index, measures a related set of conditions: the quality of elections, the functioning of government, political participation, political culture, and civil liberties. The EIU’s latest analysis, released this year, confirms that countries ranking higher on the Democracy Index carry lower operational risk. The rule of law and property rights, in their words, are among the factors that support economic growth.
Two different organisations, measuring overlapping but distinct dimensions of political and economic life, arrive at the same conclusion: countries that protect individual freedom and limit the power of the state produce better outcomes for their citizens and for the people who invest in them.
The evidence
The Fraser Institute’s 2025 report found that people living in the most economically free quarter of countries earn, on average, 6.2 times more than those in the least free quarter. The poorest ten per cent of the population in the freest countries earn 7.8 times more than the poorest ten per cent in the least free countries. The poverty rate in the least free quarter is 25 times the poverty rate in the freest quarter. And people in the freest countries live, on average, 17 years longer.
Those differences represent the performance chasm between functional societies and those that are dysfunctional.
The Heritage Foundation’s 2026 Index of Economic Freedom tells a similar story from a different angle. Countries rated “free” on their index produce an average GDP per capita of over $112,000 in purchasing power terms. Countries rated “repressed” produce just over $10,000. That’s a tenfold difference: the gap between a society that can fund schools and hospitals and one that cannot.
The research base behind these findings is enormous. Hundreds of peer-reviewed studies have used the Fraser Institute’s economic freedom data. The large majority find a positive link between economic freedom and human welfare, including higher incomes and longer lives.
But today, there is reason to be concerned. The Human Freedom Index, published jointly by the Fraser Institute and the Cato Institute, found that from 2019 to 2023, nearly nine in ten people on earth experienced a decline in freedom. That decline affected every region, rich countries and poor, democracies and non-democracies alike. For investors, the trend should be an alarm signal, because declining freedom means rising risk across the markets where you operate.
Namibia and South Africa both appear in these rankings. South Africa ranked 83rd out of 165 countries in the Fraser Institute’s most recent economic freedom report. Namibia ranked 94th. Neither country is in the bottom tier. Both have real strengths, including functioning legal systems and open elections. But both sit in the middle of the pack, and the middle of the pack is where you find middle-of-the-pack growth.
The good news is that the path upward is well marked. Mauritius ranked 21st and Botswana 69th on the same index. Both are African countries, and neither started with advantages that Namibia and South Africa lack. They made better policy choices, and the index reflects it. Improving your economic freedom score is one of the most reliable ways to accelerate growth and reduce poverty.
Threats to the centre
If economic freedom produces such clear benefits, you might ask why more countries don’t pursue it. The answer is that liberalism faces persistent pressure from two directions.
From the left, the pressure comes in the form of state control: governments that expand their reach into markets and that use public employment as a tool of political patronage.
South Africans will recognise the pattern. Consider South Africa’s system of black economic empowerment, or BEE. The government tells private companies whom they may hire, whom they must buy from, and who must hold their shares – all determined by race.
The harmful effects of racial preferencing in public procurement are particularly egregious, all the more because they are not widely perceived.
Businesses that want to improve their chances in competing for government contracts must first meet racial ownership and procurement targets, regardless of whether those requirements make commercial sense. In a sense, the state inserts itself between willing buyers and willing sellers and overrides their judgement.
That is the opposite of economic freedom as we have defined it. The IRR estimates that BEE premiums on public procurement alone cost South African taxpayers around R150 billion a year, money spent not on better services but on political compliance or lost to corruption. To put that into perspective, it is enough money to build a new, tarred road from Cape Town to Beijing every year – a distance of 18,800km – with R9 billion left to spare.
This type of problem is not uniquely South African. Across the continent, governments default to state control because it concentrates power in the hands of the ruling party. Nationalisation, localisation mandates, licensing regimes that favour the connected over the competent: these are the tools of patronage, and they corrode economic freedom wherever they are applied.
From the right, the pressure is different in form but similar in effect. Nationalism and populism restrict trade, limit foreign ownership, and try to pick winners through subsidies, tax breaks for favoured sectors, and strategic industrial policy. This is the mirror image of nationalisation: instead of the state owning the enterprise, the state directs private capital toward politically chosen ends. Populist leaders also lean on courts and regulators, weakening the institutional independence that investors depend on for contract enforcement and predictable rules.
Both left and right claim to act in the name of the common good. Both restrict individual freedom to pursue it.
This is where liberalism draws the line. It says: the freedom of the individual is the common good. A society of free individuals, trading and cooperating on terms they choose, will produce more prosperity and more opportunity than any central planner can design.
Liberals rank individual freedom above the claims of the collective. They believe free individuals, given secure rights and fair rules, will build the common good better than any government programme.
But when we look around the world, the pattern is the same in country after country. The political centre is being hollowed out. On the left, parties and movements push for greater state control. On the right, populists promise protection through walls and tariffs. Both pull voters and policymakers away from the liberal principles that produce growth.
In a polarised environment, the organisations that defend the centre face pressure from both directions at once, and the space they operate in shrinks. That makes their work harder and more important at the same time.
97 years between two fires
I lead one such organisation. The South African Institute of Race Relations was founded in 1929 as an explicitly non-racial body. At a time when racial segregation was the accepted order in southern Africa, the IRR made a claim that most people considered extreme: that the shared humanity of individuals matters more than skin colour.
That conviction carried a cost. When apartheid was imposed from 1948, the IRR fought it with data and with money. Our bursary programme helped fund the education of thousands of black students who could not get it from the state. One of them was a young law student named Nelson Mandela. When Mandela stood trial for treason in 1964, it was the IRR’s research that he used to argue that apartheid itself should be in the dock for its socio-economic injustices.
After 1994, when the new government began to introduce its own race-based laws under the banner of black economic empowerment, we applied the same principle. Race-based regulation is illiberal and causes economic damage, regardless of who it favours. Our former chief executive, John Kane-Berman, described the IRR’s position as operating “between two fires” of racialism and socialism. The Institute was criticised by the right for insisting on non-racialism under apartheid, and criticised by the left for insisting on non-racialism after it. That position is uncomfortable. It is also necessary.
The liberal centre does not defend itself. It requires organisations that make the case for freedom and challenge bad policy with evidence.
How to hold the centre
In South Africa, the IRR produces the research that underpins public debate on economic policy and governance. We conduct research into the barriers to economic growth and challenge laws that restrict economic freedom, including race-based economic regulations that have done great harm to growth and to the people they claim to help.
Over the past few years the IRR has drafted a series of policy papers and concept laws aimed at replacing South Africa’s race-based policy framework with one built on economic growth, non-racialism, and expanding opportunity. That is what holding the liberal centre looks like in practice: specific policy alternatives, grounded in evidence.
Organisations like the IRR exist across Africa, and they need support. Think of them as the immune system of a liberal society. They test the health of institutions and fight infections before they become fatal.
Investors have a direct stake in this work. The conditions you depend on, property rights and the rule of law, open markets and contract enforcement, do not persist by accident. People and organisations fight to maintain them. Governments face constant pressure to erode them, sometimes from bad ideology, sometimes from simple corruption.
If you want to act on this, you can support these organisations in two practical ways.
The first is funding. Civil society organisations working to defend economic freedom and the rule of law are under-resourced across the continent. Your support gives them the capacity to fight effectively.
The second is amplification. Use their research in your public communications and in your conversations with policymakers. Contact the IRR or the Namibia Institute for Economic Policy and ask for our latest policy briefs on mining rights, labour law, or BEE-style regulation.
We produce the evidence base that investors can cite directly in conversations with policymakers. When a minister hears the same argument from a research organisation and from the people writing the cheques, the argument carries more weight.
In summary: fund the work, use the work, and make sure the people who set the rules know you are paying attention.
Conclusion
Liberalism is a technology for organising societies so that diverse people can live together in peace and build prosperity. It works by maximising individual freedom, including economic freedom. The evidence, drawn from 165 countries and hundreds of peer-reviewed studies, is clear: countries that adopt liberalism as a technology grow faster and deliver longer, healthier lives to their citizens.
That technology is under pressure from the left and the right. In a world where nine in ten people have seen their freedom decline in recent years, holding the liberal centre is an urgent task.
You now have a framework for reading that task: look at where a country sits on the economic freedom index and look at whether its civil society is strong enough to defend the conditions that produce growth. You also have a way to act: support the organisations that do this work, because their fight is your fight.
Your capital builds mines and refineries. It creates jobs and possibility. But it can only do those things in countries where the rules are fair and the centre holds.
Help us hold it.
[Image: Star Photography https://www.starphotonam.com]
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