Africa and the Age of Global Elite: The Davos Class

In this chapter Moyo provides a critical analysis of the role of the World Economic Forum as a critical cog in the transnational capitalist class consisting of the global elites. He argues that these elites have over the years been working with various neo-liberal epistemic agencies including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, the Group of Seven (G7), the Group of Twenty (G20), multinational corporations (MNCs), and other global institutions to amass wealth, power, and global influence. More crucially, Moyo discusses how big businesses and high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) lobby governments for policies that facilitate capital mobility for the benefit of the global capitalist class at the expense of the countries of the Global South. Most of these men keep their funds in the offshore accounts in Switzerland, Luxembourg, Cyprus, and Monaco that combine fiscal attractiveness with an important financial sector benefiting from it. As such, Moyo argues that exposing this class is part of the process of delinking Africa from the trap of global capitalism and global coloniality.