What if we told you that scarcity isn’t natural, but designed?

In her striking essay Manufactured Misery, Hilda Evelyn Nakyondwa breaks down how neoliberal economic policies—often pushed by institutions like the IMF and World Bank—don’t just fail Africa, but actively deepen its poverty. Drawing from the allegorical comic Nyuki: The Bee Story, she shows how seemingly well-intentioned “development” reforms are actually tools for control and extraction.

Just like the bees in Nyuki, who welcomed the Hive Beetles only to be taxed, exploited, and trapped in endless cycles of scarcity, many African nations have seen their public services gutted, their economies hollowed out, and their people—especially women—thrown into more profound vulnerability under the burden of debt, rising taxation, and dwindling wages.

Nakyondwa’s essay unpacks:

• How Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) manufacture poverty

• Why microfinance is not empowerment but entrapment

• How land dispossession continues under the guise of development

• And how “donors,” “investors,” and “experts” often wear new masks for old empires

👉🏾 Read the comic here: The Bee Story: A Metaphorical Tale of Wealth Disparity and the Need to Tax the Rich
👉🏾 Download the full essay: Manufactured Misery- How Neoliberalism Engineers Poverty in Africa

It’s time we recognised the illusion of help—and reclaimed our power.