The Financial Times selects the most influential pundits and commentators in countries around the world. Their South African correspondent writes that the opinions of Moeletski Mbeki “arguably carry more clout” than those of his brother the president. If so, that’s good news for South Africa. Judging by his Cato paper “Underdevelopment in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Role of the Private Sector and Political Elites,” Mbeki has a pretty insightful understanding of what Africa suffers from. He blames African poverty on mismanagement and exploitation by political elites that control the state and see it as a source of personal enrichment. Inhibiting wealth creation by the private sector, the elites use marketing boards and taxation to divert agricultural savings to finance their own consumption and to strengthen the apparatus of state repression. He writes that peasants, who constitute the core of the private sector in sub-Saharan Africa, must become the real owners of their primary asset — land — over which they currently have no property rights (in much of sub-Saharan Africa, though South Africa is an exception to this).