The Confiscated Commons

The first two parts described fractures between people and between groups. This one describes a vertical fracture: the one that separates those who govern from those they ought to serve. Diverted financial flows, a public force that kills, detention without safeguards, a personal fortune built on the public purse — four expressions of one same gesture, which turns the power to serve into the power to capture.

I. The diverted resource

19. Illicit financial flows in Africa

Work by the African Union and UNCTAD estimates that the African continent loses several tens of billions of dollars each year to illicit financial flows: corruption, trade mis-invoicing, money laundering, fraud and the diversion of resources. A significant share of these losses is attributed to the extractive sector.¹

These flows are not abstract. They reduce the resources available for schools, hospitals, roads, drinking water and social protection. Money that illicitly leaves a territory becomes a class that was cancelled, a clinic that was never built, a family deprived of care. Their particularity is to be invisible at the moment they occur: no immediate victim can be identified, and the damage appears only years later, in the form of a public service that does not exist.

The We-ism response. The Economy of Elevated Sharing identifies extractive predation as the complete inversion of the economic relationship.

A resource is not merely an object to be extracted. It is embedded in a territory, a history, an environment and a community. When the benefits are captured by a few actors while the costs are borne by the population, the economy ceases to be an instrument of connection and becomes a machine of fracture.

We-ism therefore defends:

• transparency of contracts;
• traceability of revenues;
• participation of the communities concerned;
• protection of whistleblowers;
• local redistribution;
• joint responsibility of companies and public authorities.

20. The diversion of public funds by leaders

The history of Zaire under Mobutu Sese Seko illustrates in extreme form the personal capture of public resources: a considerable private fortune amassed while the state accumulated a crushing debt.² Globally, international financial institutions estimate that developing countries lose tens of billions of dollars each year to corruption and stolen assets.³

Corruption at the summit of the state is not merely a moral problem. It destroys trust, cuts social budgets, weakens institutions and turns public office into an instrument of private enrichment. It also teaches an entire society that loyalty to the common good is naivety — and that lesson long outlives the leader who gave it.

The We-ism response. This is the most complete inversion of the Economy of Elevated Sharing.

A leader ought to be the temporary steward of a common resource. When they turn it into a personal fortune, they break the relational contract between the state and the population.

Legal safeguards are indispensable, but they are not sufficient: they themselves depend on institutions that corruption weakens first. What is needed, therefore, is collective vigilance, free media, an independent judiciary, oversight institutions, transparency of assets, protection of whistleblowers and constant citizen participation.

Public power must never be regarded as private property.

II. Protection turned against the protected

21. Police violence and abuse of power

In the United States, independent counts report more than a thousand people killed each year by law enforcement, with Black people disproportionately exposed to the risk of being killed by the police.⁴

These figures do not, on their own, allow each individual intervention to be judged. They do impose an institutional question: how can an organisation tasked with protecting become, for part of the population, a recurring source of fear and death?

The We-ism response. The criteria of exemplarity for the Companion disqualify abuse of power, whatever authority is invoked.

An institution cannot ask for trust while refusing transparency. Collective security presupposes independent investigation mechanisms, hierarchical responsibility, adequate training, limits on the use of force and the participation of the communities concerned.

The link with the first part is direct. Social trust cannot be decreed: it is produced through repeated experiences of reliability. An institution falls under exactly the same rule as a person. Power is legitimate when it protects the social relationship; when it destroys that relationship without being held to account, it becomes a form of institutional predation.

22. Arbitrary detention

The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention formally rules on only a limited number of cases each year: those that have been submitted, documented and examined.⁵ The United Nations also acknowledges that people are arbitrarily detained around the world in far greater numbers, with no precise global count available.

This gap between documented cases and acknowledged scale reveals the limits of the data itself. A person detained without safeguards may have neither a lawyer, nor access to information, nor a family able to raise the alarm, nor an institution prepared to defend them. Statistical silence here is not the absence of the phenomenon: it is one of its consequences.

The We-ism response. We-ism refuses to confuse the right that is proclaimed with the right that is actually accessible. A guarantee enjoyed only by those who know how to claim it is not a guarantee.

Justice must be verifiable, independent and open to those who have neither power nor visibility. Reconciliation can come only after the recognition of the facts and reparation for the victims.

The Realism of Forgiveness is never an invitation to erase crimes. On the contrary, it presupposes a memory solid enough to prevent forgiveness from becoming a new form of domination — the one that consists in asking for appeasement from those who never obtained justice.

Four findings, one same operation: what belongs to everyone is treated as belonging to someone.

A country's resources, the monopoly on force, the power to imprison, the public purse — each of these goods exists only because a collectivity entrusted it. Each can be turned against that collectivity. We-ism sets a structural condition: all power received from the community must account to it in a verifiable way. Transparency is not a concession granted to the governed, it is the condition of the governors' legitimacy. The next part descends one level further: to where the fracture no longer reaches institutions or budgets, but bodies.