George Ayittey

George B. N. Ayittey (13 October 1945 – 28 January 2022) was a Ghanaian economist and author. He was president of the Free Africa Foundation in Washington, D.C., a professor at American University, and an associate scholar at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

He championed the argument that "Africa is poor because she is not free," that the primary cause of African poverty is less a result of the oppression and mismanagement by colonial powers, but rather a result of modern oppressive native autocrats and socialist central planning policies. He also went beyond criticism of the status quo to advocate for specific ways to address the abuses of the past and present; specifically he called for democratic government, debt reexamination, modernized infrastructure, free market economics, and free trade to promote development.