The Africa we deserve

ACCORDING to the World Bank, Africa remains the world’s biggest development challenge and yet surprisingly Africans have not woken up to the fact that the destiny of the continent can only be shaped and determined by them.
While Africa’s leaders continue to occupy their minds on how best to insult the rich and developed countries, there appears to be no visible attempt by Africans across the continent to take ownership of the development challenges that confront the continent.
In the face of a global architecture that is fatigued by the dependency syndrome that has become a permanent feature of many African countries, many African governments are increasingly looking to the newly industrialized eastern countries for salvation. What is striking is that there appears to be no attempt by African state and non-state actors to define the kind of architecture that should inform the new Africa.
Like prostitutes, many African state actors have abdicated from the responsibility of championing the African renaissance electing to auctioning and mortgaging the continent’s resources to anyone who sings from the same anti-imperialist hymn book. Asia and Latin America have seen the glaring vacuum in Africa and the apparent inability of Africans to take ownership of their destiny with potentially disastrous consequences for the African brand.
'What kind of Africa do Africans want?' is a question that requires a pan African response. Any person who shares the African heritage should be concerned about the African condition and should be aware that if Africa does not work for its people, they are equally at risk of undermining their own ability to protect and sustain their rights in an increasingly competitive global environment that is characterized by strong national brands.
The responsibility to map out a future for Africa should not be the exclusivity of state actors who in many cases are blinded by their own inadequacies and nationalistic propaganda but should occupy the minds of all who recognize that Africa is a home for many who share the black pigmentation in the majority. There is no other continent in the world like Africa where Africans have been provided with a theatre to give themselves an identity that is challenged by Africa’s promise.
With 54 nation states, the urgency and the need for Africa to come up with a single defining message of what kind of continent it should be and what its expectations from global partners are cannot be overstated.
I could not think of a better topic than what kind of Africa Africans deserve and who should define its architecture for my first article in the last month of 2006. Only last week we celebrated the World Aids Day and an African broadcaster, Dali Mpofu, CEO of SABC, was elected as Chairman of the Leadership Committee of the Global Media Aids Initiative (GMAI) that brings together about 150 CEOs of major broadcasters in the world.
This is an alliance of global media networks that have come together under auspices of the UN to harness their power to combat the HIV/AIDS pandemic. This alliance was inaugurated by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in January 2004. Initially it started with 22 broadcasters and now boasts of 150 members.
The ownership of the anti-HIV/AIDS movement in both Africa and where Africans in the diaspora continue to be victims does not reside in Africans. Can you imagine that Madonna’s adoption of a Malawian child makes breaking world news while Africans remain cheerleaders with no visible response to the challenge of poverty and helplessness? We see the emergence of a new philanthropy driven by global business moguls and their political and non-state partners in their home countries driving the African agenda
We have seen Bono, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Gere, Angelina Jolie, and others dominate the African landscape of solutions with no visible African response. Equally, without the UN system, we do not see any African initiative in the making to respond to this real challenge. While HIV/AIDS has the potential to arrest if not cripple Africa’s ability to address its challenges, we now have an African leading the global branding effort to use the media for positive good and all we can do is to support Mpofu by creating our own institutional response mechanisms.
The world has responded by giving Africa three terms at the helm of the UN and yet it would not be surprising to see the outgoing Secretary General of the UN being absorbed into the developed world driven philanthropic organizations. I have no doubt that Kofi Annan will not be looking to Africans as source of his income or purchasers of his book rights. In as much as Africa has failed to accommodate its political leadership in business and civil society structures, I have no hope that Annan will look to Africa as a source of livelihood.
In fact, it may emerge that he will end up like Clinton who abused his two terms as President of the USA and could not make an impact on Africa only to emerge now as a champion of the continent’s challenges. The emergence of political leaders from the developed north as the official spokesmen of Africa poses a new threat to Africa’s governance that all Africans have to reflect on. Most of these politicians are bank rolled by companies that do business in Africa and the commission income that should ideally accrue to African businessmen is now domesticated in the developed countries.
The interplay between business and politics as it relates to African issues in the developed countries needs to be studied carefully by Africans who risk being marginalized. The only protection Africans can rely upon is through organization and to date Africans have failed to create pan African institutions choosing to look at the world from tribal and racial lenses.
As Africans reflect on their condition, it is important that we framework the agenda using the World Bank statistics of the countries that it serves and the location of Africa among the 5.5 billion people who live in countries that are classified as developing countries.



It is clear from the above table that Africa’s place among the developing countries is a cause of concern. Africa takes the lead in all the ills of the world. If one could analyze the above statistics and seek to brand Africa, I think it will challenge all of us to do something. African cannot and should not be confused about the root causes of the dismal statistics shown above. These numbers only demonstrate that Africa has still a long way to go and yet it appears to have no champions who can provide the required leadership.
Has Africa been failed by its people or has the continent been failed by the world is a question that all Africans need to answer for themselves. Assume that Africans in the diaspora are, for example, 20 million. Israel has a smaller population than Africa and yet Jews like the Irish and Indians in the diaspora have demonstrated that their destiny is intricately connected with their home countries. If Israel collapses, the consequences on Jews globally are quite severe compelling the Jews in the diaspora to regard the interests of Israel as their own personal interests.
As Africans we have failed to engage in conversations about the way of life that people of African heritage should have. Should Africa be a communist environment or should it be a capitalist environment? To the extent that the raw materials for politicians across the world are the poor people who vote, is there a place for rich Africans in Africa? Is the capitalist system the answer given Africa’s objective conditions? Should Africa have its own black robber barons? Given that most African governments who derive their legitimacy from poor people, is it conceivable that they would have an interest in accommodating a black rich class. How will they explain the islands of affluence to their voters? In the post Cold War era, what lessons have Africans learnt from the communist legacy? How do we explain the emergence of left wing governments in Latin America?
Africa cannot avoid addressing the key ideological questions that help define the way of life that its people should have. Even in countries like Zimbabwe, it is evident that succession is analysed outside the ideological framework. Zimbabwe has witnessed the criminalisation of business activity resulting in the unprecedented actions by the government to selectively target business executives and use the law to create a new class of enemies of the state.
Can you imagine that business executives have been arrested for violating price controls in an environment widely acknowledged as hyper inflationary? Under this construction, the approach adopted by many governments is to seek to sidetrack the attention of the voters by focusing on the alleged illegal and criminal behavior of the business community while ignoring the drought of political leadership that may be at the root cause of failed states. Is it the kind of Africa that we want where doing business can end you in prison for responding to the real and not imagined economic challenges created by political and other variables beyond the control of the new victims of Africa
Most of the targeted businesspersons are invariably black and in so doing the inventory of black role models in business diminishes each day. As the politically induced attrition of black business role models in Africa continues unabated, the future of Africa is at risk and the Africa we want may not be attainable without risk takers. In many African countries, it appears that the proposition that an ideology that undermines the rights of business is necessary a better one is gaining currency. Only the Chinese businessmen and anyone from the east is deemed to have interests that are aligned to the ruling class.
When Africa is strategic defense instruments in a globally competitive environment are being daily humiliated and intimidated, the prospect for a better Africa is severely compromised. While the developed countries are being challenged to focus on the African problem, it is incumbent upon Africans to reflect on the self destructive initiatives that have come to characterize African governance. Africa will never emerge when the way of life as defined by its current leaders is predicated on exposing its business leaders to risks that their counterparts in competing countries would not even imagine.
Who will make African governments accountable when the people who create such governments have not constituted themselves into viable interest groups that should define the minimum acceptable standards of governance? It makes sense for any political system that has run out of ideas to manufacture enemies of the state as a way of distracting attention from the core issues that should occupy Africans interested in progress. Africa’s future can only be as good as its people invest in it. No change will come without action and lessons are abound of what an organized people can do to transform a nation or continent even in the face of intransigent and formidable adversaries.