Posted on

From South Africa with Hope

Thank God there is Africa. We the people of this beautiful planet should be glad we are so located. The world sees our continent as the virgin land, which indeed it is and our friends across the globe have concurred that we shall be greater. I was recently in South Africa, the Africa’s most ‘complex country’ and the world’s ‘rainbow nation’. My one month in South Africa (SA) was for research but I got more than research from the love and care, the ready hands of all people I met, white, black, coloured and Asians. Even from my conversation with tourists I saw a fundamental hope for Africa and Africans. Our continent might have been brutalised in the past but we cannot afford to continue to agonise about the past. We must appreciate our past while forging ahead with what lies ahead in the future, in the present. And South Africans are showing the way: reconciliation is on-going and development wheel is moving fast, while contradictions in governance and service delivery remain as in any part of the world, developed, semi-developed or developing.

My recent one month in South Africa was not my first time there. I was there first in 2009, for a Democracy and Diversity Institute Programme of the Transregional Centre for Democratic Studies of The New School for Social Research, New York, which took place at the postgraduate school of the University of Cape Town. The city of Cape Town is a seductive city. You don’t ever want to leave there. There are people, from across the world, and there are buildings that would make you think you are still somewhere in Europe. Faces of different people as well as the splendid tourist taste make Cape Town tick.  Everywhere you turn, there is an interesting thing going on. People like to dance and eat, they like to hug and gist, and if you are there all alone, like I was, you would want to wish you had come with your partner. But I missed nothing. My friends and associates made the whole period memorable enough.

I am further increased in knowledge of South Africa and Africa. I also discovered once again that a number of African countries have a lot to learn from South Africa. One, you cannot develop if you cannot boast of 24/7 electricity.  I understand there could be occasional power outage in certain parts, but through the one month, split and spent between three cities of Nelspruit, Johannesburg and Cape Town, electricity did not winkle, not even for a second. Nigeria in particular needs to set up a panel to go to SA and ask for advice on how it is done there. It is abysmally unbearable for Nigeria, with all its resources, not to boast of 24/7 power supply in the twenty-first century. Two, you cannot develop without social security for the poor and the unemployed. The government of South Africa has built millions of houses for the less privileged and raised the hope previously disadvantaged groups. Education fees, where not free, are subsidised. What is Nigeria waiting for? We need a Youth Development Fund Board, which will give loans to indigent students and young entrepreneurs so as to educate, engage and empower them. Three, you cannot develop without good roads, modern rail system and good airports. All major roads on which I travelled in South Africa were as good as those in the UK. Nigerian governments need to do something urgent about the state of our roads. Four, you cannot develop if there is no security. South African Police are well equipped, and their efforts are complemented by City and Community Policing. Nigeria, with 150 million people and 36 states must professionalise its Police and consider a regulated community policing system. The truth is, there is a big correlation between security of lives and property and development.

All said and done, I see hope. I see hope that Africa will rise above the poverty of its majority and that our people will use what is most valuable in our cultural values and ethics to power the Africa of our dream. Africans alone cannot do it. We will need the collaboration of folks across the world, but the effort would have to be home grown. If South Africa can give a positive sign of a stable political economy and continues to march on, despite occasional skirmishes here and there, I see hope.

I see hope that Africa will be greater.

Tunde Oseni is a Doctoral candidate at the University of Exeter, UK.
Share
Posted on

Watch out for Africa, says the World Bank

Africa economic opportunity
 
The World Bank's new report on Africa, published this week, concluded that that continent "could be on the brink of an economic take-off, much like China was 30 years ago, and India 20 years ago".
 
In its draft strategy for Africa, published on Monday, the bank said the continent's steady economic growth, progress on the millennium development goals and good rates of returns on investments give Africa "unprecedented opportunity for transformation and growth". Promoting Africa as an exciting and lucrative investment destination will be crucial to fulfilling this potential, it added.
 
"The emergence of new development partners such as China, the untapped potential of mobilising domestic resources, as well as the rise in private capital flows to Africa, calls for a new approach – Africa as an investment proposition – and points to the need for new partnerships among governments, development partners and the private sector," said the bank.
 
Based on data from the World Development Indicators, private cash flows (remittances and foreign direct investment) to developing countries totalled more than $650bn in 2009, while official development assistance fell to less than $130bn.
 
As the strategy's name – Africa's future and the World Bank's role in it – might suggest, the draft, which comes five years after its last Africa Action Plan, is both an optimistic reading of Africa's development and an assertive defence of the critical role the bank can play in its future. According to some, the emergence of new and very eager investors like China and India has left the bank worried about losing its footing on the continent.
 
Writing in the Nairobi-based Business Daily, Johnstone Ole Turana argued that: "The increased accessibility of grants from the BRIC [Brazil, Russia, India, China] nations, which is being provided with less conditionality compared to the World Bank and the western countries' bilateral aid, has forced sub-Saharan African nations to re-orient their engagement from the west to the east."
 
The draft moves away from a focus on single-issue projects – in an implicit critique of an MDG model of development with separate targets – and instead focuses on systems and structures, giving special attention to closing Africa's "infrastructure gap" and leveraging its investment potential. This means developing a more "attractive" climate for foreign investors, tackling "key constraints" from the regulation of labour and land to the lack of "financial (and overall business) literacy".
 
The bank is, of course, positioning itself as the essential partner for both developing countries and potential investors, willing and ready to exercise its "comparative advantage" in partnerships, knowledge, and financing. "From the reputational perspective, it's absolutely crucial for them to be seen as linchpins to African development, particularly with regard to private sector linkages" , said Soren Ambrose, from Action Aid Kenya, last month.
 
Yesterday, the bank's managing director, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, approached the China Mining Congress, being held in Tianjin, China, with a bid for how "the World Bank can help lay the ground work for larger investments", offering knowledge and guidance to investors and advice to governments on how to marry investment and development priorities. Okonjo-Iweala also advertised the bank's programme of providing "political risk" insurance to investors in case of war, civil unrest or expropriation.
 
Changing perceptions
The draft also sets out the bank's commitment to improve the otherwise poor perceptions of Africa, which can make attracting investors challenging. The paper claims the rate of return on foreign investment in Africa is higher than in any other developing region, but notes that "given its legacy of poverty, slow growth, conflict and disease, not everybody sees Africa as the emerging frontier".
The bank's wants to help change the public mindset, "not just in providing the evidence of the changes on the continent and educating the rest of the world, but also in supporting those, such as the media, who interpret this evidence to the public and thereby shorten the lag between perceptions and reality".
 
The bank also plans a shift in its own communications with the public, moving away from the stand-alone reports aimed at specialist audiences.
 
One early example of this shift is the bank's decision to make public a series of stakeholder consultations on the draft strategy, held in 36 countries between June and September this year, and uploading a promotional video on YouTube.

 

[youtube]RjcQhptocqQ[/youtube]

 

 
Now, the bank has launched an online consultation alongside the draft, actively seeking comment from the public to feed into its final strategy for Africa, due early next year.
 
What feedback the bank chooses to incorporate into its strategies and programmes on the continent – if any – is the crucial question. In the past, critics, such as Beatrice Edwards, of the Governance Accountability Project, have come down hard on the bank for showing "transparency about the problem but no accountability or attempt to fix it".
 
But the online consultation does provide an opportunity to tell the bank what you think – and posting a comment isn't too arduous, at least from the UK. Feel free to cross-post your comments here.
(Report from the Guardian, UK)
Share