Africa goes on retrospection, strategises for sustainable future

The first two quarters of this year have been particularly engaging for African policymakers and thought leaders. This is understandable, especially when dwelling on the fact that the year 2015 itself signifies an important watershed in global development architecture.

For the first time in a quarter of a century, the World Economic Forum on Africa (WEFA) sought to look inward and evaluate the continent’s past efforts at attaining socio-economic development with a view to creating an all-sector inclusiveness in its future development plan. Converging for its annual deliberations in Cape Town, South Africa, from 03-05 June 2015, the 25th edition of WEFA provided yet another integrated platform for global leaders in business, government and civil society to deliberate under the theme “Then and Now: Reimagining Africa’s Future”.

Much of the deliberations in Cape Town centred on Africa’s greatest attractions for Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) which are notably in natural resources sector, public infrastructures and agriculture. Efforts that will be needed to develop these identified prime areas as essential poverty-alleviating growth drivers and panacea for sustainability were passionately discussed at the various intellectually-stimulating sessions.

Strategic sub-themes resonated throughout the debates around access to international capital market; new finance model for infrastructure; financial inclusion; stemming illicit financial outflows; climate change, natural disaster and insurance; public private partnership (PPP); commodity price volatility; public debt; achieving double-digit growth to sustain Africa’s Next Billion; trade liberalization and intra-African trade; brain drain and human capital flight; urbanization, smart cities and clean energy access; gender, leadership and entrepreneurship; ICT and Africa’s contribution to the post-2015 development agenda.

What perhaps was most striking at the special sessions – some of which were broadcast live on the WEF’s website or televised for broadcast to a global audience – was the approach of evaluating past efforts and appraising present goals with a view to planning for the future. Klaus Schwab, WEF’s founder and executive chairman, instructively submitted at a session of the 25th WEFA tagged “Back to the Future: An Intergenerational Dialogue” that: “By 2040, 50 percent of the world’s youth population will be African. Already, Africa needs to create 18 million jobs each year to absorb its current levels of job seekers. Africa’s challenge is to create conditions that encourage entrepreneurship so this gap can be closed and young people can shape their own future.”

Africa has enough reasons to focus on these issues. In the World Bank’s Doing Business 2015 Report published on January 1 and tagged “Going Beyond Efficiency”, major African economies were classified among the least business-friendly globally and having the poorest rankings on the Ease Of Doing Business Index (EODBI). Africa’s poor showing on the EODBI was to be further corroborated in The African Competitiveness Report (The ACR) 2015 – a joint initiative by the African Development Bank (AfDB), the World Bank Group, Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the World Economic Forum (WEF) – released on June 4 within the framework of the Global Competitiveness Index.

Again, in its April 2015 Africa Pulse – an analysis of issues shaping Africa’s economic future – the World Bank stated that sub-Saharan Africa’s growth will slow in 2015 due to factors ranging from falling commodity prices and weakening terms of trade for the region’s exporters, to the rise of new types of conflict and the potential for disease epidemics within the sub-region.

The ACR 2015 recommended a comprehensive policy mix that includes efforts to close its infrastructure deficit, leverage on its human resource potential, as well as implement a strong, but encouraging regulations on its trade and investment frameworks for Africa to overcome its development challenges.

Then on June 5, the African Progress Panel – a group of 10 distinguished individuals from the private and public sector who advocate for equitable and sustainable development for Africa and chaired by Kofi Annan, former UN secretary-general – released the African Progress Report (APR) 2015 tagged “Seizing Africa’s Energy and Climate Opportunities” and recommended that investment in energy must be significantly scaled up to unlock Africa’s potential as a global low-carbon superpower, especially when the continent’s energy deficits stand in stark contrast to its potential.

APR 2015 in its overview captures the region’s development dilemma and instructively submits: “Nowhere are the threads connecting energy, climate and development more evident than in Africa. No region has made a smaller contribution to climate change. Yet Africa will pay the highest price for failure to avert a global climate catastrophe. Meanwhile, the region’s energy systems are underpowered, inefficient and unequal. Energy deficits act as a brake on economic growth, job creation and poverty reduction, and they reinforce inequalities linked to wealth, gender and the rural-urban divide”. The APR further emphasized that “Sub-Saharan Africa is desperately short of electricity. The region’s grid has a power generation capacity of just 90 gigawatts (GW) and half of it is located in one country, South Africa. Electricity consumption in Spain exceeds that of the whole of Sub-Saharan Africa.” Both The ACR and APR 2015 were launched during the 25th WEFA in Cape Town.

Addressing the 25th Ordinary Session of the African Union (AU) which held in Johannesburg, South Africa, about a week after the WEFA 2015, African leaders again made renewed pledge to work towards attaining the continent’s dream of a sustainable future, now contained in a 2013 road map tagged Agenda 2063. In her statement to the AU Assembly on June 14, the chairperson of the AU Commission, Nkosazana Zuma, effectively captured the prevalent mood on the continent today, and this has been the gist of my arguments on Africa’s development in recent times.

“If we educate and skill our people, with an emphasis on science, engineering, technology, maths resource and innovation, including technical and vocational skills, our people will stop undertaking the perilous journeys across the Sahel and the Mediterranean Sea. When we undertake this skills revolution, extremists, armed groups and terrorists will find it difficult if not impossible to recruit our young women and men. Instead, our youth will have the skills to generate electricity, including renewables. They will produce enough food for the entire Africa, as they modernize and grow agriculture and agro processing, and agribusiness. They will stop camping at the borders (and shores) of the industrial world, but will transform our economies through industrialization, manufacturing and by adding value to our natural resources. They will develop our blue economy and build our infrastructure, connecting our capitals and commercial centres through ICT, and through highways, rail, aviation and oceanic and waterways. They will ensure that this is done through the most modern of technology, including the pan-African high speed rail network. They will create a uniquely African continent whose economic development will not only be based on profit, but on the needs of the people, driven by the youth and women. They will create a prosperous and non-sexist continent. They will take charge of our outer space,” Zuma declared.

It is clear from the various reports affecting Africa, and the attendant deliberations on them in the first half of 2015, that Africa is poised to seize the moment and unlock its potentials for development and leadership, particularly as other world regions also re-think their strategies in order to gain advantage in the post-2015 development era.

I wish to reiterate my view published in an earlier article, “Africa in a world adrift” (BusinessDay, 22 May, 2013 at page 14): “Delivering on Africa’s promise will no doubt require development partners from other regions of the world, but the realities of recent years ought to have taught African leaders great lessons that no region of the world will help place the continent’s feet on the development ladder; it has to resolve by itself to assume global leadership position before other countries can key into its dreams.” As the continent looks inward in consideration of these facts, it will surely be observed that “Africa’s destiny lies in her hands”.

Oluwatoba Oguntuase