In about late-April 2022, for instance, Israel, that unapologetic American ally, made the hugely surprising decision to include the Chinese yuan in its foreign exchange reserves, echoing worries across the globe about the need for countries to diversify their West-centric risk mitigants.
While relatively minuscule at 2 percent of its reserves holdings, the Israeli move is evidence of global concern across varied persuasions about the myriad uncertainties in the current global economic system. American leadership, which has clearly seen a resurgence in the swift and effective coalition it has brought to bear towards reining in Russia for its aggression towards Ukraine, is evidence that the US will be able to lead the urgent and hard reforms needed to make the currently faltering global economic system better suited to the changing times.
Where is Africa’s place in all these? Africa has always been at the two extremes of the value chain. A double jeopardy. Inputs are extracted on the continent for cheap, value is added elsewhere, and the final manufactured good is sold back for Africans to consume at a significant premium over cost
Still, while the cloak-and-dagger Nixon approach is needless for the current times, American leadership will undoubtedly be crucial to making the needed changes. In this regard, the agenda around the current global consensus against Russia’s belligerence has to be broadened. In other words, as the Russia-Ukraine conflict has forced a joining of forces to avert another world war, it must also birth a re-alignment towards providing comfort to capitals around the world that the liberal global economic order can be salvaged.
Where is Africa’s place in all these? Africa has always been at the two extremes of the value chain. A double jeopardy. Inputs are extracted on the continent for cheap, value is added elsewhere, and the final manufactured good is sold back for Africans to consume at a significant premium over cost.
Most of the attempts at getting Africa in the middle of the value chain have not proven to be optimal. In fact, from slavery in the first wave of globalisation and colonialism in the second wave, it is hard to be optimistic about a significant change in fortunes for Africa in the incipient third wave. In his 2021 book, “Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the making of the modern world, 1471 to the second world war,” author Howard French, a veteran journalist and professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, shows how Africa has historically had more agency about the trajectory of its development than is otherwise acknowledged, even as the West systematically and deliberately erased from history how crucial Africa’s wealth has been to its progress. French (2021) describes it as a “centuries-long process of diminishment, trivialization, and erasure of Africans and of people of African descent from the story of the modern world.”
More astonishingly, “why did Africans so readily give themselves to a trade that at least from the standpoint of historical hindsight seems so clearly detrimental to the very regions where the slave trade was most intense or prolonged, as well as to the continent overall,” French asks. We could similarly ask why Africa has so readily given itself up to international trade arrangements that are so clearly detrimental to its progress ever since.
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The shameful legacy of Western colonialism is not unique to Africa. India has used its agency since independence to evolve to a place of envy in the comity of nations today, and is on course to leverage on its global success in the information and communications technology sector during the second wave of globalisation to acquire even more gains in the third wave. China took its destiny into its hands too, transforming over the years from a majorly poor nation to the behemoth it is today.
Still, it is within Africa’s power to ensure that the prosperity that countries like India and China were able to secure in the second wave of globalisation, which they are set to continue enjoying, could similarly be its due in the third wave.
The example of China is instructive. In his 2021 book “The Digital Silk Road: China’s quest to wire the world and win the future,” veteran China watcher Jonathan Hillman, who is a senior fellow with the Simon chair in political economy and director of the Reconnecting Asia project at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC, details the red dragon’s evolution over the years, especially in the crucial tech sector. It is important to know that China’s succes did not come easy.
But it is also important that African development policymakers know that China had help, especially from the West. China leveraged on its demographic advantages to lure Western companies to exchange knowhow for access to a consumer market of more than 1 billion people.
True, China arm-twisted Western firms when it could and quite literally stole technologies and intellectual property that they would not readily provide otherwise. Later on, as China became richer, it bought Western firms with the technologies that it needed, after which the West realised its chicanery and began to erect barriers to its freewheeling dealings hitherto.
