It is inevitable that wealth and power, the motive force for most tensions and conflicts affecting humanity, are moving away from their dispossession-determined locations in South Africa. The apartheid colonial order is giving way to one increasingly crafted by a new cohort of self-determined and purpose-driven South Africans inspired by the possibility of a non-racial and pan-African future. At issue is to what end and direction the great turning wheel of defining new economic commanding heights of Africa are taking us. Can an Africanist order emerge to set up new conditions of engagement that the world should negotiate its space to be accommodated?
Doubtful Thomases about Africa argue that the new African renewal will not look better than what we know about the African Continent but will be worse than its present squalor. With a perfected experience of failed states, there is a general belief that the super efficiencies represented by the new movement of innovative Africans might be departures of efficiencies of failure. Without noticing their doubts manifest their fear that their preeminence over Africa's development is passing away, this movement also deals the most significant blow to their mercantilist relationship with Africa and her resources.
The order created as normality within which Africa should imagine itself, most of which is based on rules and laws that advantage those that wrote them, is in retreat. New frontiers of economic power interrogate the theoretical foundations of economics, and nation-states are advancing their agendas for a new African order with its own episteme of value chains and supply and demand rules. A new, uncontested, and less fragmented system of in-Africa sub-regional blocs, ideational networks inspired by indigenous knowledge systems, spheres of influence, and Afrocentric mercantilist networks are becoming the hallmarks of a new Africa.
The fact that there are substrates of rising gross geographic product growth points in Africa, be it individual countries, city regions, provincial economies, nodal development zones, private companies creating cross-border value, continent-wide looking think tanks and universities, cross-border infrastructure fund managers, and many other institutions of African leaders are consolidating to make Africa their primary market is a good sign of the renewal. The political, cultural, and economic experiences Africa has gone through have concreted how the continent sees the world through what has now been accepted as a decoloniality thesis, which is not necessarily an anti-thesis of colonialism, but a condition of being that is under construction. The general liquidity of Africans through compulsory savings such as government pension funds, surpluses earned out of the growing risk business premiums, and efforts at formalising special purpose saving schemes into the mainstream financial services sector are fast creating in-Africa capabilities to create own debt borrowings that could be collateralised with infrastructure investment.
The new cohort of economic mandarins, and mainly flogging the development horses of Africa from a financial service cognitive platform, has been bolstered by the narrative of a declining global financial system whose bailouts indicated a commitment to the local of international financial institutions at the expense of high-interest borrowings to the developing global. Whilst this has tarnished the legitimacy of liberal capitalism, it has bolstered Africa's muted demands for financial independence to explore the possibilities of Africa switching systems out of which local currencies could be consolidated to create African value.
For these and many other reasons, the African Continent is entering a political phase where there is not only a change of guard in economic leadership but a transition of ideation and norming required to undergird the renewal that Africa needs. There is a growing faith in the requirement that corruption robs the vulnerable of participation in the new and emerging economic miracle, as it leapfrogs the politically exposed over the hardworking. The recent economic and commercial leadership movement, which has boosted confidence in the freeness of the African Market, and increased faith in the democratisation of political power management, has been gradually positioning what is emerging in Africa as an order that could be its own. The political order emerging is one where vertical democratic systems that display lesser accountability than you would find in horizontal democracies are perfecting a capability to combine the respect of market dynamics with the exigencies of vertical democratic stability, a polemic intellectual rejection of the Western order that imposed on the dimension of imagining a democracy.
The ability of the new African mandarins, instead of 'amabutho', to navigate the new continent is not only a function of an emerging intellectual prowess but a dividend of the social capital associated with understanding the developmental needs of Africa from a native perspective. The efforts at resuscitation of South African Airways back to its regional airline glory days are, over and above the bottom line due diligence made, reflective of the nostalgic safari those around the deal are known to be associated with. The SAA has historically been an airline that captured the essence and pride of being South African. It was the best aviation human resource development centre the country had. Young men and women dreamt of being pilots, air controllers, and hostesses through the prism of SAA possibilities. In full swing, the multiplier effect of the SAA resuscitation, and dare I argue, potentially other SOEs, will, and if construed within the emerging African economic and commercial mandarin context, be a development miracle.
Whilst the new movement is ascendance in Africa, and the relative positioning of South Africans is improving, non-black African capitalism is alive and well. Pursuing the Continent as the new oyster of opportunity may well be based on the principles that created the exclusion these endeavours seek to change. The latest should thus enter the renewal context, not with a commitment to contest the basic rules the system has already put in place but should wish to gain authority and leadership over its objects. The renewal of Africa should be about preserving what in the system works. CUT!!
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