At the beginning of the 19th Century when one of the most organised consensuses of the subjugation of Africans was codified into a Constitutional democracy, Africa responded with the formation of a South African Native National Congress in 1912. It was the beginning of a historical journey those born in that generational space would conclude in their adult life by securing a franchise-based liberation of an otherwise still economically oppressed African society. The establishment of a constitutional democracy is a context within which laws of the dominant are codified to define power and property relations within which interests, as the currency of politics is going to be reconciled with the requirements of law. Several wars of dispossession and regulations of subjugation ended harmony required for human co-existence in favour of strife and tensions to impose hegemonies whose intents were at variance with what constitutes humanity.
The prospect of a tension-free co-existence amongst humans living in a geographical space called South Africa today has given way to a future characterised by conditionalities no peaceful settlement could resolve. Ideological fault lines ranging from race supremacists to ambiguous non-racialism as well as the Eurocentric or non-Africa- originated isms have fragmented the concept of African development as a common sense issue and made it an Africa in the image of non-African philosophy endeavour. The potential of ideational oblivion has in fact made a range of political and policy debates to be foggy than they had ever been. The cold wars that have migrated into ideation and learning spaces Africans volunteer themselves into are clearly announcing that the Eurocentric ideological disputes upon the African continent are far from being settled. The brute truth is that as bigger questions of what constitutes Africa's genuine development are asked, Africans might be forced to consider radical proposals which reflect the true challenges of transformation. The horizon might expand to uncontrollable proportions.
The predictive prowess of liberation and freedom policies through codification into constitutional democracies continues to define the often ignored legacy of post-colonial leadership in Africa. The unanticipated consequences of the post-colonial African State, in the main facilitated by human greed, have not succeeded to remove the vision of a self-determined Africa in all areas of human development. What Nkrumah, Selasie, Nyerere, Mugabe, Gaddafi, Nasser, Machel, Tambo, Mandela, and many others imagined of Africa has not changed as some of them were changed by the largesse of public power. What they anticipated as the future of Africa is unfolding. Despite it coming across or being sponsored, as an antithesis of the liberation thesis they crafted, the hypothesis undergirding the antithesis is fast developing into a self-standing thesis with which new ideations about Africa are establishing a new Africa, Thabo Mbeki labelled it The (new) African Renaissance.
As scenario planning is graduating from negativity about Africa, generating new scenarios based on the non-negotiability of global competitiveness is fast assuming structural forms. The certainty of poverty eradication as the most logical outcome for any developmental thesis about Africa has been removed from the list of uncertainties regarding critical infrastructure subjects such as energy, water, and food sovereignty as conditions of their security. Interior to the logic of scenarios is the originative-historical background of human emancipation in Africa.
The genius of being indigenous and the abundance of land and its resources underneath will redefine localisation as a strategy to curtail dependence on the industrialised north and west. The globalisation of knowledge and its speed to all human minds could spell not only the end of templates of human dominance that came with colonialism but propel an Afrocentric development movement whose sheer scale could paralyse any concerted effort to keep Africa permanently at the starting blocks waiting for the proverbial gun to be shot by dishonest referees. The need therefore for Africa to innovate and overcome several cataclysmic dangers it faces is an exigency of its governments and independent thinkers, resident or in the diaspora.
The intellectual, financial, sociology-political, and technological capital of Africa, notwithstanding its inherent prowess, is a precarious predicament from which Africa needs to untangle itself. Fundamental to this unentangling will be the awareness of governments and institutions of the leadership of the costs and risks they are facing. The greatest of shifts needed are not only paradigmatic but those of consciousness development and reimagining of Africa as a global hegemonic space. As the global order is beginning a new history of and about humanity, Africa cannot afford not to be at the forefront of its own definition. The idle minds of the state whose imagination of Africa is in the permanent image of historical colonial centres should be ditched in favour of appreciating the potential scale of Africa's future. Spending of time and resources should be on human capital development and human mobility infrastructure creation to reduce the distance, in physical terms, between ideas and resources required to effect their impact on humans of African origin.
Africa requires long-term thinkers at the scale of those that constructed the Egyptian Pyramids and those that developed the Indian Ocean marine navigation systems whose impact is manifested in the fabric of trade routes between east Africa and East Asia. The connection of Africa at the scale of China's road and rail belt is an imagination current generations should template as an institution of leadership for all future infrastructural investment in Africa. The development infancy of Africa is an opportunity to imagine its matured state as what incumbents can bequeath to future generations and posterity. National Development Plans of the countries in Africa should be tested against one Continental Development Plan anchored by a fund whose security and collateralisation are based on a Metal Bank full of Africa's precious metals. CUT!!!
🤷🏿♂️Just Thinking
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