The templates are shifting: the African century has begun. Are we bracing?

Wealth and power, the motive force for most tensions and conflicts affecting humanity, are moving away from their dispossession-determined locations in Africa. The colonial order is giving way to a new African order that is increasingly crafted by a new cohort of self-determined and purpose-driven Africans inspired by the possibility of prosperity for all pan-African future. At issue is to what end and direction the turning great wheel of defining new economic commanding heights of Africa is taking us. Can an Africanist order emerge to set up new conditions of engagement that the world should negotiate its space to be accommodated? 

In his inaugural speech as the second President of a non-racial and democratic South Africa and the … head of the national executive of a geographical space called South Africa since 1910, President Mbeki committed the edifice of South Africanness to Africanness. Mbeki said, “We trust that what we will do will not only better our own condition as a people, but will also make a contribution, however small, to the success of Africa's Renaissance, towards the identification of the century ahead of us as the African Century”.

Work on the African Century has since begun, and treaties, agreements, partnerships, and institutions of development leadership have been established. Africa’s approach and posture to multilateralism, global trade, diplomacy, and international relations have been slowly shifting established colonial templates. Africa has been interrogating post-liberation arrangements made with past colonisers. African governments have been developing long-term development plans that integrate the continent for seamless trade and cooperation.

The financial services architecture of Africa is almost ready to emerge with a continental one-currency regime underwritten by its mineral wealth and compulsory saving liquidity. The African central banking regime, inter-bank clearances, and bond structure designs have been developing benchmarks that will dictate the cadence of foreign direct investments. The recalibration of the global order with the introduction of BRICS and other strategic regional multilateral bodies outside the Bretton Woods system has opened several windows of opportunity for Africa to renegotiate its position as a global player in trade, industry, manufacturing, and governance.

Doubtful Thomases about Africa argue that the new African renewal will not look the better of what is known about the African Continent but will be worse of its present squalor. Events and issues, such as corruption, state capture, and organised crime that emerge in ‘trusted democracies’ like South Africa, can threaten Africa's reputation, market position and operation in the broader scheme of global competitiveness. Such situations are just part of the challenges of being an African democracy and economy, and a brigade of new and development-focused leaders, both political and business, are redefining the rules of engagement. 

 

With a perfected experience of crisis, fragile, and failed states, there is a general belief that the super efficiencies represented by the new movement of innovative Africans might be the end of efficiencies of failure. Without noticing that their doubts are a manifestation of their fear that their preeminence over Africa's development is passing away, so too is this movement dealing the most significant blow to their mercantilist relationship with Africa and her resources. 

 

The political and economic order within which Africa should imagine itself, based on rules and laws that advantage those who wrote them, is in retreat. New frontiers of economic power definition have started interrogating economics’ (theoretical) foundations. Nation-states are advancing their agendas for a new African order with its 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 economic and think-tanking 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, development nodal 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 leadership that are consolidating to make Africa their primary market is a good sign of a rise to the African century challenge Thabo Mbeki posited. 

 

The political, cultural, and economic experiences Africa has gone through have concretised how the continent sees the world through what has now been accepted as a decoloniality thesis, which is not necessarily an antithesis of colonialism but a condition of being that is theoretically self-determined. 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 is fast creating in-Africa capabilities to create own debt borrowings that could be collateralised with bankable infrastructure investment.

 

The new cohort of economic mandarins, and mainly flogging the development horses of Africa from a financial services cognitive platform, has been bolstered by the narrative of a declining global financial system whose bailouts indicated a commitment to the local of global 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 value in Africa.

 

For these and many other reasons, the African Continent is entering into 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 requires. 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 a dimension of imagining a democracy. 

 

The ability of the new African mandarins, or instead '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, and 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 dream 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 ascending in Africa, and the relative positioning of South Africans is improving, non-black and yet African capitalism is alive, well, and here to stay. Pursuing the Continent as the new oyster of opportunity may be based on the principles that created the exclusion these endeavours seek to change. The latter 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 objectives. Preserving what works in the system is what the renewal of Africa should be about. If Africa should tinker with the system, it should be about jobs and new economic opportunities.

As we debate the restructuring of SOEs and who should benefit from their restructuring, it should be based on what templates we are creating and which we are fracturing. The rhetoric should stop. CUT!!