Africans have a second chance at joining the international economy as equals, thanks to the current reshaping of the world order – so let’s not blow it.
Africans have a second chance at joining the international economy as equals, thanks to the current reshaping of the world order – so let’s not blow it.
This statement could have been the theme of the 16th Highway Africa Conference that ends today but it was not. The actual theme was 'Africa Rising? How the media frame the continent’s geopolitics, trade and economic growth'.
Speakers at the conference broadly agreed that most African countries missed their first chance at becoming politically and economically significant shortly after they became independent in the 1960s. Presenters could not agree on the reasons why these countries failed to become fully functional nation states, but most laid the blame for these failures squarely on the shoulders of the developed states.
Keynote speaker Tom Mshindi, Managing Director of the Newspaper Division of National Media Group (Kenya) said African leaders had formed an “unholy alliance with former colonial masters to supply raw materials for them and in order to secure favourable deals, had not delivered on promises.
Mshindi acknowledged that the blame had to be shared, as military dictatorships destroyed any real prospects for democracy, but he also argued that from the early sixties till late in the eighties, global leaders manipulated the Cold War for their own agendas, successfully applying the divide and rule strategy to the detriment of the African peoples.
He blamed African media for failing to report critically on the widespread abuse of power and the readiness of African leaders to adopt structural adjustment plans. Mshindi said if African media organisations had revealed the full extent of the consequences of these plans, the peoples of the continent would have been empowered to take action much earlier.
The world is currently experiencing a massive reshaping of the geopolitical order. Many speakers reminded delegates how the extraordinary growth of China in particular, as well as that of India and Brazil, has undermined the overwhelming dominance of the United States and its western allies.
They claimed that as the world order changes and an array of new media technologies forces media companies to completely rethink the way they do business, there is a golden opportunity for Africa to rejoin the international community as equals and for African media to play a more proactive role in reporting on this transformation.
The notion that Africa might finally be rising was tempered at the conference by the simple act of placing a question mark at the end of the first part of the theme. ‘Africa Rising’ is a trendy catchphrase that is currently the title of a book, a movie, several websites and the title of a well-known and often quoted article from the Economist magazine.
The strategic placement of the question mark is clearly intended to raise concerns about whether Africa is actually rising or not. Mshindi highlighted several reasons for optimism about the future of Africa: the continent’s diaspora is coming back; African women have become more liberated and are now more than ever participating as fully fledged members of the local economies and the increasing number of African capitalists has resulted in the publication of an African Forbes magazine.
He said that this is “all fantastic news but it needs to be nuanced”. He was one of several speakers at the conference who issued cautionary notes suggesting that if the leaders of the first generation of independent African states sold their national birthright to their former colonisers, perhaps our current generation could later be found guilty of a similar betrayal in another 20 years.
They noted that African leaders of the 21st century make recurrent pilgrimages to Beijing and usually return amid much fanfare with billions in apparently soft loans and grand project plans – but what they leave in the Chinese capital in exchange for these favours is never made quite so clear.
