By 2030 one in five people will be African. Combine the continent’s soaring population with technology, improvements in infrastructure, health and education, and Africa could be the next century’s economic growth powerhouse.
Read Here – World Economic Forum
Africa is by no means destined to lag behind the rest of the world economy. On the contrary, it could easily become a global economic powerhouse – and within the next decade. But, to fulfill its economic potential, Africa must industrialize.
Some Middle Eastern countries are showing a great deal of interest in Africa these days, and although Africa seems to welcome the attention, it can do without the drama.
From a negligible trickle in 2000, China’s trade with Africa topped $160 billion in 2015, ranking as far and away the largest trade partner with the continent. In 2014, China signed more than $70 billion in infrastructure contracts in the continent, and Chinese banks now provide more loans to African nations than does the World Bank.
During his years in South Africa, Gandhi sought to ingratiate himself with Empire and its mission. In doing so, he not only rendered African exploitation and oppression invisible, but was, on occasion, a willing part of their subjugation and racist stereotyping. This is not the Gandhi spoken of in hagiographic speeches by politicians more than a century later. This is a different man picking his way through the dross of his time; not just any time, but the height of colonialism; not through any country, but a land that was witness to three centuries of unremitting conquest, brutality and racial bloodletting.
One result of the complicated and tangled jihadist landscape in Mali is that figuring out who’s allied with who can be tricky. It’s not just the split between MNLA and their Islamist allies, and not even just Belmokhtar’s on-again, off-again relationship with al-Qaeda. Earlier this year, someone claiming to speak for al-Murabitun announced that the group was pledging its allegiance to ISIS. Several days later, Belmokhtar shot down that report as false.
Today Nigeria, with a population of some 174 million people, is the world’s tenth-largest oil producer, pumping 2.4 million barrels a day, and has the highest gross national product in Africa. But the riches have brought neither stability nor prosperity. A series of military dictatorships siphoned off billions of dollars of oil revenue over Nigeria’s first four decades, creating a culture of corruption that permeated society.
Burkina Faso, Congo, and Burundi are among the world’s poorest, least developed, worst governed countries. Compaoré, Kabila, and Nkurunziza are corrupt and unaccountable men, more like Mafia godfathers than like public servants, and they hardly bother to pretend otherwise. When they say that they must remain in office, they make no case for what good they’ll do, no connection between their interest in power and the public interest.
Ethiopia has come a long way since the dark days of a quarter-century ago. Its resurgence, domestically and internationally, is unmistakable. Never have so many Ethiopians had so much reason to be optimistic and confident about the future. The Ethiopian vision of a Nile Basin where resources no longer lead to zero-sum competition and violent (proxy) wars, but rather to joint strategies to tackle poverty, unemployment, and climate change deserves wide-ranging support.
As African nations recalculate gross domestic product to include previously unaccounted-for economic activity, it is evident that the size of the continent’s economy is much larger than what has been largely believed.
