“It’s not all doom and gloom for Africa,” so says academic, activist, and social and economic commentator, Lebogang Pheko, when quizzed about the prospects of Africa, a continent seen to be on the rise.
A plus, she says, is that the continent’s economic improvements mean Africa is never going back to where it was and it’s increasingly occupying the international space.
Pheko says new developments that point to Africa’s advances, especially on the economic front, mean a new level of confidence has been instilled as we become less dependent, economically, on others.
As the ANC NGC 2015 takes place in Midrand, Gauteng, expectations are there for the gathering to address issues about the continent’s leadership challenges. Pheko reminds us that Africa boosts liberal democracy differences that lead to leadership contradictions from country to country, thus the issue is more complex than it seems.
But in essence, Pheko says all that Africa needs is accountable leadership. She adds that for the ANC NGC to discuss continental leadership issues, they will in turn be indirectly dealing with their own leadership challenges.
On Agenda 2063, she says it’s not the most cutting-edge document we’ve ever heard. She thinks it’s an attempt to collate and co-relate past discussions.
Listen below as Pheko touches on the need for Africa to identify which relevant institutions to use in churning our future; on how the NGC should tackle issues of weak State entities; the need to differentiate between party power and State power; how the increasing number of unemployed youth are rather a threat to society, plus the prospect of the continent rising further.
Further in the interview, Pheko took time to touch on the ANC NGC document in its entirety, saying we have seen documents which have had little substantive differences in past ANC discussion documents, with the majority of documents starting to look the same.
According to Pheko, the documents raises a number of important issues, but implementation has been extremely weak.
Listen below to more of her views:
On another development, Pheko says Africa Rising is a concept where Africa is seen through the eyes of the West. She says interesting enough, it’s a concept brought about by The Economist magazine, the same magazine that, a decade earlier, had described Africa as a hopeless continent. But through the exponential growth of the African economy, their views changed.
She points to how a number of African countries managed to sort out their contradictions, having suffered indebtedness at the hands of the IMF and the World Bank, but after realising improved economies through adjusted programmes.
As a result of the improvement, she says most African countries started to receive what’s deemed as “debt forgiveness”. But on the flipside, the discussion document indicates that Africa’s growth has brought the spotlight on the continent, with countries like China eyeing moving their companies to Africa, in search of cheap labour.
The ANC NGC discussion document notes that Africa’s trade with the rest of the world has ballooned, inflation dropping, foreign debt declined, labour productivity improving with unemployment declining with the proportion of the working population with low income decreasing. Pheko says this is a result of many governments having been able to divert national fiscus towards more development and national planning.
Watch the AU’s video, put together by the African Arts Institute, sharing some of the continent’s aspirations on Agenda 2063:
– By Tshepo Tsheole
