Africa’s poverty situation was put on the front burner when Nigeria’s Akinwumi Adesina was sworn in as the new President of African Development Bank in Abidjan, early this month. Lack of critical infrastructure, such as electricity, denies most economies on the continent the badly needed productive base for sustainable growth and development. This is a serious challenge the AfDB boss has pledged to confront from five priority areas: electricity, food production, economic integration, industrialisation and improvement in the quality of life.
According to him, electricity is the most significant because of its multiplier effect. Unfortunately, power is not available to two-thirds of Africa and this explains why the International Energy Agency says that additional $450 billion investment is required in the power sector to, at least, reduce the problem by 50 per cent, and make every urban dweller have access to power by 2040. It is this consciousness that propelled Adesina to pledge: “We must light up and power Africa…Energy is the engine that powers.”
Nigeria, with a Gross Domestic Product of $510 billion – the highest in Africa – and a population of about 170 million, has a paltry power output of 4,600 megawatts. Government officials told the Senate ad hoc committee investigating the sector that this figure was attained after N2.74 trillion investments were made from 1999 to date. This is an awful picture that has driven many manufacturing companies out of the country, with Ghana being a preferred destination.
Most African countries are in the same hell-hole with Nigeria, save, perhaps, South Africa, which boasts about 40,000 MW. It is a disturbing narrative that 65 per cent of the world’s arable land is on the continent, yet, it depends on food importation to survive. Nigeria, for instance, spent $1.39billion to import fish; $1.33billion on rice in 17 months – (January 2014 and May 2015). But if the arable land is maximally utilised, Adesina believes “it can help meet the food needs of nine billion people on the planet by 2050.”
However, Africa’s development challenges transcend AfDB programmes or its assistance to countries. At the heart of the continent’s under-development is poverty of leadership. It is vision that drives development; and this is lacking in most African countries. Corruption too, has eroded the little available resources for development.
The African Union found this development worrisome as it undermines the capacity of most countries to achieve the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. It, therefore, set up a committee in 2012, chaired by Thabo Mbeki – a former President of South Africa – to examine the case. Shockingly, the team discovered that $60 billion left Africa illegally annually, with much of it from Nigeria. The capital flight flows from official corruption, money-laundering, contract scams, tax evasion, trade under-invoicing and illegal deals of multinational companies.
It bears repeating that the MDGs initiative is a global agenda that promotes better life for humanity, especially those in the Third World. Leaders are enjoined through purposeful governance to focus on the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger and achieving universal primary education. Other goals are promoting gender equality, reducing child mortality; improving maternal health; combating HIV/AIDS and malaria and ensuring environmental sustainability. Only Ghana was able to meet the target in 2013, ahead of the 2015 deadline. This is most shameful.
The GDPs of Nigeria, Ghana, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Angola, among others, may have increased within this period. But how to translate their annual growth rates of above 5 per cent, into better lives for their people remains a huge problem. Many Africans still live below the $1.25 per day poverty threshold, forcing the United Nations Development Programme to describe Africa as “off-track” in overcoming this first MDG crucible. The continent’s leadership tragedy is exemplified in the fact that, since 2007 when the Mo Ibrahim $5 million African Leadership Prize was instituted, only four leaders have been found worthy of the coveted annual diadem.
Yet, this gloomy picture of Africa must be reversed, if it is to be hooked to the global grid of economic development and prosperity. Citizens’ demand of governance driven by transparency and accountability has become imperative. A continent full of mineral resources, arable land and human capital cannot continue to be aid-dependent.
There is, therefore, the over-riding need for a new development construct, and for the AU to move its annual summits away from rhetoric to action platforms for resolving the barriers to economic advancement. First, Africa must feed itself; promote trade; integrate economically and deliver infrastructure such as good road networks, rail transportation and quality education to foster these strides. Second, the continent must join others on the super-highway of economic growth by encouraging productive knowledge. It has been proved that “prosperous societies are those that have the knowledge to make a larger variety of more complex products.”
However, a new start for its leaders will require having a second look at why the laudable initiatives of regional integration of the past – Economic Community of West African States, the East African Community and Southern Africa Development Community – have not been able to deliver as expected. In ECOWAS, the suspicion between Anglo-phone and Franco-phone countries constitute real danger, while dual membership of ECA and SADC by some countries like Tanzania, limits capacity or commitment to the ideals the two bodies stand for.
These economic obstacles that were the nemesis of Africa in the last century should not be allowed to continue to shape its destiny in the 21st century.
