Wasted chances give Africa little cause to cheer

It is a fascinating paradox that while most of the rest of the world seems to be accelerating in all directions, Africa is all motion without much movement, given the present circumstances in countries that represented the continent’s best hope.

Nigeria’s great promise remains a mirage, with rampant unemployment, corruption, entrenched poverty and a government that appears completely rudderless. The ailing President Muhammadu Buhari is the mirror image of the economic and social health of his country.

CRIMINAL GANGS

South Africa is limping, burdened by the lost promise of a once-promising black rule. Angry blacks protesting a lack of jobs are openly xenophobic.

They are killing foreigners and burning their businesses because they think that these are the people that have taken their jobs. They are wrong.

The country’s problem is a complex mix of corruption and wealth/income inequalities that have been made really bad by former President Jacob Zuma’s inept leadership, a leadership that he willingly lent to corrupt and criminal gangs.

President Cyril Ramaphosa is precariously perched atop a crumbling tree and he will need to be a miracle worker to save his presidency and right the tottering ship that once was the mighty nation that Nelson Mandela dreamt about and midwifed.

And then there is Kenya, East Africa’s gem that has refused to shine, thanks to handlers that have prioritised self-interest, greed and avarice as the sole objectives of leadership. Thankfully spared the rough treatment that military coups meted out to Nigeria for decades, and the dehumanising experience of apartheid that politically stunted South Africa for so long, Kenya’s post-colonial narrative should be more heroic than apathetic, but it is the latter that dominates.

The exuberance of hope nurtured by a Mwai Kibaki-government has rapidly evaporated to be replaced by cynicism, fear and desperation.

KILL DEVOLUTION

Thousands of Kenyans are being released from their jobs to join multitudes of unemployed and under-employed people. Banks, manufacturing companies like East African Breweries, service industries such as hotels, media firms, and telcos like Airtel and Telekom, have retrenched workers.

If the grim 2019 half-year results now being announced mean anything, it is that we will see more exits in the coming months.

Meanwhile, the country’s politicians have refused to vacate the gutter. They have splintered the country into noisy enclaves abusively clamouring for the presidency as the only prize worth chasing.

They have smothered counties and seem determined to kill devolution, arguably the one positive initiative to emerge from the 2010 Constitution that is itself being prepared for slaughter for all the wrong reasons!

We can’t manage the airline we have ironically christened ‘the pride of Africa’, the little that is left of our rivers has been polluted as Nema doses. Our forests have been mortgaged and ravaged. A new education curriculum is being introduced at primary level, seemingly through fiat, while we have started questioning the quality of our graduates and PhD holders at tertiary level.

Sixty years into independence and running on a Sh3 trillion budget, the country is happy to receive food aid to feed its people, some of whom have died from hunger in Turkana County!

It was never supposed to be this way. Some very clever minds thought through and Parliament endorsed policies and plans to guide us away from the sorry state we are in now.

IDEAS FESTIVAL

The Sessional Paper No 10 of 1965 that foregrounded import substitution as the key economic driver of the time; the Sessional Paper No 1 of 1986 that underpinned the structural adjustment programmes and the ambitious Vision 2030 policy blueprint that sees Kenya achieve a middle income status by 2030, never intended to drive us into the ditch we are in now.

As we ponder and gnash our teeth in despair and desperation, the Nation Media Group is planning a thought and ideas festival in Kigali next month to telescope Africa’s next 60 years. Brilliant minds will again paint optimistic portraits of what can be. There will be talk of the promise of technology in a continent holding 40 per cent of the world’s population by 2100. The tremendous wealth, the large tracts of land, etc.

That same optimism is in the Africa Union’s Agenda 2063 — the blueprint and master plan for transforming Africa into the global powerhouse of the future.

But the past 60 years tell us that these great ideas are going nowhere until we fix our politics first.

American President Donald Trump might just have been right when he described African countries as huge holes of waste!

Tom Mshindi is the former editor-in-chief of the Nation Group and is now consulting. [email protected], @tmshindi