South Africa an economic giant on the African continent as well as Sierra Leone a country recovering and attempting to rebuild have experieced or are experiencing electricity challenges and frequent or total blackouts.
The energy problem which almost all African countries have, a Continental transportation platform, and a Continental communication platform, these are the pre-requisites for an industrial revolution, without these we are not going to be able to industrialise the continent more so talk of trade at full capacity.
We have to put power (electricity) in the hands of every single African not just a few, not just 10%, 20% and 40% etc as is in most African Countries but at least 90%, we should be able with hard work to put it in 100% of the African population, we should be able to bring the communication cost down, and make it easy for our people to move across the continent to start businesses and trade as well as carrybout tourism.
These 3 structural challenges have to be solved at the Continental level because small countries like Sierra Leone, Togo etc can’t deal with these challenges alone, they have no money unless we want to leave them as prey to neocolonial institutions and our people at the mercy of perpetual external neocolonial exploitation which uses trickery inorder to extract wealth.
Imperialism is not in anyway benevolent to help Africans when it can’t solve problems it has created in its own house. It is instead becoming more vicious with the return of the IMF to the continent, it is possible that the growth the continent is being aborted and we may struggle to hear a 5% growth anywhere on the continent for a nation that is just taking off, where we once heard Africa is rising, we don’t hear it any more and we may not do so for a long time.
This is instructional of us to multiply our efforts by 7 times, every preveleged African like me therefore must work or double, tripple or tripple double their effort to compensate for those less productive because they have no access to the energy, transportation and communication resources.
According to an African world renowned economist Dr. Dambisa Moyo, an Economy needs a consistent 7% growth for a decade to double in size, Africa can not and should not as it currently is afford to regress to 3.4% a figure put out by the IMF and world bank.
This means the maintaining of majority African people in poverty, penury and misery yet we have the solutions to these problems, solutions for which we don’t need external help whose precondition is exploitation of Africa’s remaining resources. Do we want to start working when all the resources have been siphoned off or do we think that the resources we have are inexhaustible? Ofcouse they are exhaustable!
Kwame Gonza
www.africanacup.org
kwamegonza@africanacup.org
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