Obama’s high vision for Africa

The momentum has been battered by warts and viruses contracted under colonial victimhood. Horrendous violence against African bodies brewed decades of post-colonial civil wars in ranging from Congo and Sudan; Liberia; Ivory Coast today’s South Sudan; partial genocide in Uganda and Burundi to full genocide in Rwanda.  Mo Ibrahim’s researchers, however, report a growing season […]

The momentum has been battered by warts and viruses contracted under colonial victimhood. Horrendous violence against African bodies brewed decades of post-colonial civil wars in ranging from Congo and Sudan; Liberia; Ivory Coast today’s South Sudan; partial genocide in Uganda and Burundi to full genocide in Rwanda.  Mo Ibrahim’s researchers, however, report a growing season of flowers in African peoples smiling to sunlight of good governance.
The tempos of European colonial minds staying bent on exploiting Africa’s top soils for agricultural products and bellow the soils for minerals. The European Union is vigorously pushing Nigeria to lead ECOWAS into entering a trade slavery while blocking Africa using China as an exit route economic growth.
While Europeans refused to share engineering skills with Africans, Lee Kuan Yew and his team of ascetic Singaporeans were lucky to learn from Japan a self-made Asiatic model for inventing indigenous industrial neo-capitalist development. The assassination of Samora Machel of Mozambique and Amilcar Cabral of Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde denied Africa the possible productivity of their virtuous teaming up with Mwalimu Nyerere of Tanzania.
 President Obama has probably been grappling with this matter. On his maiden flight to Ghana after assuming office he lashed at one of the wounds from colonial victimhood – the self love by the ‘’strong ruler’’ and dictator. He called for building ‘’strong institutions’’, not strong individuals. Ghana’s collapse into military corruption and economic decay had followed the coup against a visionary and patriotic Kwame Nkrumah.  Cote d’Ivoire’s civil war followed Gbagbo’s rejection of French control of the economy allowed by Felix Houphuet-Boigny. Tanzania’s stability after the resignation of Mwalimu Nyerere (1961-1985) seemed to make Obama’s case. Yet it was also the brilliant, visionary and virtuous Nyerere who invented the novel ‘’democratic one-party state’’ and trained patriotic leaders to succeed him.
Obama’s focus on nurturing leaders from among Africa’s youths while emphasizing their creative initiatives. The symbolic gratification of feting some in the White House -America’s seat of power – out-smarted African governments who are indifferent to talents in their own youths; even when 61 percent of the population in many African countries is bellow 24 years of age.
Previous American scholarship schemes for African students – provided by churches and government – did not focus on demonstrated creativity of awardees but on opportunity for college education which would win future friends after they returned to Africa.  The Rockefeller Foundation and Ford Foundation, for example, sought to build non-communist future university teachers for African universities.  They did not plan on encouraging beneficiaries to flee out of Africa into rivers of ‘’brain drains’’.  They failed to build special schemes for nurturing high creativity in their beneficiary scholars.
On July 25-26, 2015, President Obama and President Uhuru Kenyatta will host the ‘’Sixth Global Entrepreneurship Summit’’. They expect to assemble ‘’some of the brilliant young entrepreneurs from across Africa’’. Obama seeks to raise $1 billion to be allocated as investment grants to ‘’youth and women entrepreneurs’’. The hard-headed business network that this fiesta will create for future American and Kenyan economic relations with Africa is accompanied by a concern for security worries fanned by angry youths incited by unemployment and religious anger over Euro-American policies across sectors of the globe.
This celebration of entrepreneurial brilliance will bring access to capital, ‘’connect emerging innovators with mentors and networks’’, and roads to new markets. Some may dismiss Obama’s mountaintop at $1 billion high; considering that it is lower than the cost of one attack helicopter or drone used in Iraq or Yemen.  94 per cent of Burundi’s 4.6 million population (in 2010) are small scale farmers; with only 2.4 per cent working in light industries in urban areas. It is not clear Obama’s fund will inject capital into their rural genius to promote agro-based industrial foundering of tools; and adding value to Burundi’s bananas, cotton, milk, hides, cotton, coffee or medicinal plants.
It is not clear if Obama also sees local industrial productivity turning Africa’s natural resources into manufactured fixed capital products. Burundi exported coffee, tea, cotton and sugar worth only $122 million in 2013. Less than 2 per cent of the population have access to electricity. The country is yet to turn its seventeen mineral deposits – including uranium, cobalt, platinum, gold and tantalum – into inputs for local manufacturing industries. Obama’s intervention in entrepreneurship must hug Africa’s natural resources within a vortex of African-led manufacturing inside Africa by educated and innovative African workers. He must think big; join hands with ambitious, dignified and cerebral Africa; doing so during the sunset of his presidency and after.