Who is imagining Africa?

The G7 countries met as thousands of young Africans were drowning in the Mediterranean Sea while being exported to Europe. Gaddafi had attracted these same unemployed labour from Africa and poor Asian countries to build an industrial economy despite Libya’s tiny population. In exasperation, NATO preceded its bombs on Libya’s military and other strategic targets […]

The G7 countries met as thousands of young Africans were drowning in the Mediterranean Sea while being exported to Europe. Gaddafi had attracted these same unemployed labour from Africa and poor Asian countries to build an industrial economy despite Libya’s tiny population. In exasperation, NATO preceded its bombs on Libya’s military and other strategic targets by getting foreign workers to flee from Libya. Their absorption by Gaddafi had blocked vital migration needed to counter threats of protests by trade unions as European economies attacked socialist welfare policies won under the fears of Communism in former Soviet Union. Gaddafi had also invested in using gas for local industrial manufacturing. Reducing gas and labour exports to Europe were security threats to Europe and NATO. A clash of visioning Africa is unfolding.
As AU leaders met, Donald Kaberuka left the presidency of the African Development Bank. Kaberuka gave Africa the big idea that African governments should each transfer to ADB a small portion of funds kept as foreign reserves for the bank to invest in building Africa’s infrastructures. Through self-help Africa can build railways, roads, airports and bridges to carry trade between African economies. $50 billion as a baseline was a vision he declared to members of the African Parliament meeting in Cape Town.
 Railway lines in Africa have ran on a colonial model of hauling raw minerals and agricultural products to sea ports that served both landlocked and coastal countries. In 1961, the colonial government in Uganda invoked the 1921 Barcelona Convention to insist that Kenya must ‘’guarantee the right of free access to the coast for landlocked countries’’; and a Vienna Convention which allowed railway lines to cross borders and ensure exports from and imports. A Brazilian mining company, Vale, recently built a railway line from the Tete Province of Mozambique across Malawi to enable it export coal out of Nacala port in Mozambique. In January 2014, governments of Zimbabwe, Zambia, Botswana, DR Congo and South Africa signed an agreement which would facilitate the smooth use of their railway routes to enable mining companies export copper, chrome, coal and other products from ports in the coasted states. Zambia is expecting the completion of a 590 km rail line which will link mines at Kalumbila, Kansanshi and Lumwana to the Benguela railway line which runs to Lobito port on the Atlantic Ocean. Old visions die hard. Kaberuka obviously had a new and higher vision for railways as infrastructure for carrying Africa’s trade to African economies for Africa’s development.
One such vision is $15 billion railway to run from Mombasa on Kenya’s Indian Ocean coast and traversed lands across northern Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda and Southern Sudan. An Ethiopian line would join it. Its vision will promote and stimulate economic interaction across the evolving East African Federation. Its kin in spatial and political vision is the plan to export electricity generated from the Renaissance Dam in Ethiopia to the same countries. In both cases the Democratic Republic of Congo has a keen interest in joining this infrastructural fraternity.  Authorities in Nairobi and Kampala are already familiar with their roads being suffocated and pot-holed by huge trailers hauling merchandise from Mombasa to Rwanda for marketing in eastern DR Congo and South Sudan.  AU visions at meetings in Cape Town and elsewhere must link this project to other regions.
 The AU meeting in Cape Town was also preceded by Dangote’s cement factory in Ethiopia.  It joins others built in Senegal, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Cameroun, Zambia, South Africa; and those nearing completion in Kenya, South Sudan and Niger Republic. The vision is in Dangote’s testimony that “home-grown African entrepreneurship holds the key to the future economic growth of the continent’’. Dangote had already incubated steadily inside Nigeria, investing $6 billion in cement production in Nigeria between 2006 and 2013 nurtured by President Jonathan’s ‘’formulation and implementation of progressive policies of government’’.
 The ‘’ban on cement imports’’ into Nigeria’s market was vital. That raises a problem that has erupted between Mugabe and Zuma over South African goods flooding Zimbabwe’s market and blocking the development of her manufacturing firms.  Dangote’s cement producers might soon face challenges of exporting to other African markets if, they too, ban cement imports.  That clash of visions is better than Africa’s subsistence.