By Rosa Whitaker, for The Africa Report Q4 2021 issue on the USA Biden team
October 11, 2021
We must “build back better”, President Biden says as the world struggles to recover from COVID. This can only happen if the US makes a radical and long overdue U-turn in the way we think about and treat Africa.
Not one of the world’s most pressing challenges can be resolved unless Africa is a full and willing part of the solution — not climate change and the destruction of the biosphere, not the threat of ongoing pandemics, not destabilizing mass migrations, not the cancer of terrorism that feeds on corruption and failing states, not the potential for economic stagnation as the populations of the industrialized North age out of the workforce, not the new and potentially disastrous antagonism between the US and China.
A prosperous, healthy and self-reliant Africa, on a sustainable, carbon-neutral trajectory to industrialization and urbanization driven by its extraordinary natural endowments, is not a nice-to-have. It is a must-have. But the only people who can make it happen are Africans themselves, unencumbered by the self-serving ministrations of colonial powers, both the old and the new ones that pretend to be something else.
In the US, we had an idea of what Afghanistan should be and spent trillions of dollars trying to make it so, failing utterly. Contractors and NGOs got rich along with local elites only too happy to pocket US taxpayer dollars without full accountability so long as they said they were fighting our enemies.
If the US aid-industrial-complex could not fix one small country with trillions of dollars, what makes us believe it can fix Africa with a few billion? We have got to stop thinking and acting as if we know better. Africa has its own blueprint for building a single market served by competitive African businesses linked by infrastructure shaped for the needs of Africa, not colonizers.
We must first listen to Africa’s collective aspirations and respond impactfully, whether by creating tax incentives for private US investments in Africa or by leveraging our bond market to support Africa’s infrastructure development.
Since 2003, The Whitaker Group has been at the forefront of work to advance smart enterprise solutions across Africa. Our global clients and projects demonstrate the virtue of doing much good while also doing well.
Read this feature on page 11, in The Africa Report Q4 2021 issue on the ‘Biden Africa team’