Reclaiming the narrative
By Peter Guest | Published: 01 December, 2008
The post-globalised landscape remains Balkanised by semantic divisions. The terms used in contemporary discourse come loaded with preconceptions of risk and opportunity, of threat and reassurance. Nowhere is more a victim of this than Africa.
Just as Africa suffers from the Mercator projection in geography, it suffers from a similar perceptual shrinkage in its opportunities, due simply to a slant in the terminology used to describe it. Even the word ‘hope’ has been hijacked by rock stars to the extent that it has come to be little more than condescension to people who, by some accident of geography, are apparently born hopeless.
There are other words attached to Africa and to African business that must be addressed, regardless of the heavy weight of history on them. The continent is welcoming a new generation of leaders who have grown up in independent states, free from their former colonial powers. They are, no doubt, cognisant of their parents’ struggle, but equally they are aware that their countries can steer their own course. Yet ‘neo-colonial’ is a constant chorus accompanying each new investment, regardless of its source. To brand all foreign investments as such by instinct is to suggest that African states, and by extension, African people, have no power in shaping their own destiny, whereas African agency has never been so strong.
To some extent, we can attribute blame to those companies operating on the continent for reframing for public acceptance their development plans as pseudo-charitable, often reinforcing the perception among their shareholders and investors that the 900m people south of the Straits of Gibraltar are part of a corporate social responsibility mandate, and that to profit from them is exploitative.
In this issue, we aim to address some of these preconceptions. In Paul Walsh, Diageo has a CEO who has realised – and demonstrated – that Africa can be an engine for growth in a global enterprise. We also examine how the aspirations of a generation of urban Africans are fuelling the growth of personal credit in markets untouched by the global clampdown on debt.
Our cover story examines the recent trend for foreign investors to acquire large tracts of African arable land to solve their own domestic food security needs, looking at the dogma and the neglect that has held back agriculture across the continent and made the short-term gain of land revenue more attractive to governments than the persistent goal of self-sufficiency and export markets. In doing so, we see that these major investments may bring with them certain benefits to local economies, although their relative opacity and failure to engage with local stakeholders does not bode well for their long-term sustainability.
We must not underplay the challenges of a continent which is home to numerous young democracies struggling against the previous generation’s ‘Big Men’ and their corruption; a continent occasionally convulsed by social unrest and pockmarked by failed states; a continent with the shadows of malaria, malnutrition and HIV/Aids looming large over great swathes of its population; but these challenges must not be allowed to define our vision of this place.
Those African nations that have based their economies around their extractive industries do indeed face a stern test as global production slows. Likewise, those nations that have extraction as the founding premise of their relationships with African nations will now need to demonstrate that their commitment is not so short term as to fluctuate with the vagaries of the international metal markets and to recognise that Africa’s greatest and most sustainable resource remains its people, as consumers, as innovators and as entrepreneurs.
Peter Guest
EDITOR
