Changing the Music

Sitting under a tree in a burned out village in southern Sudan, I attempted to understand what I could of the carnage spread out before me.  It was war and its consequences were terrible. An elderly man sat on his haunches beside me and lamented that the village historian’s body lay among the rubble. “When our storytellers die, the past and the future are both forgotten.”Today, across the entire region of Canada, an old storyteller remerged and in the process gave a continent a new life and a dynamic future.  The Globe and Mail dedicated most of its paper to “The African Century” and in so doing might very well have changed the game.Edited by special request of the paper by Bob Geldof and Bono, the Africa that emerged from its pages was unlike anything Canadians had heard previous.  It was a grand treatise documenting a new African presence in the world that is about to shape all of us.  And in the process it dispelled rather tenacious myths.

• There are fewer conflicts in Africa than in Asia
• Some 75% of African children go to school (58% ten years ago)
• Nearly 30 democracies today, compared with 5 just 20 years ago
• In 2002, only 50,000 Africans got antiretroviral drugs, versus 3.7 million today

The list goes on and on, but it was the economic change on the continent that brought out the most promising numbers.

• Africa has the fasting-growing mobile market in the world
• The mineral wealth of the Congo alone is $24 trillion – the GDP of Europe and the U.S. together
• Canadian mining companies had $21 billion in mining assets in Africa
• 330 million now qualify as “middle-class” on the continent

In fact, there as so many statistics that you’d best get a copy and pour over the entire paper yourself.Four key issues arise from today’s edition.  The first is that, despite prevailing opinion, foreign aid has actually had significant benefit for Africans.  Companies aren’t building schools, hospitals, reducing malaria or educating women. That task has been left to international aid programs and non-governmental actors.  The new stats now remind us that foreign development has prepared Africans for their dynamic future.  And it must keep working.  Economic boom times can hardly prevail if people aren’t educated, healthy and mobile.  A great economic society requires trained human capital if it is to succeed and aid, partnering with investment in trade and commerce, can bring on that future.Second, Africa is about to blow the world away with its inherent natural wealth. While supplies of oil, minerals, water and food are running out elsewhere, Africa’s bounty of such things indeed seems destined to lift it to the level of an economic powerhouse.Third, corruption is waning.  Long a sore point for donors everywhere, African leaders are discerning the future and making the appropriate changes of accountability to catch the economic wave.Finally, Canada is missing it.  Recent cutbacks of development funds to 8 African countries and the rather drastic cuts to NGOs working on the continent means the government has missed the potential of the future Africa.  There’s something odd about Canadian mining companies rushing in while the Canadian government buys travel tickets to Latin America.An old African proverb states that, “the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago.  The second best time is now.”  Thanks to some remarkable foresight, courage, expense and ingenuity, the Globe and Mail has reminded us that this isn’t only Africa’s moment but our own.  One old Kenyan nun once told me: “When the music changes, so does the dance.”  Thanks to this timely and expansive kind of journalism, the tune has changed and it’s time we developed better moves.