eBusiness Weekly
Alfred M. Mthimkhulu
It is a steep climb to the Hill Complex at Great Zimbabwe. In the gasps for breath, the decision to pause and look up on the seemingly endless steps ahead or to cast an eye back on the Great Enclosure down there can be as tormenting as the throbbing muscles.
But once up on the Hill, one can easily be transported back to the life in the ancient city, a city said to have reached its most prosperous state in the 15th century. Then of course, something jolts the minds back to this modern state where the inflation rate is breaching 100 percent. The walk down downhill is a thoughtful one.
This week, a National Forum on the African Continental Free Trade Area (AFCFTA) was held at the Harare International Conference Centre (HICC). Present were representatives from the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa and the African Union.
AFCFTA seeks to boost trade within the continent by reducing tariffs. Some regard it as a game changer for Africa while others dismiss it as one of those grand plans that fail to deliver. While this meeting was going on, the Corporate Council on Africa, a United States initiative to promote that country’s business ventures in Africa, was hosting a conference in Mozambique with President Mnangagwa and several Ministers in attendance.
A day before these events, Bloomberg had published a short article titled “Regional trade ties hold key to Africa’s economic growth”. Nothing much really in that title because the African Union agenda is all about pursuing a union through five regional blocs one of which is SADC.
The article itself however was and is intriguing right from the first sentence: “Africa doesn’t need to follow the Asian development model focused on exporting manufactured goods to richer country – it could become significantly better-off simply by producing more of what it consumes at home” and boosting intra-Africa trade.
Boosting intra-Africa trade was what the meeting at the HICC was about. Indeed, the more we are able to feed ourselves the better. But there is need to rein-in this kind of conversation because at its very extreme it advocates a ring-fenced and autarkic Africa. That is disconcerting.
We learn from economic history that the degree to which a country is globally integrated determines how well it does in all metrics of human progress.
We learn that nations that reached out to others be it by force, persuasion or a combination of both prosper. We know too that at the height of Great Zimbabwe’s prosperity, Henrique the Navigator of Portugal so far away encouraged numerous expeditions to unknown lands with some of his subjects said to have interfaced with the residents of the ancient city.
It was in 1488 that Bartolomeu Dias reached Cape Town. A decade later, Vasco da Gama sailed from Mozambique to India. In the Americas, the Spaniards were not as persuasive as the more scientific Portuguese.
Francisco Pizarro for instance ruthlessly subdued the Incan Empire in 1532 and looted tonnes of silver and gold back to Europe.
But it was not all about looting and trade in goods — ideas were exchanged, languages leant, ways of treating diseases improved and lots more. The Charter of the Royal Society formed in 1660 for instance implored “mutual intelligence and knowledge with all and all manner of strangers and foreigners, whether private or collegiate, corporate or politic, without any molestation, interruption or disturbance whatsoever”.
What is the point of all these rumblings about things long past? It is that societies that network with others are more likely to prosper than societies overly focused on their domestic intricacies. In as much as Africa’s drive to boost internal trade is noble, exports to the rest of the world are essential — international trade is how better technologies and ideas are harnessed. Although Africa is a sum of many countries, the countries are similar in produce and needs.
This limits the magnitude of trade. Thus, the importance of trade with the northern hemisphere should not be understated: that is what prospered most of Asia. Africa must be alert to this fact and not be swayed by narratives that have semblance of empirical validity. A discussion on Compact with Africa (CwA) expounds on this statement.
The CwA was initiated by Chancellor Merkel when Germany held G20 presidency. It seeks to facilitate flow of investments to Africa by nurturing good governance and robust institutions.
In July 2017 as the G20 Summit was drawing to an end in Germany, Professors Robert Kappel and Helmut Reisen lamented how other issues overshadowed a discussion on Compact with Africa. “It seems” the Professors wrote, “this club of club of rich nations is still only marginally concerned that African countries are underdeveloped and not part of the global economy”. They went on to observe that the continent was barely involved in shaping the agreement” and that the agreement seemed to be an incarnation of the “generally detrimental programmes of the 1990s”.
Understandably, counter argument some countries may have is that they have numerous bilateral agreements that speak to the goal of CwA. The US for instance could say they have the African Growth and Opportunity Act which facilitates access to the US markets by eligible African countries.
The challenge that African leaders of our time have is in ensuring that is Africa relevant in the global discourse outside poverty and migration issues and on this, the African diaspora has a critical role to play it being already globally integrated. At present, the narrative on the diaspora is how remittances have surpassed other capital flows such as aid.
That is minor issue given Africa’s growth needs. It is the extent to which African leaders engage and lure skills in the diaspora that could propel the continent to prosperity. It is happening slowly in West Africa. In SADC, fingers can only point to Zimbabwe to take charge of this given the country’s highly-skilled population abroad.
◆ Alfred Mthimukulu is a Senior Lecturer, Graduate School of Business, NUST, Email: [email protected], Twitter: @mthimz
