My Beauty Best Teacher

Della Bradshaw reports in the FT on Ian MacMillan who asserts that:

If philanthropists endow the seed funding for societal wealth enterprises, in many economies, particularly developing ones, it should be possible to attract local entrepreneurs who are quite happy to live with the smaller profit streams eschewed by their counterparts in wealthier economies..."A powerful appeal to philanthropists is that their contributions have a chance to remove problems ... and the associated recurrent 'annual tin cup' dependencies. Perhaps the idea behind the proverb -- give a man a fish and he soon goes hungry, teach him to fish and he eats forever -- represents a viable option in today's world.

MacMillan's methodology is simple. "You don't just go in with your cowboy boots and spurs," he says. Instead, he and his students from across the university develop ideas they think will combine the dual function of creating businesses while addressing social problems(pdf), then put the initial idea into practice with seed funding and appoint a local entrepreneur to run the business.

Commenting on western perceptions of Africa in the media and its celebritization ,Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie stated that:

What I find problematic is the suggestion that when, say, Madonna adopts an African child, she is saving Africa. It's not that simple. You have to do more than go there and adopt a child or show us pictures of children with flies in their eyes. That simplifies Africa. If you followed the media you'd think that everybody in Africa was starving to death, and that's not the case; so it's important to engage with the other Africa...She finds CNN's coverage of Africa "exhausting" because of its refusal to let Africans do the talking. "They go to the Congo, for example, line the Congolese people up in the background, and then have a Belgian, who they say is a Congo expert, tell us about the Congo. And I think, 'Well, how about you bring the Congolese forward so we know what life is really like?' Sometimes I think, 'Wouldn't it be wonderful if I could become the voice explaining America or England to the world.' It would never happen."

Rasna Warah writes (reg reqd) in the Nation:

THOSE OF US WHO HAVE worked for, or are working within, the development industry are familiar with the many poverty-reduction conferences, seminars and workshops that we have to attend as part of our work, or for what development professionals like to call “networking opportunities”...The “hottest” topics on the international development agenda these days is Africa...I mean the Africa that development professionals love to dwell on – the poverty-stricken, disease-ridden Africa that is being managed by kleptomaniacs and dictators...IN OTHER WORDS, THE AFRICA that is the raison d’etre of the international development industry, the one that makes Bono, Bob Geldof, Madonna and Angelina Jolie shed real tears...At almost all poverty-reduction seminars and conferences, the word “poverty” is used interchangeably with the word “Africa”. To some extent, this association is justified. Africa has the largest proportion of people living in extreme poverty (over 40 per cent), and 34 of the 50 poorest countries in the world are African...Countries that have managed to reduce poverty have done so through improving economic management, adding value to their products, increasing investment in infrastructure, specialising and investing in key profitable industries, making distribution of wealth and services more equitable, and ensuring that governance structures are accountable and sustainable.
Unfortunately, these issues are rarely discussed at poverty-reduction seminars and conferences.

In an interview with the African Banker, Tutu Agyare stated:

“The capital markets in Africa are beginning to open up and open up significantly. That has surprised many bankers. For example who would have forecast 12 months ago that, by this time this year, Nigeria’s markets would see $3bn worth of new issuances? Countries like Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, even Zimbabwe are all offering investment opportunities.
“Nigeria’s market has made average returns of over 30% this year and Zimbabwe’s returned over 100% this year even after adjusting for inflation, so there’s a lot of interest, a lot of investment. Yes, there is strife and there are problems in Africa; problems in Côte d’Ivoire, in DR Congo, in Guinea, in Sudan, in Eritrea, in Somalia, but the risk/potential balance is right in many countries.

Matthew Green at the FT reports on the Nigerian Capital Markets:

Some banking stocks have trebled in the past six months alone – the most spectacular sign of the shift in the country’s status from marginal emerging market play to star performer.
Driven by a combination of government reforms, debt relief and high oil prices at a time of heightened appetite for new types of risk, the gains have revealed a glimpse of untapped potential and looming hazards...A tougher line on money laundering and a newly-awarded BB- sovereign debt rating added to the allure at a time when global funds were turning to Africa as an antidote to dwindling returns in established pastures.
The sheer size of the country’s debt and equity markets has enticed hedge funds that worry about liquidity in smaller sub-Saharan countries, while strong domestic buying insulated Nigeria from a global sell-off in March

AltNigeria compiles a few lessons from India and China.Prefacing,"...We ought to learn that progress does not take a millennium to accomplish. Economic independence has to be wrestled from the powers that presently be, nothing will be handed to us on a platter..."

Roma Luciw reports:

According to Merrill Lynch chief investment strategist Richard Bernstein, Africa presents investors with both “tremendous potential” and “tremendous risk.” In the next decade, he believes it should above all provide them with opportunity.
“Traditionally Africa has not been a place where more risk-oriented emerging market investors would invest, but that is changing,” Mr. Bernstein said in a report. “Investors in search of higher returns have increased their risk tolerances and have begun to search for greater returns from so-called frontier markets.”
Africa's economic expansion has exceeded global growth and is expected to continue to do so in the coming years. The continent may be on the cusp of an “unprecedented stage of economic development,” one that will benefit 100 companies in more than 20 countries, he said.

WorldChanging reports on Afghanistan's National solidarity program:

Ashraf Ghani has worked to establish partnerships between communities, national and international NGOs, and government, most pointedly through the establishment of the National Solidarity Program, which promotes village-level, community-run development programs, and networks Afghanistan's many villages -- through community development councils -- with one another and with agencies and organizations that can grant them access to resources.

Raghuram Rajan and Arvind Subramanian former IMF economists state:

We find little evidence of a robust positive correlation between aid and growth...We find little evidence that aid works better in better policy or institutional environments, or that certain kinds of aid work better than others...Our findings suggest that for aid to be effective in the future, the aid apparatus will have to be rethought.

Jeffery Sachs contends that:

Proper risk management is critical to the farmers' well-being and their financial viability since it increases their creditworthiness and thus allows them to make investments in high-yield activities such as higher value-added farming (using fertilizer to plant their crops). Engaging in these activities greatly diminishes the likelihood that a farmer will fall into poverty.
Citing the success of other financial schemes like micro-finance in boosting the lives of destitute farmers, Sachs raises the concept of micro-insurance as an instrument to further the progress already made. Micro-insurance as he envisions it, unlike traditional crop insurance, would have the effect of improving the fortunes of both the farmers and the companies involved and carry little risk.

Nubian Cheetah writes?

As great as the BOP is, it a little flawed in that it does not really address the most important issue in development: how can the poor make a sustainable living in emerging markets?...how can we enable the poor to generate income and make it a sustainable revenue stream?

Kofi Anan delivering the fifth Nelson Mandela lecture stated:

Africans must guard against a pernicious, self-destructive form of racism - that unites citizens to rise up and expel tyrannical rulers who are white, but to excuse tyrannical rulers who are black...Leaders must ensure that the rules are respected, that they protect the rights and property of individual citizens. Leaders must also hold themselves to the same rules, the same restraints, never above them,

Craig Eisele of the Trans-Africa Development company unveils his proposal for tackling the core infrastructure needs of Power,Communications and Transportation:

A form of Governmental/Private development needs to be initiated. A Developmental Project that will NOT create any Debt to any Country. A project that will have a portion of it as private (but biblically traded components) as well as a potion of it under Governmental ownership and in control of the Highway Portion of the project.

Carol Adelman writes:

Remittances now exceed official aid from all donor countries to developing nations combined — they are a global social security system that works. Studies show they reduce poverty and boost health and literacy. Private banks, setting up accounts for immigrants in America to send money back home to families and villages, help poor people earn interest, and establish credit worthiness for loans. Remittances also play a crucial role in strengthening poor countries' balance of payments, which improves credit ratings, allowing them to tap into international financial markets on better terms.

The WSJ reports:

Aid agencies that recognize the effectiveness of indigenous medical practices are more likely to have success in dealing with disease in Africa than organizations that don’t...Western doctors sometimes assume that rural medical practices in sub-Saharan Africa are founded entirely on superstition says Curtis Abraham a writer based in East Africa.In fact, some facets of the traditional approaches to medicine dovetail nicely with Western approaches.

Adele Shevel writes

Among the foreign companies that are investing in Vietnam are some from the US. Memories of the war between the US and the Vietnamese — which define the world’s view of the country — are restricted to museums and tourist sites. There are no signs of the conflict in the cities, which seem to be expanding at a rate of knots. Nor is there animosity towards the Americans on the streets. The Vietnamese view seems to be that they want to make their country better and are willing to work with whoever is able and willing to help them... Among many of the youth there is open admiration for the US’s entrepreneurship and free market — even while they hold on to their own culture... In many ways, this environment seems a far cry from South Africa in particular and Africa in general, where the legacy of colonialism is still blamed for many of the economic and social ills with which many countries are battling.
Without undermining the need for corrective development programmes like black economic empowerment, perhaps South Africa could learn a valuable lesson from the speed with which the Vietnamese have moved beyond their past to concentrate on building their future.

Gregory Clark questions Jeffery Sach's Millenium Project:

The long history of living standards suggests that the Sachs plan is more likely to further impoverish Africa than enrich it. The promised health improvements and one-time gains in crop yields cannot create sustained improvement of living conditions.
Industrializing Africa is the only way to solve its poverty. The industrialization of coastal China — accompanied by declining public health provision, a neglect of agriculture, and environmental degradation — ultimately transformed the lives of the Chinese

Michelle Martin reports:

One of the main challenges facing the continent is the lack of research inside African universities, which have traditionally concentrated on education. Many governments also remain unconvinced of the importance of scientific innovation in creating economic growth.

Forty years ago, many Asian countries were in a similar situation...We have to look to places like Taiwan and India and forge a new model where African universities give birth to businesses, and businesses create their own universities.

Stock Market Nigeria reports on the guidelines for Nigeria Stock Exchange's 3rd Tier market for SME's:

The primary purpose for the setting up of the sub-sector is to encourage them to become quoted, have access to more capital and hence boost production activities in the country and beyond. Before now, the exchange consists only of the first-tier securities and the emerging market otherwise known as the second-tier securities market.

Alex Renton reports on the damaging effects of US food aid to Malawi.He quotes Charles Rethman who stated:

It's very short-sighted - it doesn't make any sense. It's going to short-circuit the effort to improve nutrition here, it undermines farmers, households. It's not sustainable and it won't bring about any long-term change to malnutrition rates,'

can and does often do more harm than good. The very promise of free food can cause disaster-hit populations to leave their homes and move to refugee camps. They may become dependent on it, making it harder for them to take up their lives again when the disaster or danger has passed. Farmers leave their fields, prices fall and local traders lose their businesses. Clearly, while food aid saves lives in a disaster, it can hamper the return to normality.
It has done more insidious damage, as detailed by some aid agencies. Food aid can permanently damage the economies of nations it was sent to help. Vast tonnages of rice donated by the USA and Japan to Indonesia after the country's economic collapse in 1997 caused damage to farmers and distributors that has never been repaired: having been one of the world's largest producers, Indonesia is now a net importer of rice.

TED Global Fellow and author of "Beasts of No Nation" Uzodinma Iweala writes:

It seems that these days, wracked by guilt at the humanitarian crisis it has created in the Middle East, the West has turned to Africa for redemption. Idealistic college students, celebrities such as Bob Geldof and politicians such as Tony Blair have all made bringing light to the dark continent their mission. They fly in for internships and fact-finding missions or to pick out children to adopt in much the same way my friends and I in New York take the subway to the pound to adopt stray dogs...This is the West's new image of itself: a sexy, politically active generation whose preferred means of spreading the word are magazine spreads with celebrities pictured in the foreground, forlorn Africans in the back.

Chippla writes:

Poverty and illiteracy are, to a large extent, responsible for the success of the New Wave of Christianity that one sees in several African countries. The poor are desperate to get out of their current situation and improve their social status. Thus, they cling onto any message that seems to offer some form of hope or succor. And this is where the church proprietors come in. By adopting a fatally flawed reductionist approach, these proprietors relate every single action to a Deity, or a devil, be it bareness, poverty, inability to pass examinations, ill health, smoking addiction.
In such an environment, people are unable to help themselves because they are made to believe that greater forces dictate the course of their lives. Such a situation inevitably leads to more people remaining in poverty because rather than being given necessary tools of empowerment (e.g. an education that frees the mind), their minds are left constrained—to the advantage of those who claim to be offering spiritual direction.

Chamberlain S. Peterside writes:

Based on a recent report published by Goldman Sachs (US based global investment bank), within the ranks of so-called BRIC Nations making remarkable strides are not only Brazil and Russia (in addition to India and China), but also a new group of highly populated, resource-rich countries numbering about 11; including Indonesia, Pakistan Vietnam, Philippine, Turkey, and Nigeria – yes Nigeria. Based on the analysis, these countries are well-positioned to assume commanding heights in the future global economy. The forecast indicated that Nigeria might become one of the twenty largest economies by 2025 if it gets its act together.
As empirical evidence in advanced countries suggest, there is a direct correlation between income level, home ownership, rule of law, access to capital/information, equal opportunity and economic prosperity. Nations can hardly attain developed status and high standard of living for the majority without these key attributes. As poor countries emerge from underdevelopment in a new global village it is instructive that they utilize every opportunity to strive for not just quantitative growth, but also qualitative transformation that is measurable in the living conditions of its people.

The aims of the Private Sector Foundation Uganda, are "...To promote private sector influence for business growth and competitiveness through policy advocacy and capacity building in a sustainable manner...To strengthen private sector capacity for effective policy advocacy and market competitiveness..."

"...African Writing is interested in the literary lives, literary work and thoughts of those who make writing happen in the African world, and in the organizations and circumstances which support or affect the processing, appreciation and study of their work...",Pambazuka.

Jen Brea reports a quote from a banker in Mozambique:

"In one board meeting for the bank we discussed the vision/mission of the bank. (The NGO side creeping into the bank.) One member of the board was the CD of a large American NGO which has been in Mozambique for years. Folks said 'alleviate poverty' or 'eliminate poverty' and such.
I suggested, 'what about making our clients wealthy?' The reaction was immediate - no. That was not what we do. It was very interesting.
In the end, we thankfully dissuaded them of using the poverty word so that we wouldn't have to tell our clients - in our own mission statement - that they were poor.
Interesting article."

Mutumwa D. Mawere asks:

Could it be that Kofi Annan, like many of us, was so scared of what he would do after his tenure at the UN that he forgot to use his powerful position to empower his fellow Africans? Could he not have found sanctuary in uniquely African-conceived, structured and financed ideas instead of becoming a spokesman for ideas that may well be his, but are financed by Gates and Rockefeller money?

Barney Jopson in the FT writes:

The continent's infrastructure, on the whole, is poor. In Kenya alone the roads are crumbling, the railway is a relic of the colonial era, the port is bunged up, and the electricity supply - where it exists at all - is erratic.
Internet access is little better because east Africa is the only region in the world not connected to the global broadband network. Web users can only connect to the US and Europe, where most of the world's internet sites are hosted, via satellite links that are costly, slow and unreliable.
Brian Herlihy, an executive running Seacom, one of five projects racing to build fibre optic cables down the coast, says: "People think investing and operating a business in Africa will be cheap because it's poor. The reality is it's very expensive because communication and energy costs are high and the infrastructure is bad."

John Mbaria writing in the The Nation asks a question that strikes at the heart of one the themes that resonated at the recently concluded TED Global.Which include: Where are our capital accumulation engines? How do we build our equivalent Tata's, Infosys's and BHP Billiton's? How can we not realize the critical importance of this and channel our energies accordingly? Instead we have vacuous summits discussing irrelevancies like a United States of Africa.

The million-dollar question is how different African countries will position their economies to benefit from not just oil royalties and taxes, but also in terms of attracting global capital to invest in industries and ventures that will create significant multiplier effects and lift millions from poverty and depravity...Africa is asleep in as far as creating modern business ventures from its resources is concerned. For instance, long before subsidiaries of multinationals came in to bottle and offer “designer” water in the market, springs and streams were regarded as a communal resource to be used by all. And until very recently, locals would merely go to the nearest forest to collect as much fuel wood as their backs could carry.
And although some communities used wildlife for protein while others had long traded in ivory, many in Kenya had not learnt to commercialize its “aesthetic” value. But as Africa sleeps, American, European and Asian companies have based “roaring” businesses on its resources. With a history of innovation, better resource exploitation technology and the ability to strike very lucrative deals with the local elite, such capital is moving fast and furious, and might eventually root out what remains of Africa’s social system of yester years.

When asked about the unwritten middle volume of the Things Fall Apart,No Longer at Ease trilogy, Chinua Achebe answered:

When I came to write it I found I didn't want to do it. This is the generation who accepted the missionaries. That seemed to me requiring some explanation. Why would anybody leave his father's belief and go for some foreign religion?..."The difference between what I had been told and what I saw was very powerful. The language the church people used - of 'idolisation' - was in itself an assault. And it hasn't changed. Missionaries today still believe they are going to save lost souls. And it is a great lie.

A University of Michigan paper examines the unique role of the Township and Village Enterprise in China and its applicability to other developing regions:

TVEs addressed obstacles that many small businesses face in developing countries including access to capital and new markets and protection from corruption. While the structure of TVEs contributed significantly to their success, the economic and social climate and factors such as high rates unemployment also encouraged the success of TVEs. TVEs provide valuable lessons for other developing countries but, the chances of the model being replicated in another country are not strong unless their economic and social environment is similar. There are however valuable lessons that other countries can apply from the TVE model. The most important lesson is that public-private partnerships work and provide a good model for protecting infant businesses and encouraging entrepreneurial spirit. A combination of these two outcomes will help an economy grow.

Chris Kilbridge in a letter to the FT writes:

It seems that, like mosquitoes seeking stagnant pools of water, recent MBA graduates who cannot find a real job are in exodus to seek employment refuge in that bloated sector, the NGO/non-profit/ not-for-profit sector...These MBAs seeking more meaning in a job (but at entry-level Wall Street salaries) are no Mother Teresa's when it comes to social responsibility. It seems Prof Horton's research shows that working in a not-for-profit job can be, well, quite profitable.

Aliko Dangote of Nigeria, extols entrepreneurship:

I believe in Nigeria. I believe there is always going to be Nigeria. My faith and belief in this country is unshakeable. We have to live together in peace and not in pieces. Why are we important in the world today? It is because of our population. Population and our oil. It is not because the world loves the name Nigeria. No. When was the last time you heard about Kuwait or Brunei? The importance of Nigeria is the market. The population is there. The money is there. It is just a matter of having good entrepreneurs who can push this thing forward…We are not a company that is owned by government. People are still doing business in troubled areas like Congo. In fact, Congo is one of the best countries to invest in. During the war in Liberia, people were still doing business. A friend of mine opened a flour mills six months ago in Cote D’Ivoire.

Nicky Oppenheimer outlines his TEN RULES for accelerating development in Africa,They include:

• First, beware of those bearing gifts: The business of aid has become just that, a business. From NGO's professing to speak for Africans to consultants bearing high-altitude plans which seldom survive contact with the ground, their interests are as much in themselves as their professed target, their constituents more often the fee-paying donors than the African recipients.
• Instead of seeing aid as a form of assistance, Africa needs to view and use it as an investment catalyst, steering much of it towards infrastructure. New ways should be sought and developed to use aid in partnership with the private sector, leveraging it to attract greater funds and in practical ways through reducing risk in infrastructure ventures.
• The need to ensure market access...This is not just about removing tariffs but non-tariff barriers too, including agriculture subsidies. Openness to the international economy is a sine qua non for growth.
• Outsiders must, fourth, develop a differentiated view of Africa. Today’s Africa should increasingly be viewed by those who want to do business there as a differentiated continent.It consists of 54 countries
  

Steve Sharra writes about the William Kamkwamba story:

Something is seriously wrong with a system in which somebody like William is unable to proceed with school because or lack of money for school fees...On the other hand, it is not possible to tell with definitiveness whether William’s talents and hard work would have come out with such a bang had he been able to continue in a conventional secondary school. School systems can be places where individuals can indeed blossom and take off, but they are also known all over the world as places which can force one’s intellect into a conventional box and stifle one’s creativity and genius. This is a conundrum which is not easy to resolve.

Jen Brea writes:

Governments are only effective and accountable to their people when they are forced to deliver. Introduce external sources for the services and security that a legitimate government is supposed to provide and you give bad or despotic regimes a permanent lifeline.

AfricanViewpoint reports that the targets of a French corruption inquiry have resorted to the predictable and pathetic 'racism' excuse:

Congo's president-Denis Sassou-Nguesso- has condemned a French investigation into alleged embezzlement by him and Gabon's leader-Omar Bongo Ondimba- as "racist" and "colonial". There are on-going investigations on claims that Nguesso's properties are ill-gotten wealth that must be seized and sold, with the proceeds being used to build schools and hospitals in Africa. Denis Sassou-Nguesso is said to have lamented the fact that only he and Gabon's leader were targeted even though, "In France, all the world's leaders have castles and so on."

Ethan Zuckerman writes:

Blogs and online communities are great channels for information and citizen media dissemination, events organization, and fundraising, but they are popular, more prevalent and accessible in the developed world. In the developing countries the Internet is less present, while the mobile technology covers unexpectedly great areas and counts much more users comparing to landlines or Internet use. Mobile communications are still expending in a fast pace: by 2010 it is estimated that 50% of the world population will become mobile users (3.3 billion people).

Shortly put, when talking about social activism goals and means, mobiles have the following advantages: pervasiveness and accessibility, anonymity, viral connectivity and message propagation, personal authorship of citizen media content.

Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart ask

What functions need to be performed by a state if it is to have internal legitimacy and external credibility?

We have proposed a framework of the 10 most critical functions the modern state must perform, which was endorsed by a group of leaders of post-conflict transitions last year. The functions include maintenance of a monopoly on the legitimate means of violence, the nurturing of human capital, and creation and regulation of the market. We have also proposed that state-building or sovereignty strategies be devised to meet the goal of having the state perform each of the 10 functions -- strategies backed by compacts between the leadership of countries and the international community on the one side and citizens on the other to create capable states that deliver value to their citizens. And instead of thousands of reports, there should be a single global report on state effectiveness, compiled with the involvement of global and local civil societies and issued by a credible international organization.

Jennifer Brea writes:

Many of Africa's best and brightest become bureaucrats or NGO workers when they should be scientists or entrepreneurs...We let a well-intentioned Irish rock star, a Jewish-American economist, and their Hollywood cohort become the voice and face of Africa

Mutumwa Mawere recently addressed the Nigerian diaspora he stated:

...There are countless examples of African entrepreneurs and professionals who have substantial amounts of money in Africa but it is evident that the prosperity has not been democratized to the extent of creating an African ownership class able to take the continent’s majority into a new and dynamically positive direction underpinned by new values of work, combined with saving, investment and an ownership mentality. It is also important to underscore that there is a distinction between being “rich” and being “wealthy”.
Yes, some Africans have made money but because financial literacy and “platinum rights” was not stressed as much as a sense of public justice and civil rights were by our founding fathers and we did not keep it (the money) and we certainly we did not grow it.
Many have made money but no one has really taught us how to keep it in our communities.
Imagine, after 13 years of South Africa’s democratic dispensation, we still do not have a new mutual for blacks? No one taught us about financial literacy and the basic tenets of a free enterprise system that appears universally to capture the imagination of many progressive and successful nations.
The challenge of understanding the free-enterprise system and making it work for the majority of Africans has to become a core part of any conversation among Africans concerned about wealth creation and creating sustainable wealth addresses for Africans. Most of our wealth addresses are not assignable and transferable let alone from one African generation to the next.
Any successful nation building enterprise must necessarily be sustained by a healthy, robust and growing tax base and not foreign aid. Africa’s post colonial budgets still remain principally funded by bilateral and multilateral sources of finance.
Africa must create its own dominant class of very successful entrepreneurs, at all levels. We should have our own wealth builders and not become a continent specialized in distributing other people’s wealth.
As we approach the 47th birthday of Nigeria, we must focus on converting ourselves from cash economy customers into banking (our own banks), tenants into homeowners, small business dreamers into small, medium and large scale business owners, minimum wage workers into living wage workers, economically illiterate into economically empowered citizens.
Many of us are consumed with directionless conversations that are primarily focused on what governments can do for us and not what we can go for ourselves. We tend to be good at being against something and not for something.
Literacy can be a sustainable instrument for poverty eradication. They often say that when you know better, you tend to do better.
Any when Africans know better, I have no doubt that we can transform ourselves from islands of affluence to oceans of hope and prosperity. We have not invested much in literacy and integrated the literacy challenge in our post colonial agendas.

Any nation is as good as the interests that inform it. The only power we have as Africans in any field on endeavor whether it is in politics or the wealth game is the power to organize ourselves. One hand cannot clap but two hands can surely make a noise.
Why then is it the case that we have not been able to use our collective spent to our advantage? Many of our African governments have benefited from the financial illiteracy of Africa’s intellectuals. Africa has invested in human capital and yet such investment has not been able to provide any leadership on the bread and butter issues.
Surely, it is evident to all of us that any consolidation of our pain and opportunities can create a critical mass that is missing in action. Imagine if all Nigerians resident in South Africa could consolidate their mobile phone expenses into one pool, how much impact would they have in the South African economy.
Equally, if all Zimbabweans resident in South Africa chose to use one bank, how much would that bank be worth? Even the obvious things that Africa needs to do are not so obvious to our leaders.
I think it is self evident that the poor need the rich in as much as the rich need the poor. Can you imagine a nation of only poor people with the same means and possibilities? On the key ideological questions, we have heard many people argue that a free enterprise system is not suited for Africa and many of our governments in Africa have perfected the skill of creating ideological and theoretical entrepreneurs/bureaucrats without asking the question whether in fact if all the rich people were eliminated, Africa would be any better.
The post colonial experience has confused many of us to the extent that we are now looking for intelligent leaders to govern us when leadership may have little to do with intelligence. Even in a family, it would not be normal for all the children to be the same. Those who do well in one generation inspire the next generation to do better.

Is Africa’s future safe with a system where the state thinks for its citizens or where the citizens think for themselves and act in their own self interest? Many believe that governments (created by the same citizens) can and should be expected to lead the anti-poverty crusade and yet human history has not given us any good examples of governments acting in the interests of citizens who are not in government.

We must take ownership of our destinies and we must be the change that we want to see in the continent. No one else is going to do it for us. We must sell ourselves as worthy of investment and we must change our attitudes because in the final analysis, our attitude to wealth determines our altitude.

Anyone can make money in a growing economy than can be stolen in a decaying and dysfunctional system. If we look at Africa’s unmet needs, then we can appreciate the possibilities that exist in the continent and yet we think and act in a fragmented and confused manner. Those who should ordinarily lead appear to be visionless preferring to focus on yesterday (which is gone) and not on actions that create a better Africa.
Before we can think of creating an African pool of wealth, we need to understand the meaning of wealth. Wealth has come to mean an abundance of items of economic vale or the state of controlling or possessing such items and encompasses money, real estate and any personal property.
In many countries wealth is also measured by reference to access to essential services such as health care or the possession of crops or livestock. Accordingly, an individual who has accumulated wealth relative to others is often described as wealthy.
Therefore, wealth refers to some accumulation of resources. In light of the above, Africa is not recognized as a wealthy continent because of the inferior relationship between the majority of us and items of economic value. We are generally challenged in the resource accumulation enterprise...

Vernon Wessels at Bloomberg reported that:

Investment bankers who until now had flown into Lagos to do deals then retreated to homes in New York or London are now opening offices in the country as record oil revenue, asset sales and a crackdown on corruption spur economic growth. Nigeria may overtake South Africa as the region's largest economy by 2020.

Robert Barro question's the aims and methodologies of the Gates Foundation:

The key question for poverty alleviation is how to get Africa to grow like China and India. An important clue is that the triumphs in China and India derive mainly from improvements in governance, notably in the opening up to markets and capitalism. Similarly, the African tragedy derives primarily from government failure. Another clue is that foreign aid had nothing to do with the successes and did not prevent the African tragedy.
One reason for this is that foreign aid is typically run through governments and, thereby, tends to promote public sectors that are large, corrupt and unresponsive to market forces. Perhaps the Gates Foundation will run more efficient aid programs than we've seen in the past, but I wonder...

George Soros's answer to the question "Sir, how does one become a philanthropist?" bears repeating."Get Rich First",he answered. Creating the wealth, then disbursing it, not the other way round is something that we on the continent need to understand.
via Zoo Station