RENOWNED African scholar His Excellency Professor Ambassador Tal Edgars has challenged the governments on the continent to do away with borders in the interest of advancing the continent’s economic growth in the world.
Edgars was speaking during the first lecture of the Africa Intellectual Scholar series hosted this week by Unisa Principal and Vice-chancellor Professor Puleng Lenkabula. The topic was “The new frontier – Africa: where do we stand?”
According to him, the talk about the rise of Africa’s economy has been going on since the 1980s without tangible actions.
“We speak of privatisation. Russia and Europe have finished and they did that well over 30 years ago. We take a lot of time to do things,” he said.
Edgars said the continent has the capacity and capital to advance its economic agenda.
“I am not persuaded that Africa doesn’t have the capital to develop. If we have the political will we can do that as of tomorrow, and bring down all the barriers to movement of people in Africa. It does not require an act of Parliament; it is purely an administrative process,” he said.
Edgars expressed optimism that the next century may belong to Africa as its position on the global stage continued to grow.
He gave projections that Africa would soon be one of the most urbanised regions in the world, saying it was expected to have as many cities with more than one million inhabitants as North America.
By 2050, 10 of the 50 big cities will be in Africa,” he said.
The continent, he said, has an opportunity to double its manufacturing output by a trillion US dollars by 2025.
Edgars, however, conceded that Africa was still lagging behind when it came to internet connectivity and mobile phone penetration, which “represents critical ingredients in the context of a thriving tech market”.
He said that as things stood, “some 22% of Africans have internet access, far below the 80% of Europeans and 68% of Russians”.
In 2005, just 2% of Africa could access the internet and at the same time Europe already had 68% of its population with access to the internet.
He said Africa’s much-anticipated population growth by 2050 hinted at the potential for serious influence in the world.
“Africa’s growth will mean it is a young continent. It also means it will supply at its proportionate percentage of world working-age people with roughly half of the 2 billion expected to be young people,” Edgars said.
According to him, at the time when many advanced economies were seeing population growth stagnant, “organisations in need of employees will find a larger pool available in Africa”.
He emphasised that young Africans would need to have the skills and training necessary to meet the labour demand of the future.
“As Africa grows in urbanising, the spending power is expected to increase and in particular the continent will see a rising middle class, expected to reach 580 million by 2030 with an upper class of 116 million,” Edgars said.
PRETORIA NEWS