The Future of Africa in the Post-COVID-19 World

Abstract

Off the hundreds of pages of this book are key messages from fourteen authors whose revised contributions were accepted for publication after blind peer reviews. The authors represent various universities, research institutes, industries and independent voices from Eastern Africa, Southern Africa, and North America. The chapters are grouped under six matching thematic areas. The themes range from critical lessons at the interface of science and policy that COVID-19 presents African leaders, addressing agri-food systems and climate change, geopolitics and geoeconomics, to the urgency of a new economic order for Africa. The opening section covers disaster-governance lessons from multiscale COVID-19 models. The editor shares key lessons on disaster governance from the COVID-19 experience in the first chapter. The lessons accrued from a year-long study and modelling of COVID-19 trends at scale across thirty-two representative countries, from Africa (16) and the rest of the world (16). These models have been shared at scientific forums and in the public media including Citizen TV, the key emphasis being on ensuring data integrity and efficient testing, tracing, timing, trust building, transparency, training, and transdisciplinary research to effectively contain the pandemic. The chapter advances scientific thinking to give context to the book, challenging African leaders to the new thinking required for improved governance in a post-pandemic world. The author positions human capital and technological development at the core of the systemic change essential to achieving a healthy science-policy interface to propel African countries to higher ranks of global competitiveness. The second section covers post-pandemic agenda for education, skills development and youth. The opening chapter has a compelling message on talent management, borderless engagement of Africa’s highly skilled diaspora in skills transfer, and targeted skilling of the African youth to enhance employability and solve the growing unemployment problem on a continent with a youth bulge. The chapter draws on the diverse cross-country and cross-sector experience gained while mentoring and interacting with African youth on education and skills development, climaxing in a youth-centric education and mentorship project conceived in 2018 under GraFA’s EMPOWER Good Governance and Social Entrepreneurship Programme for doctoral students at Freiberg University of Mining and Technology, Germany. The need to train African youth in ways that can equip them with adaptive resilience for career security as digital transformation and constraints of the pandemic threatened world reshape the labour market stands out. A mind transformation map to promote impactful and sustainable youth-centric innovation ecosystems is shared as well. In the third chapter, Elizabeth Obura draws on a Kenyan example to call the attention of education administrators and other education stakeholders to a transition from “spatial classrooms” to “borderless classrooms” as a post-pandemic coping strategy. She refers to the Diffusion of Innovations Theory to argue for The Future of Africa in the Post-COVID-19 World xiiian informed transition process, rolled out through stages aimed at ensuring an inclusive online learning experience across Africa. The third section addresses geopolitics and geoeconomics. Theo Neethling explores the post-pandemic future of an Africa highly indebted to China due to the more attractive Chinese loans (compared to Western lenders). The loans are used to finance capital-intensive (infrastructure) projects. He notes that China is an emerging world superpower and Africa’s largest bilateral creditor. Sitati Wasilwa then examines the possible trajectory that the Sino-African relations may assume in the post-COVID-19 era. He presents a mutual basis of engagement as the better option for Africa, hence the compelling need for the continent to enhance its bargaining power by implementing new integrated initiatives, such as the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). Not to be overlooked under this thematic area is the governance of traditional knowledge systems as embedded in various cultural traditions of regions and local communities. Ethan Mudavanhu explores why traditional knowledge communities have not gained a competitive edge across international markets. He argues that indigenous-knowledge-centred licenses should demonstrate adequate suppleness so that, in a post-COVID-19 Africa, intellectual property standpoints of traditional communities can be effectively assimilated into a more commonly accepted legal charter. The fourth section throws the spotlight on multilateralism, a topic of growing interest especially due to the political philosophy of Trumpism and how it played out in the USA during the pandemic in 2020. Paul O. Odhiambo and Nashon J. Adero together assess the success of Africa’s multilateral and multi-pronged approach to containing COVID-19. The multilateral approach promises the collective bargaining power needed for debt relief arrangements and empowering the continent’s post-pandemic economic recovery. Investment in enabling governance and technologies for collaborative engagements driven by knowledge, quality research, and data is a critical outlook for a thriving Africa in the post-pandemic recovery period, given the foreseeable uncertainties in foreign direct investments (FDI) if the pandemic persists. The subsequent chapter under multilateralism is authored by Cynthia Chigwenya. She shares a different perspective that decries the fragmented approach to COVID-19 witnessed in Africa despite the emergence of multilateral organisations during the pandemic. She cites Tanzania and Madagascar as examples of non-conventional country responses to COVID-19. She further cites pre-existing trade wars between the USA and China among the factors that have worked against multilateralism. Food security, environmental sustainability and natural resources is the theme of the penultimate section of the book. Maurice Juma Ogada, Christine A. Onyango, and Nashon Juma Adero examine post-COVID-19 strategies for revamping agriculture and food systems in sub-Saharan Africa. They observe that the restrictions prompted by COVID-19 would adversely affect agricultural production and trade due to reduced availability of inputs, farm labour and markets. Compromised food xiv The Future of Africa in the Post-COVID-19 Worldsafety standards would also accompany the dwindling demand for food items due to reduced income. The raft of measures they recommend are: enhancing public health surveillance to ensure compliance with public health and food safety protocols; entrenching freer cross-border trade in food staples to enhance transfer from countries of surplus to countries of deficit for the benefit of both producers and consumers; providing economic stimulus to the agriculture sector to facilitate quick recovery; and implementing e-commerce among the smallholders. Ultimately, the post-pandemic future of agriculture and food systems in sub-Saharan Africa owes much to interventions in policy and technology, a fact they have emphasised while calling upon African governments to support agricultural transformation and broad-based food security through joint initiatives, such as the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). Climate change has been with us before COVID-19. It remains a major threat to humanity and all other forms of life on the planet. Omondi R. Owino and Nashon J. Adero together discuss climate change in the next chapter as a wicked problem, which exhibits non-linearity, interconnectedness, and complexity. They hence call for a systems approach, with dedicated research and development (R&D), and further critique the efficiency of R&D spending, a critical factor in enhancing research outputs to address climate change and similar complex problems in Africa. The authors state that the observed reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by about 17% by early April 2020, mainly due to the global travel restrictions imposed after COVID-19, is not sustainable without giving climate change the urgency of resolve and gravitas comparable to the response COVID-19 has elicited globally. They assert that climate change remains a key long-term threat to humanity and the planet, hence deserving unwavering attention in Africa’s post-pandemic sustainability agenda. To reinforce their arguments, the authors introduce expanded pillars of sustainability, 7Ps instead of the traditional 3Ps. Tightly woven into the same fabric of environmental sustainability is forest conservation, forests being critical carbon sinks and climate regulators. Charles A. Khamala delves into what he terms “crimes against forestry” using the example of the Mau Forest ecosystem in Kenya. Referring to anthropocentrism and ecocentrism, he discusses the nagging case of the victims of forest destruction and forcible displacement in light of the law, stated as at February 2021. The pandemic, he avows, has worsened the consequences facing the displaced communities and made more urgent the need to address the intertwined environmental and human-rights problems in the Mau ecosystem. The final section presents free thoughts and informed opinions on COVID-19. Mary Njeri Kinyanjui starts off this section with an incisive piece on why Africa must strive for a new economic order. The COVID-19 pandemic gives Africa an opportunity to rethink its approaches to poverty and development models. She maintains that Africa must rethink its subscription to a skewed global economic order and financial prudence. The flow of thoughts on the urgency of rethinking and reinventing Africa’s approach to solving her own problems proceeds to the next The Future of Africa in the Post-COVID-19 World xvchapter by Sebastiano Rwengabo. He interrogates, at length, the topic of rethinking African security strategy amidst recurrent pandemics. He expounds on complex public health emergencies (CPHE) in the form of recent pandemics such as Ebola, Marburg, and COVID-19, which have exposed Africa’s soft underbelly. He argues that pandemics have acquired the destructive potentiality of conventional security threats and ought to be given as much policy and technical preparedness and attention as conventional security threats. He proposes a deliberate repositioning of Africa’s security calculus to offer solutions to a continent more threatened by pandemics than conventional security threats. In suppliment to Rwengabo’s notion of rethinking Africa’s strategic threats, Charles Mwewa shares a firm message: the post-Covid-19 Africa should be a revolutionary Africa, an Africa ready to harness people’s talents, at home and abroad, to build an Africa ready to fight for its dominant place in the community of nations. His summative message is captured under the title: The Re-Engaged Africa: Ushering in an Equal, Dependence-Free and Economically Self-Sufficient Africa. The respective chapters carry the authors’ contacts and profiles. Welcome to engage the chapters and authors for accelerated delivery on Africa’s development agenda, including Agenda 2063, as we usher in the post-COVID-19 era