Will Africa Emerge?
Will Africa Emerge? –Socioeconomic development, Transformational Leadership and Strategic Foresight
Oluwaseun Mustapha-Temowo | 2015
Abstract
The emergence of Asia as a global economic and industrial power house has been one of the major success stories of the last century. Through effective planning and strategic positioning, member countries made the most of their resources to rise into global prominence. Leverage was optimized because leadership was blended with strategic foresight to effect transformational change. As a result, China is now the world’s biggest industrial hub, Singapore is in pursuit, India is a major global services center and tourism is now the heartbeat of Malaysia. The world saw the Asians coming… and they came. Can Africa follow and live up to its billing?
Among their many counterparts, Nigeria, Angola and South Africa have been touted as the knife edge of the emergence of the African continent. Lending credence to this hypothesis are abundant human and natural resources combined with investment opportunities for multinational companies facing dwindling opportunities and stiffer competition in the developed world. Still, the potential has been there for well over half a century and that is all it has been for most of the continent, South Africa being the only breakaway story of note. While Africa has been blessed abundantly with natural resources and environmental comforts, sound leadership has been in short supply for the most part.
Recently though, uprisings in Northern Africa and the deepening of democracy in Nigeria have shown promise that the people would hold leaders more responsible for their actions or inactions. Expectations then are that the corruption and lack of direction that have plagued the continent would start receding in the near future. Ingredients of social change are bound to start coming up afterwards. While this hope exists, a decent effort still has to be made in leadership to stir development. The frontier economies in the world are growing at such a pace that for developments in Africa to be considered significant, they must significantly outpace the norms of the present to at the minimum keep sync with the pace of the rest of the world. Strategic foresight and transformational leadership would play major roles in these endeavors. Primarily, in setting her development goals, Africa needs to aim, not for where the forefront of economic progress lies at the moment, but at the time in the future where she aims to hit her targets. Here is where elements of strategic foresight would play a role. Next comes the need for transformation to steer the continent in the desired direction. This appears the more difficult of the two processes given that the delay in the emergence of Africa as a global power till now has not been for want of plans or targets. Execution has proven the elusive ingredient. This raises new questions regarding the quality of the human resource with which Africa has to execute, as well as how ready the people are for the change they clamor so much.
The book “Will Africa Emerge? –Socioeconomic development, Transformational Leadership and Strategic Foresight” seeks among other things to answer these questions and provide a context for the emergence of African super nations.