The other day, on my way to catch a flight out of town, I picked up a book with the provocative title “Can Africans Do Economics?” I was hesitant initially, suspecting it could be one of those authored by people still hungover from colonialism and who make it their mission to try to prove that Africans cannot govern themselves.
But then I saw the name of the publishing house, Inkani Books, which has released a number of titles over the past year dealing with questions of inequality, poverty and underdevelopment. A quick perusal of the contents list revealed a number of respected African intellectuals, many of them trained economists, to be authors of various chapters.
The choice of title, it soon became clear to me, was deliberate – provoking the would-be reader to think deeply about the real reason Africa has what Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s founding president and renowned pan-Africanist, called “the paradox of poverty in the midst of plenty, and scarcity in the midst of abundance”.
I have found the book to be a great antidote to the euphoria that has accompanied the build-up to the “first G20 Summit to take place on African soil”.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not trying to downplay the significance of this forum — a gathering of the world’s most industrialised economies plus the European Union and the African Union — meeting under the African sky for the first time since it was established in 1999.
It is clearly a significant development because, as the South African government has stressed over the past 11 months, it provides a platform “to centre African development priorities in global economic discussions”.
President Cyril Ramaphosa and his cabinet, supported by South African corporates and civil society, have used the past year of the country’s G20 presidency to push Africa’s economic agenda to the centre.
They have done this in spite of hostility from one of the G20’s most influential members, the US, whose president, Donald Trump, has decided to boycott the summit on the discredited claims that SA is committing “genocide” against Afrikaners and illegally confiscating white-owned farms.
If Trump hoped that by announcing he would not be coming, he would trigger other countries to either withdraw or send junior delegations to the summit, he will be disappointed: only his ideological fellow traveller, Argentina’s rabidly right-wing president Javier Milei, has decided to stay home.
The other notable absentees, China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, will miss the event for different reasons. Putin is sending a high-powered delegation because he can’t travel to SA due to an international arrest warrant, which the country is legally obliged to enforce.
Xi, who was last in SA for the Brics summit two years ago, is sending premier Li Qiang in his place in line with the Chinese practice of having the premier take most international trips.
Other heads of state seem determined to make the summit a success. This weekend the German embassy posted on X that chancellor Friedrich Merz will be at the summit.
“Re tlo thabela go etela bagwera [We will enjoy visiting friends],” posted an excited German ambassador to SA, Andreas Peschke.
Our measurement of the summit’s success should not be how many heads of state end up attending, but whether SA and Africa score any tangible victories that will lead to poverty reduction, job creation and general economic growth.
As political economist Grieve Chelwa reminds us in one of the chapters of the abovementioned book, our continent has lagged behind the rest of the world when it comes to poverty reduction in the past 35 years.
In 1990, about two-billion people globally were deemed to live below the international poverty line of US$1 a day. About half of them were in the East Asia and Pacific region — which includes China, Malaysia, Vietnam and South Korea. By 2020, that figure had dropped to 24-million people.
In sub-Saharan Africa, by contrast, the number of people living below the poverty line increased from 270 million in 1990 to 390 million by 2019 — meaning that Africa now accounts for 60% of the 648-million people living in poverty around the world.
If the upcoming G20 Summit is serious about putting Africa at the centre of its agenda, this is one of the issues that should dominate discussions.
But one is not too hopeful given that many of the countries at the summit have been complicit, through their colonial and post-colonial era policies, in condemning Africa to this state of affairs.
The G20 presidency moves to the US next year, and we cannot put it past the Trump administration to use the next 12 months to reverse the gains Africa would have made during SA’s tenure.
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