The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), does not often feature in the chatter of Africa’s neoliberal policymakers. Outside policymakers, it can also be said that APEC is not mentioned much by many neoliberal scholars in Africa – if there can be such a thing as a neoliberal scholar anywhere.
So, it cannot be too much of a surprise that the ongoing APEC summit in Lima, Peru, has hardly registered a blip on the radar of many of Africa’s media houses. For many in the African elite, INTERNATIONAL NEWS, still means reporting on the Metropole – those that were in place in the West, soon after WWII. Peru remains a land of mystery, God is still European, it would seem.
But the world has changed a lot, since 1945. APEC brings together both small countries( with developing economies), and major world powers. Together, they account for a gross domestic product (GDP) of over $63 trillion. These countries represent 40 percent of the world’s population today.
When under-developed economies find themselves placed in such communities, the capacity to leverage membership for the strategic benefit of their people quickly reduces to the quality of those they place in leadership to think for their countries. Intellectually lazy elites and outright buffoons, masquerading as leaders, will get lost in such gatherings and return home to complain about being exploited – because they do not allow their thinkers to play prominent roles. That is deleterious to their countries’ development, a devastating cost that harms many in the end.
Thinkers, true thinkers that is, cannot be controlled and domesticated by political actors, even powerful political actors. Give them a chance to speak, and they tend to say things that disturb the sleep and consciences of the powerful, for true thinkers, are progressive and courageous in standing up for the truth.
So they get shunted aside, and the Santa Claus democracy returns to worship mediocrity, as always. Supine and sycophantic buffoonery becomes the badge of membership of the leadership circus at play, in no time. All the people suffer as a result.
FROM TALK TO ACTION – DEALING WITH THE GUGGISBERG ECONOMY
ASEAN countries and Latin America are conspicuously absent from the recorded trade (import and export) figures of many African countries. Yet, ASEAN alone has a population equal to all of Europe put together, and its economies are growing much faster.
The fact that ASEAN does not feature much as a missing opportunity in the crosshairs of strategic development choices for many of us in Africa, is simply the result of a distorted development calculus. A calculus that still holds that the center of the world must be in the West, the Metropole. An example, quite representative of much of neoliberal Africa, is well demonstrated in the trade resilience report released in 2023 by the Ghana Statistical Services (a government agency).
We have talked ourselves hoarse about the need for intra-African trade, Ghana Beyond Aid, South-South cooperation, and so on. But in terms of recorded exports, Europe is still our favourite destination. Our economies remain at the throbbing, fragmented, atomised and marginalised periphery of global economic construction, fashioned to service the Metropole. This is what President Akufo-Addo once called “The Guggisberg Economy.”
Having correctly identified what ailed us in his rhetoric, one can be excused for expecting that serious and coordinated interventions, beyond the rhetoric, would follow. But Akufo-Addo then ominously handed the management of Ghana’s economy to a vintage neoliberal, one not particularly interested in structural change or Pan African approaches.
Gimmicks and tinkering with financial instruments became the order of the day, not structural reforms; and here we are today. In an era before now, Milton Friedman had described inflation (I suppose and impliedly exchange rates), everywhere, to be monetary phenomena.
We seemed to believe him, even though the evidence was patently to the contrary. So, we look to Central Bankers and Finance Ministers, exclusively, when we want to develop economies, how can that work? Development is too important a matter to be left to Finance people, bankers, and economists alone, however seminal their role is thought to be. They have a role, but not all the roles.
Who is going to tackle the key challenges strategically necessary land reforms bring? How will agriculture, in a peasant economy, be moved forward from subsistence level to benefit the mass of our people in job creation and food supply? What are the infrastructural and industrial architecture options, as well as the education requirements and mindsets we require? What must be done to stop large-scale ecological damage? How can we build long-term, people-centered, broad-based, participatory democracies, as opposed to this Santa Claus mimicry that we are saddled with; the de facto elite capture?
This will never be at the top of the agenda of neoliberal finance people focused on the short-term. They prefer to look for magical solutions – arguing a common currency by itself will take away our woes. Or that by some great miracle, we can expect to receive a major injection of cash from the faltering and teetering Western economies in Europe, as reparations or loans or grants for past transgressions and future concerns; then those will fund our infrastructure development.
Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, in a different context, once uttered that the imperialists and the colonialists should not be blamed for the limitations of mankind, because they were not gods. We seem to think that that great ancestor of ours was wrong, we stopped thinking and surrendered our brains to donor deities.
BRI IN PROFILE – A SNAPSHOT
Riding such illusory waves, we talk development but do very little development, deepening misery, and missing real opportunities for the transformation of our lot. In an informal conversation that involved a senior African political actor months ago, I mentioned that there were many worries emerging about some of the projects funded by Xi Jinping’s “Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)” in Africa.
The promised transformative impacts, by African policymakers, in several project business cases, were not being delivered in real-life implementation, and the Chinese were watching and learning fast. There would definitely be impacts on future flows of funds. I was dismissed in a huff as an alarmist peddling tales.
Time has shown what I was warning about were not tales of a drunken village idiot. The proverbial chickens are coming home to roost in loan repayment defaults, panic has set in on both shores. Thankfully, only for some. We must take the lessons urgently.
Elsewhere in the world, and even in some parts of Africa, BRI has been transformational for many societies. With benefits reaching the people themselves, not just cornered by greedy neoliberal politicians in high office. Many African politicians have once again, in this regard, placed themselves, almost expectedly and characteristically, ahead of their people.
By pursuing prestige projects that gave mouthwatering procurement opportunities to their insatiable lackeys, but very little for the people – in the long term. We are on a short leash, for an important source of funds can dry up soon.
LONG-TERM THINKING, DEEP INTEGRITY, CREATIVITY, AND HARD WORK, DEVELOP A NATION – THE CHANCAY MEGAPORT PROJECT
Long-term thinking, deep integrity, creativity, and hard work, develop a nation, not just natural resources. We must manage and lead our development efforts to liberate the productive forces, then the value can be unlocked to improve the livelihoods of the masses. That is the only way governments can hope to earn long-term legitimacy among their people, by improving livelihoods, so the masses live in dignity too.
An example of such transformative projects is the mega port that will link Chancay (a small city located 78 kilometers north of Lima) in Peru, to Shanghai in China. It has just been announced and commissioned by the presidents of both countries; Xi Jinping and Madam Dina Boluarte.
Trade between the two countries stands at $37 billion currently. This project seeks to explode it, so much so, that the revenues from the new mega port alone will come to represent 2 percent of Peru’s GDP. To put this in perspective, there is not a single private-sector company in Ghana today – local or foreign – that represents 2 percent of GDP in turnover. Most public-sector companies come nowhere close as well.
It is very easy to see the logic and benefit of the project. It will make Peru the strategically most important transport link between Asia and Latin America (that includes the Caribbeans). When completed next year, it will lob off a whopping seventeen days from shipping lead times, compared to today’s status quo.
You do not need a PhD in supply chain management to understand the benefits of that; costs are taken out, then, strong and competent governments ensure that their people – not insatiable greedy politicians – benefit from more affordable prices of goods.
Additionally, agricultural product exports (from Peru) are given a major boost because seventeen days off, translates into decreased perishability in transit, and fresher produce at the point of consumption. The benefits to ordinary farmers and industry are huge. So are the nutritional advantages to ordinary people.
As though this is not enough, given this is a high-tech mega port, Peru will benefit from major digital technological transfer from China, which is today – in most cases – the world leader in this area. And all of these create job for growth. The increased connectivity has multiplier advantages across Latin America, and many parts of Asia. This is what transformation looks like. Hardly since Kwame Nkrumah, in Ghana, have we seen such bold and beneficial initiatives.
Pan-Asianism is doing stuff, Pan-Africanism is talking. Indonesia and China are being linked by high-speed rail, it is still a nightmare to travel across Africa, so people-to-people connection is hampered. And yet Pan-Africanism is not about states interacting, it has to be about the people.
THINKERS MUST RUN A COUNTRY
It takes thinkers to run a country. At the time we wake up to this, major opportunities that Africa should be well placed to exploit will be lost to us. The gods are not to blame – said the venerable playwright, Professor Ola Rotimi. He was right. It is intriguing to me to see the role historians and other scholars from the humanities, not just investment bankers (I am not saying the latter are devils!), played in developing this Chancay mega port project.
Some estimates put the percentage of Peruvians that are of Chinese/Japanese ancestry at 10%. Xi Jinping’s letter to the Peruvian people (published today, 15th November 2024), reads like something written by an expert in history and cultural studies.
It got to the heart of ordinary people, by truthfully tracing the ties between the two peoples. In my country, Ghana, we no longer teach history to young people at school, we seem to think all they need to know are NPV(net present value) and IRR (internal rate of return).
We should not blame God, if we do not reach the future first and as co-winners. Choices have consequences, we have chosen the neoliberal road. It comes with consequences of doom.
