2025 Obafemi Awolowo Memorial Webinar: True economic liberation means building African ownership over African wealth for all ―Kagoro

Brian Kagoro’s remarks at the Awo Leadership Webinar on March 6, 2025.

IN trying times, it is not despair but courage and resilience that define a people. President Thabo Mbeki once reminded us that gloom and despondency have never defeated adversity. And President Julius Nyerere echoed this when he said, “Unity will not make us rich, but it can make it difficult for Africa and African peoples to be disregarded and humiliated.” Nyerere was also clear: real development can only take place when people are involved.

These reflections are not nostalgic musings of post-independence African leaders. They are relevant now more than ever. Today, Africa is navigating a complex landscape shaped by compounding crises: climate change, economic instability, a ballooning debt burden, and persistent security threats. Yet amidst this turbulence, a quiet but profound shift is underway: Africa now has choices. No longer bound to the limitations of its colonial past, the continent is engaging with new global players, including China and India. Consider this: China’s lending to Africa rose from a modest $121 million in 2000 to over $30.4 billion by 2016, primarily financing infrastructure and production — a stark contrast to the conditional aid flows from traditional Western donors.

Equally, the digital revolution presents both opportunities and perils. Africa has the highest number of registered mobile money accounts in the world, with over 160 million unbanked adults owning mobile phones. This penetration has transformed access to financial services, driving inclusion from the grassroots up. But the question remains: can digital gains translate into meaningful structural change?

This becomes especially urgent when one considers intra-African trade, which stood at less than 20% of the continent’s total exports in 2019. The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) aspires to grow Africa into a $3.4 trillion economy, but that will require not just growth, but shared growth. As Professor Kingsley Moghalu emphasised that rising wealth can only result in development if it is shared and that participation and benefit from a growing economy by the average populace is important. So this is a question of inclusion. And, of course, the question on the table is how do you achieve inclusion? Yet Africa continues to replicate colonial development logics. The rural-urban divide, once a function of colonial administrative convenience, has ossified into a developmental orthodoxy. While rural areas contain the resources, agriculture, minerals, land that fuel Africa’s growth, they remain structurally neglected as people move towards the ‘colonial’ centres. The urbanization myth has become an inevitability narrative. But why do we accept a model that consistently sidelines the economic and social vitality of rural spaces?

Africa’s economies have always been rooted in collectivity. From cooperatives and mutual aid societies to rotating savings groups, the continent’s history of collective value creation is foundational. And yet, in contemporary discourse, these models are often treated as marginal or “non-modern.” Ironically, what the global financial system now celebrates as “crowdsourcing” or “crowdfunding” is merely a modernised rebranding of the same spirit of communal economic agency. The tragedy is that while Africa continues to innovate at the margins, it does so within frameworks that have not been decolonised—intellectually or structurally. This failure to reimagine economic development through indigenous logic systems means we risk reproducing the very extractive models that have historically underdeveloped the continent.

At the heart of Africa’s unrealised potential lies its demographic dividend. With a median age of just 19, Africa holds the world’s youngest population that is vibrant, creative, and full of ideas, but systematically locked out of political power, economic participation, and civic life. Without intentional and meaningful inclusion, any future economic growth will be hollow and edifice without foundation. And so, a fundamental question arises: what is a peasant without land? The creeping privatisation of rural land, unchecked deforestation, and pollution are not only ecological concerns they are existential threats to our economies, our health systems, and the accountability of governance itself. This moment calls for urgent, principled action, guided by four imperatives:

As Max Gomera of UNDP notes, Africa’s dependency on foreign aid is no longer a necessity it has become a political habit, an addiction that inhibits sovereignty. Economic security and stability can only be achieved by investing in people, reducing dependency, and building competitiveness. The pathway to prosperity must be driven by our own choices, not conditioned on donor preferences. Secondly, The current global financial architecture—anchored in the financialisation of global capital markets—entrenches structural inequality. Credit rating agencies, inflexible debt governance systems, and capital market exclusion continue to reinforce a global division of labour between the wealthy North and the resource-rich, cash-poor South. To dismantle this architecture, Africa must develop its own markets, build regional value chains, and pursue blended finance models that make affordable capital accessible to the communities that need it most.

Third, true economic liberation means building African ownership over African wealth—not just for a privileged elite, but for the broad majority. This requires a radical investment in knowledge systems, scientific capacity, and the kinds of education that translate into real, deployable skills in both the tangible and digital economies. We must transform education to equip Africans not for the past, but for the hyper-modern, digitised, financialised and increasingly militarised economy of the future. And lastly, we stand at the precipice of a historic technological revolution. Artificial intelligence, automation, and digital connectivity will reshape every sector from retail to agriculture, transport to education. But Africa must not be a passive consumer in this transition. It must define the ethical, economic, and governance frameworks that shape the future.

As Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler argue in The Future is Faster Than You Think, the speed and scale of digital transformation are remaking our very identities and social systems. Young people are being digitally migrated physically present but psychologically, economically, and socially embedded in global platforms. The real question is: how does Africa participate in shaping this new economic order? What is our agenda for digital sovereignty, data governance, and algorithmic equity? Further, Africa holds over 30% of the world’s mineral reserves—copper, cobalt, lithium, nickel, zinc, platinum, rare earths all critical to the renewable energy transition. Yet, the continent remains energy insecure. This is largely because ownership without beneficiation is not sovereignty. Because infrastructure without regional cooperation cannot unlock value. And because trade rules without collective standards simply reinforce exploitation.

If Africa is to leapfrog into a future of energy and economic security, it must rethink how its mineral wealth is negotiated, extracted, processed, and traded. The African Union must lead in setting collective standards: local content policies, environmental protections, value addition mandates, and unified negotiation strategies. Only through such strategic cooperation can the continent capture the full value of its critical minerals and position itself as a global leader in the green energy frontier.

Africa must decide: will it remain a site of extraction, marginalisation, and exclusion? Or will it reassert itself as an author of global futures defining not just its own path, but the very terms of global development? In addition, regional cooperation is also key to value addition. A single country cannot build all the skills, infrastructure, and capital required to capture global value. But as a bloc, African countries can pool resources, share expertise, and avoid the race to the bottom. We must also rethink investment rules, including pension fund regulations, which can either enable or inhibit our ability to build competitive domestic industries. So, the solution is to enter as a collective. And if one is thinking about local beneficiation, it essentially means we have to look at the education system and how our education system links to our wealth potential, the areas where we can make wealth. But we also have to look at our financial mechanisms and institutions.

The infrastructure gap still is still big but that if we close that by developing macro and micro-level infrastructure, it might increase the growth rates by almost 2% so that the annual infrastructure needs of between 130 billion and 170 billion identified by the Africa Development Bank could actually be closed in less than five years. And the financing gap, which sits at around 107 billion, could also be closed by just cooperation and better utilisation of our skills base, our resources. According to UNECA as of 2023, Africa was importing $100 billion worth of food and that those food imports could increase by 2025 to $110 billion. Our fertiliser imports are almost half a billion. And we could save on all this because the materials, the minerals required to make fertiliser are available in Africa is importing $100 billion worth of food annually. Yet it possesses the land, talent, and materials to feed itself. Agro-ecological methods, fertilizer production from local minerals, and digital innovation in farming could radically transform Africa’s food systems. The future of agriculture is high-tech, but it must also be rooted in local knowledge systems.

True development must begin with empowering people to be self-reliant and critical thinkers. It must eliminate inequalities and bring social services closer to the people. Rural infrastructure, local economies, and decentralised production must be prioritised alongside urban innovation. Security and peace are prerequisites. Too often, new mineral discoveries are followed by conflict. These are not tribal wars, they are resource wars, often driven by global interests. The narrative must shift from ethnicity to economics. But in essence, those who are behind war economies and despair economies function and thrive. Because we need to construct a unity that is economically literate, a unity that is also technologically literate, which essentially means that governance and institutional capacity needs to be thought of not purely as a way of increasing efficiencies, but as a way of dealing with, making our young people, making Africa a critical player.

Further, Africa’s digital sovereignty, if harnessed strategically, could redefine its global standing, not as a mere consumer of technology, but as a creator, innovator, and disruptor in AI development. Young people have been on the forefront of innovations like M-PESA, which propelled financial inclusion.  Ushahidi, which enabled them to monitor [and analyse information] and it’s been used by the rest of the world, by the way.So Africa must decide. Will we remain a passive participant in the context of global economic transformations, financialisation, digitalisation, and etc.? Will we assert our agency and define our own digital sovereignty? How do we want to avoid digital colonialism? Are we willing to adopt robust data sovereignty laws and forge strategic AI alliances across the continent to proactively shape global digital governance and of course reach out to our colleagues in Asia and elsewhere? And how do we deal with this question of dealing with what we see as a conflation of oligarchy, technology and repression of countries and not just individuals and movements?

In conclusion, Africa must be clear about its interests.  Africa needs to realise that no one who’s coming to Africa does so out of charity, that development will not come out of purely accepting the edicts of others, that Africa needs to look at its own resolutions in the African Union, in SADC, in ECOWAS, and ask itself the one resource it has, the people. Africa needs leaders who are not merely recipients of development theories but authors of new paradigms. Leaders who will look to the world, learn from others, and yet chart a path that is uniquely African.

• Brian Kagoro is the Managing Director of Programmes, Open Society Foundations

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