Harnessing benefits of the new scramble for Africa

By KIRAITU MURUNGI

Africa has increasingly become the new frontier in the competition for supremacy by various powerhouses in the new multi-polar world order that has emerged since the dawn of the new millennium.

At the centre of the “new scramble for Africa” is the continent’s fabulous wealth of numerous mineral resources, now indispensable in hi-tech and energy industries at the heart of the world economic order.

These include the continent’s fertile agricultural lands — a source of food and non-fossil energy — and energy and natural sources required by the economies of the powerhouses. Africa’s wealth of fossil energy (oil, coal and gas), a range of green energy sources (geothermal, wind, hydro-power and nuclear-rich minerals resources are rapidly transforming the status of the continent into the “energy source of the future”.

Clearly, the “new scramble of  Africa’s energy and natural resources” has attracted both powerhouses in the old world order like America and key EU member states and new powerhouses like Brazil, Russia, India, China and even South Africa.

Africa is in the eye of yet another storm of activities by the various powerhouses and ensuing competition for supremacy. Old supremacy struggles by the superpowers in the era of slavery and slave trade, colonialism, the Cold War and early years of the post-Cold war  “new World Order” plundered the continent’s human and natural resources, robbed it of progress and dignity, turning it a pawn in the unequal and exploitative old world order.

For centuries, the continent has haemorrhaged from this unequal and exploitative partnership.

As such, the big question concerning African intellectuals, policy-makers and leaders is how to turn Africa’s new status in the globalised world economic order and the intervention of powerhouses to the benefit of its people.

An understanding of the past roles of Africa in the old and new “world order” is critical to redefining its status in the world today, and ensuring maximum benefit from its relations with the powerhouses.

This past is inextricably linked to the rise and evolution of capitalism as a world system and the resulting accumulation on a world scale as thinker Samir Amin, aptly puts it.

At the dawn of the world capitalist system, it was Africa’s people who were captured, trafficked across oceans and transformed into a commodity of a heinous transcontinental trade in humans as an avertible source of slave labour in plantations. The profits of this trade financed early industrialisation, powered the rise of major corporations and the fundamental shift from mercantile capitalism to monopoly capitalism.

Competition for Africa’s human and natural resources was behind the  19th century scramble for Africa during the Berlin Conference (1884) and partitioning of the continent, like  a cake by Europe. This ushered in colonial imperialism, described in development theory as ‘ the highest stage of capitalism.”

Many expected the dawn of Independence from the late 1950s to dismantle the colonial regime of the extraction and transportation of the continents’ natural resources to Europe and exploitation of its people as “cheap labour” in plantations, mines and other economic sectors and the reverse the status of African countries as monopolistic markets for European industrial products.

However, despite the resultant “flag” independence, the economic fundamentals of colonialism survived almost intact as the keystone of the “neo-colonial” system in which Africa continued to serve as a source of raw materials, cheap labour and market for the erstwhile western powerhouses.

 The imperative of the Cold War geopolitics reinforced Africa’s status as an arena of completion for resources between the “Capitalist West” and the “Communist East”.

The “new scramble for Africa” in the 21st Century may not be fundamentally different from the “old”, at least in regard to focus on the continent’s natural resources. But the 21st Century scramble for Africa exhibits some unique features:

•  A Multi-polar world exists.

•  It is fuelled by unprecedented global demand for energy resources by the powerhouses, particularly China. Phenomenal discovery of oil, coal, natural gas, has turned the spotlight on Africa as a new arena of competition for these resources by the powerhouses. The global campaign for “green energy” has also refocused attention on Africa’s fertile agricultural land, huge potential in geothermal, hydro and wind energy as new frontiers of the nuclear energy technology.

Breaking old chains

• Third, and perhaps most important difference is that more than at any other time in history, Africa has a rare opportunity to exploit the competition by the various powerhouses to leverage its resources and status in the global economy to propel its own social-economic transformation and development, pull the mass of its population from poverty and join club of the wealthy.

• Africa now has access to new affordable technology that can be used to add value to its products, thus increasing their worth and its incomes and breaking the old chains of being an exporter of lowly valued raw-materials.

My own country Kenya has adopted a new constitution, now being implemented, and holds elections next year to launch it on the path to realising Kenya Vision 2030, the country’s blueprint to joining the league of the world’s middle-income industrial economies.

 

Excerpts of keynote address by the Minister for Energy at World Political Forum 2012 in Istanbul Turkey, yesterday.