African leadership and priorities debated in opening of WEF Africa

DURBAN,  South Africa — The opening plenary of the World Economic Forum on Africa took the continent’s leaders to task for a raft of failures and laid out a set of policy priorities from education, to job creation and poverty alleviation that should drive development efforts and seek to address rising inequalities.

Four out of five of the most unequal countries in the world — Swaziland, Nigeria, Namibia and South Africa — are in Africa, said Winnie Byanyima, the executive director of Oxfam International, at the panel.

Instead of addressing problems, governments often silence those protesting about unfairness or rising inequality, a problem perhaps epitomized by the fact that about 70 percent of working youth in Africa have jobs but remain trapped in poverty.

Moreover, leaders are simply failing to avert predictable problems, including one recently declared famine in South Sudan and two other countries — Somalia and Nigeria — on the brink of famine.

“Famine is a sign of failure,” Byanyima said. “Shame on our leadership. We should be embarrassed, including myself.”

Tony Elumelu, a billionaire banker, investor and philanthropist from Nigeria, put it this way: “How can you even talk about development if you can’t feed yourself?”

A debate on priorities

African governments are pushing for big business when they should be pushing for agribusinesses that create jobs and help small-scale farmers, Byanyima said. They should be investing in road networks, irrigation, financial inclusion, land and security. If those investments are made it will lead to increased growth. Investments in agriculture reduce poverty five times more than any other sector, she said.

Elumelu said that he thinks the agenda for African leaders should be focused solidly on how to alleviate poverty and that they should set their own course and priorities rather than being influenced too much by the priorities of others. Access to electricity is a critical component to poverty reduction and business leaders must be involved in solving the challenges of poverty, he said.

Richard Lesser, the CEO of the Boston Consulting Group, struck an optimistic note, pointing to the progress the continent has made in the past 10 to 15 years. He has a handy acronym for the investments he thinks African leaders need to make — AEIOU: agriculture, education, infrastructure, opportunity, and understanding.

On the agriculture front, there needs to be far more investment in climate adaptation; on infrastructure there is a massive underinvestment; and there is a need to create more opportunities for entrepreneurs and small and medium-sized businesses, he said.

While education is one of his six investment targets, it is the one priority that he might put before the rest at least in the short term, he said.

The wrong conversation

Lindiwe Mazibuko, a former member of the South African parliament and leader of the opposition, said that too often people are asking the wrong questions about Africa.

“A discussion on policy ignores the underpinning problem of leadership,” she said, adding that the current crop of African leaders has failed to deliver outcomes — so why should citizens or leaders ask the same leaders to act once again?

Some of the challenges the continent faces — including a lack of diversified economies, impacts of climate change, a lack of skills — could have been predicted, and yet leaders did not act, she said.

“We shouldn’t ask leaders to have the same opportunity to make mistakes, we should ask what to do to build the next cohort of leaders,” Mazibuko said.

Byanyima agreed that while it is important to train future leaders, it is also important to hold those in power who have either been elected or appointed accountable for their actions.

A new conversation about education and skills building

One future challenge that leaders should be preparing for is that an expected wave of unskilled work transferring to Africa from developing East Asian economies may not come if mechanization changes industries. That could create a future vacuum of employment opportunities for unskilled workers.

“We haven’t future-proofed our continent,” Mazibuko said, adding that leaders need to think about skills development in a new way that goes beyond the traditional model of education.

“Are we cultivating, building and encouraging leaders on the continent to think about these challenges into the future or are we just waiting for a wave of devastation and unemployment to break on the shores of our continent when those jobs fail to arrive?” she asked.

This issue of skills and education resurfaced throughout the day. It was evident in Lesser’s later comments about needing to give children a basic education, recognizing that science, technology, math and engineering skills are becoming more fundamental and education needs to teach how to learn in a rapidly evolving world. It was also a theme in a panel about the unemployed and unemployable where both IBM and the Coca Cola Co. talked about training programs and the need for a greater investment in both hard skills, such as coding, and soft skills that will help them succeed in the workplace.

On issues including education, governments are slipping on promises to provide free primary and secondary school education, Byanyima said, in part because they don’t collect enough revenue to pay for the programs. Governments must look to close tax loopholes for companies and generate more income so they can get more children, particularly girls, in schools.

“I worry because African governments are moving backwards,” she said.

While that training is important, those young people must have jobs to go to and so governments must also focus on improving enabling environments for businesses to allow for more growth. Government leaders should invest in access to electricity and help improve business environments to enable entrepreneurs and small and medium-sized enterprises, Elumelu said.

The discussion begged the question of how to get leaders to think and act differently. Elumelu said that they must think about the long term and not act in their own self interest, but rather with the greater good in mind. Byanyima said that for her it’s about accountability and called for the creation of a scorecard through which every president would have to report the number of jobs created each month, particularly for young people.

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