Malawian youth in Africa’s future

Africa is fast becoming the next continental economic power bloc in a decade or so. This view comes after realising that Africa could be the world’s only continent with vast natural resources that can sustainably be exploited towards the continent’s economic transformation.

 

Currently, India and China are making friends with Africa to access these natural resources to support manufacturing and industrial growth in their countries. Their terms of friendship seem to be more flexible than those of Africa’s old traditional Western allies.

Malawi, as a country, should start having a telescopic focus into the future and start strategising on how the generation of people that will be economically active in the decade to come will compete favourably on the continental and world economic stage.

As a country, we have no option but to make painful decisions and start positioning our country to take its rightful share in the next decade of economic growth in Africa. It can be projected with comfort that in the decade to come, most of Malawi’s current central players in the economy will have moved into the peripheral or oblivion. The world has been likened to a stage where everyone will play a role and bow out, leaving space for the next player.

It is important to start preparing how the future economic players will take up their role and play much better than their predecessors. For those in their thirties and forties, their comfort in that decade would depend, to a certain extent, on how the central economic players then, will be doing their act. I can imagine the agony and discomfort a business tycoon goes through when leaving a business empire in the hands of people with poor skills and competencies. While the desire would be to carry on the legacy of the business empire and take it to the next level, this would be an insurmountable task if the heirs were not prepared for this responsibility.

Some scholars claim that Malawi was richer than China some 55 years ago. One wonders what the Chinese did to achieve their exponential economic growth? It is true that China is a formidable world economy that has challenged some conventional economic beliefs of our time.

While we marvel at the success of the tiger economies, we are witnessing major economies in the West going into recession and the laborious processes they have gone through to receive a bail out. The austerity measures that follow come with immense suffering that has sparked ugly scenes of protests from citizens, particularly the youth of Greece.

Brazil is another country on the go, whose economy is growing rapidly, and it is witnessing a massive inflow of professional immigrants such as engineers, accountants, architects and the like from Portugal in search of greener pastures. Recently, there was a documentary on BBC television acknowledging that Portuguese immigrants are present in Mozambique.

They interviewed an accountant from Portugal who had just taken up a position of financial director at a company. The locals, particularly business people, seemed to be complaining that the immigrants were taking up positions and squeezing them out of business. This sounded very familiar; I must have heard this somewhere. It was here in Malawi. This was when the Chinese and Nigerian traders or investors came into Malawi a few years ago; they pushed some Malawian traders of Indian origin out of the clothing business into steel business. Later, the African Malawian felt the heat from these traders, and you know the rest of the story.

Change is inevitable in a global village, and complaining or pleading for protective trading legislation that favours indigenous people will not be a panacea for the woes that come with globalisation. We should start learning how other successful countries go about their business—their discipline, determination and aggression.

We can remain the warm heart of Africa without economic sacrifices that go with our meekness and humbleness. I believe that reasonable aggression is good for economic growth. This is food for thought for young people, who will have to compete with other traders that will find Malawi their next investment destination in the next decade.

—The author is executive director of National Youth Council of Malawi and a scholar of leadership and change management, writing in his personal capacity.