Jay Naidoo pt 4: Africa at the crossroads - Reclaiming our future in a fractured world

Key topics:Transformative leadership: From liberation nostalgia to servant leaders guided by Ubuntu and community.Economic renewal: Local processing, education, and innovation to turn natural wealth into shared prosperity.African sovereignty: A united, people-driven agenda in global arenas like COP and BRICS.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Jay Naidoo.Dialogue is not a monologue of politicians. It is a call to keep speaking and listening, to gather in circles of reflection and action across our villages, cities, and diasporas. The question is urgent and collective. How do we, as citizens, build social movements from the bottom up and leave behind the old-style party politics?The world is once again convulsed by rival empires. Superpowers, old and new, circle the African continent as though it were still the chessboard of the nineteenth century. From Washington to Moscow, from Beijing to Brussels, Africa is treated as a theatre of contestation, its minerals coveted, its markets targeted, its people too often cast as pawns. The names have changed, and the tactics have evolved, yet the logic remains chillingly familiar: Extract. Divide. Control.We cannot ignore the backdrop. The COP in Brazil later this year will unfold amid climate negotiations that have themselves become arenas of geopolitical rivalry. Pledges are traded like bargaining chips while the survival of vulnerable communities is reduced to a footnote in the calculations of the great powers. The BRICS bloc, once heralded as a counterweight to Western dominance, is now a stage for competing ambitions. Without a coherent African agenda, it risks becoming just another venue where our continent is courted but not respected.Africa, with 1.4 billion souls and riches beyond measure, holds an economy of $2.8 trillion, yet China towers sixfold above, India nearly doubles, and Brazil and Russia each rival our strength. Still, we are cast to the margins, bartered as hewers of wood and drawers of water. This exile is not fate but fracture: a leadership that falters, a vision unclaimed. Only a united blueprint can summon Africa to her rightful seat among the makers of tomorrow.Africa’s potential wealth lies not only in the deep reserves of its land but also in the vitality of its people. The continent holds around 30% of the world’s mineral reserves, vast oil and gas deposits, some of the most fertile soils, and abundant renewable energy. Equally, with 1.5 billion people today, projected to reach 2.5 billion by 2050 Africa has the youngest population on Earth, offering a demographic dividend if invested in. Together, these natural and human endowments position Africa as a cornerstone of the world’s future prosperity. Yet this potential remains largely untapped, siphoned off through resource mismanagement, extractive contracts, and illicit flows, while the youth bulge struggles with unemployment and under-education.To realize this wealth, Africa must move from extraction to transformation investing in value addition, local processing, and renewable infrastructure that convert raw endowments into inclusive prosperity. Equally vital is investing in people: universal access to quality education, health, and skills that prepare Africa’s youth to innovate and lead. Strengthening governance and regional integration, curbing corruption, and building democratic, transparent institutions can anchor this transformation. By aligning natural capital with human capital, Africa can turn its resource abundance and demographic energy into sustainable wealth, shaping a new development model rooted in dignity, sovereignty, and regeneration.Africa’s vulnerability is not destiny; it is the consequence of choices. Too often we have been betrayed by predatory elites who inherited the flags of independence but not the moral courage to complete the decolonial project. Corporate oligarchs and rent-seeking politicians have manipulated our economies and currencies, treating public office as a private fiefdom. Because our leadership has remained tethered by debt, dependency, and the psychology of colonisation, we are again enslaved to the very powers that once ruled us.This is the uncomfortable truth: liberation politics, once the moral compass of our struggle, has hardened into the politics of the messiah and the Big Chief. We have replaced colonial viceroys with our own untouchable strongmen. The language of freedom has become the currency of patronage. Too many leaders behave as though history owes them permanent reverence. But the young, who face chronic unemployment and shrinking opportunities, cannot eat the slogans of the past. The struggle songs of our youth must now become the building songs of a future. We need leadership that does not merely inherit the heroic memories of liberation but embodies the humility and service that true freedom requires.Across our continent, green shoots of a different kind of leadership are already rising. Farmers are reclaiming degraded soils and restoring ancestral food systems. Youth cooperatives are inventing new economies in technology and the arts. Women are defending water and seed sovereignty and holding entire communities together. These movements carry the possibility of a leadership that grows from below, from the patient work of community assemblies and regenerative projects. Power in these spaces is not seized. It is grown through trust, through service, through the slow cultivation of dignity.This is the Africa I believe in: an Africa that owns its future. We must arrive at the global table not as supplicants but as partners with our own agenda. That agenda must place climate justice at the centre of economic strategy; insist on fair trade and the protection of our seeds, soils and waters; speak with one voice in negotiations from COP Brazil to BRICS summits, from the UN to the G20. Such an agenda cannot be written by ministers alone. It must be authored by the people: farmers’ cooperatives, workers’ unions, citizen groups, indigenous councils, youth networks and elders who remember that freedom was won by collective struggle, not by the benevolence of any superpower.To craft such an agenda we must draw from the deepest wells of our own heritage. Africa is the cradle of humankind, home to the first stories, the first songs, the first footsteps of our species. Our biodiversity is not merely a resource; it is a living memory of the Earth’s abundance and resilience. From the rainforests of the Congo to the savannas of the Serengeti, from the Cradle of Humankind in the Magaliesberg to the Great Rift Valley, the continent still holds the ecological wisdom that can guide the planet through the climate crisis. Indigenous knowledge, of healing plants, of water cycles, of communal stewardship offers lessons that modern economies, blinded by extraction and profit, are only beginning to rediscover.This is not nostalgia. To invoke indigenous wisdom is to reclaim a science of life honed over millennia, a science that unites spirituality and ecology, economy and culture. The philosophy of Ubuntu, I am because we are, is not a slogan. It is a blueprint for a regenerative society where the wellbeing of the whole is the measure of individual success. In many African languages the word for land also means life. To return to that understanding is to remember that we are not masters of the Earth but part of it.Such a return will not be handed down by presidents or parliaments. It requires a renewal of leadership that is not imprisoned by the politics of liberation nostalgia, that does not seek the mantle of the messiah or the Big Chief. We need leaders who are servants first, who listen before they speak, who measure their success by the strength of the communities they serve rather than the size of the motorcades they command. This is the leadership of elders and of youth together, where wisdom and energy meet; where the experience of struggle is married to the creativity of those who will inherit the next century.Africa holds one of the greatest reserves of life on Earth, minerals that power the world, fertile soils that can feed humanity, rivers and sun that can generate boundless energy, and above all, the youngest and most vibrant population of any continent. This is not a curse but a blessing: if wisely stewarded, it is the foundation of sovereignty, prosperity, and renewal.We choose a path of transformation, not extraction. We commit to processing our resources locally, investing in education, health, and innovation for our youth, and building governance rooted in transparency and Ubuntu. By uniting across borders, curbing illicit flows, and aligning with Nature’s laws, we will turn natural abundance and demographic energy into shared wealth. Africa’s destiny is not to be a pawn on the world’s chessboard, but to be a model of regenerative leadership and human dignity for the planet. My Prayer May we, the children of Africa, remember the first songs of the Earth. May we honour the rivers and the ancestors who whisper in the wind. May our leaders be servants, and our servants be leaders in love. May the wisdom of Ubuntu guide every marketplace and every council fire. And may the generations to come bless us, not for what we owned, but for the life we protected and the dignity we restored.

Jay Naidoo pt 4: Africa at the crossroads - Reclaiming our future in a fractured world

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