Development as harmony
All societies that have risen to greatness have done so, by most measures, on the strength of a highly skilled population that has acted in concert towards a common vision for a sustained period of time.
Advertisement
This is the bar that we must measure Africa against in the 21st century. The brutal truth is that on that count, Africa does not yet measure up.
For centuries, Japanese culture has been guided by a singular, mono-syllabic notion known as Wa. The closest translation to this in the English language is Harmony. This idea penetrates through all aspects of Japanese life, from basic social interactions to the workplace and even to international relations in the post-war era.
Wa is a series of cultural concepts born out of the traditional family values of the island’s ancient civilisation. It describes the individual as part of a whole. Above all else, unity must be preserved; at its extreme this comes at the expense of individualism. Wa inspires communal harmony and requires a group of people to work towards a unifying goal, one that will bring honour or prosperity to everyone within the unit with any deviations quickly corrected.
Conditioned leaders
This philosophy is credited with forging Japan’s post-war economic miracle that began in 1949 and ended at the end of the Cold War, making it the advanced nation it is today. It has conditioned leaders in the public space to fight for the needs of their society as a whole; whether big or small, international or domestic. It is the reason for the country’s relatively low crime rates and the success of its automobile industry. This also might be why political unrest in Japan often results in the resignation of members of public office instead of mass civil disturbance.
Africa has its own ethical imperatives that promote social harmony. After independence, there have been many expressions that highlight Africa’s impulse towards such sensibility, such as Ujamaa in Tanzania, Authenticité in Zaire or Kenneth Kaunda’s Humanism. However, these have occurred at a much smaller scale, mostly within national borders and not at the regional or even continental level.
Perhaps the closest parallels to in the African context are concepts of Afrocentricity, Negritude, Pan-Africanism or the more recent Ubuntu, the philosophy that humanity is what binds us together.
However, Wa is not Ubuntu. Africans have sovereignty over their ideas, and Ubuntu, or the ideas that came before it, do not have political let alone cross-border imperatives. Arguably, as we seek, as a continent, to make this century our own and to undo the legacy that history has burdened us with, we might benefit from infusing the philosophy of Wa into the challenges we all concurrently face as Africans.
So what would an African Wa look like? In order to foster continental harmony to drive development, this notion has to be of pan-African scope. It must be endogenous. Finally, it has to merge and build on the traditions of thought we already have, such as Nkrumah’s Pan-Africanism, Senghor’s Negritude or Nyerere's Ujamaa. Crucially, it must give us a reason to work together as one.
Structurally tangled challenges
If there is one reason Africans must act in unison, it is because the challenges we face are structurally tangled. There is substantial consensus on at least seven challenges that Africa faces today. For example, except for South Africa, Morocco and Egypt, much of Africa has experienced rapid urbanisation without commensurate industrialisation as is happening in Asia. When it comes to health care, only half of the continent’s billion have access to modern medical facilities and even fewer can afford it, given that on average, 10 per cent of national budgets are spent on medical resources.
Access to education is still very much an issue of the 67 million children out of school globally, 43 per cent of them live in Africa. Even those who do make it past tertiary education aren’t guaranteed a future, with almost half of the 10 million graduates produced out of the continent’s 668 universities facing unemployment yearly. Also, linked to unemployment and urbanisation is climate change. The increase of arid lands due to global warming and the decrease in rain-dependent agriculture is pushing agrarian communities out of rural areas and into cities for more reliable livelihoods. This is putting pressure on the infrastructure already in place, an obstacle to growth and development. Perhaps the greatest unifying challenge is governance. The continent is witnessing the highest levels of political stability in decades, but the quality of governance in the vast majority of African countries is sub-standard.
Same coin
However, Africa's challenges and aspirations are two sides of the same coin. There is a culture of innovation already built into the African context. This can be illustrated by the calibre of entrepreneurial talent we have. In Kenya, entrepreneur Lorna Rutto understood the many issues the growing city of Nairobi was causing. It generates about 3,000 metric tonnes of waste every day and about 20 per cent of this is often plastic waste. A growing population in the city, coupled with unchanging waste collection systems, meant households and businesses were illegally dumping waste everywhere they could, creating illegal dump sites. At the same time, timber reserves were on the decline due to a deforestation crisis. However, the city’s electricity poles were made of timber and they were getting expensive due to constricted supply.
Rutto took the two problems and answered them at once. The electricity poles could be made from recycled plastic which would provide a cheaper, more sustainable alternative to timber. Her plastic waste would come from the same waste that was becoming difficult to manage. In one fell swoop, her business found unique answers to the challenges of urbanisation, unemployment, climate change and infrastructure. Imagine if we could implement her ingenuity in some of Africa’s notorious city centres such as Lagos, Kampala or Kinshasa? What if we were to escalate the spirit of her solution to higher levels of policy making and leadership? What if we taught our young people to seek out solutions with varying dimensions, as she has done?
Developing African leaders
Over the last 13 years, I have dedicated my career to developing the next generation of African leaders. At the African Leadership Academy—which I founded over a decade ago—I witnessed young people from every corner of the continent working in unison to tackle Africa’s greatest challenges, albeit on a small scale. This experience inspired many of the institutions I went on to create, such as African Leadership Network and African Leadership University, which aim to groom three million transformative problem solvers such as Rutto. My hope is to create a movement of leaders who will come together in continental harmony to solve the continent’s grand challenges and exploit its greatest opportunities.
However, this is just a drop in the ocean. To truly accelerate the trajectory of our development, we must see many more initiatives in education, health care, infrastructure, governance, climate change, conservation, agriculture, the empowerment of women, job creation and regional integration. This would be the spirit of an African Wa.