A world renowned American economist and Harvard Professor Jeffrey Sachs has warned African nations not to put their hope and trust in the American government of President Donald Trump who, according to him, “will not help Africa with even one dollar.” Speaking at the 2025 Obafemi Awolowo Memorial Webinar on March 6, Sachs urged Africans to forget the Western powers and look up to China, India to leapfrog into becoming an economic superpower. Rather than being divided, Sachs says Africans should come together as one politically and economically, to be a global superpower. I was at the webinar organised by the Awolowo Foundation and recorded Prof. Sach’s powerful and motivating keynote address which I have meticulously transcribed as a souvenir for my readers. Here is Jeffrey Sachs at his bluntest, giving candid advice to African leaders. He starts with taking a dig at Donald Trump!
***
Everybody knows we are in a period of tremendous disruption and flux right now. Donald Trump is just a part of that. He is definitely a part of that. We are in a period of massive geopolitical change. The rise of China is certainly the most significant geopolitical reality of our age. But it’s not only the rise of China. Many parts of the world are experiencing a massive advance in technology in the geopolitical weight. India is another example, Russia obviously is a great power in the world today. And I count Africa being the same way in the coming year which I will speak about. But geopolitics is changing rapidly.
Of course, the technological revolution is changing our economies dramatically, faster than we can keep up. The advances in Artificial Intelligence are very real. The advances in robotics are very real. The advances in space-based technologies surveillance and the ability for satellite imagery to change many ways that governments are functioned, unfortunately ways the army is functioned. But these technologies are deep and are changing rapidly. At the same time we have the environmental crises that actually have accelerated dramatically just in recent years. The earth has warmed just in the last four years by 0.3 degrees Celsius. This is absolutely remarkable. In the past, that might have taken 20 years to happen. But in just four years, we have a warming 0.3 degrees Celsius. So we actually exceeded the 1.5 degree Centigrade limit that was agreed in Paris in 2015 as the upper limit that we would do everything to avoid. And we have massive demographic change on the way as well. In some parts of the world, populations have peaked and are beginning to decline. China is a case in point. China’s population has peaked at 1.4 billion. But if current assessments of future fertility are borne out, China’s population would be under one billion by the end of this century, and even around 700 million according to the United Nations forecast. At the same time, Africa’s population continues to soar. It’s about 1.5 billion today. By mid-century, perhaps 2.5 billion, and according to UN estimates, it could be as much as 3.5 billion by the end of the century. Roughly, 35 to 40 per cent of the world population. So we are in the midst of massive change.
From Africa’s point of view, the main question is how should Africa as a united country be positioned for success in the coming years? How should Africa as a union move forward rapidly, economically, technologically in terms of the quality of infrastructure? How should Africa as a unit face the challenges of the climate change, the threat to biodiversity, the loss of the Congo basin rainforest to deforestation and many other environmental challenges as well? And how should Africa participate in a very tough geopolitical world that is now multi-polar, where great powers, the major powers, the United States, Russia, China, India, are in quite intense dangerous competition as well? Where those major powers have their eyes on Africa’s natural resources.
I started the day in a Zoom meeting in India. And the main topic of that session was strategic minerals. All of the talk was about how the major powers would secure their strategic mineral supply chains. But frankly they were talking about you (Africans). It was mainly about competition among Russia, India, China and the United States. Africa was not in that particular discussion but it was the object of the discussion in part. Ukraine too basically holds the pieces now in part because of competition for the strategic minerals in Ukraine.
So, what do I envision in all of this? What would I, broadly speaking, recommend for the 1.5 billion people of Africa and what would soon be 2, 3 and more billion people in Africa? First, quite obviously, I believe that the next 40 years can be and absolutely needs to be a period of extremely rapid economic growth. And I would like Africa to follow the path that China and India have been on. China during the period from 1980 to 2020 achieved around ten per cent per year economic growth. And that meant more than 30 times increase the size of the Chinese economy. India today is growing at around six per cent per year. I think it would increase to around seven per cent per year. And that is also a rapid rate that is transforming India’s economy, ending its extreme poverty and putting India also into advanced technologies. As for Africa, I believe that Africa can aim for and can achieve economic growth on the order of eight to ten per cent per year for the four decades up to when we say 2063 to the hundredth anniversary of African unity. So, I would like Africa to model and implement a very high growth strategy in the coming 40 years. And the roadmap that China achieved and India is achieving is very helpful for Africa as well. Africa currently is growing at three or four per cent per year aggregate and because of rapid population growth around two or two-and-a-half per cent. That is not good enough in per capita terms. That is of course absolutely unsafe and insufficient for Africa. So the growth rate needs to be increased markedly. And the questions are: how to do that? The first point is that high growth results from high investment rates. And those investments are of multiple kinds. They are most importantly investments in education and the skills of young people. And Africa is the youngest continent in the world. Almost half of the population is of school age. And those young people need quality education. And there is no time to miss for them. And when they drop out in lower secondary or before finishing upper secondary, this is a cost for a whole lifetime and a cost for the society. So the first order in business in achieving the next 40 years of rapid growth is achieving a very high level of the educational attainment. And that is expensive and it takes a long time to realise the returns. It takes 20 years to educate a child but the returns are the highest returns a society can achieve. It takes around 20 per cent internal rate of returns to educate a child through upper secondary education.
(To be continued)
This post was originally published on here
