Vice President Yemi Osinbajo has told American scholars and professionals that Africa’s economic transformation is about improving standards of governance, increasingly confident youth and civil society.
Osinbajo said this while delivering the keynote at Batten Hall on the course ‘’Africa Rising, understanding business, entrepreneurship, and the complexities of a continent at Harvard Business School Cambridge Massachusetts,”.
He told the gathering of scholars and professionals, “it appears the political pan-Africanists of old have given way in terms of prominence to the business pan-Africanists the likes of Aliko Dangote, Issad Reb Rab(Cevital) Mike Adenuga, Kim Bello-Osagie, the Sawiris owners of Orascom from Egypt, and mining magnate Patrice Motsepe amongst others.”
Oshinbajo also traced the genesis of Africa’s economic turnaround to the last decade in twentieth-century adding that democracy provided the support for the change in the mid-1990s.
According to him, the entrepreneurs step beyond national borders to the global economy. He added that the change was accelerated in the last few years “phenomenal rise in Chinese resource bullishness, the commodities boom including new oil and gas discoveries in many African countries, digital technology, mobile phones and the Internet”.
He explained that the creative ingenuity of Africa’s businessmen and women cut across different sectors of the economy such as agriculture, telecommunications, manufacturing and IT.
He said “We’ve been seeing the slow but steady maturing of institutions; press and civil society that are boldly taking advantage of the empowering nature of the Internet, and an increasingly engaged diaspora,”. He also Drew attention to Africa’s phenomenal growth stating that continental development experience gave very important lessons one of which is that “economic growth is not sustainable without nation-building, and even of greater importance, State building.”
In his emphasis “the need for a healthy distrust of purist ideological prescriptions, in favour of a common sense introduction of markets with a fair balance of state participation or intervention that has shown interesting results’’. He maintained “Africa cannot afford to underestimate the power of technology to fast-track the continent’s rise. Emerging technologies have played extraordinary roles in every aspect of the continent’s most touted successes.
Meanwhile, Prof. Caroline Elkins of the Harvard Business School noted the contributions of the Vice President to the legal profession in Africa and his impressive public service career especially during his tenure as Attorney-General of Lagos State.
