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What If Africa Was Just ONE Country?
What If Africa Was Just ONE Country? Make no mistake, drawing up broad generalizations about the African continent is likely to be met with strong reactions, often deemed willfully ignorant. For as long as time has allowed, Africa has struggled with an image problem, one that portrays the continent as a vast and impoverished landmass plagued by disasters, pandemics, diseases, and famine. As has frequently occurred, the majority of people confuse a single country with a continent of 1.4 billion people.
For Africans who are frequently subjected to this oversimplification about Africa, there is an entirely reasonable instinctive desire to clarify that Africa is not a single country. The continent boasts of a composition of 54 distinct countries with individual borders, varying currencies, religions, cultures, and ethnicities, as well as political governments.
Admirably, irrespective of the vast array of challenges that the continent has faced, continental innovation has advanced at a rapid pace. There have been google product development offices across Africa, and lengthy subsea cables that promise to double internet speeds for millions in Africa. Several cities across the continent including Nairobi, Kigali, Kampala, Accra, and Lagos are booming technology hubs that are boosting their respective countries into the ranks of global digital competitors. The continent’s average annual GDP growth has steadily exceeded the global average, where urbanization rates are increasing, and digital penetration is spreading faster than ever before, bringing millions of previously marginalized people and communities into the formal or semi-formal economy.
Nonetheless, Africa’s collective growth has been deplorable and severely stifled in most contexts, leaving the continent vulnerable and reliant. Jubril Enakele, Chief Executive of Iron Capital, an Africa-based, Africa-focused investment banking firm, states in his report that one of the single greatest threats to this growth has been systemic challenges to unity. The lack of a united front is emphasized by a lack of trade, or so little trade, between a continent with over a billion people. Evidently, only 17 percent of internal trade activity was recorded in 2017, ranking the continent with the lowest internal trade activity of any multi-country continent. Honestly, a united country made up of 54 distinct nations, all armed with a unique wealth of natural resources, would be a terrifying global powerhouse. Evidently, South Africa earns the most money from its mineral resources, generating $125 billion per year. Nigeria is second with $53 billion in annual revenue, followed by Algeria at $39 billion, Angola with $32 billion, and Libya at $27 billion. As a matter of fact, more than two-thirds of the continent’s mineral wealth was produced by these five countries.
So what if Africa was a country? What if, somehow, all 54 nations were fused together as a collective entity? What if a seamless transition across borders of states and nations within the continent existed? And a common currency was recognized and accepted as high up north as Ras ben Sakka in Tunisia, and downward south towards Cape Agulhas in South Africa?
Prof. Oku Singer, Mechanical/Solar Engineer
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