Tag: Africa

Africa’s coming rough years

| January 24, 2022 | 0 Comments
Africa’s coming rough years

The years 2020 and 2021 were tough and worrying years for Africa and Africans. Will 2022 prove better and more life sustaining? The COVID-19 pandemic set Africa’s development back in 2021 by at least 10 years, according to the World Bank. In addition to soaring case rates everywhere, but especially in South Africa in 2021, […]

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Can Ramaphosa save South Africa?

| July 2, 2018 | 0 Comments
Can Ramaphosa save South Africa?

Cyril Ramaphosa is South Africa’s last best hope. Its new president inherits a series of complex and dangerous crises, and must rapidly rescue sub-Saharan Africa’s most advanced and modern country from two decades of wanton despoilment and depravity — or fail and see his nation fall fully into a yawning chasm of underdevelopment and despair. […]

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Beating back terror in Africa

| April 3, 2018 | 0 Comments
Beating back terror in Africa

Africans are containing terror and terrorists, but declaring victory against the forces of revolution and insurrection in 2018 is premature. It is still a massive work in progress. In addition to the swirl of repetitive civil conflict in such disparate African countries as Burundi, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South […]

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Africa’s existential exodus

| September 30, 2017 | 0 Comments
Africa’s existential exodus

The Italian navy is tired of plucking Africans from dangerous Mediterranean waters off Libya night after night. Thousands of Africans are smuggled weekly across the dunes of the Sahara Desert from the northern outposts of Niger by people smugglers. After desperate days in holding camps in northern Libya, another set of people smugglers sends African […]

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Africa’s thirst: severe water gaps

| July 1, 2017 | 0 Comments
Africa’s thirst: severe water gaps

Ezirazi wishes she were in school. But, like so many 10-year-old African girls south of the Sahara, she has to trek early every morning and just before sunset every night to fetch water from a well 10 kilometres away. The drinking and washing needs of her family take priority over schooling. Anyway, she also has […]

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Africa’s urban problems to worsen

| December 16, 2016 | 0 Comments
Africa’s urban problems to worsen

Africa’s destiny is in its cities. Already the home of half of sub-Saharan Africa’s 1 billion people, with untold more millions to come, some of the cities of Africa will soon be the largest in the world — with all of the possibilities and problems that pertain to megacities with high potential and inadequate infrastructures […]

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Tunisia’s fragile advances

| October 4, 2016 | 1 Comment
Tunisia’s fragile advances

When political change is not accompanied by widespread economic change, there is a risk of reversion… When old economic structures are preserved or only modestly adapted, it cannot be expected that different outcomes on growth and equality will result. — Oxford University Press. Mostly hidden from western eyes, Tunisia, the only nation to successfully emerge […]

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Will Africa keep rising?

| October 4, 2016 | 0 Comments
Will Africa keep rising?

Sub-Saharan Africa has been rising rapidly in this century, growing economically at an unprecedentedly rapid pace from 2005 to 2015, with most of its 49 countries participating in a new post-colonial prosperity. But, with China’s own economic surge slipping, India and Japan weak, Europe lagging and North American demand limited, will sub-Saharan Africa stagnate and […]

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Brazil into Africa

| June 30, 2016 | 0 Comments
Brazil into Africa

As China’s growth engines sputter, Europe remains weak and India focuses inward, African economies correspondingly retrench severely. Where African nations once were growing at a steady five percent a year, thanks to Chinese demand, now much of sub-Saharan Africa is increasing its GDP per capita at only two and three percent a year, with South […]

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South Africa’s looming crisis

| March 22, 2016 | 1 Comment
South Africa’s looming crisis

South Africa’s economic, social and political outcomes drive sub-Saharan Africa. At least it did for a few years at the end of the last century and the beginning of this one. After all, South Africa for many years harboured sub-Saharan Africa’s most dynamic economy, its most vibrant political system, its most advanced infrastructure and its […]

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