The inability of current African presidents to maintain Africa as a single, indivisible entity has been bemoaned by former South African President Thabo Mbeki. He has cautioned them to take a cue from Nigeria and South African musicians, whose strong partnership has transformed the continent’s entertainment industry into a goldmine.
By Hi-Tech Editor Prince Osuagwu, based in Johannesburg, South Africa
The inability of current African presidents to maintain Africa as a single, indivisible entity has been bemoaned by former South African President Thabo Mbeki. He has cautioned them to take a cue from Nigeria and South African musicians, whose strong partnership has transformed the continent’s entertainment industry into a goldmine.
According to Mbeki, the young performers have succeeded in building a strong rapport and effective teamwork techniques that have helped them popularize the entertainment industries in both nations and generate income for everyone involved.
Mbeki bemoaned the fact that political leaders are enmeshed in a spurious egocentrism and territorialism that stifles the richness that cross-border economic and cultural interactions may bring to Africa.
The leader of the African National Congress (ANC) made the remarks at the Thabo Mbeki Foundation in Johannesburg while receiving a visit from the third cohort of MTN-MIP Fellows. The visit came after the conclusion of a two-day Media Innovation summit focused on the topic of “Sustainability of the media business in the digital age.”
Taking the Fellows on a trip down memory lane for pan-Africanism, Mbeki said that leaders’ great awareness of the continent’s history and the purposeful creation of policies meant to give it influence over other regions made Africa a terrifying place in the past.
He lamented, meanwhile, that today’s leaders lacked this kind of political commitment, were increasingly Eurocentric, and had no clear idea of how to keep Africa a free continent.
“There is no African state that is not characterized by the diversity of its population today,” he stated, emphasizing the importance of political will to manage diversity for the survival of all of them.
Thus, a deliberate political choice must be made in order to maintain the unity of a continent or a nation. Tanzania is one very notable case in this regard.
“Under Julius Nyerere, two crucial choices were made to maintain the unity of Tanzania when it was known as Tanganyika. Having a single language at the center was one of them.
Nyerere made the decision that all people had to give up speaking their own tongues and learn Swahili. Therefore, Swahili is spoken by all. The decision to abolish the chieftaincy ship institution was the second. Thus, neither this tribe nor that tribe has a chief. The political leadership made these deliberate choices. It has been successful for them to unite the Tanganyikan people into a single nation.
Therefore, Tanzanians have grown accustomed to their unity. Even a few years ago, when certain Tanzanian politicians revived the issue of tribal identity in an attempt to further their own political careers, Tanzanians’ collective consciousness was strong enough to overcome them.
That’s the reason I’m claiming that this is a political decision. In that regard, South Africa is quite lucky, as you may know, since the diamond mines were originally found in the 19th century and brought visitors from all across Southern Africa, including Angola.
Then, after a little while, gold mining began, and there was a great deal of social and economic development on a national level. Remember that one of the main goals of the African National Congress when it was founded in 1912 was to “bury the demon of tribalism.”
Since the turn of the 20th century, there has been a political organization whose job it was to ensure that all of these pieces came together so that you could see how you arrived at this point prior to liberation. For example, in 1960, you could have asked the African community in this country, “Who is your national leader?” regardless of where you were in the nation. Alberto, they would say.
“Therefore, the continent has regressed from the kind of pan-Africanist commitment that we had with other earlier leaders on the continent, and the weakening of that resolve has negative consequences like the chilly relationship between South Africa and And now, addressing the challenge is to address the larger political problems.”
The relationship between artists—Nigerian and South African artists in particular—and their abilities is a constant topic of contention, he continued. Nigeria. Another is the inadequate regulation of visas, which has severely hindered cross-border trade.
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