@TimesLIVE Proof is there in Australian ports where BYD docked a 5000 units carrier just recently, sending Australian based Western Propaganda agents in full panc mode
@TimesLIVE ...despite all these efforts,widespread media propaganda Chinese companies keep displacing and crushing US companies in sales, orders, looks and perfomance.
@TimesLIVE Any competion to US companies which beats them fare and square in their own open market suddenly becomes an aid to a communist government. The US gov openly tries to aid their companies by banning such competition, sanctioning them, but despite all these efforts..
@DailyMail Serves Africans right. What's stopping them from subjecting Americans to the same treatment instead of treating them like their gods whenever they come to Africa?
Domestic capital mobilization — channeling the $4 trillion Africa holds in long-term domestic savings into development — is increasingly a necessity as the era of aid comes to an end.
But 20 years ago it was a choice — and former South African president Thabo Mbeki was one of the pioneers.
In Cape Town on Africa Day two weeks ago, Mbeki recounted an important chapter of African business history: the establishment of PAIDF, the Pan-African Infrastructure Development Fund.
PAIDF, launched in 2007 with $625M & managed by @Harith_Africa, pioneered the playbook for redirecting African pension savings into African infrastructure that's still being run today — and Mbeki was its primary architect.
It ran its full lifecycle and delivered critical regional infrastructure projects including:
• The Lake Turkana Wind Farm in Kenya, one of Africa's largest wind projects, which now supplies ~15% of Kenya's electricity
• The Henri Konan Bedié Bridge in Côte d'Ivoire
• Lanseria International Airport in South Africa
• MainOne's subsea fiber-optic cable, West Africa's first privately-financed undersea broadband connection
• Power plants across Nigeria, Ghana, & South Africa
Real assets. Real returns. Real proof of concept.
But when Mbeki conceptualized PAIDF circa 2005, his vision was to mobilize billions in sovereign civil service pension assets from as many African countries as possible.
Instead, only South Africa (via GEPF/PIC) and Ghana (via SSNIT) actually anchored the fund with state-backed civil servant pensions.
(Other anchors included the African Development Bank & commercial financial institutions like Old Mutual and ARM.)
In Mbeki's telling, pension fund managers of the continent's other countries looked at Africa and said no:
"The level of risk on the continent is too high — and therefore we can't invest these African pension funds in Africa. We'll invest them in the London Stock Exchange."
Two decades on, Mbeki is still asking the questions he asked then:
"Where's the cohesion of the continent? Where's the sense of a common direction?"
A continent that defines itself as 50+ separate entities, each putting national interests ahead of collective ones, will be unable to address the big issues of the day: poverty, unemployment, job creation, education, healthcare, food security.
"So long as we define ourselves as different fragments — each one thinking that it can survive on its own — then we're landed with this problem of poverty forever."
As the geopolitical landscape continues to shift, what lone voices in the wilderness argued in the early 2000s is now increasingly clear to all:
African development will be built on African capital, or it won't be built at all.
—
Afridigest Intelligence — real intelligence & advisory to win in Africa's growth markets: https://t.co/pTeD1UjeWi | Follow Afridigest on Instagram
@GaytonMcK@CyrilRamaphosa coloured people must wake up. This one is just like De Lille. All he wanted was just to get a cabinet position. Doesnt even remember wht he promised them as PA voters