Africa and its enemies from within

WE, in the village, are grateful for yet another year to do better, to grow and contribute more to the motherland.

As a people, as a nation, we must take stock — it is imperative that we pause and reflect.

As much as we value our strengths, we must also reflect on some of our own weaknesses which are often taken advantage of by our enemies.

For instance, as we seek to grow our economy there are some among us who cannot help but believe that everything Western is better than anything African or indigenous.

Among us are some with a deep-seated lack of self-belief and confidence in who we are as a people, where we are going and our capabilities.

Even as evidence abound that we can do it on our own, with our own resources, with local initiatives, they still doubt that we can.

This blind belief in everything Western and the abhorrence of anything local affects everything we do and the decisions we make in relation to social, cultural, economic and political aspects of our lives.

We fought a liberation struggle in which we “stood no chance” and emerged victorious; we took land and were disparaged, given no chance, ridiculed, yet today we have millionaires on these farms.

So why doubt that we will reap massive rewards on the economic front!

It is a war we will win.

A lack of self-belief blinds us in terms of defining who our real friends are and who our serious enemies are.

In the long-run attempts to transform ourselves from black to white will fail, for those we seek to please and ape will never accept us as one of theirs.

We will only come to grief if we sup with the devil — no spoon is long enough.

As we are in the new year, I challenge our education sector to help us do away with the notion that everything from the West is superior.

Our educational systems should nurture the minds of our youth in a manner which makes them proud Africans.

For instance, anyone who has interacted with O and A-Level students in Africa will be impressed by the degree to which most of them can reel out names of prominent Western figures, such as Duke of Wellington, Winston Churchill, General Montgomery, Napoleon Bonaparte, John F Kennedy and Harry Truman, among many other Western villains.

Sadly, the same students would find it extremely difficult to recall names of African heroes, such as Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda, Samora Machel, Thomas Sankara, Josiah Tongogara and Joshua Nkomo among many more others.

They will be found wanting on what all these heroes represent.

These students would not find it difficult to dramatise the significance of celebrating Christmas Day, Boxing Day and Easter Holidays, but will stammer when it comes to explaining the significance of Africa Day, Heroes Day, Independence Day and National Unity Day!

We should not deny ourselves information and knowledge about the world in general but our people, especially our youth, should know the world and everything useful in it from an African point of view.

We should know the world and whatever is worth learning from it, but do so to strengthen the position of Zimbabwe and Africa and to promote our interests.

To know Zimbabwe and Africa and to define its interests properly, our people need, first and foremost, to know themselves well, in regard to where they are coming from, historically, and where they would like to go as a nation!

To have knowledge about the rest of the world which excludes Africa and Zimbabwe amounts to having no leg to stand on.

When we know who we are first, everything else shall be added unto us.

Let us invest more in our institutions and organisations to serve and consolidate African interests first and foremost.

It is a travesty that Africa is currently producing generations who are barely conscious of the epic journey which Africans have travelled in their quest for emancipation from slavery, colonisation and neo-colonisation.

We must bequeath to our children and grandchildren the values, beliefs and practices steeped in Zimbabwe’s heroic and successful struggles against foreign domination.

If Zimbabwe is to protect the freedom and independence which it fought for with tenacious ferocity and persistence it has to invest heavily in its youth and in a big way.

We must protect the achievements of our liberation movements across Africa and reproduce those aspirations and ideals which motivated them and pass them on from one generation to the next.

This is the legacy which our current institutions, be they academic or otherwise, must instil in our youths in a manner which is relevant, timely and compelling.

We should never forget what happened in Libya when some Libyans opted to embrace Western countries as allies, especially Britain and France, in order to topple their own government.

Today Libya is in ruins — need I say more! It is a telling example for the rest of us that some Libyans embraced Western countries as allies and forgot that those very countries had always envied and looted African resources from the time of African slavery, through colonisation to the neo-colonial era.

Today, the West is doing what they have always excelled in when it comes to Africa: looting Libyan oil on a “non-stop-24/7” basis, without opposition from Gaddafi whom NATO took care of.

The West has no resources but have big populations and will always be keen to help itself from African resources as it has always done in history.

In contrast, Africa is a big continent whose size is matched by its vast wealth lying below and above its rich soils.

Unless we defend these vast African resources for our use and that of our children, others from outside the continent will not hesitate to come and loot them. — The Patriot

Headquartered in Nairobi, SunCulture has raised over US$40 million to equip rural farmers with solar-powered irrigation systems.

Instead of counting on rainfall or revving up diesel or petrol pumps, farmers can now rely on solar-powered systems that are cheaper, use renewable energy and need minimal maintenance.

Once the company installs a solar panel on top of a farmer’s house and connects it to a battery-powered water pump, the irrigation system can cover up to three acres.

Annual capital investment in renewables in emerging markets needs to reach US$1 trillion per year if the world is to achieve the goal of net-zero emissions by 2050.

“Now the missing piece is continued investment from both public and private financiers.

“Solar is particularly attractive because of its positive environmental impact, job creation potential, and economic development potential,”said Ms Mikayla Czajkowski, chief of staff at SunCulture.

“African nations have immense potential to benefit from utilising solar energy — especially in remote and under-served regions where energy access is limited — and facilitates a reduction in the continent’s carbon footprint, making a valuable contribution to global efforts to combat climate change,”Ms Czajkowski added.

In an impact survey of SunCulture’s customers, measurement company 60 Decibels [a US-based organisation that offers customised assessments] found that SunCulture brought about significant improvements: 89 percent of smallholder farmers experienced a boost in their quality of life, 90 percent increased their production, and 87 percent enhanced their earnings.

From GridX Africa, a firm that offers offgrid solar power to farms, safari lodges for tourists and construction projects in Kenya, Mozambique and Tanzania, to the pay-as-you-go solar company Bboxx and the Egypt-based solar power developer and electricity distributor KarmSolar, Africa has no shortage of original solar energy start-ups.

While the ambitions of these solar businesses

More than 500 million people living in Africa have no access to electricity, according the IEA Africa Energy Outlook 2022. Governments and non-governmental organisations have launched many high-profile schemes to boost the solar energy sector in African countries, with mixed success.

The continent needs a global response to address a challenge of this immense scale.

Launched in 2012, the US-Africa Clean Energy Finance (US-ACEF) initiative attempted to offset the costs of the early-stage development of clean energy projects, in a bid to draw investment to these ventures. Solar is particularly attractive because of its positive environmental and economic impacts.

For Ms McAteer, the US-ACEF model proved effective. Now innovators need higher levels of catalytic capital to continue scaling so that they can meet the UN Sustainable Development Goal 7,“Ensuring access to Clean and Affordable Energy”.

“Annual capital investment in renewables in emerging markets needs to reach $1 trillion per year if the world is to achieve the goal of net-zero emissions by 2050. US-ACEF set the model for how the industry can achieve that,” Ms McAteer said. “Now the missing piece is continued investment from both public and private financiers.”

So far, the US-ACEF has supported 32 projects, with country-specific investments in Ethiopia, Kenya, Morocco, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda.

Nijhad Jamal, managing partner of Equator, an early-stage venture capital firm focusing on climate technology in sub-Saharan Africa, agrees that Africa’s solar energy sector has benefited greatly from US-ACEF.

“There is a lot more impact to come from US-ACEF with projects like the Health Electrification Alliance, which aims to electrify over 10,000 health facilities in Africa,” Mr Jamal said. “Most of the US-ACEF projects emphasise sustainability.

In our opinion, this will have a lasting impact on the solar energy sector.”— Africa Renewal.