Here is something I certainly agree with. Alec Hogg recently commented on the 2012 State of the Nation and Budget speeches in South Africa, and indicated a strong sense of pride and optimism in the clear direction being taken by the government. They are looking to create a hybrid economic model, trying to take the best of free market capitalism and meld it with the best of socialism. I believe that it’s possible to do so. I believe it’s desirable to do so. I certainly hope they can pull it off, and show the world a whole new way of managing the affairs of a country that is fair to both rich and poor, employer and employee.

The week our world changed – I love it, but the cynics certainly won’t

by Alec Hogg, CEO of Moneyweb – sourced from the South Africa: The Good News website
Some of you may well have read this already, but we think that this is the most interesting commentary on the budget that we have seen, so have reproduced it here for you.

From my earliest memory, I’ve been in love with this country. But rarely have I felt so proud to be a South African as right now. It’s been a momentous fortnight. We didn’t win any World Cups or Gold Medals. What happened was a lot less obvious, more subtle, even a little stealthy. But once you absorb the Budget and overlay it with the State of the Nation speech it all becomes clear. Something very big has just happened. Life in South Africa will truly never be the same again. Depending where you sit, that’s either a cause for great celebration or the final straw that forces your emigration. I’m with those cheering.
Continue reading →

Dusty streets, mazes of informal market stalls with fetid uncovered sewers running freely nearby, shabbily clothed unschooled children play between the shacks as corrupt officials swish by in fancy cars. This is one picture of many African cities in 2011. But we have maybe forgotten that it was also the picture of most South East Asian and Chinese cities just three decades – a generation and a half – ago. The depressing similarities run deep: war, disease, disasters, lack of education and healthcare, ignored by the world, except as aid recipients.

But there is good news.

I have a simple thesis: where Asia has come from is almost identical to where Africa is now. And where Asia is now – the exciting, rapidly growing, shiny-new, pulsating place that everyone wants to be part of – is where Africa’s future can be. By the end of the next decade.

Africa below the Sahara

My thesis applies to sub-Saharan Africa: to be more specific, the roughly 30 countries from Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana across to South Sudan and Kenya and down to South Africa. Northern Africa is more connected to the Arab world, and Europe.

Continue reading →

This will be the web page of the research project by Graeme Codrington and the TomorrowToday team. Our thesis is simple: where Asia has come from is almost identical to where Africa is now. And where Asia is now – the exciting, rapidly growing, shiny-new, pulsating place that everyone wants to be part of – is where Africa’s future can be.

Our team is currently researching the political, economic, social and other factors that have taken Asia (in particular South East Asia and China) from underdeveloped, rural, agrarian, uneducated countries to the globalised, strongly growing countries they are today. We want to learn lessons from the last three decades of Asian development, and help companies, governments and individuals apply these to sub-Saharan Africa today.

Sub Saharan Africa’s time has come.

To register an interest in our research, help us with our thinking and investigations, or be alerted to interim findings and articles, please click here to send an email to Graeme Codrington, TomorrowToday’s international director.

And come back to this site in the near future, as we develop it into a hub for information and insight into sub Saharan Africa’s near future.