Globalism’s Promises of Progress or Disorientation &
a Shoddily -Prepared African Leadership
Public lecture RL Vol XI No XXVI, CXXIV, MMXVII
Costantinos Berhutesfa Costantinos,
PhD
Published by Fortune
Addis
Abstract
Initial efforts by the African Union and the OAU to
develop and integrate Africa included the most comprehensive programme adopted
– The Lagos Plan of Action, Final Act of Lagos, Monrovia Symposium, Arusha,
Khartoum, and Addis Ababa Declarations, African Common Market, Cairo Agenda for
Action, Abuja Treaty. Africa also actively participated in a myriad of vastly
costly exercises in numerous multilateral initiatives. In the Libreville Declaration, African countries declared that they ‘are
committed to enhancing our cooperation at the international level and to
adapting the structure to meet the new challenges and to taking advantage of
the opportunities arising from the new environment’. Integration into the
international economic system underpins the need to search for and provide a
fresh and renewed focus in programming for the demands of globalisation,
develop approaches for integration, train policy makers in the art and
techniques of analysing global trends, learn from best practices in the areas
of resource mobilisation, borders trade and formulate and execute a system-wide
regional decade programme for human capacities in Africa.
Nevertheless, powerful forces and trends of unity and
disunity, chaos and order mark this moment of global transformation. The forces
of globalisation are dissolving old boundaries in a network of dialogue, flows
of information and trade. In advancing the case for world-class leadership in
Africa, it requires the defiance of the boundaries of inward-bound insight
(common sense), as an essential paradigm shift, of patterns of thinking and
behaving which, over the years, have built themselves into routines that pacify
African leaders to everlasting dormancy. Whatever we, as animators of development
and facilitators of entrepreneurial leadership, choose to be, we must have the
zeal, commitment, diligence, greatness of spirit, consistency and strength to
transform change management chaos into economic opportunities that can project
our communities on an irreversible global growth trajectory. Nonetheless, the issues
are whether the BRICS or the G20 will ignore or substitute for the views of the
G77 and whether the BRICS transactions with LCDs can alter North-South
interaction.
Key
words: globalism, Africa, leadership,
policy, strategy, structure, process
See lecture here or https://www.academia.edu/34482601/Globalisms_Promises_of_Progress_or_Disorientation_and_African_Leadership_RL_Vol_XI_No_XXVI_CXXIV_MMXVII.pdf
