Former South African President Thabo Mbeki lamented that the failure to maintain Africa as one indivisible entity is due to the weak political will of current African presidents and warned that they should emulate the excellent relationship between Nigerian and South African musicians that has transformed Africa’s entertainment ecosystem into a gold mine.
Mbeki said that young artists have built great relationships and strong cooperation strategies that have popularized the entertainment sectors of both countries and brought wealth to those who perform there.
Mbeki, on the other hand, lamented that political leaders are obsessed with unfounded egocentrism and territorialism, suppressing the wealth that should come to Africa from cross-border trade and cultural exchange.
The African National Congress (ANC) leader made the statement at his Thabo Mbeki Foundation premises in Johannesburg while welcoming the third batch of MTN-MIP fellows who visited him after the two-day Media Innovation Summit on Media Business Sustainability in the Digital Age.
Mbeki took the fellows on a trip down memory lane of Pan-Africanism and said Africa was feared because of the strong Pan-Africanist consciousness among its leaders and deliberate policy formulation to empower Africa.
However, he regrets that today’s leaders lack such political will, have become more Eurocentric, and lack a clear direction on how Africa can remain a liberated continent.
He said: “The political will to manage diversity is central to the survival of all African countries, because there are no African countries now that are not characterized by population diversity.”
“So if you want to bring a continent or a country together, you need a conscious political decision. In this respect, Tanzania is an outstanding example.
“When Tanzania was called Tanganyika, under Julius Nyerere, there were two very important decisions to bring the whole country together. The first was to have one central language.
Nyerere decided that everyone would speak Swahili and to abandon tribal and local languages, so everyone speaks Swahili. The second decision was to abolish the institution of chiefdom, so there are no chiefs of this tribe or that tribe.
These were conscious decisions made by political leaders. They made one Tanganyika people We wanted to build a nation of people of Tanzania, and it worked.
“Tanzanians are so used to a sense of unity that even a few years ago, when some Tanzanian politicians started to revive the issue of tribal identity to advance their political future, the sense of unity of Tanzania was strong enough to defeat them.
“That’s why I say it’s a political decision here. South Africa is very lucky in that respect. You know, the first diamond mines discovered in the 19th century attracted South Africans from far away, especially from Angola, to South Africa.
“A little later, the gold mines came, and the movement of people in the country increased, and socio-economic development took place. Remember that when the African National Congress was formed in 1912, one of its main slogans was to bury the demon of tribalism.
So from the beginning of the 20th century, there was a political organization whose task was to make sure that all of this algorithm came together and reached the pre-liberation stage. In 1960, if you asked any African community anywhere in this country, “Who is the leader of your country?”, they would say “Alberto.”
“So what’s happened on the continent is a retreat from the pan-Africanist commitment that we had with other previous leaders on the continent, and that weakening of resolve has had negative effects like the frosty relationship between South Africa and Nigeria. Another is poor visa regulations that make cross-border trade very difficult.”
“And so addressing the challenge now is addressing a larger political issue: the relationship between Nigerian and South African artists and what they can do is always at issue,” he added.
