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The free flow of people, money, trade and ideas isn’t moving everywhere.
Instead, the world is fostering economic inequality, declining political discernment, rising indebtedness and glaring disparities throughout the world's economies.
O'Sullivan argues in his book that what we need next is the levelling of all these imbalances.
Globalisation is dead. Some top economists think that this marvel that has defined global interaction and integration among people, companies, and governments for more than 4,000 years is behind us.
In its place, an emergent multipolar world that will be dominated by China, the US and European Union is evolving.
The Economist has in the past two months carried headlines like, “Goodbye globalisation: The dangerous lure of self-sufficiency” (May 16-22, 2020) and “Globalisation is dead and we need to invent a new world order” (Jun 28, 2019). There is much more than these headlines.
In his book, The Levelling: What's Next After Globalisation, published mid last year, Michael O'Sullivan, details a world in transition. He sets the scene from historical analogy in England to explain what is happening today.
In 1640, O'Sullivan writes, a faction by the name Levellers grumbled about the notables in Oliver Cromwell’s army, immediately after their victory over Charles I in a civil war. The war elites wanted to enforce a postwar settlement without any reference to the rank and file in the army.
The ordinary members of the army, the Levellers, revolted asking, “Have you shook this nation like an earthquake to produce no more than this for us?” In a similar version, the world is waking up to an unfair system where the elites are doing things without reference to others.
The free flow of people, money, trade and ideas isn’t moving everywhere. Instead, the world is fostering economic inequality, declining political discernment, rising indebtedness and glaring disparities throughout the world's economies. O'Sullivan argues in his book that what we need next is the levelling of all these imbalances.
More specifically, what is needed is the levelling of “wealth between poor and rich countries, of power between nations and regions, of political accountability from elites to the people, and of institutional power away from central banks and defunct 20th-century institutions such as the WTO and the IMF.”
Africa fuelled globalisation for centuries by providing raw materials and labour without compensation. In truth, our forefathers were complicit in depriving the continent of its resources and exacerbating the wealth inequalities we face today. That, in my view, remains true as most African countries approach 60 years of independence have not changed. Leadership in Africa today is seen as a gateway to elitism.
Most of our founding fathers saw themselves as a replacement of the colonial rulers. Although there was a spirited fight by the academics to refocus leadership on the people, that institution was smothered. Some countries like Uganda have never recovered to date from the crude leadership of Idi Amin Dada that completely destroyed the academia.
This forced many intellectuals to move to Western countries.
The impact of exile was such that the likes of Ali Mazrui and Chinua Achebe died away from home. The African intellectualism today is basically dead. Unlike in the past, intellectual scions of the current African academics both in the continent and in the diaspora — with so much research opportunity to provide leadership — have failed to take advantage of the prevailing tension between the US and China to widen the continent’s power to negotiate.
Most important is that both academia and policymakers must articulate Africa’s role in the emerging re-alignment of power in the world, failure to which the continent might find itself playing second fiddle to the new global order.
What Africa needs now is to avoid the exploitation that it has gone through for more than 400 years. It cannot be done with the prevailing mindset of mutilating the continent into smaller nations that are not economically viable.
In Kenya, for example, the failure of nationhood led to creation of querulous devolved units.
While all and sundry say that more resources have gone to devolved units, no one is saying that the focus on devolution has negatively impacted regional and international trade as well as undermined national entrepreneurial activities.
Africa’s future power will come from how fast it integrates to a unit to create a powerful region where enterprises can scale easily.
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