“While US$134 billion flows in each year, predominantly in the form of loans, foreign investment and aid; US$192 billion is taken out, mainly in profits made by foreign companies, tax evasion and the costs of adapting to climate change.”
— Health Poverty Action.

FROM pan-Africanism, Afrocentricity, Humanism to Negritude, Africa has come up with some of the world’s most brilliant ideas but the reality confronting the motherland is a need for a paradigm shift.
Africa must now be crafting policies and initiatives that speak to the global issues of the day.
There are many difficult questions confronting the continent, with the most significant being: Why is Africa poor?
There are many reasons this is so; why the continent is having to grapple with all too familiar problems everyday.
But perhaps what we should be asking ourselves is why we are in this mess when we have come up with some of the best theories that can help develop the continent.
Of course, the skewed nature of global politics has time and again made it difficult for the continent to find its feet and be a key player in global political affairs.
The West and our erstwhile colonisers left structures that make it easy for them to loot the continent and bleed it dry.
But that should never be an excuse for the many challenges we face on a daily basis.
We have the brains.
We have the resources.
We have firm foundations for development in the form of the ideas of our forefathers.
What we seem to lack is the wherewithal to emerge from our shell and become the key stakeholder that we should be.
As such, the ball is in our court.
The price of the continent’s inaction on issues like terrorism is too steep for Africa.
According to the 2015 Global Terrorism Index, the cost of countering terrorism to the world was US$52,9 billion in 2014.
This is the highest figure since 2011.
Thirty-two thousand people died due to terrorism acts in the same year.
In Nigeria, the Boko Haram insurgency has led to over 100 000 deaths since it started its brutal operation six years ago.
A May 14 2017 report by the Daily Monitor raises fundamental issues that Africa should embrace in its quest for development.
The report talks about what is known as collective mindset which it says the continent should be siezed with if it is to find its way out of the current quagmire it is entangled in.
“The reason Africa is an undeveloped continent is not because of a lack of mineral resources or money but because something has not yet started in the mind,” reads the report in part.
“Something has not developed coherently or fully in our minds at every level.
The collective minds of Africans, their leaders, their craftsmen, traders, institutions, culture and the wider society have not yet arrived at the point of ‘seeing’, sensing, knowing and wanting the things that put together what we know as a developed society.”
In Zimbabwe, there is a man called President Robert Mugabe.
He is no stranger to many progressive minds and forces of the world.
This is a man who has seen through things.
This is a man who has redefined Africa’s quest for development.
He is the same man who has read through the West’s minds and has in turn come up with economic empowerment programmes that have not only infuriated the West but has uplifted the livelihoods of the black people.
It starts with political emancipation.
It then goes to ownership and control of natural resources.
The final stage is exploiting those resources for the benefit of the masses.
In 1980 Molefi Kete Asante published a book titled Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change which talks about a theory known as ‘Afrocentricity’.
Afrocentricity is a revolutionary idea that asserts the role of the African in global politics from a standpoint of the African himself.
It eliminates the presence of the whiteman in African affairs and says Africa can be a better place without the continued interference of whites.
The concept locates the African’s ideals and values and places them at the centre of everything that the blackman does.
Historically, pan-Africanism has often taken the shape of a political or cultural movement.
It proposes that all Africans must be united and become one nation from which everyone has a role to play in the development of the continent.
In May, a report about the so-called aid and investments by the international community reveals that contrary to the widely held assertion that these investors are doing us a favour, the opposite is true.
According to Honest Account 2017, more than three times the amount Africa receives in aid was taken out mainly by multi-national companies deliberately mis-reporting the value of their imports or exports to reduce tax.
These illicit financial flows, brain drain, debt servicing and the costs of climate change caused predominantly by the West, makes Africa a net creditor to the world.
We certainly need new ideas as a continent so that we can address and do away with the numerous challenges facing the continent.