LIVING LIFE : It’s Africa’s Turn

This week, Africa will take centre stage as the host of the world’s most popular soccer bonanza – the World Cup. This is our chance to show the world that Africa is no ‘black continent’ that the western media prefers to paint as the amorphous backward, poverty stricken, war ravaged continent. Not that we do not know that this impression of Africa is not true. Africa’s time has come. South Africa is easily a first world country in Africa. Zimbabwe seems to be breaking from the clutch of the lost years. Kenya is new Silicon Valley of telecommunications and innovations in mobile banking. Uganda is on the verge of refining oil. Nigeria is a market so massive for the whole world to take a piece. Angola is out of decades of war. A new southern Sudan is about to be born. And Rwanda is a standard of progress in adversity not for Africa alone but for the whole wide world. There is a new wave of hope and Africa is riding here. It does not stop with the World Cup in South Africa but economic progress of nations in sub-Saharan Africa is evident. It gives an opportunity to each African, old and young, to rise from whatever conditions that we have been born into, been raised around into better more progressive individuals. The time is ripe for individual innovation and collective growth. In Rwanda, the government is taking various strides to improve the investment climate, to attract tourism, to enable all its citizens take advantage to progress their own self and their country. The World Cup has never come at a better time to Africa. Africa is going places, in football and otherwise. Yesterday, the world saw a spectacular opening ceremony in an African stadium next to Soweto with a capacity of 95,000 slightly larger than England’s biggest stadium, Wembley (90,000) or Barcelona’s Nou Camp, also Europe’s biggest stadium (98,000). Today the Euro is facing its worst crisis; America is just recovering from a global recession that clobbered a good part of Asia as well. Russia is still struggling to emerge from the doldrums of the soviet collapse. Meanwhile, the erstwhile global underdogs are having their time in the sun. Brazil’s economy is booming, China is growing at a crazy double figure rate, India is riding on a market size of more than a billion people, and most importantly, Africa is rising. Now is the time of opportunity, to start thinking big. Let this infectious feel-good mood that Africa is experiencing this June infuse into your veins and into your cells. Try learning new things, see how others who have been there, done that, did it. Enjoy taking parity in the peaks that genuinely successful people have reached. Allow yourself to get shocked by how some age mates of yours have achieved so much and why not you? Look for local or African heroes who have made it in similar environments like you and study their stories. While at it, believe, believe and believe that you can do it. I wish you a stimulating Sunday! kelviod@yahoo.com