For the past few days, Africa has been celebrating its size.
On September 4, the United Nations General Assembly overwhelmingly backed the “Correct the Map” initiative, encouraging governments, schools and technology companies to move away from the familiar Mercator projection, which exaggerates land masses nearer the poles and makes equatorial regions such as Africa appear smaller than they really are.
And suddenly, social media discovered Africa.
My brothers and sisters celebrated as though surveyors had entered the Atlantic overnight and returned with several million square kilometres of previously missing family land.
“Ei! So Africa is this big?”
Yes, my brother. It has been there all along.
Africa covers about 30.4 million square kilometres. Asia remains the world’s largest continent, but Africa is enormous. The old map may have diminished our appearance; it certainly did not diminish our resources.
So, wonderful.
We have corrected the map.
Now, who will correct the management?
Because Africa appears to have been created when God was feeling unusually generous. Gold, diamonds, oil, gas, fertile land, rivers, sunshine and a youthful population are all available in abundance.
And yet, somehow, we remain permanently standing outside the development office asking whether the manager has arrived.
Our elders say, “In the abundance of water, the fool is thirsty.”
Africa has converted the proverb into public policy.
We export cocoa and import chocolate. We export crude oil and import refined petroleum. We export gold and then borrow heavily from countries that have little or none.
Apparently, once African raw materials obtain visas, they become more intelligent.
Agriculture offers its own comedy. We have sunshine that can roast an egg on a trotro bonnet, fertile land and millions of young people searching for work. Yet supermarket shelves across the continent groan under imported food.
Somewhere, an African farmer is staring at uncultivated land while officials attend an international conference on “Food Security in Africa.”
The conference lunch may well be imported.
Then there is leadership.
Every election season, politicians rediscover Africa’s enormous wealth. After winning, the treasury suddenly becomes an empty family cupboard inherited from the previous government.
Roads remain unfinished. Hospitals require miracles. Factories flourish mainly in PowerPoint presentations.
Meanwhile, another delegation travels abroad to study how developed countries became developed.
With allowances.
So yes, correct the map. Show Africa in all its magnificent geographical size.
But Africa’s real tragedy was never that it looked small on paper. It is that a continent so enormously blessed continues to produce results far smaller than its potential.
Gold underground is merely geology. A river that irrigates nothing is scenery. And a youthful population without skills, jobs and opportunity is frustration waiting for Wi-Fi.
Africa was never small.
Perhaps the map we urgently need to correct is the one inside our heads.
Because in the abundance of water, the fool is still thirsty.
By Jimmy Aglah
