In a special episode of Connecting Africa, CNN’s Eleni Giokos and Victoria Rubadiri celebrate five years of the show, in front of a live audience in Abuja, Nigeria.
Giokos opens by reflecting on the journey of the show, “Over the last five years we’ve travelled across the African continent, meeting the business leaders, the changemakers, the trailblazers, and telling the stories that are driving Africa forward.”
She continues, “We launched Connecting Africa during the height of the global pandemic, and we quickly delved into the innovative new ways of doing business. Despite the shutdowns, we set out to showcase Africa’s economic transformation and integration under the world’s largest free trade deal, the Africa Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA).”
Joining Giokos on stage in Nigeria were Wamkele Mene, Secretary General of the African Continental Free Trade Area and Wale Tinubu, Group Chief Executive of Oando PLC.
The Secretary General discusses the progress made over the last five years with the AfCFTA,
“We now have this task of integrating the continent of Africa, creating a single market, enhancing our industrial capacity, enhancing our digital economy. We have now concluded all of the protocols, which is to say, the legal foundation is there for this to transition into implementation. And so, I think we’ve come a long way. We have a long way to go. But five years down the line, certainly there is a great deal of success to be celebrated.”
One of the biggest challenges for businesses during the 2020s has been the coronavirus pandemic. Tinubu reflects on the impact of the pandemic on Africa,
“I think COVID forced us to understand that we need to create our own healthcare systems, our own vaccines, our own support system. The reality is that when we finally decide that setting up global standards and creating centres of excellence within our own environment is the way to go, then things will happen. The resources exist, but the question is the political will and the commitment to understand that we can’t keep exporting our resources when we need to start to build internally.”
As the AfCFTA continues to be implemented, Mene discusses the growth potential, “We have to grow our economy at sustainable rates year on year to ensure that by 2050 we have the jobs that are required for young people entering the job market. That means that we have to grow at a minimum 5% per annum year on year over a sustained period.”
Africa’s growth is tied to its energy potential. Tinubu explains, “There’s no doubt that we can’t flourish without solving the consumption of energy in the continent, because you can’t industrialise if you don’t have cheap, plentiful energy […] We have the resources to power the continent. We’ve got tremendous amount of gas. We have tremendous amounts of rivers and waterways that could be dammed to provide hydroelectricity and all the other sources. And the world today is putting pressure in terms of transitioning into cleaner energy and really Africa needs to use what it has to transition.”
In addition, Rubadiri speaks to young entrepreneurs and the next generation of innovators. This includes Terra Industries co-founder and CEO Nathan Nwachuku. The robotics and drone manufacturing startup is based in Abuja. Nwachuku tells CNN about their plans for the future, “We are deepening our distribution and naturally looking at scaling drone factories now in all the regions of Africa to serve the unique security cases that each region is seeing. So, I think that’s the next step for us over the next 24 months. And second is also improving our threat intelligence software, which is what enables our customers like mining companies, oil companies, to be able to spot out threats autonomously, identify these threats and track them across their assets. We must protect Africa and the only way Africa can be protected is by Africans.”
