 Felly, wrth gwrs, a fawr i'r unig yw'r Unig Afro-afro-afro-afro-unig. Y Unig Afro-afro-afro-unig wedi'i gweithio'r cyffredinol y mae'r llwyddon yn ystod yng nghymru yn ystod yng nghymru, byddai Dr Carlos López, yng nghymru yng Nghymru yng Nghymru, yng Nghymru yng Nghymru. Mae'n fawr i'r unig yng Nghymru. I'm Dr Deborah Johnston, the Pro-Director for Learning and Teaching at SOAS University of London. On behalf of SOAS, it is an honour to welcome you all to tonight's first SOAS centenary lecture in Africa. Now, I hope that most of you will know that this is SOAS's 100th anniversary over the coming 12 months. We are proud to be the world's leading institution for the study of Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and our centenary year will celebrate SOAS's contribution to the world and look forward to a thriving future. Since our early days, of course, SOAS has been involved in relevant regional area studies. Today, the school offers an unrivaled portfolio of language study in terms of breadth and depth, including many strategically important languages that in the UK are only taught at SOAS. We don't study language in isolation, we have built a series of programmes that draw on a wide range of disciplines in the social sciences and in the humanities, all of them with a focus on Africa, Asia and the Middle East. I'm especially delighted therefore that this event is being held by the SOAS Centre of African Studies, which has been at the forefront of research and dissemination of Africa-related issues since 1965. The Centre, one of its kind in the UK, is a hub of academic activity, rigorous scholarship and community engagement in, about and for Africa. Our research at SOAS seeks to make a difference to society, and scholars who are affiliated to the Centre of African Studies are in conversation with issues that range widely from economics, politics, governance and development to African visual arts and literature and the African diaspora. There's a rich diversity of research seminars, workshops and conferences, including on areas of new scholarships such as the conflict between local and global identities. The Centre attracts visiting scholars, post-doctoral researchers and an international community of academics. It offers scholarships thanks to the partnership with the Moe Ebrahim Foundation and it offers fellowships thanks to the Leventus Foundation. So I hope in our centenary year you will look at our website and please involve yourself in the wide range of activities at SOAS and at the Centre of African Studies. So I'll hand over now to Chris. Thank you very much. Thank you very much Deborah. Welcome everybody to SOAS in Addis. Do you know that Ethiopian restaurant in Dar es Salaam called Addis in Dar? This is SOAS in Addis. That's what it is for the first time. So welcome everybody and thanks to all those at the African Union at the Economic Commission for Africa and at SOAS who've organised and made this possible and above all to two people who've made it possible. One is Angelica Basquiera who's doing sterling work and still downstairs trying to process people and let them in. So thank you to Angelica and of course above all thank you to Carlos, to Dr Carlos Lopez who is our speaker. But is it a lecture? Is it a conversation? We'll find out. I'll tell you a little bit about how I think it's going to go. So it's an in conversation event. I'm going to prompt Carlos with some questions around the title which is his title and the theme of a forthcoming book I think he wants to put together based on a hugely successful blog that he's been running. I don't know how he has time to do that but he does. So I'll prompt him with some questions and we'll guide it that way, have a bit of conversation and then after a while hope very much to stop and to open it up to all of you who can ask hopefully very challenging questions of him, not of me but of him. And my dear colleague Deborah may well join in with questions at some point as well. But let me, I think all of you probably know Dr Lopez but let me just briefly for the sake of formality reintroduce him or some of his, the question also be really how big is Carlos' career and experience. I think Carlos as you all know is the executive secretary of the UNECA, the Economic Commission for Africa. He has a very deep experience of and commitment to the UN system having played many, many roles within UN. He worked for a long time at UNDP and was the res rep in Brazil, I think the largest UNDP office for a while. He was the director of political affairs in the executive offices of the Secretary General I think under Kofi Annan. He's been head of the UN system staff college and other roles UNITAR so on so forth it would take a long time to go through all of them. The staff college I think was before coming here in 2012 to take up this post here in Addis. That's a lot but there's obviously more depth and range to Carlos' experience and interest. He has a very, very strong deep educational commitment and among the other roles he's played is sitting on boards, advisory roles, teaching roles linked to various institutions including the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, to the Bonn International Centre of Conversion, to Iscote in Lisbon in Portugal and to the Kofi Annan Foundation as well as others. What I always like to remember about Carlos is in his office here if you've been there you'll know this photograph. There's an aerial photograph I think of the village you, your family come from and this sort of scattered little plots in Guinea-Bissau. I think it's quite nice to think of that photo and to zoom out from there to the great sweep of what he will be talking about tonight and indeed to the huge sweep of Carlos' own career and his vision. That's what we will hear a little bit more about tonight. Carlos, thank you very much for joining us and welcome. Thank you. Now, let me begin at a very general level. You've got, this may not be to your taste, there are three economists sitting up here. So a lot of what we talk about but not exclusively will be about economics and economic development in Africa. But let me start at a kind of more broad level. I think one of the central issues for you Carlos in posing this question, how big is Africa, is to get underneath, maybe to challenge, maybe to replace some of the prevailing and typically very misleading narratives about this strange thing called Africa. We have all become sick and tired of the African tragedy, the hopeless continent, so on and so forth. Then that was replaced in recent years by another rather kind of cliched narrative, the Africa rising narrative as the McKinsey report put it, lions on the move. It was capturing something very interesting but it was too simplistic and that's, you know, it's a bit like, it's a little bit like me trying to make a cake or something. You know, it rises and I get very overconfident and then it sort of appears to collapse when the price of the commodity, the flower goes down or whatever it may be. Narratives are full of cliches, they serve a purpose and that purpose can go wrong with oversimplification. The best introduction to that for me critically is the Kenyan writer, Binyur Vanga Wainana, who wrote this lovely sharp satirical thing called How to Write about Africa. Let me just give you one little quote from him because it's relevant to this question of how big is Africa. And he wrote, look, you know, if you want to get a publishing contract and to be read writing about Africa internationally. Readers will be put off if you don't mention the light in Africa and sunsets, the African sunset is a must. It is always big and red. There is always a big sky. Wide empty spaces and game are critical. Africa is the land of wide empty spaces and so on, very, you know, quickly challenging that. What I want to ask you first, Carlos, is, you know, before we go into the economic details on this, do you think there's a better narrative closer to the reality, but still strong enough to kind of capture something of and happening within Africa at the moment that you'd like to put on? Thank you, Chris. I have to thank Deborah for being here and yourself and so has for the invitation. Angelica, for the great work that she did preparing it and AU colleagues and DCA colleagues that have also got involved. And I want to recognize the presence of Minister Arkebi Okubai with someone that is part of my dialogues to construct a new narrative in the continent. So I'm really very grateful that he could find the time to be here. Well, you know, you have this map in front of you and, you know, there's something wrong with this map. It's terribly wrong. And you may not detect what is wrong with it because it was put up to provoke you. And of course what will attract your attention immediately is the fact that you have all these big countries that actually fit within the land mass of Africa. So Africa is much more bigger than normally people think. But in fact what is wrong with this map is that it is Africa according to Mercator projection. And I think it's very interesting for us to go back to that story. Mercator projection was done in 1560, so long ago. And it's wrong because actually it is a projection based on the angles and the longitude and the latitude, not using the equator in the middle of the square, but rather using it slightly up to the north to give more prominence to the land mass of the northern parts of the universe and less prominence to the southern parts of the universe. And as a result Africa gets shrank into the size of basically Greenland, which is not actually the reality. Now, it took almost until, you know, 60 years ago to get this corrected. This map was used without any questioning or not major questioning. And what is interesting is that it still is used. You know, I have to fight at ECA each time I see the Mercator Africa. I detected it with my eyes and I said, you have to correct this, this is not the real Africa. And this one is the Mercator Africa, the Peter's projection as it is called, the one that corrects this projection and gives the equal size to the land mass of all continents according to the reality should have been a standard used by everybody and still is not. So to respond to your question, my interrogation is yes, why are narratives so persistent? They are persistent because there are some images that are located in the way we deal with reality because after all what we are doing is decodifying things that it becomes very difficult for us to change unless someone questions it in a way that is appealing, perceptive, insightful. So we kind of ourselves start looking to reality differently. So we need those type of people that come with interrogations, that come with insights that demonstrate that maybe the way we are looking at things is not actually the one reality that we thought it was. And that's what I'm trying to do with everything I write. We try all the time to provoke a different way of looking into, in this case, my subject of interest and study Africa in a different way. Whether I succeed or not will depend on how many people I manage to convince. And so far if you have a statistical sampling probably not that many, but that does make me give up. Maybe the first indicator is not how many people you convince but how many people you upset. Well, true. Then you're doing something right. True, true. I think it's very interesting that issue of the map and we'll probably come back to it later. But it will kind of broad a level what's going on and the point you're making is the way the frames with which we look at things shape the limits of our understanding and our responses. They shape policy responses. So if we move from there to the economy, how people tend to see the economy, the economy is the very diverse economies of Africa, very much affects what they think and the narratives they produce. But the problem is it's very difficult to know, even at a basic level, how big are African economies? What are the main problems there? Well, for instance, just looking back into the map. Now I wasn't my way from New Delhi airport to the city centre when I went to attend the India Africa summit. And there were these displays along the way, very nicely done, of a lion in the middle of two maps that overlapped. And these were the maps of Africa and the maps of India. Little detail, the map of Africa and the map of India at the same size. And you can see it's not quite the reality. And this was not an accident. I know it was not an accident because when we were preparing a fact book between Africa and India, I was told by Indian authorities we dealt with that they didn't want in the cover that we prepared to actually have the maps that we chose because India map was very small in comparison to Africa, but that was the reality of the landmass. So it was not an accident. It was important to give this image. Is this an Indian problem? No, it's not an Indian problem. It's more a problem associated with Africa because look at this. There is the G7. Nobody questions that the G7 should have the head of the European Union. Why? Because the combined GDP of the European Union is sizeable and it will fit within the G7. Now if the size of the GDP of Africa was put together, it will fit into the G7 group. Are we invited? That doesn't cross anybody's mind. Not even close. Do people realise that Africa has 3% of world trade and India has 2.7%? Do people realise that the GDP per capita of Africa is higher than India? Do people realise that the number of people displaced by conflicts, by the Naxalite insurgency and Kashmir, is higher than the number of people displaced in conflicts in the Great Lakes? I can go on with the list. Internet penetration is higher in Africa than India. Investment attractiveness is higher in Africa than India. But the image that we have, even now, is that India is a star performer with 7% growth per year. And Africa is this lousy thing that did well for a few years and now it's getting back to its normal. These are all perceptions and it's something that we have to strive to change. Now it's not very easy to change and you are right. I upset a lot of people and other people that have such type of assessments upset a lot of people. But it's also a bit of laziness when it comes to Africa. People don't want to go beyond sort of a normative perception of the continent. They will say, well, there are lots of pirates in Africa. The Somali coast is full of pirates. Well, nobody will tell you that the Strait of Malacca has three times more piracy than all Africa combined. Because Strait of Malacca is Singapore. It's Malaysia. So everybody associates that with something fantastic. Africa always with a negative. Why? So there's a kind of, what we might call a kind of mercator syndrome. Yes, still. That's why the map becomes so important. Because it's not just a map. It's actually a frame of mind that is translated into this sort of iconic representation of Africa. Just to push you a little bit further. So what you've really given us a sense of mainly thus far is how the rest of the world pictures Africa. Do you think there's a way in which the same mindset is in turn? Actually, it's even worse when it comes to Africans perception of themselves. Let's take the example of GDP. Not that GDP is without fault in terms of measurement of economic performance and for the better growth. But you know, there are only 12 countries in Africa that have their national accounts up to date. Meaning that they have the ear base that they are using for their national accounts within the range of five years that is recommended methodologically. All the others are behind. Some are behind, believe it or not, 20 years in the ear base. So they are still contributing economic activity according to the era of talents. And you know, they don't know that we are already in mobile technology that, by the way, is spreading like fire in Africa. So they are still in the talents. And you know, at a time where it contribution to Africa's GDP is higher than agriculture in about 15 countries in Africa. So Africans don't know the size of their economy. They don't know also the size of the different sectors of their economy. So if they don't know, what do they do with the very bad information they have? Well, they rely on views that come from outside. If those views are negative, you know, they actually think it's almost deserved. People have this negativity well entrenched that they think they want to deserve these bad notes about themselves. We are not doing so well. Well, whereas if we were going to calculate the GDP of all the years that are not counted in the various countries that have not up to date national accounts, according to World Economics for Projections, we probably are missing about 21% GDP of the country. Look at my figures with India with 21% more. Indians will really look bad. You know, we'll look fantastic. But that's not really what Africans themselves think of their size. They celebrate growth in a way that is also very sickening. Because it's not about quality growth. It's not about, you know, how much inclusiveness or job creation or very social indicators progress you are making. Although we are making, you know, and actually the news are not that bad. But my point is that it's not what is celebrated. What is celebrated is just the numbers of growth in terms of GDP appearing. And, you know, a growth that has no transformation or not enough transformation and so forth, which brings us to the debate about what kind of model is Africa after. And, you know, even if we have proclamations about structural transformation, industrialization, because we have convinced the leadership to adopt these, how many countries are really committed to this? Let's come back to that terribly important thing. I just want to hop on this theme of the evidence and the size of the economy. So if we take the normal way, if we try to just estimate GDP as a simple, misleading, but still useful indicator of the size of the economy there, there is a very massive challenge, a statistical challenge, as you outlined. Many countries, the method is a bit outdated. And that's before we even get to the issue of the size of unrecorded or informal, unenumerated economic activities. Do you think though that, I mean, so the question really is why does that persist? We've known that there's an issue. People wake up when they see the Ghanaian or the Nigerian economy rebased and suddenly they think, what do we make of this? Suddenly these are much larger economies. The Nigerian economy is bigger than South Africa, so on. It's very important, but there are still, I think, you know, there's still many of these issues in many countries. Why do we still have such a big challenge in really knowing these fairly basic facts? Partly it's because, you know, the heavy presence of international institutions producing data and giving projections has installed some laziness in the system. That, you know, you go with the projections. If you ask a minister of finance in many African countries what is the size of their economy or what is the growth projection for the year, they will say, you know, I will ask the IMF, you know, because basically they live with projections, they don't do their own, and they know that the quality of their statistics is not good. They don't do this necessarily in bad faith. It's just that they don't know the quality of their statistics not being good rather than risking calculations and projections on the basis of the national accounts. They go into the international flows that are better controlled by the IMF and then, you know, you get the result that you get. So that's one reason. The second reason I think more important is that it is very convenient to not have good statistics, politically speaking. It's therefore out of political expediency that many countries don't actually attach importance to statistics. Why? You know, imagine that the size of your rebasing exercise, meaning now you have updated, sorry, the year base and now you've discovered that you have 20% bigger GDP than you thought you did. People immediately, the next question they have to ask, including from international organisations that serve as oversight of the world, is, you know, what is your fiscal pressure? So if, you know, the people thought that country X fiscal pressure was 17%, the average in Africa was very low compared to, you know, what you would expect from a middle income economy. And then you discover that you actually have a 20% bigger GDP. So your fiscal pressure goes down to levels that are absurd, not to say scandalous, which means that the economic activity of the country is not being taxed properly. And this is a very peculiar problem in Africa, is that when we discuss informal economy in Africa, you always think about the guy that is selling SIM cards in the streets and we think about, you know, some hairdresser in a corner that has used one of the bedrooms to do some activities for extra income. Never think about the big fish that are in informal economy, the ones that are actually doing their utmost not to pay taxes, not because they are poor, but because they are very rich and they can afford to bribe the system through. This is the dilemma in Africa, this is the number one problem. Our fiscal pressure is low because we have a lot of big fish that get away with it. And you know, this is about tax efficiency, it's about a lot of things. The third problem is that we have this ODA or industry of aid syndrome, where instead of discussing the real important issues, we discuss aid all the time. Now aid, as we know, is about $50 billion a year of aid for the entire continent. We have been able, despite all the problems I just described, to increase our tax revenue from about $262 billion to $510 billion in just about 10 years, so that shows the incredible growth that is being produced. But aid has stagnated or diminished, so you would have thought that the majority of the attention of the decision makers is about where they can get more resources and better allocation and really using it for transformation. That's not where they spend their time. They spend most of the time discussing aid. And therefore, if you discuss aid, as I say jokingly, breakfast, lunch and dinner, you are not giving it the attention span that probably your interlocutors think it's appropriate, but when you compare with the priorities of the country, this is absurd. You know, we have to give it the macro importance it has, which is very small. Actually, we should discuss as much migration and remittances as we discussed aid because remittances now is $62 billion, aid is $50 billion. So we should be discussing more about the diaspora and we should discuss about aid. So we have the priorities completely upside down. So I say the three reasons, Chris. First reason is because laziness has been installed because others do the projections, the numbers. The number crunching is done by specialists outside. So you don't really pay attention to statistics. The ones that pay attention to the statistics are the ones that are committed to structural transformation because they know that's fundamental for their planning process. The second reason is this accommodation of the informal sector, which is very convenient politically. And the third reason is that we have the priorities not right because they are distorted by the aid industry. Thanks for that. I think that's very important that the sort of two particular things that are intention, I guess, in some places the political expediency of sustaining limited evidence, but on the other hand the places where there's a real drive to achieve structural transformation, you can't do that. You can't do good policy without decent evidence, without knowing what base there is for taxing and where the change needs to happen and so on. I think that's very, very important. There's a story, I don't know if it's apocryphal and you don't have to comment, but where somebody was going to come and talk here in Alice, actually, about these evidence issues, statistical issues, and the head of one statistics agency in sub-Saharan Africa threatened to block a meeting if this person was invited to come. The answer goes right to the heart of the political problem that you touch on and is very, very worrying. Carlos, I think beyond there, I think that message is terribly important, but there are things maybe particularly kind of as the nature of economic activity and challenges and global capitalism evolved during the 21st century. There are dimensions to the economy. You mentioned shifting from the age of telex to the internet and the MIT, but there are other dimensions that are terribly important here, especially in the context of climate change and those challenges. I think some of those have thus far been a bit left off the picture, their colours that aren't in the palette on your map of how big of Africa. I know, for example, that you're interested in explaining to people about the blue economy. I don't really know how big that is or how to go about that. Will you tell me a bit about that? It's fabulous to talk about the blue economy because it's even bigger secret than the landmass secrets that you are aware. For instance, if we are thinking that our natural resources are not properly taken care of, either because there is no value addition or because we have not been good negotiators of contracts or more into our domestic challenges, we have not diversified enough and we depend too much on commodities and their volatility. Project that to the sea and wow, you can multiply it by 10. The exploitation that is going on in the sea and our lack of knowledge of it is just astounding. The potential for making the sea part of the solution and our ignorance of tapping into that potential is just amazing. Of course, associate to that the fact that in terms of sovereignty, our debate has been about consolidation of borders basically. From that consolidation of borders now stabilizing the role of the sovereign state has not been very successful in many African countries. When it comes to the sea, this is much worse, which means that most of the African sea is just up for grabs. Anybody can go and take it and it can explain a lot of conflict. Normally, we will be very fast in saying, well, the reason why in the Great Lakes there are so many conflicts is because there are minerals, it's mineral rich, so there is a lot of trafficking going on there and people exploring potential by illegal means and so on. But nobody insists, although it's known, that the conflict in Somalia is partly related to the sea. The piracy is related to the sea and a lot of the reasons why we still have a conflict in Somalia is related to the sea. We can say the same for a number of other conflicts, but there are some characteristics of the blue economy that are not just about the sea, that are also about how we manage water potential in the continent. We are not that rich in water as we think we are, although people will be very fast in mentioning that only about 5% of our water is being used for hydropower generation and only about 9% is being used for irrigation purposes, so it's negligible continent-wide. People will not remember to say that it's not just about multiplying hydroprojects, because we also have challenges that are of an environmental nature and the way we are going to manage the water is going to actually define to a great extent our ability to adjust to a type of industrialization that needs to be different from what everybody else has done before. Privilege of the late comma, not being able to do the same things as the others because a lot of the niches are no longer available, but being able to learn from the previous experiences by becoming smarter and becoming much more aware of the challenges that are ahead of us like climate change. Do you see evidence of where people are taking good advantage of that advantage of late comma status? Normally I say that if we consider that industrialization is the entry point for our structural transformation, we have to associate immediately to that narrative three things because people get disturbed if we don't do. First is to explain that there is a link between agriculture and industrial transformation or a transformation through industrialization. People have to understand that. Normally they don't. They think it's about choices of sectors. If you do it in industrialization, it's not about agriculture. No, that's rubbish. You have to basically dispel that confusion. The second confusion you have to dispel is that you are going to do industrialization like others did before, meaning import substitution model, export driven model as the main entry points. In fact, you can do some of it, but you cannot put your bets on niches that have already been occupied. Now no longer available. Just to give an example, import substitution was at the time in Latin America where this bottle of water was produced from A to Z in the same place. Now probably it is in the appearance produced in the same place, but it is no longer the case because the patterns of all these things are in different places. The marketing is also entering into the equation and the registry of how you produce this plastic is probably, I don't know, from the Netherlands. So the global value chains have become imperial and Africa can no longer afford to do it like Latin America did. Then the third dispelling dimension is to make people understand that this boom that we have on services, that is of course linked to internal consumption, this boom is not by itself or by design going to absorb the informal economy. It actually can propel it in many ways if the right things are not done. So where we can put the discipline of productivity gains of making sure that the society is organized in a way where productivity becomes central is through industrialization. So once you have dispelled those, people say, but what is left for Africa? You have the worst intellectual property regimes ever. Nobody else industrialized with these intellectual property regimes. These are just amazing. Trade negotiations have become complex, stalled and manipulative to say the least. You don't know enough about the global value chains. People can even go and say, now you even have robotization automation that is not going to help you. I don't buy that part, but we can discuss it. Fourth industrial revolution for me is a myth, but we can discuss that. And then you have this situation where people will say, we are not even talking about your internal shortcomings. You don't have power, your infrastructure is a disaster, your skillset is really not up to the standards and so on. All of that is true. So what is left? Well, I think late-comer advantage. There are four things that are left to tap into those. The first thing that is left is that we are the first region that is going to experience industrialization at a time where the cost of producing renewable energy matched fossil fuels. That is an incredible advantage. So we can actually leapfrog and have a green type of energy for our industrialization, provided we do the right choices. This is amazing. No other region had had this before. So which means that we are not in the business of retrofitting. We are in the business of catapulting into green industrialization. To Morocco's huge solar scheme. Yes, what a chance. Well, you know, Archébi will tell you about Ethiopia. What's the advantage? The second advantage, of course, is demographic. People can go around and tell whatever they want. By 2035, the largest labour force is going to be here. But more importantly, you know, the speed of urbanization will be such that the deficit of infrastructure, and we are seeing already with internal consumption, is going to be so huge that the opportunities are here, that other people like it or not. What kind of infrastructure improvements can you make in industrialized countries? Some, for instance, retrofitting. But you know, nothing commensurate to the demands that are going to be centered in Africa. And you know, if you just look into investments on infrastructure, they have been growing steadily. And you know, they have not been affected by the latest commodity cycle challenges that we have faced. So that's a second advantage. The third advantage is the real technological leapfrogging is not only about robots. It's also about frugal innovation that is made possible because of access to IT. The fact that everybody will have a cell phone. The fact that we already have, you know, 30% internet penetration, but we are going to have about 80% internet penetration by 2020, not 2050, 2020. So imagine the incredible energy in the system that it allows, and we are already seeing it with mobile banking is a traditional example that people normally like to mention, but there are a number of other areas of innovation, frugal innovation that are coming from this interaction. And then last but not least, what we are seeing in the financial system is a lack of trust in the future. I mean, negative interest rates, then we are really entering into new territory. So you pay central banks to keep your money and actually you don't expect a reversal of this in the next 15 to 20 years means that you really don't believe in the future. Your risk appetite is so low. You are so afraid that growth is not going to be there, that you prefer to put the money in the kitty and pay to keep it there and actually get less money when you go get it. Wow! It's linked to demographics because you know these are aging populations, so risk appetite is linked to aging. People don't know what the future is going to look like. I better save for the future, but it's also linked with debt levels. So the financial system will have to have some sort of adjustment of the sorts. Nobody knows exactly what will come, but it will have to go through some adjustments because obviously these debt levels are unsustainable. The IMF entered together with the European Central Bank and the special EU fund to rescue Greece 10 years ago. The debt GDP ratio of Greece at the time was extremely high, so they considered that it wasn't sustainable. So something needed to be done structurally, right? Don't call it structural adjustment, that's what it is, structurally. So the debt when this programme started was 124 billion. Today, after 10 years of programme and interventions, the debt is 174 billion. So that's the result. Why? Because nobody wants to accept that someone has to take the heat of bad policies, whatever they are. Those who landed can be the Greeks messed up. It doesn't matter, this problem of appetite to risk is linked also with the problem of how we deal with when there are losses. So in that situation, would you put your money in Africa? Well, the answer is no. Most people will not, but I say that's just a matter of time. They don't have to come. So that's the last mega-trend in our favour. So if you line up these four, yes, we do have a chance, but we have a chance if we do the right things. This is by all means not automatic. It depends on how consistent and how convincing our policies are and our commitment is not going to be measured by proclamations, is going to be measured by specific implementation and action. Facts on the ground. I particularly like what you were saying there, your second advantage was the demographic one, because people are very torn. This is a very, very young and a very rapidly growing population. It's a bit like the GDP problem. We don't really know how many people there are in African populations for some of the same reasons, statistical capacities, but we do know that it's growing very, very fast, that it's a lot, and that it's very young, that something like a billion people under the age of 18 will be in Africa by the mid-part of this century, about a third of the children in the world. What you see internationally, coming back to the Mercator syndrome, is people just put their head in their hands and they say, oh, the youth bulge, it's terrible, it means people will be fighting each other and so on and so forth. You told a much more positive story on your advantage. It's brains, it's hands, so it's a labour force. It's potentially competitive labour force, but it's also an internal market. I guess whether it goes one way or the other is what you're talking about at the end. It depends on policy interventions. Policy interventions start by making sure that we have a continental free trade area, so regional integration is real, because that will create incredible opportunities and we have made all the projections that demonstrate that really, this is not just a theory. It is possible to demonstrate that the gains for the continent are just astounding and much better than negotiating other agreements with other parts of the world, so our internal market is a real driver. Two-thirds of our growth right now is coming from internal consumption. Imagine if we had, you know, bought a facilitation of that. I mean, this would have been fantastic. Forgive me if I find that difficult to take as an Englishman right now. Come from a place that's just shrunk rather than getting bigger. Now, the second incentive when we look into the African market is the fact that this market is going to be very different from the composition, demographically speaking, of other markets when they actually entered a similar stage of industrialisation, et cetera. So, like for China, the big mobility from rural areas to urban areas and from the east of the country to the west of the country and to the coast is very well documented and researched. There is a lot of empirical evidence to demonstrate that those dynamics were fundamental for their industrialisation process. In Africa it's going to happen when already, you know, a large proportion of the population is in the cities. So, we can do it faster in a way. And McKinsey is about to publish Lions on the Move version 2 or a second instalment. And they have empirical evidence to demonstrate that the growth of jobs in Africa is higher than the growth of the labour force, which is a fantastic finding. Which is not what most people say. They will also demonstrate that manufacturing and services right now exceed by far, you know, the growth in agriculture. So, it's not true that manufacturing is not taking gold in Africa. In fact, you know, just five years ago we used to export about $50 billion worth of manufactured products outside the continent. And now we are exporting $100 billion. So, we doubled it in five years. So, it's possible. But to come out to your earlier point, I think it's increasingly important that people try to get away from traditional distinctions between manufacturing services and agriculture. You know, they're not distinct. If you think about what's happening in this country in Ethiopia, whether it's Dutch production or French-Ponsettia plants to export to the Netherlands or it's Ethiopian-armed firms that are exporting herbs there, if you look closely, they're actually manufactured things. And I think it's very important to dispel that wrong impression, as I said. But it's also on the other end of the spectrum important for us to dispel the impression that because of automation and robotisation, Africa doesn't stand a good chance on this cycle of industrialisation. Because contrary to what people believe, you know, the productivity gains have basically stalled in the industrialised countries. So, there is very little productivity gains in the last five, six years. And this is wrongly, in my opinion, being attributed to the rise of robotisation. But there is empirical evidence to demonstrate, particularly a study done for France, that, you know, the number of countries with the highest robotisation are probably the ones that are suffering the most from the stalling of productivity gains. No, sorry, the other way around, are not the ones that are suffering from the stalling of productivity gains. So, where does this life leave us? It leaves us that no matter how sophisticated and how value attribution we give to IT, sophisticated sort of top-of-the-scale activities and productivity, we still need to produce the low end as well. We still need to produce the shoes. You will put your robots where you can have gains in terms of your systems of production that are better than the labour force gains. You are not going to put your robots to produce shoes or to produce textiles. You are going to automate some of the activities of that production, but you still need hands. And here comes Africa. What are our competitors? Our competitors in Africa right now and in the near future are not going to be the countries that are facing the robotisation problem. Our competitors have names. Our competitors are Bangladesh. Our competitor is Vietnam. Our competitors are Philippines. Our competitors are the poorest parts of Thailand. Those are our competitors so they have levels of education that we can match. Provided we make the case that it's better to produce here than there, we are going to attract this low end value production. Why would they be interested in doing it in Africa when in fact they are already doing it successfully in those countries? Because the raw materials are here. So they will come because the raw materials will be closer to the production. That's why we are not going to produce Toblerone or Godiva, but our cocoa can do cocoa paste. Vietnam is now also producing cocoa. In fact in about 10 years they are producing more coffee than Ethiopia. Did you know this, Archive? This is incredible. Now in 10 years they are going to produce it. These are the competitors. We have to be attentive that some of our raw soft commodities in particular, but also the mineral, I will come to that if you want, have advantages that we have to tap into. But we have a very, very, very short window to do that. This window is going to close very fast if we don't do it fast enough, which brings me to the McKinsey Lions that you mentioned. They were responsible for the African Rising narrative. A great deal. They report more than any other contributed to this African Rising excitement. It has always been about opportunities, but not for the Africans. It was opportunities for corporate business. Wow, now we go. It's rising, let's go. For the Africans it's about structural transformation. It's a much more painful, more difficult journey than the African Rising narrative tends to say to transmit. And you know, since they use that metaphor of the lions, probably they were comparing with the tigers in Southeast Asia. Let me say a word about the lions. The lions, you know that they are show-off the lions. They are really show-off because in fact they don't work that much. The lionesses do. So they are not gender sensitive. It's all about show. But you know, it's not about the real thing. So in fact that metaphor is very befitting. The African Rising narrative is about the lions. It's about show-off, it's about short-term, and it's about exploiting women. Brilliant. On that note I'd just like to thank Carlos very much and all of you for listening.