 Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, or welcome to those of you who've just joined us. My name is Paul Asquith. I work for the African Foundation for Development, who's been a partner at the Centre of African Studies and so has for a number of years. It is with great pleasure and honour that I'm chairing this panel, the topic of which is actors and perspectives in the future of African development. We have a diverse range of speakers from very different backgrounds, with very different research interests to inform the topic of discussion we have, which is in a nutshell, if Africa has changed as much as it has over the last 100 years, how might it change over the next 100 years, with a particular focus on topics of development and governance? I think it's significant because there is a long historical relationship between African Studies and what we term development studies and notions of development. And as part of this relationship, Africa as a continent has figured largely as a canvas, as an idea, a testing ground, a leitmotif indeed for what should or could constitute development. Now, I think we all will have seen the pace of change in Africa over the last 20 years, certainly the last 20 plus years that I've been working in or on Africa, that transformation has been enormous. I think it's just as likely that that pace of transformation is likely to accelerate and the next 100 years are likely to be incredibly exciting for the African continent, but it throws up key questions for us about what that development will be and done in whose name. So, we'd no further ado, and following quite neatly, I think, on from this morning's discussion, which focused on issues of culture and identity, and we saw from the presentations this morning that these issues directly affect people's ability to engage in whatever development is or whatever modernity is or whatever globalization is. I think it forms quite a natural segue into our first speaker, Kenneth Muzzata from the University of Zambia, who will be speaking on policy and consistencies in language of instruction in Zambia. So, with no further ado, I'm going to hand the floor over to Kenneth, please. Good afternoon. Usually, when you're coming from lunch, it will become lazy and so on. I hope we'll be awake. Kenneth Muzzata, my name's from the University of Zambia. I'm not representing the University though because the time I sat to look for an avenue to present the ideas about the language of instruction, I came across saw us, and I clicked the button and thought I should send my abstract, and then it came. I was given a chance to come, thanks to the organizers, that definitely at the end of the day, a voice for the minority perhaps can be heard, and it can start from here, and it's starting from so on at 100 years. Thank you very much. Policy and consistencies in language of instruction, a vehicle for the extinction of minority languages in Zambia. Many are times when we conduct research and we are usually wood by numbers because we are taught 60%, 80% of the respondents say this, and therefore this informs policy. What about the 40%? How do you take care of them? What about the 20%? How do you take care of them? Ladies and gentlemen, language policy, I believe, is a very difficult phenomenon for most countries, especially those that have multilingual combinations. But we all know very well that language is a very important tool, not only for education, but for development as well. Language identifies you as a national, it identifies you as an individual, it is a conduit for cultural values, norms, beliefs, definitely it gives you that confidence, that self-identity, definitely it identifies you as an individual. So, it is very important that no matter how minor the language may be, yes, it is important to the national identity and to the individual identity. Now, if we forget the fact that minority languages can go extinct if we make poor policies, then definitely 100 years from now you will not see any minority languages around. First of all, let me make, I would like to make it clear that, what do you consider as minority? Because philosophically, when you look at the term minority itself, perhaps it doesn't even exist, or maybe it does. It is only minor in terms of numbers, but the truth of the matter is that where two people converse and understand each other, if language is used for conversation, they should be able to understand each other, then I don't think that is minor. It's an important tool for communication, so definitely it must be taken care of. Education in a minority language is an important way to maintain the status and further the development of that minority language. Many languages have become endangered simply because the language is not transferred to the next generation. That was a quote from Stake 2017, as latest as 2017. What is happening in Zambi? Historically, we were colonised by the Britons. First of all, we had missionaries, and the missionaries used local languages. They first went and learnt local languages, taught us in local languages, and then from there we came to the BSA company. We also took over using local languages here and there they were used in the classroom and so on. Then from there, the phelps talks comes in, they introduce the language of instruction as English, so we took it from there. But there were challenges even then. The challenges were teaching in English itself. People feel, we have talked about the identity issues here, people feel that learning in a foreign language means that you are still colonised. Okay, fine. So what do we do? Changes in the policies continued. We find ourselves in a situation where we started to introduce selected local languages. Four of them were picked Bembalosi, Tonga, and Nyandja. But in a country of about 72 local languages and dialects. Okay, and so four only represent. But after 1964, there was an introduction of other three languages that were picked from the north-western part of Zambu. Now, this time around, I know time signals have started. This time around 2013, we introduced a new policy in the language of instruction. We say, we need to teach these learners from grade one to four in the familiar local language. What is the familiar local language from grade one to four? Familiar local language. What is the familiar local language? This is simply a language that is representing the other languages that every child who is growing, perhaps by connotation, understands. But the thing is, does every child know the so-called familiar language that has been introduced as the language of instruction? Me, as I speak now, I would say I am of value. But within value, there are about four dialects which I don't even understand. But the teaching, perhaps is going through, not perhaps, is going through the medium of instruction as a level. What about the minority? So I carried out a study on the experiences of teachers in using the local language of instruction that was introduced in 2013. That introduction of that particular policy is actually a recycle of the time before independence, because that was tried. And then, with a lot of challenges of materials, with the complaints of the minority languages that we consider dialects, with all those complaints put aside, we still bring in back this particular policy. So I tried to find out from the teachers their experience of teaching in this local language that have been selected to represent the 72 minority languages. What do I find? Ladies and gentlemen, some teachers, Zambia is a highly multilingual country. Some teachers that have moved from one area to another have even lost their own languages. They cannot teach fluently in their own mother tongue. They would rather teach in English or they would teach in the local language, in the area they have stayed longer. Now, the question is, what about those whose language is not even used as a language of instruction and are considered minority? I ask about the performance of learners within the classroom, those that are from the minority languages. Teachers still tell us, yes? Please. Teachers still tell us, I thought it's two minutes, from right, yes. So teachers still tell us that the performance of those learners is actually lower. That then means that there is a problem in the language of instruction. We need to come up with policies that are inclusive. If there is a section of society that makes certain people feel that they are not part and parcel of this particular society, then there is a problem there in policy. While we are doing our way with, we want to do our way with English. We speak, of course, from grade five onwards, but to introduce a local language at the base when children actually are supposed to be built properly at tender ages, it becomes a very, very big problem for the minority languages. Eventually, there will be extinction. Thank you. Thank you, Kenneth. Both for keeping your presentation very sharply on time, which was impressive, but also for picking up on these very important themes, which other speakers touched on this morning, and are mindful of Cymru's paper in particular in relation to language policy in Algeria. We've seen similar issues in Rwanda, for example, or in Ethiopia, which is a country I know better. So thanks to Kenneth. Now, I'd like to introduce our next speaker, Salvatore Mankoso, from the University of Cape Town, who's very kindly been able to join us despite a rather difficult journey, I think, from Cape Town, who's going to be speaking about the Somali legal system. The floor is yours, sir. Thank you, chair. Thanks to the organisers for inviting me and accepting my presentation. I have also to make a special bowt of thank to the person who assisted me with my flight arrangement for her passions and commitment to welcome my special needs. I will try to make my presentation also sharp in seven minutes, and not to be too technical, because I know that being a lawyer I will be boring for most of you, not for all of you, but, you know, someone has to do the dirty job. And so lawyers are always around, you know. I will try. Why Somalia? I think my idea in presenting this paper is that what is happening today in Somalia for the possible development of the legal system is something that could be a sort of mirror for what is going on in many African countries in terms of developing their legal system. I said I am speaking about mixed jurisdiction, but I won't speak about mixed jurisdiction technically, because technically when we talk about mixed jurisdiction we talk about common law and civil law countries where the two legal traditions are melted. For example, South Africa, the country where I'm coming from, is traditionally considered one of the one mixed jurisdiction as well as Scotland or Quebec or Louisiana and others like this. Somalia has a very strange situation because as you know Somalia comes from the unification of two of the former Italian and British Somali territories. And when this unification was made in 1960 there was already an element of technical mixity because the system was largely based on the Italian legal system and therefore on the civil law model, but on the other side there was the criminal procedure was based on the Indian Criminal Procedure Act of 1872 or something like that that was applicable in Somaliland at the time of unification. So there was an element of mixity already. But what is more interesting is the fact that the system that today we have in force in Somalia is actually the one in force at the time of the fall of Siad Barre in 1990, in January 1991 because as you know afterwards Somalia became a failed state, the emblem of the failed state. And this meant the fact that we didn't have a government or a legislative body able to change the law and also courts or another system of judicial administration for administering these courts. So we have in this period of failed state we have a further element of great mixity because the Somali legal tradition that was put down during the Siad Barre regime obviously went up in this period. The Islamic law also raised up in terms of application, but you have to imagine that also for those areas where religious or traditional law was difficultly applicable we have element of mixity just to give you an example. There was no authority to incorporate companies in Somalia in this period. So the Somali citizens went to Dubai incorporating companies there and they were bringing and then they were making these companies made under the Emirates law working in Somalia and adapting the legal rules I would say or the legal way of functioning of those companies to the Somali society. Today we have and I mean let me give you quickly an element that I think is important is the fact that this is a sort of a typical legal pluralism. I mean for those who are familiar with the issue of legal pluralism when we think about legal pluralism we think about competing legal orders that are present in the legal system of one given country but we take for granted the fact that one of the competing legal order is the law of the state. Somalia gives the example that the law of the state can be absent and there is also a form of legal pluralism given by those elements that I was mentioning before. Today we have a federal constitution Somalia is embarking into a federal experience with a lot of difficulties I mean I'm taking aside the situation in terms of of these orders internal disorders but from in terms of purely legal situation the Somali government is still figuring out how to put in practice the federal option. We have the problem of Somalia land that is going on with its own legal development even if it's not recognized as an independent state and we have a country that is trying to understand in which direction it has to rebuild the legal system. The law in force is strongly influenced by the civil law pattern. We have common law elements we have religious elements we have traditional elements all present in the reality. We have a lot of consultants coming from different legal backgrounds that are in Mogadishu presently working with NGOs international organizations and other entities trying to propose ways to improve the legal system or to reform the legal system in Somalia and obviously each one brings or puts forward the model or the pattern he knows better the one from the country comes from. So this creates tension the final point is what first from the purely legal point of view the Somali government obviously has to make a great choice having adopted the federal option dividing the legislative competencies between the federal states and the central state first of all but secondly the history of Africa tells us that we cannot take aside the local legal cultures and therefore the legal culture must be incorporated into the legal system and when I'm talking about legal culture I'm talking about what is normally called this morning we were the panel was about identity I don't like the word customary law so let's use the word the traditional or informal law but we have also to to accommodate religious law the final point is that we are in the situation of potential great mixity with a huge situation of legal pluralism the big the real point is how to make these legal orders not competing anymore but cooperating and so completing each other in a way that we can accommodate the different the different traditions without creating a situation of clash finished thank you thank you Salvador again for keeping your presentation perfectly on time I think you raised some important points particularly about the mixed legal systems prevalent in a range of different african states and the extent to which these do or do not underpin governance and therefore politics and development and I'm slightly mindful I'm sure there's a kitling quote about making mock of men in uniforms who watch us while we sleep so having a robust legal system having a robust governance is fundamental to how we construct developments so with no further ado let me introduce our next speaker who's Mary Dunbar from the University of Basel who will be speaking about family planning in africa thank you thank you my name is Mari as Paul mentioned and I'm a PhD candidate in epidemiology at the swiss tropical and public health institute which is an associated institute of the University of Basel for three years I conducted field work using a health social sciences approach in the province of south kivu eastern democratic republic of Congo or the drc and much of my work took place on this island to your right Ejwi island on lake kivu which is bordering the country of Rwanda my research explores fertility patterns and contraceptive use in the region and today I'd like to discuss recent trends in health and development programs with the professed aim of bringing sexual and reproductive rights to populations in sub-saharan africa they're mainly encouraging women and more and more in the recent years men to delay childbearing to have smaller families and to space children out over longer periods of time ideally using the so-called modern methods of contraception such as pills injections or implants reproductive norms in the drc tend overall to be extremely high these beginning in the teenage years and the most recent demographic and health survey showed that the average number of children per woman in this province was 7.7 modern contraception was just recently introduced on a wide scale and uptake as of now is very low in thinking along the central theme of this conference when we're imagining the future in terms of development especially in the context of health in sub-saharan africa I'd argue that the past is the first place that we have to start because reproduction is a site of power negotiation development programs addressing sexual and reproductive health are inherently political and they're also inherently part of a very recent history of colonial manipulation control and coercion of bodies perhaps nowhere was reproduction manipulated as flagrantly as a socio political and economic force than in colonial belgian congo the atrocities and exploitation committed during king leopold's regime led to extraordinarily high rates of adult and infant mortality in some areas of the colony infant mortality was as high as 90 the congolese population was decimated by the first decade of the 20th century as capitalist enterprises in the colony lacked able bodied workers quote industrial labor anxieties emerged on the continent in europe to fill this labor void pro natalist policies for the colony were framed on the continent as patriotic endeavors communicated through overtly racist discourse and professing unapologetic economic aims this patriotic plea from a leader in the colonial pro natalist movement in 1926 illustrates perfectly without black labor she says our colony would never be able to send to europe the wealth buried in its soil to protect the child in the congo is a duty not only of altruism but of patriotism nancy rose hunt and american historian writes of various pro natalist policies and interventions in the congo in the colony including forced pre natal care cash bonuses for births the active discouragement of traditional abstinence and breastfeeding practices to space births and in mass monitored feeding of children older than one year by colonial agents contemporary contraceptive programs then are implemented against this backdrop of colonial reproductive coercion and violation as well as mid-century population control movements rooted in eugenics and elitist quote race and class anxieties over the quality of population growth and certainly in the discourse surrounding so much of recent immigration crises in both europe and the united states we still see these similar population anxieties and panics manifested over the course of three years in south kivu i conducted an evaluation of a family planning program implemented on ejui island by an international NGO this program aimed to encourage modern contraceptive use and the practice of birth spacing which is a world health organization recommendation to place at least two years between a woman's last birth and her next attempt at conception as part of this NGO's program women were eligible to receive cash payments from 15 to 24 months after their last birth as long as they did not deliver a subsequent child women could have received up to 38 us dollars for following the program which was a substantial amount of money on an island where 83% of individuals in 2012 were living on less than $1 a day conditional cash transfers or ccts such as this are a development strategy that were first adopted in latin america in the 1990s whereby payments to individuals are conditional on the adoption of a particular practice or a service attendance as ccts have emerged in african settings and spread rapidly around the world they generally target specific health behaviors over a shorter period of time rather than broad poverty alleviation strategies as was the case in earlier latin american programs ccts have gained widespread support from influential institutions such as the world bank and evidence shows that they do have an effect on reaching particular development outcomes conditional cash transfers then seem to be the future of health and development in africa ccts operate though on a market-based rationality so in low contraceptive uptake settings such as south kibu all that is needed to push women to use family planning it's assumed is to bring reproductive decisions into the market if we assign non-reproduction of monetary value so the reward becomes immediate tangible profitable and therefore rational however high fertility in south kibu province is a woman's path to social personhood fertility secures her a place in her husband's home her husband's fidelity access to her husband's kinship network resources and social recognition and clout in her community market logic therefore ignores the fact that reproductive decisions are embedded in complex sociocultural norms negotiations and very personal emotional desires contingent on a multitude of factors and actors so one of my central questions to my colleagues on this panel into you the audience is do we really want to market an incentive-based development programs for poor people especially those targeting sexual reproductive health choices to be the driving force of a new generation of development strategies accounts from the colonial era are evidence to how sexual and reproductive health policy and practices historically reflect the socioeconomic and political priorities not of the program beneficiaries but rather of the powers driving the programs into existence however if these programs help or even push some women to practice family planning and ultimately make healthier reproductive health choices are the ideologies and modalities to reach that end justified ultimately I believe we must ask why it is acceptable to set stringent behavioral limitations on the poor namely who should and should not have children when and how many while those at the top of the capital game those using the most resources per capita and those largely subscribing to a free market ideology that champions individual choice free will and self-determination are free to realize their own reproductive preferences without incentives limitations or coercion by incentivizing a particular reproductive agenda especially in poor populations conditional cash transfers go explicitly against the sexual and reproductive rights based frameworks that most health and development institutions claim to champion so considering that cash transfers do in fact seem to have an effect on health behavior but that they occupy this ambiguous ethical space what is the alternative proposition anthropologist James Ferguson introduces the idea of a new politics of distribution where individuals especially the poor including those not engaged in wage labor may be entitled to quote cash payments as rightful shares that are due to owners rooted in a conviction that citizens and particularly poor and black citizens are the rightful owners of a vast and national wealth at which they have been unjustly deprived through an historic process of racialized dispossession. Ferguson and other scholars urge us to imagine possibilities beyond normative market-based thinking that cash must necessarily be exchanged for something such as labor or in the case of ccts as a reward for what is deemed as best practice by dominant power structures rather can we imagine a health and development paradigm where quote it is better to give money to poor people directly so that they have confined effective ways to escape from poverty themselves and in the context of my discussion today realize their reproductive rights i would argue for a return to the wealth and opportunity redistribution routes that drove some of the first cash transfer programs in the 1990s but reimagined to fit the contextual needs priorities and rights of local populations in sub-saharan africa also further research to understand how making cash transfers unconditional could shift the underlying paternalistic and often coercive dynamics of ccts while achieving small similar if not better and further reaching outcomes across development fields and beneficiaries it is worth noting that a paradigmatic shift that places reproductive rights at the center of dialogue may not always result in outcomes as defined by dominant discourse in the global north although my research would suggest differently women on each island may continue to choose to have 13 children even after they are given the tools to facilitate a different choice ultimately whatever reproductive choice women and men make their choice once made freely and without coercion is their right a truly rights based framework that prioritizes and facilitates autonomy through resource redistribution as well as informed decisions could be foundational in the widespread realization of reproductive health development well-being and fundamental rights for women and men in africa in the near future thank you thanks again to marie for delivering her presentation bang on time even though i slightly messed up my card timing so thanks a very interesting presentation as well around a topic that's of great controversy and also highly politicized in the current context as someone who has previously worked in public and sexual and reproductive health i very recognize very much the point she raised but also in the field that myself and my colleague on the catchy work in which is around migration and development policy practice and research this issue i'd even suggest there's even a moral panic about questions of overpopulation in the global south and particularly in africa so i think marie's presentation sort of very hopefully framed that so with no further ado let me hand you over to our next speaker detlef from the university of bonn and i will try and set up his power point as well thank you thank you for thank you paul good afternoon i would try to contribute some theoretical thoughts to our panel in response to the organizers questions of how to relate development and future and future making and to begin with i would like to just point to the formulation of the topic of this conference and i would rather prefer to talk about africa's futures in pluri and not in singular and i think this is not a trivial differentiation because if we talk about the future in singular it implies that there is only one future and this will be completely wrong when we look at the african continent not only at africa but at the world at large so what we need to understand is how a future of possibilities can unfold in a world where development rather goes into one particular direction that brings me to the topic of what i want to elaborate about without really having a program i see when paul stops me how far i can't get with the seven points in seven minutes plus a map i'll begin with the map because the map that's is the only representation of my own discipline i'm a geographer as you can see from the production of the map and that brings us to to the idea i want to talk about much of what is happening in terms of development in africa is a development that is conceived not by africans but by others and we have to see how visions of africa's futures and the visions of the people themselves in africa coincide or rather clash with the visions of the development makers and that has a lot to do with spacemaking what you do see in the map is a network of development corridors or growth corridors as they also called that are criss-crossing the african continent some of them already operational some of them still in the planning stage or under construction and the outline of such a system of development corridors does have major impacts on the transformation of the countryside and the regional economic structure and this is this is somehow built into the method of implementing development corridors i will no longer elaborate about that because it's part of a major developed a major research project we are just launching at the universities of bonn and cologne under the title future rural africa so in 12 years we can talk about the results of that project and i have seven points the first one very briefly what is the future i'm referring to a book published by john aria a year ago with the same title what is the future and the question is not a trivial question because one very important point john aria and others also do have is that envisioning the future has a lot to do with your culture or social background so there are different ways of looking at the future which have something to do with the time frames in which people live and whenever we look at a situation of development it is a clash of different time frames so people who are living in an area have a vision of the future that does also include their children and grandchildren for development officials usually they think in terms of project cycles and other time frames which may be quite different from the time frames of local population second point how is the future produced future is made as researchers we can't really approach the future as such but what we can research is the way how the future is folded into the present and one way of doing that is to look at practices of future making future making i would define as the translation of vision into practice so the visions are important and the big question is where do these visions come from who has produced the visions and which interests are embedded in the in the formulation of visions development i would argue quite often has the tendency to securitize processes so to pretend that there is something like certainty about the future but again this would be a complete misconception of the future the future is by definition unknown and open and if you do plan for the future and that's what you have to do when you plan a development project you have to make assumptions about future conditions which may be completely out of place and i think this is something we have to be aware of how the very concept of development is arguing with certainty whereas on the other hand visions of the future always have something to do of how to get along with uncertainty i think this is a major problem that we need to understand how can we research practices of future making well i would follow a suggestion by arjun a padwrai in his essay on the future's culture effect where he distinguishes three practices of future making and anticipation imagination and aspiration what's interesting about these three practices of future making is that anticipation is closely related to our if you like western scientific way of looking at the future making it calculable putting it into statistics and into plans and into development whereas a future of aspiration is something completely different that's the future of dreams that may be unrealistic but that is the expression of what people want and that has lot to do with hope and spaces of hope and that's an argument i'm borrowing from david harvey a marxist geographer who writes about utopian thinking and what he calls spaces of hope so if we try to better understand how futures are are produced and what potentials possible futures have we need to understand what a padwrai talks the capacity to aspire so how can people in africa what what ideas do the do they have and what capacities do they have to express their own ideas and translate them into development planning i think this is a fundamental question that we need to take into account in development studies where does that lead when we try to connect future making with space one concept i find interesting here comes from sheela jason of science and technology studies where she talks about dreamscapes of modernity these dreamscapes of modernity often may be completely unrealistic and what she is observing in her historical examples about the dream dreamscapes of modernity is that quite often these are models that are copied from one part of the world and then transferred to other parts of the world and this is quite often what's happening in development planning and here i come to the development corridors who i would say basically are blueprints for modernisation which were not born in africa but somewhere in the world and that's my last point if we look at the planners themselves the people who are planning development corridors in africa or who are behind the formulation of national plans like kenya's vision 2030 tanzania's vision 2025 and you name all these visions and renaissance and whatever um these guys come from well london germany um singapore and the models they have in mind are models of singapore as a role model for the future development of kigali for example um singapore also um as a as an example of the planning of the valfish bay corridor in namibia so these are real dreamscapes of modernity that are harmful to african development that's my last question i i do not have an answer to that but i hope we will discuss it further in the panel how can we actually reconcile visions that are technocratic visions that may perhaps be feasible because they prove to work in other parts of the world and how we how can we africanize these visions so that they are not um blueprints that are just transferred without being sufficiently embedded in african culture needs and society thank you thank you very much detlef for a fascinating vision and i think vision is the word here because we're talking about future visions of africa and i was minded during your presentation as a advert for i think it's orange mobile phones here where the slogan is the future is bright and i think when we talk about development we assume that the future will be bright even though the historical evidence would suggest to the contrary so um on that note i'm going to introduce our next speaker on ikachi wamble who will be speaking about uh migration and mobility in 21st century africa good afternoon i'm not going to answer the questions that are coming up um they were suggested to us as the last speaker said as a way of kind of framing all of our conversations i will respond to some of them but i think they're there and um maybe useful later on for our conversation i'll broad the conversation but i wanted to talk really about um demographics and in amongst that how demographics impact migration and i also wanted to if there was a third team a theme that i wanted to address it was um automation and what does all this mean for africa 100 years hence um a few weeks ago i was at a conference um as we all are in the uk we're obsessed by brexit and what's going to happen after 2019 and this particular conference was um looking at how the the uk might re-engage with africa and um looking at investment models um and win win kind of um trade and investment between the uk and africa and what was interesting was that the conversation was around the usual finance it was around um intellectual services other commodities basically it was the usual thing that we would do in a have in a trade conversation but there was nothing about labour there was nothing about people it was all about money and um and we were talking about what it was that each side traded and what we could do so it was the usual conversations about oil about you know the things the resources that africa have and then what is it that africa needed from from the west and um i'm from the uk in particular and my contributions to the conversation was to say that actually what africa is one of the big things that africa has to trade is labour and if we're serious we need to be putting that on on the agenda at the moment africa is exporting this labour in a very dysfunctional manner we see that um with the people crossing the mediterranean and in various states of distress and the deaths but um there could be a model for how we skill up that labour and export it in a much more meaningful way and this is really important if we look 100 years hence because as i said africa is exporting labour because there's a huge demographic bulge on the continent at the moment and that demographic bulge is leading to push factors in terms of migration the biggest push factors is from the rural to the urban areas a place like Lagos is going to expand Kyra the big mega cities are going to expand in population because they're absorbing people from the rural areas and then the second biggest push is across the african continent itself in terms of regions uh and possibly that the least of the pressures is the one that's going north to south and which strangely enough is the one that's attracting the most conversation and we know why so what's what's this demographic explosion that we're talking about the according to the UN in um in 21 um at the end of this century um 22 wherever we are africa will have 11 billion people sorry the world will have 11 billion people the world but what is shocking is that africa will constitute half of those 11 billion people so we're looking at probably five billion on the african continent um Nigeria alone will have 700 million these these are the projected figures um what does that mean in a place like Lagos are we looking at utopia are we looking at a dystopia what are we doing to talk about this in terms of um what's going to happen to this labor and it is all obvious that Africa given those numbers and given that share of the world population is going to carry on exporting labor so how are we going to do this and i'm really asking a series of questions at a forward in terms of the question what do we mean by development we we think development is about a job um because if if you have a job generally the things that everybody else is trying to do for you in terms of building a well and all that you can do for yourself where are these jobs going to come from um at a time when we know in the next 100 years that automation is going to destroy a huge number of the jobs that we currently have so these are some very kind of big issues that that i i would like a conversation about i don't think i'm you know i'm not saying we have the answers yeah um but in terms of africa's engagement with the world if we the african population constitutes half the world's population that engagement is going to be very different um and what is that going to mean in terms of some of the questions that we've been talking about in terms of transnationalism in terms of diaspora in terms of culture in terms of you know and i'm talking now not just about african culture but global culture so these are going to be very huge questions um that we look at it could also be that africa's expanding and producing lots of um lots of labor to point as i say with automation that labor's not going to be needed because robots will do all all the work and so again africa will be caught out when you know the world has shifted and how it does things and understands itself and we're producing again things that the world doesn't need um the final point that i i wanted to put out there was was really that um you know we've talked a lot about africa and we're talking about the future but there's been and we do talk about the past because we're stuck in it but on this question of labor i think it's really important just to revisit the fact that for certainly the last three four hundred years africa's been again exported a lot of labor again in a very dysfunctional and criminal way as we know as a result of the slave trade on that occasion you know people were kidnapped and enslaved and taken off to work uh implantations as part of this global system that again we we we seem to not want to talk about in its organic sense and the role of labor in that and who pays for that labor and where does that labor go and how is that labor going able to move around and be and be free free in all the senses um that we understand that word particularly when we talk about the period of enslavement um it's important to note that most rich people can move around the world if you've got two million there's no country in the world that won't accept you if you've got skills there's no country in the world that won't accept you so we're talking about again a particular group of people who can't move and interestingly the african continent the movement within african countries and across the continent itself is restricted it's problematic but it's freer than sometimes the broader movement north so we you know we need to kind of interrogate um what all of that means um so i think um for me the question is in a hundred years time five billion people half the share of the world's population what are the opportunities for that and what are the challenges for that is it utopia or is that this terpia thank you thank you on your catchy for uh an interesting and inspiring discussion perhaps slightly controversial i hope it was slightly controversial for some people but in uh in some ways it may anticipate our last but very much not our least uh speaker which is professor chris cremer so if i could ask him to come on to the stage now please hi hello um salvatore was um slightly worried that other people think that lawyers are boring try being an economist so be that as may i and my head is slightly buzzing with these very interesting kind of dreamscapes and visions and all sorts of ideas that have been running but i want to try and talk about a very small part of at least what might be the present and and the near future um and because of i think my argument is that whatever the very very many things we think development involves or means to different people arguably at its heart there continues to be um a process that that's been identified long ago and that's a process of a shift of people out of very low productivity economic activities and increasingly into higher productivity activities traditionally that was thought to mean people moving from the countryside off their farms and into cities and into large urban factories and the problems with that now are that people fear that cities cannot cope with the scale of the the the possible influx more than that there are very great fears at the moment that industrialization traditional industrialization isn't what it used to be that it doesn't generate jobs for all that labour that on your catch you was talking about at the same rate that it used to and has done in other parts of the world so just when uh mainstream development economists have rediscovered something called industrial policy and it's become quite fashionable actually possibly no longer will kind of work the same magic um rather contorted magic that it that it used to mean um so people talk for example about the fears of premature deindustrialization in Africa um and I think it's within that context that I that I I want briefly to to mention this thing I call the industrialization of freshness because there is there are different sources of employment and foreign exchange earnings and things that are useful in the processes of development that are hugely significant globally and to Africa's future there's a change if you like in which the factory is moving to the farm um and I wanted to just sort of talk through a couple of examples and ask you which you think is the industrial product here and you're supposed to say it's this it's the carton of oranges and we don't have time to play games it's not it's the orange okay the oranges are much more high tech sophisticated industrial product than this why because any any anyone can put together a kind of cardboard carton these these days and what they fill it with typically this is in South Africa is the really bad quality oranges so if you want to sell the really good stuff that gets high value high prices that's a harder thing to do right that's the orange on the right um if you if this is just for an advert for machinery that does part of the kind of processing and cutting for macadamia nuts uh often in this country we would get them just just kind of ready to process but in some parts of the world particularly Asia people like to sit around and kind of prize them open and there's a bit a neat little incision that you make here there's many many stages in in processing macadamia nuts on the farm and and elsewhere um there's also a macadamia nut mafia in east coast china but that's a that's another story um there's the there's if you go around this is a this is an interesting farm this is a Dutch farm uh in Ethiopia um where the the owner and they they grow poncetia cuttings and they get them further processed in the Netherlands and the owner was very much agreeing with me that what's going on in here is that his his torturing plants they're manipulating heat uh humidity light and so on so forth and they they they're deprived I didn't know this about plants but apparently plants like to sleep and what he does is he deprives them of sleep a bit like don rumsfeld depriving people of sleep and so on so somewhere else um so I mean this is this is a kind of amazing thing and actually the very interesting kind of green technology underpinning quite a lot of this as well you know you buy those avocados is my last example for now when you buy avocados and they have that sticker on and it says ripe and ready to eat and five years ago they weren't you know you crack this thing open and it would be kind of like a rock inside it wasn't now a higher proportion of them are and it's very interesting to think what's gone into that um and just one part we could follow the chain from the genetic plant stock r and d in california or whatever um through to the very very complex processes involved in meeting international phytosanitary standards the it systems that you need in order to barcode and be able to trace every carton of avocados oranges whatever it might be the very very precise energy efficient application of input so on and then when you've got your avocado somewhere else it gets cooled down to slow down the ripening process and then it might arrive in in southern england and then it goes into a ripening facility where it's treated with ripening gases that affect the rate of ripening so on so yeah and this is this is extraordinary stuff and and and increasingly sophisticated and what i want to very briefly and simply say is all of this confirms how economists historically have thought of the industrial and there are many different definitions of what that means the industrial but usually it involves kind of complex processes you know broken down into producing something what alan young talked about in 1928 which is the insertion of an increasingly intricate nexus between the raw commodity and the final consumer you can in other words you can take these things and you can see for those of you who may have done a little bit of your reading of adam smith you all know about adam smith's pin factory where he describes the the breaking down of making him a pin through a very efficient division of labour process into about 18 operations and you can see that division of labour in the the roundabout production of a bag of herbs in an Ethiopian herb factory actually that one is supplying Tesco's here i think amongst as well as the domestic market roundabout is another thing alan young talked about that's what the industrial is it's a roundabout process of production and there are many many more pictures showing how many different steps there are involved in in producing that okay why does this matter so one reason it matters is as i've said in a world in which traditional industrialisation the garments the cars and so on so forth might not be managing to solve the labour problem right because of automation and things on you catch was talking about this agro industrialisation may have a much higher rate of labour absorption so it might be one important part of the puzzle of of dealing with a very very intense challenge second thing is that many policy makers and i'm most familiar and something this work with those in Ethiopia and in South Africa who are concerned perhaps with dreamscapes of modernisation they're not from Singapore they're from Ethiopia they're from South Africa but they have in mind a process of modernisation in which they think that agriculture and the countryside is a slightly embarrassing leftover from the past more bright factories making cars and superconductors and these are more exciting they're ignoring something with huge value gains huge scope for employment for foreign exchange for technological change so on so forth that's why i think it matters it matters too because i mean this for this audience it's interesting but but many development economists so have always been very pessimistic about the scope for gains from so-called primary commodities and processing them and i think they're they're missing a trick there but this is a final thing i want to say is if you want to succeed in what's effectively an extremely hostile world but a high value world of production and trade in these things you cannot just leave it to the market anywhere that succeeds in these whether it's Peru or it's Brazil or it's South Korea and grapes or whatever it might be anywhere that achieves success in this field of the industrialisation of freshness or by the way in the USA or the UK does so on the basis of and with the support of very very carefully designed serious state interventions and support and that's where some of my work is is looking at in the policy gaps but we don't have time to go in for that so i'll stop there thank you thank you very much chris for a stimulating discussion as well i'm almost tempted to abuse my chair's privilege here and ask chris a question directly on the basis of his presentation uh uh are you optimistic about the future of the potential for industrialisation in africa from here um i'm always optimistic yeah you have to be um otherwise otherwise i'd give up and go home i mean i i think it's a slightly more nuanced answer is that they're um all the kind of rhetoric of of the african renaissance and the rapid growth in in recent years was actually very very troubling because it didn't in many places really reflect a process of structural change it was unprocessed commodity boom stuff um and i think it's partly because of that but people mainstream development economies sort of finally did come round to the need to push for structural change including industrialisation but they don't fully know and they disagree with one or another on what that really involves and um i think what's given me an excuse to talk about Ethiopia what i think is really really interesting is the way in which uh the few places where something genuinely possibly very interesting is happening is in spite of the uh development mainstream not not not because of it it's because of policy makers doing something and it's fraught with contradictions and it's very very problematic but there are things happening in Ethiopia which are almost i think unlike almost anywhere else actually uh and if it fails there then i start to become a bit more pessimistic thank you and i could happily speak about Ethiopia all day i was going to mention a quick anecdote earlier this week i was speaking to an Ethiopian civil servant who was complaining vociferously about what he described as the north's development agenda that focused almost exclusively on urban centres on urbanisation uh to the detriment of the larger rural populations and he felt that this was a problem in northern development policy reading between your lines i get the sense that it's not just a problem of northern development policy it's a problem of development policy full stop but um i don't want to get lost into an Ethiopian loving i want to throw questions and answers out to the floor so has anyone got any questions for our panel i think there's a lady at the back here on the left hand side anymore for it and i'll take questions in groups of two or three and uh there's another lady here on the left hand side right behind you there yeah hi panel i i rather enjoyed quite a few presentations but i'd like you to address um the question of whether what you've been discussing isn't more or less the recolonisation of Africa rather than the development of Africa could i slightly paraphrase that for you madam uh just slightly and just suggest is it about recolonisation or just continued colonisation i don't want to put words in your mouth i really don't and i think there was a lady here who had a question sorry here thank you good afternoon um i really enjoyed all the presentations um thank you very much i think maybe my question might go for um to the man from afford um and it's still mainly dealing with migration of the diaspora um so what happens is usually it sounds like a great thing i mean face forward uh or face value the the diaspora going back home is a beautiful thing but then usually what tends to happen is the culture breakdown or perhaps just the lack of understanding between maybe um a british nigerian or a british ghanne and going back to ghanne or nigeria itself um and in the country itself as well perhaps the problem of people not really accepting diasporans just because perhaps of the sort of yeah you're a bit uppity uh we don't want you to come and think that you know best but come and adapt but at the same time the good intention is that perhaps the diaspora may have to come back and want to do well so that sort of cultural clash and those clashes um so essentially sort of looking behind the curtains of the pretty presentation of the diaspora going back yeah okay thank you um let's start with uh uh a panelist immediately on my left i don't know if you've got any comments you want to make to these two points kenneth just a comment perhaps on the first point and the first question whether colonisation or decolonisation um from the perspective of education and policy uh issues in zambia we find ourselves in a quagmae of some kind because for example if we move away from english at the moment we are creating another problem the problem we have is we have for example as at now um seven selected familiar languages but then we have 72 that are not used as languages of instruction and the moment you start using these seven at grade one to four you are depriving the 72 minus seven over the quality education that they require so even as late as yesterday i was reading a new article that was still proposing that we continue using english in the interest of fairness in the interest of equality if we have to be disadvantaged let us all be disadvantaged and so at the end of the day you would be talking about continued colonisation instead of decolonisation but if the global world wishes to help africa come out of this quagmae the idea is to invest resources to empower teachers to teach in the various local languages that exist in those countries and i believe this is not on the problem of zambia there are so many african countries with so many minority or dialects languages so colonisation may continue if we take it as colonisation but the issues will have to handle development in africa has to be handled from a perspective of inclusiveness that whether one is a minority or is from a majority they have to participate in this same development that way so the idea at the end of the day is we need an inclusive policy a policy that does not actually exclude some people from the development agenda and if we are talking about that policy achieving that policy we have to speak of issues of equity equality they have to be brought to the table and that should benefit the minority languages as well so we find ourselves in that particular problem at the moment people want that every child must be subjected to a learning channel through english if you use the local languages you are disadvantageing the many other languages as well i'm not really sure whether we are on the right track but we are we find ourselves in that work mile it would be better to have policies as at now to have policies that would empower the minority languages as well rather than just select the local languages thank you kenneth that left uh is there anything you'd like to speak to either these points uh let's just gloss uh uh it as development as colonisation or also around migration and uh diaspora return yeah my point is um i think we should get out of the the blame game um this is an argument we've often heard that um development corporation is a continuation of dependencies and there is some truth to that argument but at the same time in other places there is no truth to that it doesn't explain everything we are decades after the end of the colonial age and we have to see that some countries have really changed a lot just take the example of Ethiopia again i don't think that we can explain what's happening in Ethiopia at the moment just just in terms of a continuation of colonisation on the contrary what we do see is that um the the very pronounced development optimism that we do see in Ethiopia comes from the country from inside it is something that comes from the government so if if you want to use the term of uh recolonisation we should rather see that there's new people in power who are no longer um from the north but these are people in the global south who are themselves controlling and and colonising their own country and there's certainly something that that has some truth in Ethiopia and in other countries in in Africa so please do let's get beyond um um the blame game the situation is more complicated thank you Detleff only catchy yeah i'd like to disagree slightly with that but i mean i think um i mean these issues are structural um and to be honest um you know a long time ago i stopped blaming the colonists for anything i mean i tend to think it's a little bit like the rain and if you want to avoid being so to get an umbrella so so the question is what is it where is the agency with the Africans because you know as the African Americans used to say if you're a dormat you will be stepped on so what is interesting in the Ethiopian situation is that they weren't colonised actually and they have always preserved their policy space which is the point that Christopher was making how do you have the agency to preserve your policy space why were the Chinese the Indians able to do that because quite frankly a lot of the advice over the last 40 years on development has been terrible and most of the Africans have been like dormats and got along with it you were told to shut your tertiary educations from the word bank and you did that why would you do that when that is the source of modernisation if you're serious about the project so i think there is an element of this and and what i'm much more interested in is why have those countries who are not moving forward or protecting their policy space to decide what they want to do and assess advice on the basis of their own understanding of reality why have there been so few and that for me is a much more interesting question in terms of the diaspora issue i met somebody who returned back after 40 years in the UK to Jamaica and then said oh the Jamaicans don't like me and they don't understand me and they don't and i'm like well you left 40 years ago the country hasn't stopped yeah so if you're going to go back you need to make the politics to go back because life moves on you may have stagnated but um Jamaica is a different place so in the same way that we've made the politics and expanded our rights to be here you need to do that there and this is also about how we increase you know the knowledge production the institutions that enable us to to make that politics there is a lack of awareness there as well about what the diaspora brings to the table and that's those are the things that we have to put on the you know we have to make people much more aware of and that's what you then need to negotiate um you know your new role um you know again i was talking to a a Nigerian professor a vice chancellor of one of the leading universities in the country um about 10 15 years sorry 10 years ago and said have you thought about having a a chair not a department just a chair in the diaspora studies or and he looked at me like why would i want that and and then i had to explain that something like you know 20 percent of his foreign exchange was coming from diaspora and i can't see why the leading university is not interested in where 20 percent of its foreign exchange is coming from and how it maintains that and grows it and does what it needs to do so i think you know all of us what i try to do in my presentation is to talk about um africans as economic actors not as victims of all of this we are exporting labor we're just doing it very badly let's actually do it better let's skill that labor get value for it and do what we need to do rather than this perennial thing that things happen to us rather than us having the agency to determine this we are the biggest transnational almost after fdi flow of finance into all our countries what does that mean if you're a british um business person and you go to garner the minister will see you if we go nobody but that's also a result of our function you know somebody will meet you at the airport treat you like you're a god and but we go along and you know who are you and you're treated the way that you are that's that's ridiculous so i think we need to raise our game in the process just to add as a slight footnote to your question in terms of diaspora return i'm informed that in Somalia there's a neologism which is Dujuspora which means diaspora in a pejorative sense so who are these guys coming over here with a western passports western education stealing all the best jobs so it is nuanced and it's certainly not clear cut mary were there any points you wanted to address out of the two i'll go with um i would say not a continued colonization but an evolved colonization actually and i'm speaking from my experience in Congo which is perhaps one of the most extreme examples you could have of a long term very entrenched presence of NGOs and i think one of the biggest successes of NGOs in sub-Saharan Africa has been the contribution to an African middle class anyone associated with an NGO is living in a very different socioeconomic status than their rural counterparts that they are working on behalf in fact um and this is could not necessarily be a bad thing of course i want my African colleagues to enjoy those those privileges as well but i fear that it's um we've always seen that there are intermediaries involved in colonization and also um now and in my presence and all of the NGO workers presence in in these contexts um and what are the consequences of those intermediaries then now living a very different reality than for example people in rural areas that the programs are trying to um to reach um and we come up with especially in health and development certainly in the sexual reproductive health arena what happens when our agendas from the global north clash with the agendas of our our colleagues in Congo or Rwanda or anywhere that we're working how do we negotiate different ideas of development different visions of development um and when we're when we're trying to get away from colonization um but then i have my Congolese colleagues who tell me my male Congolese colleagues who tell me that rape does not exist in marriage how am i supposed to mediate those two very different worldviews coming from a woman uh and an advocate for reproductive and sexual rights um but that is that's the cultural context that i'm working in so these conversations i think i would agree that it's a much more complex colonization now um than we had before where it was literally black and white um i think there are a lot of gray areas now in these conversations thank you chris anything um anything you'd like to add it is more complex and largely because you have the great joy of multiple sources of power globally now as well you can be colonized by lots of people um i i i had a friend no it's not a good thing sorry um i i had a friend who who um he wrote about it and used to talk about sadly she died about the first american empire and the second american empire and in the first american empire from the end of the second world war until about 1979 the motto was you do it your way so as long as uh countries and their governments were not raving communists they would get lots of western support and they could kind of largely do what they wanted they could experiment with economic policies and so on south korea et cetera the second american empire uh bit hard from 1979 onwards and is the era of the washington consensus and the motto was you do it our way and there was very very restricted policy space i think despite the ongoing the lasting pressures the conditionalities despite the enduring arrogance of western diplomats and governments and so on so forth i think we are beyond the extremes of the washington consensus and there is more scope for for debate and within that context the owners tends to be i think it might not be for me to say on african politics societies and leaders to to grab that opportunity and i think to go bring back briefly to ethiopia there are ethiopian flower growers as well as dutch there are ethiopian vegetable exporters so on so forth but the real issue is about maximising the the linkages the domestic gains it is it's very very striking in the vegetable business how absolutely all the inputs are imported uh and in the chinese built light railway in adis you know the stern tiles on the the the slope down into the only section which is underground i mean it's obvious they can be produced in ethiopia but they're shipped over from china these are things that you know can do something about right so i i think that's where the issues really are and i think the the responsibility largely lies domestically servitori any final reflections on these two points before we open the floor to more questions talking about law the situation is is very is very complicated first of all what we mean by decolonisation of law i think decolonisation of law in africa means that the african legal culture the african spirit about law must be into the laws of the african countries at the very end the law is not made for me or other colleagues to stay here on this table and this entail about it is made for the people to apply it and people don't feel confident if they don't recognize in the law it's we are talking this panel goes across the general idea of governance and we if you go around in africa many people say that africa needs the rule of law but rule of law is a western concept if you think and if you look around in the in the in the scholarly work scholars today admit that there is a rule of law with chinese characteristics why is not possible to have a rule of law with african characteristics the message i brought in my presentation is that the cultures of the african people must be brought into the law but this is in the hands of the africans the african people themselves at the very end because if in togo or in tanzania when there is a new law to be made the government asks a western consultant to draft the law what is the the in i mean the background of the western consultant the western one what is the interest of the western consultant in voicing the government that gave him the task at the very end we have a very nice piece of law that is most mostly not applicable just to give you a couple of examples in in western central africa there is an harmonized system of business law that is the same for 17 countries it's a huge i mean it's a huge achievement ideated by the africans but at the very end they asked this covers mostly former french colonies at the very end they asked the french consultants to make the law what the french consultants did they called they mostly copied paste the french law and for example in the in the one about securities the only the only security of the other removals is the mortgage you would say normal but then if you go and look at the at the the experience of these 17 countries less than three percent of the land is registered how can you give a mortgage if your land is not registered a colleague from belgio who was entrusted and this is the final point who was entrusted to make the the draft law about contracts was requested to make a law based on a an extremely modern pattern that is the unidra principles of international commercial contracts taking into consideration the african specificities he was very smart he traveled 14 out of these 17 countries to investigate which were the african specificities he has to take into account and speaking with judges government officials law professors no one was able to give him any hint about the african specificities or contracts out of the fact that there is a high level of illiteracy so from my point of view this is what i mean the african the african people must take conscience that they have the tools to produce their own laws that are based on the legal on their own legal cultures and that are useful for the people thank you i'm also slightly impressed that we've managed to get to nearly 3 p.m. before china has mentioned can i just add something go on let me catch you before i answer the next before we get next questions and thanks for a really great response on that i mean i just wanted to say that i mean in the nigerian context where i'm from um you'll find that something like between 60 and 80% of legal disputes are settled at customary level in the villages by a chief or whatever framework that they have um in in my part of nigeria would be a group of old men who would do that based on in in our place um a system that literally translates so men are liars contact on the land so the principles of how you you do jurisdiction sorry how you your legal principles are derived from the relationship with the land and the transition we made from hunter gathering to settled farming communities and a series of approaches to customary law and embodied in that principle now what happens in nigeria is that most of the reason most people won't go through the the british or the western uh state system is that one they're afraid of the cost secondly if you don't speak english you're in a a context where you won't even understand what's going on in terms of the proceedings secondly um you can be caught up in that system some people have been on parole sorry on on bail um for you know five years sometimes seeking legal redress and then there's the issue of fairness because people sometimes don't try and trust the judges and everything else so the reality is that you know the vast number of legal disputes are settled at this other level um which is again not recognised because most of the people involved in that system are not paid you know what what would happen is that the the two disputing parties in my village would take a you know a hen or something or a goat to the person who does the arbitration and um and at the end everybody accepts a verdict but they're not part of any kind of legal system within the country they don't receive resources um there's no conversation about how you transfer some of the best practices in that other system into the system the two just kind of operate in two parallel worlds i mean it's um and and so i i really take on board a lot of the points that um that have been made there about the importance of just actually looking at what what is going on in terms of reality and this does have very significant um kind of consequences i mean what happens is that the state when it wants to solve problems pulls a load of money in pulls a lever and of course there's nothing at the other end because the other end is completely operating in its own parallel track thank you on your catchy right let's take two or three more questions from the floor and i'm going to take them from this side of the room because i don't i'm often accused of being a leftist so let's look right this time uh i'll take the gentleman in the suit he's uh sat there uh yes that gentleman with the the blue suit that would be the first question i'll take Federica next sorry yes the mic's coming to you sir yes that was you exactly right yes thank you to the panel um i would like the panel to address uh the issue of the state in africa or in other words the the failure of the state in africa coming you know i mean um you mentioned the current pace in terms of law but actually the idea of state is a current pace from europe and it's still an alien uh you know concept in africa just to quote um someone who was talking kenyan politician who was talking about the elections recently he said there's no second as kenyan there are kenyan is a geographical phenomenon it's not a country so uh i think this question touches on all the things that we mentioned before for example in terms of language one reason state is failing in africa because there are different conflict between different communities which language goes first question of migration out of africa the people are the reason our people are dying in the oceans is because there's a failure of our people our our leaders to govern um the states of africa the same goes even to the to the idea of um the industrialisation of freshness uh that that seemed to be a flimsy concept to me because underneath Ethiopia for all the good news we hear from it there is a huge issues going on there in terms of stability and national unity and so so please could the panel touch on the issue of governance and the state in africa thank you so we've got a question about the state in africa and i might even be attempted to uh parenthensise it in relation to the state in africa in a world where increasingly states maybe aren't the kind of units in a globalised world but i want to take two other questions one from frederica and then from uh professor suni here and then we'll have some more rounds of questions and give the panel a chance to respond thank you um i like this opinion emerging from this panel that the futures need to be african and that we need more african solutions for problems that may be colonial or maybe african or maybe global i also think that africa has the potential to give some solutions to the rest of the world um and my particular interest is in languages and multilingualism and so my question is maybe more directed or my comment more directed at keneth but i think it's um also valid for the discussion we had in the morning so i think it's really striking to see that the the the language issue has not really progressed much since independence and you know we still see it as a problem that can only be solved by having all languages instrumentalised in an education system or all of them continuing to be marginalised and i think this is a european solution to manage something that is a is an african reality multilingualism the european solution is to have you know these bounded languages each of them needs to be used in all domains each of them needs to have a standard the standard needs to be taught and hence you need to have a territory for this language because you cannot teach 72 languages for instance in one place not even three we know that even the richest countries in the world who have multilingual language policies struggle to even implement three languages so what i want to emphasize here is that i believe there are already solutions in africa because africa has been multilingual for a long time and if you look at what happened happens beneath the surface what happens in oral interaction in classrooms for instance what happens in village assemblies what happens in regional federations is very flexible arrangements to deal with linguistic diversity through interpreting through language etc yet the education systems remain wedded to this very european idea of language so i think the solution is there it's just not recognised and you know it would involve rethinking what languages are and how they can be used in so can i gloss your question as how can african solutions to multilingualism be promoted or such okay and there was one of the question i think it was from professor sunday where we're going to take if i could ask to keep your question or no just a comment actually you see the issue of justice administration in africa and specifically nigeria remains the old system type justice is underfunded and undertaking care of so to say but i think i want to just draw your attention to something that is happening now when you talk of about africa now what is the most important thing you know about alternative dispute resolution ideal they'll say is african magic and i give an example there was this particular case of land dispute a young man was denied the property of his father for a long time and 12 of his siblings actually came over to take the same group plot given to him again and as the team dragged onto the court so at every court hearing each of those siblings will die so after the first die second third up to the eighth so the judge became worried and the man was a date of the court sitting will say tomorrow mr lawyer don't come or something will happen another person will die so the judge got tired and said what is happening and the man said it is gold that was killing them not him and it was through anyway so eventually the judge had to dismiss the case because all the witnesses had died i say yes that's african magic it works faster than the european justice system and the lawyer eventually sought to know the formula from the man of course i won't tell you that one thank you thank you for that fantastic anecdote and i was going to suggest that the panel start at salvatore's end so maybe this is a good point for him to step in thank you i'll try to be very telegraphic on the three points state multilingualism and justice uh state uh you are right the state is not working in africa is the west falian model that is not working in africa because uh the western again the western concept of the state uh is linked to an idea of separation of powers and uh the idea of a majority that wants to keep a majority place and the minority wants to become majority this is not the african culture you know this better than me in africa the chief must be the chief of the entire community otherwise he is not a chief but for the way in the western in the western in the western pattern this is dictatorship but in the african in the african culture if the the chief is not able to run the community properly there are mechanisms to remove the chief and to appoint a different chief so why don't we have to study these things and see and see if they can be incorporated for example into a constitution i mean these links with the the what i was telling before about creating a concept of rule of law with african characteristics multilingualism i'm not a linguist but what i observe in africa is that in most of the cases the vehicular language of the law is the western one because there are too many languages spoken in each of the african countries i was astonished when i i learned that in congo in drc there are more than 500 different languages that are spoken so the only common one is the is the uh the the western one and the people study in universities where they are taught using a western language so we go back to the to the issue that my zambian colleague was was addressing so again this moves uh to another issue i mean that i put the or just on the table that in many african language i would say in most of the african languages there is no legal terminology and therefore it's difficult to to create i mean to have at least concepts or terms that are uh coincident with the western ones that are used in the law so this is is an enormous problem in terms of addressing law and and the relation between law and language in terms in terms of justice i would link what professor said with what my nigerian colleague here said i think that in terms of i mean i we can make different examples but in terms of administering the justice in the african way is not is not necessary that the two things must go parallel i think that there is a way of cooperating i give a very quick example from somaliland where the elders can go to the judge take the file of a case and decide the case under traditional law and then the judge countersigns the decision of the elders as its own decision so basically making bringing the decision of the elders as a decision of the state and they do this also in criminal law using the principle the islamic law principles where the the victim can decide if he wants to be judged by the caddy and the elders represent the caddy in somaliland and there the judge gives only a small punishment that represents the offense against the state so there are ways of cooperation the thing is that we don't have to go parallel we i mean conflicting but just cooperating that's it thank you salvatore chris do you have any sort of points to make in response to state specifically or any of the points raised it's about the most monolinguistic person in the room i'm not going to comment on that i think i don't find it very easy to say anything very kind of neat um about the state i mean i i i don't like the suggestion that somehow the european state is a kind of a historical natural thing and it's completely unnatural elsewhere it's it's a historical evolving and very very complex set of institutions and and i think that we you know you can't expect it to look the same in all places at the same time um and and i think what's what's going on is experiments in statehood and and they shouldn't be expected to to take some kind of beautiful perfect shape fast it's always been a conflictual thing everywhere and i don't know what the future of the state in africa or in that strong and stable place called the uk is either i really really really done um but but i would say one thing which is that it's often seen as though it's um again this thing i don't totally like the failure of the state in some african and other parts of the world that leads to a lack of developments on some sometimes it's it's sort of more complicated dynamics i mean i it's not me raising Ethiopia you raised it this time but but it's actually part of what's going on there is actually a consequence of what we call or some people call development it's so those those tensions within that which are what you're raising new tensions new strains and they have links to very very old ones this is by the way this is a part of africa that chrys clapham calls non-colonial africa and yet it's a part of africa that has had something something like a state for a very very long time um but i think those those links between the sort of development outcomes and processes and statehood are are much more complex than often seen thank you marie any points you'd like to make sure i'll be very brief but um i think a comment was made earlier that we don't want to be stuck in the past which i agree with however i just think it's impossible to ignore centuries of deliberate dispossession um and making sure that certain people africans were not welcome into the very messy process of decolonization so a particular group of africans is benefiting from this evolved colonization that i mentioned um and you can look at again congo is my reference point right now if we say that the solutions are with the africans and then that is a way of us washing our hands of any involvement in a very messy situation i mean congo has been in a political crisis for two years now so whose responsibility is it to make sure that africans do have a chance to be a part of a solution um and how do we take into account this this process of dispossession that has happened since since colonization so um i have more questions than answers but uh i don't think i think it's it's important to to not in in saying that um we need to decolonize we're not washing our hands of of a process that we as the west cause and the consequences that that brings for people who are not included in the current system as it is thank you i think that's quite a desirable end state to be in more questions and answers on your catchy um but one of really interesting thing in terms of doing the work with the ford is that every time we have a grass fruits meeting and over the last few years and people come together they always want to recreate or or create the african union and afresh so there's this huge pan african spirit out there and then you look at some of the issues within each each of the countries and how they're trying to how we're trying to evolve towards this of course the au is there we we're all kind of invested in that we've looked at the regional economic communities where there's echo us at that and others as a way of evolving towards this pan africanism that i think most ordinary africans yearn for um i wanted you know i don't want to make this the kind of the nigerian discussion but it's the one that i know best but i wanted to talk about the nigerian state which is again going through um a number of stresses at the moment with people wanting to to leave again there's discussions and we've seen the conflicts in the northeast with bokeh haram with a generation before we saw the conflicts with in the niger delta so there's you know we've got this colonial construction uh and people inside of it and who are a lot of people are not feeling very happy um most of us would agree that it's not you know it should be perhaps a double trillion dollar economy and so it's underperforming given its resources the people the talent and everything else so it's really underperforming so what are the issues what one of the problems within that and is it to do with the colonial the nature of the colonial state i think one of the things that i do when i i look at that is to do a a balance sheet and to look at some of the challenges that that state is facing which is that you know as as christopher said you know we we are where we are as a result of history um so all these people were put together by by the british we at independence we chose to stay together but essentially it's a very tough call it's it's a little like having if you look at the population size the way that people do things are different cultures the different religion you know europe's got perhaps five percent muslims and you can see the the issues that europe's have been trying to accommodate that nigeria is 50 percent muslim 50 percent christian it's has huge um population groups so it's a a little bit like britain germany spain um perhaps not germany but spain um the netherlands um italy in one country um which lots of other smaller groups and then expect in coherence at the centre i mean this is nobody would do that and we can see the tensions in europe from the british trying to work out how that works you know um but on the plus side what what do we have we have you know 180 million africans the the most advanced and biggest pan african experiment at the moment and most pan african is always dismiss nigeria but it's actually the best experiment of 180 million people um using broadly the same laws same currency and has free movement you know an immense achievement and has since 1960 aside of the civil war has been innovating around how we make this union more manageable so the principles of federal character the issues of how we share resources but there are some big issues and those issues are not unique in terms of the problems that the state is going to the nigerian state or the african states the issues now if you're looking at globalisation how do you handle freedom of movement how do you handle in these bigger constructions whether it's the EU the competence the balance of competence between the centre and the federating units or and that conversation is going to go on i don't know whether the nigerian state itself was survived as a result of that or whether it will break you know i mean the the joke about it breaking up is that nobody's going anyway if they eibo go or the northeast they'll still be in the niger area so the big issue is how do we organise the neighbourhood and what are the values that keep us together as a neighbourhood that we respect each other and that and we're going to have to resolve that and that also then enables us to do the most um um to be able to develop that neighbourhood so that people feel that they're involved and everything else and provided with with justice and access to justice and all the other things that people want and it seems to me that those questions are not african questions they're being played out everywhere at the moment globally i hope we find african kind of solutions to that that accommodates our cultures and where we and the visions that we have for ourselves in in that region but i you know i i think it's a balance sheet and at the moment it's it's interesting where it is thank you on your catchy that left anything you'd like to say about the futures of african states or african multilingualism well let me just link up to uh on your catchy just said i i think um we should stop exoticising our understanding of african states so we probably all agree that um we have to get beyond stereotypes of weak states in africa and and efficient and strong states in the west i mean just look look at the newspapers of what's happening in our countries here in europe at the moment here i i think we would get much further um than than understanding states as containers um in the in the sense of the vestalian model by uh trying to understand how heterarchy um evolves so different systems of of control and governance um that overlap and this happens in africa as well as in europe so um again we need another theoretical background to understanding these processes which do not only happen in africa and the second point friderica um i think you had a very strong remark um when we when we tried to understand what's happening in terms of development your point was that african solutions do already exist but the point is we don't listen to them and um the first conclusion for me would be that when we do development and i'm not against doing that uh we should stop preaching and start listening and the second thing we need to understand and that's something for development research and now i'm coming to pause question um it's not only detecting solutions but we should understand the obstacles why these solutions are not implemented thank you ken if anything you'd like to add either on states or on language but i suspect language yeah it looks like um my colleague has answered what i really wanted to say except we have to understand that the background of african development has to do very much with colonialism so the blame game that we're talking about will continue being there so at the end of the day all we need is that both of us the coloniser and the colonized have to find solutions to the problems that were created okay so what am i trying to say we understand very well that um uh language for example and that is my comment that's where my comment really comes language especially local language or is it your mother time is key in understanding development whether in education economics in another sector and most of the european countries your research i mean are my readings sure that you have developed because you understood development from your own language perspectives okay which is actually a very good idea that we have also understood that we can embrace our own local languages and understand development from those perspectives however the problem that was created was that english was planted fine blame game over we tried to bring in the local language but then it doesn't still solve the problem because there are so many other local languages so research actually shows there are so many researchers that have actually identified in zambia that have i uh um uh pointed to the fact that learning in the seven selected local languages actually doesn't actually uh advantage the many other 72 minus seven so what are we saying the solution is there we are trying to come up with us but where are the resources going to come from okay so where are the resources going to come from uh why can't the global world then identify because researchers have written they have they have they have they have done their set they have written they have published and the fear to have these policies implemented positively we would definitely go for the 77 languages for example for the 72 languages but the thing is where would they get the resources so they fear perhaps that is one problem the territorial polis languages that was proposed again the problem with africa i don't want to run out from it traditional um is that um the fear to lose power i think that's actually quite a nice point at which to end uh our little panel discussion around power i just want to throw in a little anecdotes because we've been talking about language as well in amharic the official language of Ethiopia the word for a foreigner a white foreigner is pharange it's from the Arabic word if frangy means frankish but uh in adis slang when i was last there a few months ago the word they use for foreigner now including foreigners who look like me is china um unfortunately times with at hand is against us so i'm going to have to cut short this uh panel discussion in q and a it's a shame because it was just getting interesting but i'm mindful that people need refreshments and food so i'd like you to give a big round of applause and thank you to our most excellent panelists thank you to you as our audience for for interacting and engaging with us so well and let's go and hunt and gather upstairs thank you