Africa doesn’t need 2,000 years to catch up with the United States. That’s why revolutions exist—they act as catalysts; they push history and evolution forward at a rapid pace.
Dr. Kwame Nkrumah said: “Revolutions are brought about by men—by men who think as men of action and act as men of thought.”
If we’re talking about a slow evolutionary process, then yes, it could take 300, 600, or even 2,000 years for Africa to develop and catch up with the rest of the world, without talking of the huge cost paid by Africa and humanity to develop the US and Europea through brutal slavery and colonialism. That’s the only option if you can’t envision the possibility of rapid change. This is similar to the mindset of those who advocate for the African Union’s Agenda 2063—but keep in mind, many of its advocates won’t be alive to see it fulfilled, the best of their efforts being uncoordinated action, wasted energy, time and valuable resources.
For revolutionaries, however, this transformation can happen within the next 20 to 30 years, focus has to be on the fundamentals, continental; sovereignty, a railway platform, a communication platform and energy platforms around the continent. Then Industrialisation can happen, then can we talk of trading.
I encourage us to read Nkrumah’s book Consciencism, where he addresses this very issue. What you see around you is not the result of magical occurrences—they are material achievements, mastered by one group of people and capable of being remastered, and mastered by any others, Africans included. China has already demonstrated this to the world, transforming itself from a backward agrarian society into a fully modernized, technologically advanced global powerhouse in just a few decades, an industrial behemoth.
What Nkrumah teaches us is that we must understand the forces driving society at any given time, harness those forces, and direct them in a revolutionary way to benefit society. For a revolutionary, this understanding is essential. The revolutionary’s task is to increase the forces of good (positive) and reduce the negative forces to a bare minimum.
What took Europe 600 years and America 300 years, China achieved in 30 years. We African can do it and more in 15 or 20 years.
The greatest task isn’t just to build or rebuild—it’s to organize and reorganize. This means we need to remove the complacent and complicit generation from power to accelerate this process.
This is exactly what the African Continental Unity Party (ACUP) is doing—organizing. Look at the progress made in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger. In just 2 to 4 years, Mali is debt-free and together, the 3 have made significant security gains that the entire UN, France, Germany, and the U.S. combined couldn’t achieve in 10 to 15 years in the Sahel.
This tells you something.
The problem lies with disorganized people, influenced from outside. The solution is organized people who prioritize African interests.
