What Awaits Us In 2021

Happy New Year to all my readers.

For many people, crossing over from 2020 became the only goal once it was clear that indeed, it was a wasted year. But let us not cry over spilt milk. 2021 presents us with lots of opportunities. They won't come as they did before the pandemic. They need your creative input and hard work to complete and actualise the gains.

Africa welcomes the commencement of the African Continental Free Trade Area - AfCFTA with 54 out of 55 countries now signed up. Eritrea is yet to smell the coffee.

AfCFTA is the largest free trade area in the world today and the boldest statement out of Africa since the formation of the AU, if anything, this is what will make the AU a respectable body and not the global lapdog that many view it to be. It is estimated that this new initiative will enhance inter-African trade by up to 50% and provide about USD 75 billion worth of opportunities for outsiders trading with Africa. The excitement is truly global.

AfCFTA will be both a boon and a bane for different people. No country is fully ready for it but equally, everyone is worse off without it. For those who have a huge footprint on the continent, AfCFTA is a bonus as it facilitates increased opportunities. The financial services sector will experience interesting resets in entities consolidations and customer bases as geographical barriers to entry fall off.

For the less prepared countries, it will feel like recolonisation all over again, only this time from others of the same colour. For the more prepared, commercial tourists are a welcome lot. The challenges this phenomenon provides come as opportunities for us in the consultancy space. The mistakes that the South Africans made in their northward match in the 1990s and more recently the blunders made by the Nigerians in the financial space in Africa are good places to learn from.

Several cultural breaches have unnecessarily cost these investors huge opportunities. The big question for them is: "were they coming to tap into the opportunities or were they coming to teach the rest of Africa how to trade with them in their respective countries?" You are either a missionary or a businessman. First mover advantage ends up being a first-mover disadvantage. Too much time is wasted on changing the market culture instead of adapting and building momentum around prevailing norms.

So for you here in Kenya, how can you gain from AfCFTA? First, this is not another one of those opportunities that fall under the quail bird husbandry frenzy and expedition to Loliondo rush herd mentality driven initiatives. It requires a totally different mindset.

As Albert Einstein said: "The significant problems that we face today, cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that we were at when we created them.", we must rise above our domestic biases and seek to understand before we are understood.

This is the time to develop a culture-based index with ours assigned a zero or neutral value and others assigned values weighted on marked differences with ours. The index will possibly have aspects such as political space-related matrices, linguistic challenges, permitted social etiquette, trade practices and much more. Otherwise, you stand the risk of making come true the African saying that: "every market place has a mad man".

We also need to understand the standard 'ease of doing business' metrics.

Armed with this information, one can have a personalised plan to address the gaps. Those who frequently engage in cross-tribal trade have a head start. Those who only trade around tribesmen or feel that their community was the only one created for business are in for desperate times ahead.

It is indeed a time of personal reflection for country leaders because a seamless trading experience may be interrupted or punctuated by negative occurrences perpetrated by such leaders. How they treat neighbouring nations is an indication of what others can expect.

Someone somewhere will keep a log of country attitudes towards AfCFTA and will update us on the best and worst leaders. You will begin to see opinion polls that urge other Africans to vote just so that the actual voters in a particular country can read Africa's barometer on their respective leaders. For undecided voters in a country's national elections, such opinion polls hold sway. They will matter.

So Africa is now moving away from strongmen and puppets sponsored by forces from outside Africa, to one where strong African-led commercial interests dictate the politics of countries. The bribes paid out in lieu of such formations will have to fall off for you cannot receive a bribe where a right to trade subsists. So government officials must shape up or ship out.

It will be interesting to see what happens when continental business giants clash with hitherto unchallenged colonial interests directly or through their surrogates.

This clash, happening on the backdrop of a global reset that is brought about by capitalistic oligarchs, has its accelerants in Covid-19 and in men who are above their respective country constitutions to worry about.

And if handled well, AfCFTA will flush out such types. The rise of real big African business boy clubs shall inevitably play a role in country politics going forward. If ten or so continental billionaires focus on a stubborn country, they will affect local politics. If you are in KEPSA, you must think continental whilst preserving local business gains or give way to new thought leaders. The same is true for all commercially-based associations.

Now, if you walk into 2021 with a village mentality, for what was national, in effect has been downgraded by AfCFTA, you will experience a year worse than what 2020 was to you. You must upgrade your level of thinking to thrive in these new settings.

Our challenge in 2021, is in our correct reading of the prevailing fundamentals. What got us here, won't keep us here or take us where we want to go.

If we underestimate the push that the rest of Africa will exert on our local operations, then we shall be in for a rude shock. A wait-and-see approach will only get us trodden on by those that are better prepared.

We are at our most vulnerable moment because, comparatively, we have the advantages of infrastructure, location and a ready human resource base on a plug and play basis. Yet, we are distracted by political events that will occupy us as the rest of Africa come in and realise their dreams on our soil as we spin in our political merry-go-round.

Many well-prepared business people that lack the enabling environment at home see Kenya as the place to come to. With restrictions falling away, competition from those who have studied us more than we have studied them will be on the rise.

We shall perhaps experience a variation of what the education-deprived black South Africans encountered immediately after the collapse of apartheid. Able-bodied people could not take up knowledge-based jobs that other foreign Africans took up. The resentment that ensued was built up over a long time but the explosion happened all at once and the aftershocks continue to be felt to this date.

The danger that lurks in the new dispensation, is that Africa is increasingly becoming a knowledge-based economy but at a rate that is dictated by some leaders yearning for a sustained information blackout system within the citizenry. They know that information is power and they want to be the ones that are all-knowing on behalf of their people so that they remain powerful.

The gap between those enjoying the trappings of the information age and those living in the traditional agrarian and hunter-gatherer ages is clear and still wide. If anything, today's gangsters and pilferers are present-day hunter-gatherers responding to financial gaps-related pressures. We have both millionaire and pauper hunter-gatherers, the corrupt guys and the victims created in their wake.

Let me add that the tools of information are widely abused to misinform so that the majority remain in a trance. But the good news is that you can only fool some people all the time but you cannot fool all the people all the time. Something will have to give and it will be those whose charisma is not felt beyond their borders.

Everything has its good and bad side. Are we ready for both sides of AfCFTA? As we take advantage of the failures of other countries, are we prepared for the problems that our present successes will bring upon us such as non-citizens benefiting from our better developed financial systems, roads, schools, health systems and much more?

What about a sharp rise in crime rates brought about by moths that have suddenly seen the light and are hungry to feed on our hard-earned economic fabric?

So, to thrive in 2021, you must upgrade your thinking and modus operandi. Plan such that you achieve the good goals and overcome the bad challenges brought about by the new dispensation. Upgrading has its pains and you must endure them or endure a bad year.

So do the following:-

1. If you are not benefiting from your present associations and friendships because you are all struggling in the same way, change them. Associate with those who can take you to the next stage.

2. Separate your wheat from the chaff. Gems transcend time but "nice to haves" have an expiry date. The date is determined by the next big force such as AfCFTA. Shed off all the things that are not useful any more. To upgrade, you must carry only the gems. To get to the moon, the rocket carries a heavy fuel tank. But once the contents are consumed, the non-reusable tank is discarded in space to float amongst the meteorites and extraterrestrial bodies.

3. Focus on new mentors and learn to embrace what successful people across geographies do for they are rock solid in all seasons.

4. Work on getting what you are good at marketable continentally.

5. Team up with like-minded visionaries and conquer the continent. There is a rough terrain out there.