Everywhere across the world there is animated excitement about Africa’s economic growth, which at average 5% by far outstrips the entire globe.
Business people across the world are descending on the continent, with every one of them miming a mantra that “Africa is the place to be.”
The most charitable among them go as far as to say it is finally Africa’s turn.
Or is it?
May be so!
For a continent long plagued by strife, plunder, disease, war and poverty, news of economic growth far outstripping the whole world could not have come at a better time.
For decades written off as a dark continent or in some worse cases a failed continent, Africa has insatiable craving for a good headline.
But as Africans we should be careful not to be sold a dummy and allow ourselves to be caught in a milieu of false dawn.
Crucially we should be careful not to get caught in the stampede.
This is by no way being pessimistic. Rather it is being realistic and being pragmatic.
On a number of occasions in the past we have been recklessly optimistic about our situation only for reality to hit home and remind us that the situation was from being as rosy as we had led ourselves to believe.
And the most painful lesson to take from that history has been that every time that happened to us, our ability as Africans to cope with such painful reality had been much lower than was the case before we were made ÔÇô and accepted ÔÇô the false promises.
While we have every right to be excited at the good news about it being Africa’s turn, there are key questions that we should ask ourselves as citizens but also our leadership.
Is what we are seeing not just a bubble that will soon burst taking us back into even deeper levels than where we were before?
Are we as Africans in a better place to take advantage of that growth to builder a more solid foundation that we would in future use as a buffer against sliding back?
Are we in position to build such institutions like a strong middle class to cushion our economies from future shocks?
These are just some of the questions we have to answer. And if all our answers are in the affirmative then we have to move on to another level and insist on our leaders to tackle the pervasive poverty, corruption and economic inequalities that have so often been the source of social strife and political instability in our continent.
To what extent is the economic growth of the African continent that about which the entire world is not only animated but also fretting being felt by those across continent who have waited so patiently and for so long?
The important thing is that we should use that growth to graduate into the middle class the mass number of our people currently in the fringes.
We may be talking about Africa as a continent but the fact of the matter is that all that very much applies to Botswana as an individual country.
To what extent have we succeeded in translating the growth we have had consistently over many years into creating a solid middle class that that would on its own be able to carry the nation on its back beyond diamond-fueled growth?
Our view is that we have not been successful.
Our middle class remains thin at its base, weak in its structure, shaky at its roots, and fragile in its texture.
Just as we call Africa to do what is needed to bolster its middle class on the back of the ensuing excitement about unprecedented growth levels across the continent, we do so with diffidence well aware that in Botswana, we have failed to achieve just that when as a country we had a double digit  growth than ran for many years when every country of the world was almost on its knees.
