As Africa cried in Russia, the world moved on

Another summit - where a western, Asian, or Gulf state leader gathers African leaders with him at the centre as the star - just ended in Russia.

With the war in Ukraine still raging over a year since Russia invaded the country, and the sanctions against President Vladimir Putin and his regime that have divided the world, it was a diminished affair. The first Russia Africa summit in 2019 saw 43 African leaders in attendance. This time there were 17.

African leaders, ranging from the recent coup makers in Burkina Faso, to President Museveni, made powerful speeches, dwelling on why Africa is still “backward”. Rightly, they mentioned the destructive impact of nearly 400 years of the enslavement of Africans; the pillage of nearly 100 years of colonialism; and the imperialism that followed after independence. Of course, Asia had longer periods of colonialism, but many parts of it have overcome and gone on to be the world’s richest, as Africa has remained mired in poverty. Therefore, the colonialism and imperialism explanations are continuing to wear thin, their validity notwithstanding.

This time, as Mr Museveni and his peers held forth, there was a clear sense that something had changed. For starters, several of the African leaders who didn’t go to Moscow didn’t stay at home fleecing their people nor went holidaying on the French Riviera. They gathered in Tanzania where President Samia Suluhu Hassan launched the Africa Human Capital Heads of State Summit. Sounds boring, but definitely talent is several times more important for Africa’s social and economic development than anything that was discussed in St Petersburg.

But even that wasn’t the big difference. One, was that it happened at a time when the noise about artificial intelligence (AI) is very loud. AI, to talk about it like we were in Nakasero Market, therefore loosely, is using computers to generate humanlike knowledge and then surpassing it by several times.

People who follow sports, especially basketball, will know of an African-American basketballer called Michael Jordan, perhaps the greatest player to ever play the game. There was something very unusual about Mr Jordan. He could really jump high to make a score. But many other players too could. What he did, that no one else has ever done, was that once he jumped in the air and players from the opposite team also did the same to block him from scoring, he would snap and make an extra jump that would take him higher. It was thought not humanly possible to do that, as humans need to anchor themselves on something to accomplish that kind of movement. What Jordan did was to make a second from a jump. Artificial intelligence is a bit like that.

The results of these AI advances over the last year have been dramatic. All of a sudden, vaccines and cures for cancer are near. A cure for illnesses that plague mostly Africans, like sickle cell, and was thought to be incurable, is now game. Very new materials for making things are emerging. An American technology visionary who has made a fortune off computers and the internet, postulated that if AI is done right, the US economy would grow by a mind-boggling 100 percent a year, not the 3.5 percent it is doing today (impressive as that is for a mature economy),

With the next breakthroughs in science, business development, and materials development coming not purely from the raw intelligence of humans and the hard sweat of their long hours of work, or from the bowels of the earth, it is going to become less compelling to say the greedy west or Chinese are growing rich from exploiting African resources, and keeping the continent poor so they can continue to have access to them cheaply.

In fact, as the Russia-Africa summit happened in St Petersburg, there was a hot debate in the specialist press that covers planetary things. In the next few years, they reported that there were going to be over 50 missions to other planets. Some of these missions are looking for minerals that scientists believe are plentiful out there, and that future-looking businesses see as the killer materials for the latter half of this century.

The debate was about an urgent need to have a new set of rules for exploiting other planets. How much of the moon should America own, given that it’s going back there again? How much of the minerals on Mars can a country lay claim to? Ten thousand, or one hundred thousand kilometres, from where its exploration vehicle finds it?

In these times developing right under our noses, railing about the theft of Congolese timber, and the plunder of copper of the last century, will soon look like a madman shouting in the market. It’s not just the cheese that is moving. The whole dairy farm and cheese plant are.

Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”.

Twitter@cobbo3