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Introduction
Good evening ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for inviting me to address you this evening, at this place of learning that has contributed so decisively to the struggle against apartheid.
Education is about discovery and self-development. The creation and transfer of knowledge is the basis on which our people and our societies grow. It is both the basis and fruit of our human emancipation, and deserves therefore all the protection and nurturing our societies can provide. But education has responsibilities as well, and one of them is to ensure that we identify and qualify the statements of what we know, do not know, and cannot know.
In the field of economic policy, the realism and clarity that ensues from that identification process is particularly difficult to achieve. Even the best statistics are only comprehensible through the medium of models – themselves necessarily simplified distortions of our complicated ‘real’ world.
For all of us, governments, civil society, firms, unions and the academic community, the ambiguities of the real world and our need to represent it in intellectual constructs opens up endless scope for subjective interpretation and argument. But to even this there must be a limit, and our development of knowledge, no matter how flawed, helps to identify those limits and frame the decisions needed to progress the project of human emancipation through development.
For Africa, the application of knowledge to decision making is no less complex than in other regions of the world. Our history has set out many obstacles to overcome.
Africa’s initial challenge is to achieve economic development, which I define simply as the sustained increase in income of all members of society so as to be free from material want. One aspect of that challenge is to achieve development in an interdependent world. That is a world in which goods, services, people, capital and knowledge flow relatively easily across national borders with large net benefits to economies.
African development can and will benefit from economic and political interdependence with the developed world, other emerging markets, and other developing regions. Interdependence can be a trigger for Africa’s development. Positive outcomes from interdependence, however, are contingent on how we define the current state of dependence – and how we implement the domestic and international policies that enable us to move from dependence to interdependence.
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