A great contender for best World Cup article must go to Paul Vallely writing in The Independent 11/6/10. Under the heading, ‘A Big Day for Football. A Giant Leap for a Continent’, Vallely produces a jaw droppingly optimistic account of Africa’s future economic prospects and in so doing, totally wipes away decades of western media stereotypes of Africa as a basket-case continent. He barely mentions football yet his article gets to the very heart of South Africa 2010. Vallely sets out his stall immediately with this wonderfully upbeat and provocative assessment:

The image of Africa in many minds, elsewhere in the world, is of a Hopeless Continent. It is a place of disease, famine, poverty, corruption and war. There is some truth in all stereotypes. But never the complete truth. And there is a story that we in the west resist: that of an Africa whose moment may be about to come.

And that story is mind-bogglingly vibrant. Vallely elaborates:

Where we might ask ourselves, does the future lie? Here in the old world of Europe, with its currency crises, national deficits, denuded natural resources, high expectations and aging populations? Or in Africa with its vast mineral and oil reserves, under-exploited agricultural expanses, huge potential to tap the sun, wind and water for renewable energies and bio-fuels and a burgeoning population of young people eager to work for low wages and consume?’

To support this rarely heard view of Africa’s prospects Vallely produces a mountain of mouth-watering statistics, the most spectacular being printed in a comparison table under the title; ‘World Apart’. Just consider some of these startling comparisons. Over the last decade the increase in per capita GDP for Europe was 37.39 % while for Africa it was nearly double that at 64.27%. While growth forecast for Europe is a mere 0.7% for Africa it is a staggering 4.5% and that is in the middle of a world recession! If those figures are not interesting enough, try these. Proven oil reserves in Europe are just 6,300m barrels while in Africa they currently stand at 127,700m barrels. While our deficits on average in Europe stand at 6% Africa can boast a surplus of 1.9%. And possibly most significant of all, while Europe has a median age of 40.2 and getting ever older, Africa has a median age of just 18.6. While we in Europe will soon be crippled by an aging population demanding sophisticated health care and sizable pensions, Africa will be marching forward as one of the dynamos of the world economy.

Vallely continues to expand on his optimistic picture of the African continent.

Trade and foreign investment have quadrupled since 2000. Dictatorships have largely been replaced by democracies. There are 30 proper democracies today compared to five at the end of the cold war. No new major wars have begun in the last five years, and according to the OECD’s latest Economic Outlook, reported incidents of civil tension in sub-Saharan Africa decreased by a third between 2004 and 2008.

Virtually every index that you choose to look at shows a dramatic improvement. Vallely paints a powerful but unfamiliar African landscape.

Political stability has increased. Telecommunications, banking and retailing are flourishing. Construction is booming. And investment in infrastructure and education are paving the way for 200 million Africans to be rich enough to enter the market for consumer goods by 2015. Africa is becoming the new economic frontier.

Vallely provides his readers with a seemingly endless list of African positives nearly all which would be a huge surprise to the European/ North American ear. I won’t list them all but I can’t resist picking out a few of the more dramatic among them. For example, Vallely tells us that Africa has many cities of one million or more and is now nearly as urbanised as China. Trade with the United States and China has increased tenfold in the last decade. In 2000, roughly 59 million African households broke through the $5,000 per year income barrier and that is expected to reach 106 million by 2014. And consider this; in 1998 just 2 million Africans had mobile phones; now the figure is 400 million.

Vallely is not blind to the more familiar picture of Africa and notes, The other Africa has not gone away. But due to G8 debt cancellation and UN education and health programmes even some of the more depressing features of the African continent are beginning to change for the better. At the start of the decade just 58 % of African children went to primary school; today that has risen to 75%. Vallely reports that African poverty rate is declining by 1% annually but adds the sobering comment; that still leaves a huge number of individuals who endure a grim hunger on a daily basis.

In many respects the 2010 South Africa World Cup is something of a sporting miracle when one considers the political and social outrage of apartheid is a mere two decades ago. Now every time an African team takes the field I find myself pondering the picture that Vallely paints of an economic miracle that might be slowly but surely transforming the African continent.