It was a painful ordeal for a parent.
In most African cultures, rain is a sign of blessings. The irony is, in this case, the poorest of the poor, who need the water the most, are the ones who hurt the most when it rains.
Three-year-old Everlate Chauke, her father Shadrack, and mother Cynthia were in their makeshift home in Alexandra, next to the Jukskei River, six kilometers from Africa’s richest square mile, Sandton, when it started to pour. When water filled their shack, they climbed a tree for safety; Cynthia on one branch, Everlate and Shadrack on the other. The branch broke and Everlate fell into the raging waters. Shadrack jumped in after her, but couldn’t find her. What started as a celebration, amid South Africa’s longest drought ever, ended in death and despair. Little Everlate was found 10 kilometers downstream, almost three weeks later.
The Chauke family is among 150 other people who lost their homes and property in the downpour at the Setswetla settlement in Alexandra. Several other people around Johannesburg died during the floods and many others lost their property. Yet, Africa may one day go to war over the lack of water. Too much water can take lives – yet so can the lack of water that one day Africa may go to war over. It has already happened elsewhere in the world.
The Khedevite of Egypt invaded Ethiopia, in the mid-1870s, to gain control of the Nile River. The dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir is largely about control of the Indus River. For now, for most of Africa, it’s a king-sized headache.
On March 10, major dams in Africa were down. In Lesotho, Katse Dam, the highest dam in Africa built in the Maluti Mountains, was 53.6% full; Swaziland’s dams stood at 75.8% and in Zimbabwe, Kariba Dam, one of the biggest in Africa at 128-meter tall and 579-meter long, stood at 32.8%. Water levels in Malawi, Mozambique, Kenya and most of the rest of Africa remain low. The UN warns of a looming crisis.
“Let us commit to invest in water security as a means to ensure long-term international peace and security,” says  former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
Ratings agency, Moody’s, early last year, went as far as to say a lack of water was causing rising inflation, risking a weak South African economy going into recession. It is so concerning that, Cape Town’s Executive Mayor, Patricia de Lille, declared the city of the rich a disaster zone. At the time of going to print, the city had just over 100 days of useable water left.
The problem is the average household uses about 20,000 liters of water a month but Cape Town’s top water wasters, located on Haywood Road‚ Crawford‚ used a shocking 702,000 liters in one month. The city is naming and shaming all water wasters in an attempt to ensure they comply. On February 1, the city introduced harsher water restrictions; meaning everyone should use 30% less water or face a R5,000 ($380) fine and a higher bill. It is helping.
On March 6, in the Western Cape province, dam levels had dropped to 31.5%, which was 1.6% down from the week before. If the situation does not change, the province could run out of fresh water in dams by 2019.
“With the last 10% of a dam’s water mostly not being useable, dam levels are effectively at approximately 21.5%. Consumption has broken through the 800 million liter barrier for the first time to 783 million liters of collective use per day, but we have still not achieved the new collective usage target of 700 million liters per day,” says the City’s Mayoral Committee Member for Informal Settlements, Water and Waste Services, Councillor Xanthea Limberg.
Water Scarcity: Cooperation or Conflict in the Middle East and North Africa?, an article in Foreign Policy Journal written by Lisdey Espinoza Pedraza, International Relations lecturer at the University of Aberdeen, and International Relations researcher, Markus Heinrich, suggests while Africa struggles to quench its thirst, some regions of the world have ample supply of this scarce resource.
“While 70% of the planet is covered in water, only 2.5% of it is fresh water. Of this, only 1% is easily accessible, as much of the world’s freshwater is trapped in glaciers and ice caps. Compounding this is that this scarce resource is very unevenly distributed,” say Pedraza and Heinrich.
One problem is Africa is not pouring money where the rivers flow.
Water projects account for a meagre 1.3% of total infrastructure investment in Africa, according to the Africa Construction Trends 2016 report by Deloitte Africa. The report notes that there are only 15 water projects across the continent, valued at $4.8 billion, in comparison to 271 non-water infrastructure projects valued at $319.2 billion. The water sector is thirsty for investment. But it’s not that simple.
“If you are asking the private sector to finance water, what’s the return, who is going to pay them and how are they going to collect their money? Water is a basic human right. This also colors how people treat water from a drinking point of view. Should you be paying for something that falls from the sky? In many instances, the charges that cities levy on water are often far too low from a cost recovery basis,” says John-Pierre Labuschagne, Infrastructure &amp; Capital Projects Leader at Deloitte.
According to Labuschagne, water does have an opportunity for investors.
“The economics behind it though is what makes it difficult… The trick is how do we get the water from the dams to the cities? The water network is crucial. It needs to be rehabilitated and also expanded,” he says.
Ethiopia is leading the way to a solution with its $5-billion Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam project.
Located about 500 kilometers north west of the capital, Addis Ababa, in the region of Benishangul-Gumuz along the Blue Nile, it is expected to be completed in July this year. It will be the largest dam in Africa at 1,800 meters long, 155 meters high and with a total volume of 74 billion cubic meters. The dam will generate some 6,000 megawatts of electricity which will be sold to neighboring countries and is expected to aid Ethiopia’s growing economy.
This world’s ninth biggest hydroelectric project dam, however, has been under fire because it will flood 1,680 square kilometers of forest, displace 20,000 people and possibly affect the flow of the Nile River, which is shared by Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, the DRC, Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, South Sudan, Sudan and Egypt.
In Namibia, 4,860 kilometers south of the Nile, the answer is desalination.
Dewald Duvenhage, General Manager: Engineering Services at the Swakopmund municipality in Namibia, says desalination may be the only solution for the water problems Africa faces. The only problem is it uses a lot of energy.
“If the energy is renewable – solar panel farms, wind generation, concentrated solar power – all with suitable storage to allow 24-hours-a-day operation – then yes, it is sustainable. Interesting also is that all the large luxury shipping passenger liners are producing their water with desalination,” he says.
Sustainable, yes. Cheap, not so much.
The Namibian government is considering desalination with a special Cabinet committee, but media reports indicate that about N$57 billion ($4.36 billion) may need to be spent on it.
“Desalination water is presently exclusively used for mining water supply, yet since the same pipes transport and the same reservoirs store the water, we are all drinking desalination water mixed with borehole water as far as Henties Bay, Swakopmund and Arandis is concerned,” says Duvenhage.
He says we should use water responsibly but should also consider other avenues.
“We may consider recycling – but given the complications when industrial waste pollutes water, it is cheaper and physically simpler to desalinate seawater than to recycle sewage back to potable water. Yet we should first ask whether there is anything we can do to solve the energy supply crisis. No energy, no desalination, no water,” he says.
Professor Neil Armitage, the Head of the University of Cape Town’s Urban Water Management research unit, agrees that desalination is expensive and power-hungry.
“Most of our power is generated by thermal power stations that contribute to greenhouse gases contributing to global warming and contributing to climate change which is what caused the problem in the first place,” says Armitage.
That’s not all. For many years, Australia had a drought and opted for desalination plants, which according to Armitage, would cost between AUD2 billion ($1.5 billion) and AUD4 billion ($3 billion). As Australia was in the process of commissioning them, it rained.
“There were major floods, people were washed away in cars, reservoirs filled up and the residents said they don’t want to pay for the water when they can have water at a quarter of the price from the tap,” he says.
To do a similar project in Johannesburg or Cape Town, according to Armitage, may cost anything between R30 billion ($2.3 billion) and R50 billion ($3.8 billion).
“Someone proposed to me that we should build an undersea pipeline from the Congo River to Cape Town… another said can’t we get water from the Orange River to Cape Town… these are very expensive for something that can be managed if we change the way we manage our water.”
Armitage says two to three times more rain falls on Cape Town than is distributed to the people. The rest of it is wasted.
“There are two ways of dealing with that. One is rain water harvesting where you have a rain barrel taking water straight off your roof. This is very common in farming rural areas… the biggest problem though is that Cape Town’s climate has long dry summers and relatively short winters. You need more water in summer time than winter… If you are going to make rain water harvesting to work, you will need rainfall all year round.”
Another option is storm water harvesting.
“If we can find a way of harvesting that, storing it and treating it, then there is potential to supply all the cities with storm water. The reality is, it is very difficult. Storage and quality is a problem. Storm water can be very polluted,” he says.
It has worked in Singapore. For years, the country heavily relied on imported water from Malaysia and catchment water. Now it also has NEWater, produced from treated purified used water and desalination.
“In Cape Town, we have a natural sand aquifer on the Cape Flats. We are doing research to see if we can’t store water underground for periods of time; could be a month, six months or a year. It has been done in Cape Town for many years up on the coast where, for about 40 years, water to [the Western Cape town] Atlantis came from harvested storm water, treated sewage affluent put into the ground and then taken out again after a period of time… we are proposing to do something similar but on a bigger scale.”
It’s time Africa pours more money in its water, before a long dry season could lead to war.
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Water , The new oil?

Four years of drought and South Africa is counting the costs on the farms. It is tougher than most for hundreds of struggling sugarcane farmers in KwaZulu-Natal who lost everything last year and fear the same this year.
Fifty-year-old Thembelihle Mzila grew up near Wartburg, 40 kilometers from Pietermaritzburg in KwaZulu-Natal. All she wanted, like her parents, was to own a sugarcane field. For more than 20 years, she has lived that dream. All these years, Mzila has worked long hours to feed her children and has build her house.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-4750" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/DSC_1312-300x169.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="169" />
“I have learned to use my own hands at a young age. I know how to use my hands, it is something I was born into, I never begged,” says Mzila, pointing to her sugarcane field stretching downhill near her homestead. When FORBES AFRICA met Mzila, the sky over the rural town of Wartburg was grey and the clouds were heavy. It rained when we left but not enough to make up for the four years of drought.
Mzila’s childhood dream is slowly running dry. Since drought struck a few years ago, there is little to harvest, forcing Mzila to look for other income while she prays for rain. Last year, KwaZulu-Natal was the first of five provinces declared drought disaster areas by the government. Early this year, the government announced a R15-billion ($955 million) bailout through loans, but Mzila and her 95 associates won’t qualify for it. They don’t have collateral. While she waits for rain, she is selling soft drinks and snacks to keep her children at school.
Mzila is the chairperson of the Inzwakele Co-operative Group, formed in 2011, that meets once a month. There are 95 members, who plough a field the size of a football field. Most are pensioners, unemployed and single parents. Besides solely depending on rain for ploughing, there are many other problems. They use their annual financial support from government to hire agricultural instruments and repair fences broken down by cattle.
It takes up to two years for a sugarcane harvest. Many are despondent as well as dry.
“Because of climate change, and its unpredictable weather, we find it difficult now to know exactly which months are good for ploughing the fields. Habitually we start in August and through to the end of January, but there was no rain last year, as a result the fields dried up and went hungry with no money,” says Mzila.
“Unemployment is very high here. Many people turn to farming for income. Though we have so many members, we still have a challenge to assist each and every one getting started with their own fields. We have many in the waiting list because we hire tractors and tools. We have a roster that we keep,” says Bongani Shangase, a 75-year-old former bus driver who now farms sugarcane.
<div id="attachment_4748" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-4748" class="size-medium wp-image-4748" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/P26B8333-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />Young children collect water from a spring in Kimaswa Western Kenya Wednesday, Sept. 30, 2015. 375 schools in Cheptai and throughout Western Kenya are currently being given Lifestraw Water Filters to ensure that every child at school has clean water to drink. Jaguar Landrover are supporting the project being run in partnership with Vestergaard and Climate Care and employees form Jaguar Landrover are currently visiting the schools to assist with distribution. ( Photo/KATE HOLT)</div>
“As the small cooperation farmers, we get advice or recommendation from the ‘mill’ as to what kind of sugarcane seed we should be planting at the given time. Based on the soil test done by Illovo representatives on our land, we were given sugarcane N12 and N48 seed to plant. Those of us who ploughed in 2012 have started selling sugarcane to Illovo.”
Mfanufikile Mbatha, 52, is another member who has yet to see his first crop. He’s a shopkeeper as well.
“We worked separately on our own gardens, ploughing vegetables for ourselves and selling when the product was good. But when the local officials approached us to organize ourselves, we came up with the cooperation in 2012. The thing that boosted our confidence was the government grant, although at times we received money a little late into the ploughing season, we are grateful for it,” he says.
They’d be even more grateful for a few weeks of torrential rain.

Dry And Desperate

Agriculture has become an increasingly crucial issue for African governments. Poor infrastructure and lack of long-term finance have been fingered as the culprits blocking Africa’s path to food security.
Africa’s last decade belonged to telecommunications. To achieve meaningful development, the next decade must witness massive investment and progress in the education, healthcare, electricity, water, road, rail and air transport sectors. This means economic diversification, urban decongestion and its economic gains, namely, rural development, inclusive growth, innovation, heightened productivity and spiraling employment.
Solid infrastructure will boost knowledge and agro-produce exchange between African nations.
Beyond infrastructure development and food security concerns, expanding food production will also have a positive impact on local and regional labor markets, as more people are absorbed into the agribusiness value chain.
Small scale farms produce 80% of the food consumed across Africa. Consequently, the agribusiness value chain is a short one, delivering little value to national economies. According to the African Export-Import Bank, Africa’s global share of food processing is less than 20%.
The paucity of processing, trading and retail mechanisms has restricted Africa’s agribusiness sector to the bottom of the socio-economic pyramid. The current practice of just cultivating-to-sell restricts the value chain to a primary commodity-level activity. Service providers involved in input supplies (seeds, fertilizers, machinery), packaging, exporting, transportation, processing, and converting basic produce into finished goods are urgently needed to extend the value chain. De-risking the sector might also require the establishment of public and private-sector initiatives which enable farms and agro-allied concerns to access bio- and agro-technology, financial credit and risk assurance.
According to the World Bank, Africa’s agriculture sector could be worth $1 trillion by 2030 if infrastructure and financing challenges are overcome.
Slightly over 60% of all the uncultivated arable land in the world is in Africa. In Nigeria, only 40% of its 84 million hectares of arable land is cultivated. These productivity gaps can become Africa’s competitive edge.
Coming out of the 23rd AU Summit of Heads of State and Government in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, last July, African leaders adopted the Malabo Declaration, reinforcing a decade-old commitment (the 2003 Maputo Declaration) to end hunger and cut poverty in half by 2025.
To meet this lofty goal, the leaders reaffirmed their resolve to devote at least 10% of their national budgets to agricultural development. Only 10 countries have so far met this target. The Malabo Declaration raises the bar of focus and commitment to smallholder farmers and rural communities across the continent, says One.org, a campaigning and advocacy group which helped to galvanize pan-African and global support for the pact.
Africa’s leaders however stopped short of agreeing on a common formula for measuring the 10% target. Whichever way one looks at this matter, the key point is that the local and international appetite for Africa’s agribusiness sector has picked up.
Embedded in the declaration are a set of risk management and strategic corporate social objectives namely, operationalization of the African Investment Bank; increased support for intra-regional trade; adoption of climate-resilient farming strategies; responsible private sector investment; youth inclusion and employment targets; and mutual accountability for results.
Hopefully, Africa’s next decade will be fruitful. Ethiopia, South Africa and Kenya seem well adjusted to the nuances of commercial and small-scale farming, producing and exporting excellent quality coffee, wine, citrus, vegetables, tea and flowers.
In Nigeria, an     Agricultural Transformation Agenda (ATA) has transformed a once comatose sector into an engine of growth. Food imports declined from $19 billion in 2011 to $4.35 billion in 2013; bank lending to the sector as a share of total loans has also risen from 0.7% to 6% within two years. Over $4 billion private sector investment commitments has also been attracted to Nigerian agriculture over the last three years.
Earlier this year, Aliko Dangote, president of Dangote Industries, reached out to Kenya for agro-expertise. The Kenyans initially hesitated, pointing at Boko Haram and Ebola as the reasons why they feared coming to West Africa. But when they were offered a remuneration package that was too sweet to refuse, they accepted the challenge. They are now supporting Dangote’s sugarcane fields in Nigeria.
Money talks and agriculture is a multi-billion dollar business.

YOU CAN GROW MONEY  AFTER ALL

A large advertising hoarding at Maputo Airport claims Mozambique has the best prawns; one of the most hackneyed boasts in Africa. Mozambique has a deep, sheltering, offshore ridge stretching along the floor of the Indian Ocean. In these fertile waters prawns thrive in the warm flow of the gulfstream to become big, juicy, and world famous.
Under the sea bed in these same blue waters is another natural resource that could make Mozambique more famous than it is for prawns.
Twenty-two years after the guns of a bitter civil war fell silent over this poor and weary land, Mozambique is on the cusp of an energy boom. In a generation, this boom could transform the country into a rich player in the lucrative business of supplying an energy hungry world.
Energy appears to be a field where African prosperity could lie. It is a sign of the times that when FORBES published its list of the world’s top 10 oil and gas finds in 2013 – six of them were in Africa &#8211; a remarkable number in year of scarce finds, called lackluster by the industry; in a year when exploration giant, Tullow, drilled 20 holes only to find them dry.
The biggest find of 2013 was 80 kilometers off the shores of Mozambique. Italian energy company, ENI, struck gas more than six kilometers under the sea in the Agulhas field. The company says it has between five to seven trillion cubic feet of gas (tcf), worth the equivalent of 700 million barrels of oil (BOE). That’s about two years’ worth of Nigeria’s oil production.
This rich find is merely the tip of the iceberg. Industry estimates say Mozambique has the world’s fourth largest gas reserves after Russia, Iran and Qatar. This year, the energy giants from Texas, Anadarko and partner ENI, will decide whether to build one of the world’s largest liquefied natural gas facilities in the world, off the coast of Mozambique. The complex would pave the way to tapping deep off-shore gas fields that could rival Australia and Qatar as the largest liquefied natural gas reserves in the world.
Mozambique’s hopes will enrich an economy rated by the United Nations as the fourth poorest in the world, with most of its more than 23 million people living on less than a dollar a day.
It is likely to prove a long and expensive road to prosperity. Mozambique has a huge skills and infrastructure gap coupled with meager state coffers. One look at the potholed roads of the capital, which turn into a river of mud in heavy rain, will tell you how far Mozambique has to go. An encounter with corrupt policemen on the street will tell you why hard work and enterprise could also struggle.
These are among the many obstacles to vast and unimagined wealth lying under the sea. The most promising discovery is in the massive Rovuma Basin, which is 30,000 square kilometers – about the same size as Lesotho. Since 2010, there have been 10 offshore discoveries in the basin promising 190 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of natural gas. The industry believes a supply and demand gap for natural gas will open up by 2020, sending prices soaring. If Mozambique can get its industry together by then it will be able to compete, albeit from a low base, with the big world players like Russia, Australia and Canada.
A senior government advisor in Maputo told me that Mozambique aims to be shipping gas to Thailand, South Korea, Japan, South America and the United States by 2019. The infrastructure bill for this dream is likely to be immense. One of the reasons why investors often fight shy of gas, unlike coal and oil, is because it is difficult to move it to market.
It is a sobering thought that investors have sunk more than $1 billion into extracting Mozambique’s gas with very little to show for it – it is going to take many billions more in foreign investment. This, at a time when the new Basel III banking rules are tightening around the world and it is getting tougher every year to summon up interest in this kind of 20-year, high-risk, infrastructure.
The next step on the road to gathering this foreign investment is the fifth round of licensing bids, expected this year, most of which will be for the Rovuma Basin. Exploration data is doing the rounds among interested investors, but a few are also looking at their watches.
“This is all taking too long for us,” one investor told me in Maputo.
One reason why it is taking so long is that Mozambique has little experience in running an energy industry and wants to make sure the national exchequer gets its fair share. Mozambique has studied how other African nations have been by-passed by their resources booms and is tightening legislation.
The fear in Maputo is: most of the revenue will flow overseas; the equipment will be bought in from elsewhere, as will highly paid expatriates, leaving the people of Mozambique as bystanders in a land where their government owns all the mineral rights.
“We are striving to make the market more stable and predictable for investors… If you align your project with Mozambique’s priorities, you will have a strong chance of success,” says Leopoldo de Amaral, the manager of natural resources for the Maputo legal company Sal and Caldeira Advogados, told the MMEC conference on mining and energy in Mozambique in March.
These priorities will be laid out in the amendments to the Petroleum Bill, on its final passage through parliament, which will lay down new rules for foreign investors. The bill is expected to be published in the next few months, before parliament dissolves ahead of elections on October 15, and has a tough job ahead of it. The plan is to maximize revenue for Mozambique and provide certainty and clarity for investors, without jeopardizing competitiveness.
Under the bill, crude oil will be subject to 10% production tax and for natural gas, 6%. It stipulates that 5% to 20% of the capital of foreign companies be placed on the Mozambique Stock Exchange, within five years, for sale to locals.
Furthermore, investors must inform the state of discoveries within 24 hours and remit the proceeds of exports back to Mozambique within 90 days. Ample discretionary power is given to the minister, giving he or she a say over the transfer of mining rights and the right of the state to participate in projects. This is unlikely to impress foreign investors.
Another worry for foreign investors is a hefty capital gains tax of 32% that came into force on January 1. The rules stipulate that the tax will be levied on the sale of equity in any operations in Mozambique, no matter where in the world transactions take place.
On top of this, foreign companies will have to set aside a hefty budget for training. The bill says foreign companies, operators and subcontractors alike, must train workers from Mozambique: 5% for big companies; 8% for medium-sized companies and 10% for small companies.
Mozambique also plans to take advantage of the end of a 10-year agreement with energy giant Sasol, to supply cheap piped gas to South Africa in order to encourage the building of infrastructure. Under the agreement, Mozambique was selling around $700 million of gas to Sasol at around one fifth of the price. According to the watchdog, Centre Integridade de Publica de Mozambique, the country was making as little as $10 million out of the deal.
With the expiry of the deal in March, Mozambique will be able to reap more from its gas and there will be more space on the pipeline to do so. Sasol is going to spend $190 million on the 865 kilometer pipeline, from Pande to Secunda, in South Africa, to increase its capacity by up to 30%. The energy giant is also going to spend $135 million on a new processing plant to be opened in 2015. Sasol is having to revise its prices now that the sweetheart deal from Mozambique is over and is already suffering a volley of criticism from customers.
The very fact that one of the biggest energy players in Africa is prepared to put its millions into Mozambique bodes well for investor confidence. Despite this, many investors are likely to look at the country’s new rules and scratch, if not shake, their heads.
Mozambique, rated as the fourth poorest nation on earth, has a long, long, way to go before it can become a player in the world energy market and become more famous for power than prawns.

Prawn To Be King

The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership. There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian character. There is nothing wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or air or anything else.”
So writes one Nigeria’s most prolific sons, Chinua Achebe, in his somewhat defeatist essay, The Trouble with Nigeria. His sentiments are part of a chorus bemoaning the fact that for all of Nigeria’s wealth, be it in the form of highly educated professionals or resource endowment, there is not enough patriotism. We don’t have functioning roads but I have a jet. We don’t have national security but I can hire a private security outfit. And so the logic goes. It is this ‘every man for himself’ attitude that erodes nationhood. With a population of 175 million jostling for a toehold, it is not surprising that this notorious spirit beats strongly throughout Nigeria.
One young woman who embodies the contradictions of the green-and-white nation is 24-year-old Orode Ryan-Okpu. To some, her claim to fame is as the daughter of Dr. Emmanuel Uduaghan, the governor of the Delta State.
Ryan-Okpu’s new claim to fame, however, is explained by two business cards. She offers me two – a pink one first and then a purple one. The latter is for Raum Oil Services, where Ryan-Okpu is the managing director. Raum Oil Services is the only upstream oil business in Nigeria owned by a woman. So far it has collected an impressive list of clients, including Nigerian lender Zenith Bank, pan-African energy group Oando, and oil and gas company Conoil.
Ryan-Okpu will be the first to tell you that she was born with the proverbial silver spoon in her mouth. She will also freely admit that she has used her networks to get to where she is today. But she is quick to point out that, “to whom much is given, much is expected”.
A young woman working in the male-dominated oil industry, Ryan-Okpu is regularly asked why she wastes her time on such a challenging venture when she could get more than enough money from her financially successful parents. Surely she should be able to live her life as a lady of leisure? Or, at worst, get a ‘nice’ job?
As she answers these questions, one word keeps making its way into the conversation – legacy. A popular preoccupation of many young people on the continent, it is perhaps best encapsulated by the phrase: “I’m on my hustle”. For Ryan-Okpu, however, it is not an obsession with hustlin’ to make money, but rather, hustlin’ to leave the world with something to remember her by.
The second business card is emblazoned with the words, ‘Pink Pearl Foundation’ (PPF). A pet cause for the Nigerian version of China’s famed silver-spooned princelings? If so, she certainly puts a lot of effort into it. Motivated by the loss of family members to cancer, as well as by her own brush with the illness, Ryan-Okpu founded PPF six years ago. A university student at the time, she decided something needed to be done to educate and empower Nigerian women in the fight against cancer.
The foundation carries out advocacy drives across Nigeria, increasing awareness about cancer symptoms and the importance of regular self-examination. PPF holds free breast and cervical cancer screenings at mobile clinics and has developed a series of educational talks aimed at women in rural areas.
In July, it opened the Rubies School of Women Empowerment, which offers cancer survivors short courses in business management, catering, tailoring and jewelry design. Ryan-Okpu has also just wrapped up a film called “Happy Funeral”, which raises awareness about cancer symptoms and the need for regular checkups.
PPF has reached out to nearly 4,000 women every year since 2007. The foundation believes that if you can save a woman, you can save a generation.
Inevitably, the question of why she chose not to follow in the footsteps of her political family crops up. When I probe her on her political ambitions Ryan-Okpu concedes that she is interested in pursuing the family tradition. Just give me time, she says, explaining that she wants to achieve much more before entering the political arena.
If Ryan-Okpu is an indication of the future of Achebe’s Nigeria, a new generation obsessed with what they leave behind, then the green-and-white nation may just be on the right track after all.

Hustlin’ for a Legacy

Women are itching to get involved in Africa’s multibillion-dollar infrastructure industry.
It is no easy task. The sector is historically dominated by men, financial institutions turn up their noses at women attempting to access money and established companies are favored for big deals.
But Leading Women of Africa (LWA) is determined to help women not only get their foot in the door, but become the ones formulating the plans and signing deals. LWA is a network of 18,000 contacts, mostly in Africa, which links women in different countries. “If you are not on the table, you are on the menu,” says LWA president Madelein Mkunu.
LWA launched Women in Infrastructure Development in Africa (Wida) at the third Corporate G20-Africa Investment Conference in London in July. The initiative is starting to create a space for women to engage with infrastructure stakeholders in the public and private sector. “We want to support a mechanism that will increase the number of women-owned companies that are in the infrastructure sector. Also at a policy level and at a legal framework level&#8230; because that is where everything needs to start; where women need to be recognized.”
Wida aims to ensure that women’s agendas are taken seriously by institutions and by the Program for Infrastructure Development in Africa (Pida).
Pida was set up to accelerate the delivery of Africa’s current and future regional and continental infrastructure projects in transport, energy, information and telecommunications technologies, as well as trans-boundary waterways. It promotes regional economic integration by bridging Africa’s infrastructure gap. The con-tinent is the least integrated physically and economically, with intra-regional trade and global trade at 10% and 3%, respectively.
Pida, which will run until 2040, is supported by the African Union (AU) Commission, the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad), the African Development Bank (AfDB), the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa and the Regional Economic Communities.
African governments are increasingly focusing on infrastructure development to grow their economies. It is estimated that poor infrastructure alone saps the continent of 2% economic growth every year.
Earlier this year, the AfDB launched a $500 million development fund to sponsor feasibility studies of large infrastructure projects across sub-
Saharan Africa. Mkunu says the LWA is in talks with the AU, Nepad and AfDB, and that Wida has been well
received all round.
“At the G20 summit… there was a strong push by the LWA, Pida department and Nepad Business Council for more women representation in infrastructure development.
“We did not expect for them to be so receptive, because we know that the issue of women and infrastructure is a new issue we are bringing up. You know, nobody really ever thought that women would be interested in this sector. We were kind of amazed about how they were willing to listen to us.”
For the LWA, it makes business sense to focus on infrastructure. The industry is growing at a rapid pace, and if Africa is serious about development, much still needs to be done.
According to Pida, only 30% of people on the continent have access to electricity, while 34% have access to roads. Internet penetration in Africa stands at just 6% and only 4% of available water resources are developed. The total cost of implementing all the projects that Pida has identified to address projected infrastructure needs by 2040 will amount to $360 billion.
“For us at LWA, yes, we do agree that the economic empowerment of women needs to start at the bottom. Women have to put food on the table and send their children to school. However, when we look at the sustainability of women’s economic empowerment, it actually involves women getting access to real projects.
“Let’s just look at the next 30 years and Pida’s goals for 2040: we don’t want to be left behind. We want to get in there while they are planning. We don’t want, by the year 2040, that they realize, ‘oh women again have been left behind’,” says Mkunu.
One woman who is grabbing the bull by the horns is South African property developer Belinda Moleko. Moleko has gone where no African has gone before. She is spearheading a $500 million project to design and build a small town near Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania.
Last year Moleko approached the Tanzanian government for a piece of land to develop. The government agreed and gave her land near Kilimanjaro, to take advantage of the high number of tourists who flock to Africa’s highest mountain, and therefore attract international investors.
“Through LWA, I presented myself to say: ‘I can do this type of thing. You offer me the land, you offer me payment guarantees, I will offer you performance guarantees’,” she says confidently.
“I was very lucky with Tanzania. They said: ‘Belinda, I will give you the MOU (memorandum of understanding) to develop 20,000 houses. We want you to create a whole new (town), like they do in South Africa.’”
The first phase of the project will see the local municipality moving its employees on site. Currently they have to travel daily from Arusha, which is about 100 kilometers away. A total of 1,400 houses with sanitation, electri-city and running water are due to be built by March next year. The town will eventually have all the amenities of a modern urban space, including schools, a library, hotels and parks.
“I’m going to leave a legacy that a woman came in and changed the face of Africa forever,” Moleko says intently.
But her dream has not been without obstacles.
“I could see there is a problem of housing, there is a problem with sanitation and that somebody needs to go in there and change it. But with this huge project on this table… I’m still finding it difficult, I cannot do it alone. I find that all the people I’m interviewing,
99 percent of them are men, and cannot believe that a black woman from South Africa has landed this project. They look at you as if to say: ‘you must have done something to deserve this’.”
One of Moleko’s major headaches has been access to finance, a common problem for women in the construction industry as well as in other sectors.
Commercial banks and even development finance institutions believe that women are more of a risk than their male counterparts. And that is even though Moleko has 20 years’ experience in the industry and her company, Bella Casa, built the first housing cluster in a South African township, Tembisa, near Pretoria.
“Take this project in Tanzania now. I have contacted banks here, and the first thing is: ‘what sureties do you have?’ I don’t have sureties, but I have a project that can give me sureties. I’m yet to see a bank that supports women without those conditions.
“I have seen ladies getting a small tender of about R100,000 ($10,000)&#8230; She gets that tender, knocks at the bank (door) to say government has given me a tender to supply them A, B, C, D. That tender even expires. That is why you see a tendency of people selling tenders to sell that project because it’s either you settle for a R1,000 ($100) or you lose.
There is no bank that wants to listen to you. They just aren’t friendly from the reception up.”
Moleko says another concern is that many women do not know how to put together a business plan, but banks and development finance institutions refuse to help them.
Although the AfDB has launched its development fund for infrastructure, Mkunu says the LWA will eventually set up its own fund to help women in infrastructure.
Moleko credits South Africa’s Trade and Industry Department for enabling her to move on the Tanzanian project. She approached the department’s gender desk to fund a $1.7 million feasibility study. After nearly five months of thorough checking, the department agreed.
But as Moleko says, governments cannot support infrastructure development on their own. Public-private partnerships, a buzzword gaining traction on the continent, are essential.
Although they look good on paper, in practice these partnerships leave much to be desired. Often projects are not completed because of logistics, non-payment by government, or even because companies run off with the cash. There are also very few systems in place to monitor what is being done, and unfinished projects are common across the continent.
Although Moleko is facing her biggest challenge so far, she believes her town will not be another half-baked project, and that once she has proved her mettle, the world is her oyster.
“We hope that from this project, all the other projects I have identified in Rwanda and Kenya, they will open themselves up.”
As a woman, Moleko’s journey has not been easy.
“In our industry, you have to be strong. It forces you to change yourself, your culture, your mannerisms, your ‘womaness’, and beat the man at his own game.”
She offers unequivocal advice for women wanting to enter the industry or those wanting to further their careers. “I always tell ladies wherever I speak: ‘Take off that apron! Don’t knock, kick (down) the door!’ Gone are the days of wanting to play housewife, cleaning. Create jobs by getting a helper to do it. Get out of your cocoon and go out there.”

Women demand a slice OF THE INFRASTRUCTURE PIE

The Inga Dam project in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has been work in progress for more than 50 years.
<div id="attachment_267" style="width: 222px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-267" class="wp-image-267 size-medium" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/043_BGA11475-212x300.jpg" alt="" width="212" height="300" />DRC CONGO BELGIUM OFFICIAL VISIT DAY3</div>
The first feasibility studies for the initiative being investigated in the 1960s. The construction of Inga I, the first of four stages of the venture, was commissioned in 1972. The project is intended for completion sometime between 2020 and 2025 and could cost up to$80 billion. The Inga hydropower scheme is touted as being the solution to Africa’s energy woes—it is thought that when complete it could generate as much as 45,000 megawatts—more than South Africa, the biggest producer on the continent.
On the Inga Dam rests new projects, like BHP Billiton’s $5 billion aluminum smelter project, which could consume as much as 2,000MW.
“The major shortage of power is stopping development in many sectors,” says Thierry Naweji Kankwala, chairman of the South Africa-DRC Chamber of Commerce.
Capital is the biggest issue. A slice of a $100 billion green energy fund  could emerge from the COP17 talks in Durban and that could help.
Another one of the comlications is the structure of the finance for the project. In 2004, the Western Power Corridor, or Westcor, a cluster of African countries including the  DRC, Angola, Namibia, Botswana and South Africa, signed a memorandum of understanding  to finance Inga III, but in 2009 the government of DRC changed its mind and turned to  private investors.
Environmental concerns such as deforestation have also been raised. The World Energy Council estimates that the project could save 100 million tons of carbon being spewed into the atmosphere.
The completion of the Inga Dam project could be a coup for the continent with transmission lines planned as far afield as Egypt and Europe.
“The project will have a big impact in the continent, especially in the Southern African countries (Zimbabwe, Mozambique, South Africa and others),” says Kankwala.
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