GoingToMeet

Introduction In the last few years, the world has morphed into an electronically connected interdependent atomic economic unit where a disruption in one marketplace affects the others. Consequently, it has become naïve to appraise the competitive challenges and opportunities for nations or indeed a continent without looking at the big global picture. Recent financial crises have shown in no small measure that the world is interlinked and the global commerce and industry has been transformed by the extraordinary powers of information and communication technologies.

Increasingly, individuals are having much power either in the capital markets, governments or entertainments and the era of centralized political power is progressively giving way to citizen’s power. Indeed, our world is being redesigned and new waves of innovation are evolving to disrupt our modern economic structures. And this trend is expected to continue as the powers of microprocessors continue to improve and information gets cheaper.

While the redesigning process is global, the innovation race is not. Many developing nations are not adapting fast enough because of deficiency in knowledge and infrastructural capability. And the developed world will not wait for them because the competition is intense and the global economic health fragile. New technologies will continue to disrupt markets while some like nanotechnology has the capacity to destroy African commodity markets. This poses security threats if plans are not developed to retrain those that will be displaced from the industries. The debts and financial crises in the PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain) are showing that a single currency is not a panacea to all economic problems. As it offers a larger market, single currency also could damage a weak continental economic structure.