Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Davos speech — “the old order is not coming back” — sounded like a revelation to some in the North. In the Global South it felt more like a diagnosis finally written in plain language.
Africans have lived with the gap between the rhetoric of a rules‑based order and the reality of selective enforcement for decades. The difference now is that the gap has become strategically dangerous.
Carney’s core message is simple: middle powers must stop pretending the old bargain still holds and act accordingly; to “take down the sign in their windows”, to use Václav Havel’s greengrocer analogy from communist-era Czechoslovakia. For Africa’s middle powers, especially South Africa, that means a hard reckoning with both external coercion and internal decay.
For decades, African leaders have been told to liberalise, privatise and integrate. If we signed the trade agreements, deregulated capital and showed up at the right summits, the system would reward us.
The story suited us because it provided cover. We could speak the language of universal values while expecting the system to deliver enough stability, access and growth to make it all work. In return, we accepted double standards and asymmetries: court rulings that matter for weaker states but are quietly ignored by bigger ones and climate promises made with fanfare and delivered in teaspoons.
African economies sit right on the faultlines of this new world.
Now the mask has slipped. Great powers have moved from using the system to shape behaviour and mutual gain, to using direct economic coercion such as tariffs, sanctions, technology bans and choke points in supply chains.
When shipping routes, payment systems and app stores become tools of pressure, dependence stops being a development strategy and becomes a vulnerability. We’ve already seen what can happen — a change in rich-country regulation can wipe out a clothing factory in Lesotho or a flower farm in Kenya overnight.
African economies sit right on the faultlines of this new world. Our minerals feed other people’s energy transitions. Our ports and railways connect South–South trade. Our mobile networks and data centres run on platforms built elsewhere. Our debt burdens and infrastructure needs make us targets for influence.
Corruption weakens the state, erodes trust
In this context, corruption is not a side note; it is the enemy within. It quietly does to us what external adversaries spend billions trying to achieve: it weakens the state, erodes trust and makes us easier to manipulate. Every looted project, every cadre deployment into a technical role, every manipulated procurement process, is a small surrender of sovereignty.
Strength, by contrast, is a revenue service that collects what is due. It is ports and railways that run on schedule because appointments are based on competence, not connections. It is regulators who enforce rules the same way for politically connected firms as they do for everyone else. It is citizens who refuse to normalise impunity. This is what underpins any credible talk of strategic autonomy.
So how do we start to build this? Carney’s plan for Canadian autonomy — “value‑based realism”—travels well to our context. Keep your principles: sovereignty, human rights, territorial integrity. But pair them with clear‑eyed pragmatism: build domestic resilience in energy, logistics and institutions; diversify partnerships; and form coalitions issue by issue rather than relying on institutions that no longer guarantee protection.
Carney’s Canada has the fiscal muscle to cut taxes, fast‑track a trillion dollars of investment and double defence spending. Africa’s balance sheets are tighter, but we have something else: scale and youth.
Continental strategic autonomy
For Africa, strategic autonomy must be continental. We need to appreciate that the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) is not just a trade agreement; it is our main instrument for turning 54 relatively weak bargaining positions into one meaningful one.
That requires resisting the temptation to sell off pieces of our leverage via one‑off deals that fragment the African agenda. It also requires something harder: making AfCFTA real in ports, borders and courts, not just in speeches.
Sovereignty must also come with a deep and sustained investment and a radical increase in the pace and relevance of education and skills development. It is vital to democratise and rethink skills development so that talent and confidence, not inherited wealth, determine opportunity and set the pace for continental development and innovation.
South Africa has a particular choice to make. It likes to see itself as an African leader and a global middle power. Yet its foreign policy increasingly looks like improvisation: gesturing one way in Geneva, another in New York and a third in domestic politics. A more honest path would be to align our external ambitions with internal reform: fix energy, fix logistics, rebuild institutional capacity and then use that restored credibility to anchor a more coherent African position in global forums.
In Carney’s terms, “taking down the sign” boils down to four disciplines: name the world as it is, rebuild the state at home, diversify friends abroad, and apply your own principles consistently. None of these requires permission. All of them are within our control.
Strength is not something we have to wait for others to grant us. Strength is us – the choices we make about corruption, about continental integration, about who we partner with and on what terms. Embracing sovereignty is not an act of rebellion or a grand gesture; it is the first honest step towards designing the next order rather than scraping out an existence within it.
• Foster-Pedley is associate pro vice chancellor (global engagement — Sub-Saharan Africa) of the University of Reading and dean and director of Henley Business School Africa.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.