Before I make you acquainted with my imagination of the future of Africa by 2123, which is 100 years from now, let me explain why I preferred Imagining to Thinking the Future of Africa. I will explain by simply telling you the difference between imagination and thinking.

Imagination is a creative mind process that uses imagination to generate ideas and think outside the box. Thinking is an analytical mind process that involves using logical reasoning, facts and evidence to come to conclusions. The Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary defines imagination as the ability to create pictures in your mind of what something might be like. If one is able to do this then one can put forth exciting new ideas, and is said to be imaginative. The same Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary defines thinking as the process of thinking about something.

While everyone can and does think, not everyone is a thinker. A thinker is a person who thinks clearly about something, and often writes about important things, in his or her field of knowledge or expertise and beyond, articulating and clarifying issues for society. A think-tank is thus a team of thinkers, usually intellectuals and academics, that situate themselves as a group generating advice and ideas on political, social, economic and other issues. Africa is short of think tanks. The only one I have recently heard of, and with which I am closely associated, is the Africa Think Tank founded by philosopher, Dr David Dan Mayanja.

While it is still evolving, currently it consists of thinkers such as Dr Frank B. Ssebowa, Dr Deo Apollo Musisi, Prof William Kyamuhangire, Prof Brunor Ma Ocaya, Prof Edward Rugumayo, Prof Yash Tandon, Prof John Dumba Ssentamu, Prof Sandy Tickodri-Togboa, Prof Robert Parker Bakibinga, Dr David Dan Mayanja and Dr Ham Mukasa Mulira – all of Uganda – and Dr Osita Anlemoka and Prof Smart Egwu Out -both of Nigeria. Dr David Dan Mayanja tells me all effort is being deployed to ensure that the Africa Think Tank is an integrated team of thinkers resourced from a wide range of fields of knowledge, continentally representative and free of domestic and global political, economic and social influences.

The ancient philosophers spent a lot of their time and energy, almost in equal measure, imagining, thinking and generating new ideas and ways of doing things. However, it is important to state that if there is imagining and thinking, there is also re-imagining and re-thinking. Both are necessary when new reasoning, facts, evidence, phenomena, knowledge, ways of doing things and ideas emerge. It is dangerous to continue like before when new ideas arise. These dictate new situations and circumstances. The stance of “No Change” in governance can result in catastrophic consequences in the short- medium- and long-term.

My topic “Imagining the Future of Africa by 2123” is not the first of its kind, but it might be the first to include the year 2123. Many other thinkers have imagined Africa’s future under different topics. Recently G.A. Asante (2020) did so under the topic Reimagining Africa’s Future” and Ellie Glevey did so under the topic “Imagining the African Future”. Other Topics I have come across, but will not bother about those who coined them, include:

• Imagining the Future, Rebuilding the Past
• Envisioning the Future of Nigeria
• Imagining Africa’s Futures
• Africa’s Futures, Crisis and Possibility
• African Futures
• Imagining Africa: Past and Present
• Africa’s Hopeful Future: A Look at Tomorrow’s Opportunities and Challenges
• Africa’s Futurity as Forgotten History

Africa is considered the most colonised continent between the late 19th century and the early 1960s, when most African countries were created and dominated by colonialism. They supposedly obtained their political independence from the colonisers. We can trace the colonising process to the Berlin Conference of 1884-85. During the Conference the Continent of Africa was parcelled into the current enclaves called “African Countries”. Only Ethiopia was not colonised.

The consequences of colonialism have been many, diverse and well-documented. One consequence is continued deceptive ownership of Africa by the orthodox colonisers in terms of economics, politics, sociality and futurity. This is most expressed by the deceptive robbery of Africa through foreign aid. In reality money flows out of Africa far more than comes in from the so-called foreign aid-giving countries. These are frequently the former colonial powers, but also other countries such as the USA, Japan, China and India. Many of our  continent’s immediate post-colonial and current rulers served or serve as conduits through which the great robbery is carried out.

Some of the rulers became stinkingly rich through foreign aid or by stealing the resources of their countries – financial and natural. Some of the rulers manifested, or manifest as dictators or more or less like glorified monarchs. Some made national constitutions that freed them from public reproach and put the national wealth in their hands. They are constitutionally the ultimate owners of their countries’ resources. The Uganda Constitution 1995 does this, making the president central to everything small and big.

The orthodox colonialists thus continue to influence and dictate Africa’s position in what is now called the Global Village. They are not only imposing foreign aid as the tool for “development” of Africa. Consequently, Africa is continually under their economic domination through their financial power houses – the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Even if the African countries do not need foreign aid, these institutions will connive with the rulers to ensure that Africa is permanently hooked to foreign aid. They know that foreign aid is not charity and can never pull Africa out of poverty, because associated with foreign aid is corruption of the rulers and the bosses at the two institutions. Currently they are globalising poverty in Africa and using it to coarse her African people to transit from heterosexuality to homosexuality. This is despite their knowledge that homosexuality does not reproduce genealogies of families but is like the terminal GM seeds that cannot be grown twice. Like the genes of the GM seeds that disappear from the crop genome, the genes of homosexuals disappear from the human genome. Ultimately, extinction of populations is the final homosexual act. The deliberate determination by foreign interests to popularise homosexuality and proliferate it in Africa seems to be aimed at achieving genome death and, hence, population extinctions in the continent.

One school of thought links this choice for Africa to a plot by the West to ultimately own Africa the way they owned New Zealand, Australia and the Americas. To possess New Zealand, Australia and the Americas they used crude methods of elimination of the Maoris, the Aboriginals and the Red Indians respectively.

The former colonialists continue to dictate the economic and the functional and structural relations of Africa with the rest of the world; and what the continent sells and buys from outside. They invented the phenomenon of globalisation to ensure the continent remains in their sphere of influence economically and even in terms of ecology, security, science and technology. They arm our armies, which they use to ensure that our security and peace continue to depend on them well in future, and to maintain and sustain their preferred rulers in power to serve their selfish interests at the expense of the African people. They continue to maintain and sustain sociopolitical chaos in different parts of the continent to continue exploiting the continent to fuel their economies and continue to exploit material resources as in the past.

Today the former colonialists are encouraging the African rulers to sell large chunks of land to their multinational agribusiness and/or seed firms, ostensibly to promote and improve food production on the continent. Seventy-two per cent of the continent’s land is now owned by such firms. Yet simultaneously, they are promoting genetically modified seeds (GMOs). The GMOs are reducing the genetic diversity of the continent’s traditional crops. The cultivation of GMOs is not only destroying the continent’s diverse ecologies and soils, but also its diverse agroecological systems on which food production has depended for centuries.

GMOs are one reason the collective health of Africa’s people has deteriorated meteorically. The consumption of GMOs combines with pesticides and herbicides, without which they cannot survive, to cause different cancers in our people. Cancers of different types have become very common threats to the continent’s human populations. Numerous men, women and children are increasingly succumbing to different types of cancers (there are as many cancers as there are organs in the body), and other food-related ailments such as kidney failure and high blood pressure.

As if all this is not bad enough, selfishness, greed, political ethnicisation and ethnic politicisation in many African countries are at the centre of leadership and governance failures. This is not only forcing people to the margins of Nature to etch a living. It is also eroding the biocultural and ecological diversity of the continent through intentional denials, dispossessions, human displacements and even annihilation of whole indigenous communities. Disguised and outright ethnic cleansing is silently taking place in some African countries. In some African countries there is concealed genocide, often funded and carried out by foreigners who have no historical, genetic, biological, social, ecological and psychological attachment to their “victimised” countries. Human population displacements are leading to rising numbers of crossborder and internal refugees. A combination of external and internal refugees is one of the main reasons why many important ecosystems and agroecological systems are collapsing or being removed from the face of the Earth and climate change is becoming an integral phenomenon of the African continent.

In Uganda, for example, government’s soft spot for external refugees is precipitating the arrival of so many crossborder refugees in the country. Who would not love to become a refugee in Uganda where the government maintains an open-door policy for them and is even planning to borrow trillions of shillings to educate their children and build descent houses for them at the expense of the nationals? It is easy for them to get national Identity cards, passports, citizenship and other certifications at the expense of the indigenous people.

External refugees, once certified, can be more of nationals and citizens, settle anywhere in Uganda and access all opportunities previously available only to bona fide Ugandans. They are grabbing the ancestral lands and the agroecological systems of indigenous Ugandans, pushing them to towns where there are no opportunities for them. They claim they have the right to settle anywhere in Uganda because they are Ugandans! The Uganda Constitutions of 1995 confers that right on them. Obviously, the victims in the short-, medium- and long-term are the indigenous Ugandans.

One time some Uganda government officials made political appeals to the peasants to leave their rural areas for towns, today they don’t have to choose to leave. They are forced by the crossborder refugees who are thirsty for land for grazing their cattle or to establish ranches, farms or any other human enterprises for those refugees who have become modern-day settlers. The modern-day settlers have grabbed mines, forests, swamps and parts of the lakes, and are now the ones growing coffee, sugarcane and other cash and food crops, and control the production chain. They own factories, petrol stations, supermarkets and hotels, to name but a few. Some own them by remote-sensing – with one foot in their countries of origin, because they have easily accessed the country’s nationality, sovereignty and citizenship.

Sometimes land-grabbing is done for foreigners by the government, ostensibly to fuel investment, industrialization and development. The foreigners are, thus, assured of free land. Furthermore, they are assured of repatriation of their profits back to their countries and cheap labour. In Uganda there is no minimum wage; so, workers can be paid anything without government interventions. It is more or less domestic slavery. Those young people who cannot be employed locally are ferried out of the country to Arab countries to provide cheap labour as external refugees.

Elections in Africa are normally organised by the rulers, not to be lost but to retain power, sustain them in power and ensure unlimited access to the natural resources of the country for personal or family gain. Talk of development, transformation and progress is done for deceptive intension to maintain the status quo which ensures that a few have unlimited access to opportunities that the economy offers. Usually, all effort is done politically and militarily to exclude alternatives to them and from active participation in the socio-politics and/or from the ecologies and environments, let alone, the labour force of the countries. They prefer to import foreigners, by whatever means, to perform jobs that would otherwise be performed by the locals. Therefore, they are against the people and countries they rule. It is as if the countries and people are their enemies.

So then what is the future of Africa by the year 2123 if what is happening today continues well in the future?

The continent will have lost most of its land, forests, swamps, and waters to foreigners and foreign firms.  All its lakes and rivers will have become heavily polluted and depleted of fish. Some lakes will have joined Lake Chad in West Africa in being reduced to swamps.

One thing seems obvious. By 2123 the local Africans will have become the foreigners in their own countries. The Continent will have been penetrated fully by new colonisers, principally China, which will have grabbed most of the assets of the countries, including airports, forests, lakes and rivers. Just like did happen in Asia during the Green Revolution, heavily funded by the World Bank, the locals will have been completely disconnected from their ancestral lands in favour of foreigners and foreign firms. As I said, currently more than 72 per cent of African land is owned by foreign seed firms. The locals will have lost their citizenship, sovereignty and ownership of their countries entirely to the foreigners and foreign firms. The instruments of power will be firmly in the hands of foreigners, who will make the laws and policies for the locals, just as was the case in the colonial times. In virtually all African countries the rulers will be foreigners, formerly cross-border refugees.

Since the Africans generally hate reading and writing, even when they are well-educated, by 2123 the history of Africa will have been rewritten to reflect the value and interests of the foreigners. The cultural values and identities of the Africans will have been thoroughly eroded. The locals will not be growing their own food since they will have lost all their land to the foreigners. Just like the Ogoni people of Nigeria who lost their land to the oil industry do, the majority of African people will, if at all, grow food in pots or tins. The foreigners who will be feeding them will determine who to live and who to die. Unless some other factors, such as the superior heavenly power, intervene, nothing will have prevented Africans becoming as insignificant in numbers on their continent just as the Maoris, Aboriginals and Red Indians became in New Zealand, Australia and the Americas became some 300 or so years ago.

The Continent will have become fully globalised. It will be the focal point in globalized poverty. Just like New Zealand, Australia and the Americas, which once were lands of the Maoris, Aborigines and Red Indians respectively but were grabbed by Europeans, Africa will have been grabbed by China and other Countries. In one short sentence, Africa will not be for Africans!

Unlike African universities rise up as a collective to the new knowledge production cultures and/or systems of interdisciplinarity, crossdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity and extradisciplinarity the majority of them will have collapsed just like the University of Timbuktu, whose knowledge culture, practice and fate I described in my recent article Rethinking the governance of science and technology in light of the knowledge integration momentum, in the Mediaeval Times. Many of them today don’t even have websites or emails and those which have them cannot sustain them. So, by 2123 they will have been disadvantaged and marginalised by the World Wide Web, artificial intelligence and the new and different knowledge production systems or cultures on which the World Wide Web and artificial knowledge depend. The continent will be located exactly where it is today. However, its African people will have been dispossessed of the continent and the African intelligentsia will be an insignificant contributor to global knowledge production unless drastic efforts are deployed to transit from producing disciplinarily-educated or trained persons to interdisciplinarily, crossdisciplinarily, transdisciplinarily and extradisciplinarily-educated and trained graduates of the 21st century and beyond. The Africa Think Tank must take this seriously if it is to be futuristically relevant for Africa and the world in education development.

In conclusion, I am not predicting the future but imagining the future. I do not have the capacity to predict the future. Doing so is the work of God. I know many of my readers hate hearing of God because they are adherents to the theories of evolution and the Big Bang. However, I am a scientist who, like many other scientists, accepts that a superior being exists and was the one responsible for the emergence of a universe with so many species, each different from the others.

God himself says that he frustrates the predictions of astrologers and makes his plans and predictions come true (Isaiah, 44: 26-26). Hopefully, many Africans have the same imagination that I have about Africa. Perhaps most are not even imagining anything beyond 10 years. Perhaps many Africans are not even thinking 100 years ahead. I am imagining even when I know that I will not be there in the next few years.

However, God can make my imagination of an Africa 100 years from now not come true just as he can make any human prediction not come true. This article suggests that the past, present and future are interconnected. What is happening today has influenced my imagination of Africa’s future by 2123. As I intimated to you, I will definitely not be there to see if my imagination will become true. Seeing is not by the eyes but by the brain. It is my brain that has produced my imagination that I am sharing with you. Independent imagination is as a right as independent thinking is a right.

I have fully used my imagination as a right. You too can. Let everyone imagine the future of Africa as a continent for Africans and detest beforehand the real possibility of foreigners taking it away from Africans. Africa must remain for Africans. Can the Africa Think Tank take over from here and innovate the strategies to ensure Africa is not robbed from its owners well in the future?

• A Tell report / By Prof Oweyegha-Afunaduula, a former professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences of the Makerere University, Uganda