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.
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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. 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. 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. 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.
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