Africa desperately needs visionaries cut from the same cloth as Gamal Abdul Nasser and Kwame Nkrumah at this point in her history

By Ayo Akinfe

[1] Today is October 31. On this day in 1959 the USSR and Egypt signed a contract to build Aswan Dam. Today, the damn is fully functional with a capacity of 2,100MW. Pivotal to Egypt's planned industrialisation, the Aswan Dam had three main purposes. This was to control flooding, provide increased water storage for irrigation and generate hydroelectricity

[2] Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, was a genuine visionary, who had a clear picture of the kind of nation he wanted to build. He saw Egypt as the link between the Arab and African world's and wanted to build it up as an economic and military power. Given Egypt's location as the corner of Africa and along the mouth of the Red Sea, President Nasser saw the Suez canal and the River Nile as central to his economic programme

[3] In all fairness, there were other African leaders who thought like Nasser in the 1960s. Our own Tafawa Balewa built the Kainji Dam to supply Nigeria and Niger Republic with power and President Kwame Nkrumah built the Akosombo Dam to supply both Ghana and Burkina Faso with electricity. At the time, it was agreed that rivers runs across countries, so power plants, so serve as many nations as possible

[4] What I like best about President Nasser was that he was not phased by the fact that Egypt was a desert nation. He had plans to make her an agrarian economy, using the annual flooding of the River Nile for an unprecedented irrigation programme. Today, Egypt is a major agricultural product producer growing everything from rice, to onions, to tomatoes to maize. Most desert nations her size and wholly dependent on food imports but alas Egypt is not

[5] President Nasser was a genuine pan-African and pan-Arab. His programmes were not laced with all sorts of personality cults as happened with Maumer Gadaffi. His was simple economic growth centred around industrialisation. President Nkrumah shares this dream when he said on March 3 1975: "Our independence in Ghana is meaningless unless it leads to the total liberation of the African continent." President Nkrumah then went about trying to build the United States of Africa

[6] Having said all this, Egypt is still a long way from where she should be. Once upon a time, Egypt was the greatest nation on earth and they should be aiming to recapture that glory. A country that gave us the pyramids, arithmetic and time should be a permanent member of the G7 countries of economic giants

[7] As our President Muhammadu Buhari is currently attending an Islamic Finance summit in Saudi Arabia, I hope he is thinking like President Nasser and President Nkrumah. Over the last month, President Buhari has been to investment summits in China and Russia, so he has been given a global audience. All he needs to do is sell his vision to them

[8] I am pleased that the Russians have agreed to resume control of Ajaokuta as we have made a right mess of it. We simply do not know how to make privatisation work in Nigeria as all the state assets we have sold off like the steel mills and electricity distribution companies have been abysmal failures. By the same token, we have also made a mess of state-owned industries like Nigerian Airways, the Nigerian National Supply Company and the Nigerian National Shipping Line

[9] Going forward, what Africa simply needs is for Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa to get off their knees. If these three countries are G7 economies with gross domestic products of say $3trn each, they will drag the rest of the continent along with them

[10] Over the long term, I can see these three carving up Africa into three among themselves. If not three, maybe no more than 12 as our continent simply has too many nation states at the moment. Many of them are simply not viable. Benin Republic for instance cannot exist without the port of Cotonou, which is only there to serve Nigeria. Why Benin Republic is not part of Nigeria is simply beyond me. You know, the likes of Nasser and Nkrumah saw all this and were they still around, they would have found a way to build bigger and more economically viable nation states through a massive amalgamation plan