As the IMF discusses a new programme with Mozambique, an important debate with and within the IMF becomes relevant. After the secret debt fiasco, the IMF has the upper hand, but donors and civil society will need to monitor the discussions to ensure that a hard-nosed IMF negotiating team actually follows the new guidelines emerging from Washington.

South Africa recently discovered that 17 banks were colluding to manipulate the national currency to make super profits. Often, government officials are part of such scandals. What is needed is a unified, Africa-wide solidarity network from below and beyond borders working together to get governments and institutions to ensure that damaging profiteering is stopped.

The evidence available contradicts the propaganda the South African president and his backers are attempting to disseminate: Zuma has been, not a victim, but a friend of both white monopoly capital and organisations linked to Western intelligence agencies when it suits him.

The Canadian government under Justin Trudeau is attempting to alter the narratives about our country's relationship with the African continent. Beware the initiative is largely an ideological chimera devoid of concrete action, but even worse, it is blatant hypocrisy.

While inequality has become a topic of increased popularity and politicization in recent years, most of the attention has focused on how 1% own an increasingly large share of the world’s wealth, rather than on inequalities between nations. In a global context in which national borders and citizenship pose few barriers to the mobility of capital, the reality is also a story of the world’s richest nations continuing to reap a disproportionate amount of the globe’s profits.

It is dubious that African middle classes by their sheer existence promote economic growth. Their increase was mainly a limited result of the trickle down effects of the resource based economic growth rates during the early years of this century. Their position and role in society has hardly economic potential and dynamics inducing further productive investment contributing towards sustainable economic growth.

America’s policies under the Donald Trump White House are likely to hurt Africa. Nations on the continent should aim to diversify their products away from exporting raw materials, foster home-grown small and medium enterprises and intensify intra-Africa trade. They should also diversify their global trading partners.

Once we rid ourselves of the false notion that the market economy, as a system, could be objective or benevolent, and we distinguish it from the market as one economic institution instead of a system, we can aptly move towards rejecting the market economy while embracing healthy regulated markets.

How can a small club of extremely rich white men who have bullied markets, governments and competitors in the most undemocratic ways, now be looked upon to decree on democracy and accountability merely by the size of their bank balances and trust funds? This perhaps is the most insidious form of state capture.

Fraudulently under-reporting the price, quantity of a product or service and the value of a commercial transaction in invoices are resulting in Africa and developing countries missing out on billions of dollars in tax revenues, foreign exchange and ultimately development.

An internal IMF report admitting the destructive nature of neoliberalism may have come too late for many African countries. The neoliberal structural adjustment programs have led to economic hardships, political instability and conflicts in most African countries where they have been implemented.

There is a distinct possibility of a much smaller “Little England” looking at itself in the mirror and asking how it might salvage its relations with Africa in order to continue to get Africa’s resources and markets. This time, Africa should not let England divide and rule it; it must take the opportunity to unite and negotiate as one continent.

Last week the South African Reserve Bank Quarterly Bulletin confirmed that foreign corporations are milking the economy, drawing away profits far faster than they are reinvested or than local firms bring home offsetting profits from abroad. Can anything be done to stop the hemorrhaging?

It takes quite some fantasy to imagine how, based on the living costs in Africa’s urban centres, a $2-a-day threshold catapults someone from the $1.99 margin as criteria for poor into a middle-class existence. And then into playing a pioneering role in the continent’s future transformation.

Their high-blown fantasy and improbable outcomes notwithstanding, James Bond films are strangely relevant to project management. They demonstrate the benefits of proper planning with clear implementation strategies and regular and effective monitoring. Further, the films emphasize the importance of networks and partnerships.