The World in 2050_ Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future - Laurence C. Smith [20]
[September 15, 2006] “On Friday, September 15, 2006, at about 3.00 P.M., a team of over 200 policemen in eight trucks from Delta State Police Command drove to Afiesere Community. . . . On arrival, they started shooting sporadically. According to media reports villagers including women and children took to their heels to avoid the bullets of the rampaging policemen. Those that could not escape were shot and killed or wounded. The policemen then looted several shops and homes before setting them ablaze. When the policemen eventually retreated around 5.30 P.M. 22 persons lay dead, 60 houses and 15 vehicles were burnt. The police also set ablaze two corpses while some were taken away and dumped in the bush. Five other victims, mostly elderly persons also reportedly died from shock over the incident.”
While all is not lost in Nigeria—it completed its first transfer of power between civilian governments peacefully in 2007, and Lagos crime rates fell sharply in 2009—it remains a dangerous place to live. Despite growing Nigeria’s gross domestic product to the second largest on the African continent, Lagos is a slum city and—like other slum cities in Africa, Asia, and Latin America—is a stark illustration of an urban world we don’t want. Clearly, there is far more to building shining technopolises than urbanization and economic growth.
Sub-Saharan Africa is a collection of countries bursting with natural and agricultural resources. Many have functioning or semifunctioning democracies. Yet, colonialism, nonsensical borders, tribal loyalties, HIV, and other problems have bogged it in muddy poverty. Nearly two-thirds of its towns and cities are slums. Recall that at current growth trajectories, these urban populations will triple in the next forty years. The still-unfolding results of the Lagos experiment do not bode well for this new African urbanism. Under the conservative ground rules of our thought experiment, it’s hard to envision how so many problems can be eliminated overnight. By 2050 I imagine much of sub-Saharan Africa—the cradle of our species—to be a dilapidated, crowded, and dangerous place.
Shifting Economic Power
Not only is the geography of the world’s urban population shifting, so also is its wealth. The economic impact of nearly two billion new urban consumers in Asia has not gone unexamined by economists. Unlike the situation in Africa, there is every indication that the rising Asian cities will be modern, globalized, and prosperous. In a thoughtful, forward-looking assessment the U.S. National Intelligence Council writes:65
The international system—as constructed following the Second World War—will be almost unrecognizable by 2025. . . . The transformation is being fueled by a globalizing economy, marked by an historic shift of relative wealth and economic power from West to East, and by the increasing weight of new players—especially China and India.
China and India—along with Brazil and Russia—are considered such economic giants-in-waiting that they’ve won their own acronym, the “BRICs” (from the first letters of Brazil, Russia, India, and China), first coined in 2003 by the global financial services company Goldman Sachs.66 According to econometric model projections by Goldman Sachs, PricewaterhouseCoopers, the Japan Center for Economic Research, the International Monetary Fund, and others, the BRICs are on pace to displace current economic leaders faster than you might think,