Africa therefore has most impressive prospects and if available opportunities are maximised, the continent will enjoy a significantly good future. Among other things, this will demand strategic skilling of her young population, taking charge of agricultural production to feed the growing population and motivating innovation by youths to both overcome the existing employment shortage constraints and to build on present production infrastructure to spur development in different areas.

If the above circumstances however are not well managed, they spell disaster for the continent, with potential mass starvation and unprecedented poverty as results. Threats to the continent’s fortunes are both internal to the continent and also stem from potential external interference.

With regard to the former, the biggest danger to the continent could be failure to operationalise harmony in the strategy applied to resolving the continent’s challenges. It is very difficult for the continent to realise the benefit of universal statistical analyses and to take advantage of projections arrived at for the continent-wide scope, when there is no significant unity in practice.

To this end, initiatives such as the African Continental Free Trade Area must work. The initiative is meant to create a single continental market for goods and services, with free movement of business persons and investments across the continent.

Trading under the relevant agreement is set to begin on July 1, 2020. Future generations will then have to build on such initiatives to cement stronger unity ties on the continent. The same goes for schemes such as the agreement reached by African countries in 2003 to assign 10 per cent of their budgets to agriculture.

The continent should adopt a do-or-die mentality about such plans and implement them without fail. Related to the need for enhancing agricultural production, for example, Africa already runs an annual food import bill of about $35 billion. In the next five years, this figure is predicted to more than triple to $110 billion. This is unfortunate for a continent with more than half of the world’s cultivable land.

The threat of external interference will also remain real to the continent, and in a capitalist world it should not be a surprise that other global players will want to tap into Africa’s potential for their own interests.

That is how our world works and it is up to African states to safeguard their own interests and pursue them with resolve, an objective that would still nearly be impossible to realise without a high level of harmonious trade between African countries, as well as pursuing unity beyond just trade and commerce.

The surest means to an Africa that will ably take advantage of imminent opportunities while navigating dangers in future is for the continent to strengthen her internal capacity to do so. It is the only hope for next African generations and without it, even partnerships with the best intending external players will fall short.

This continent strengthening is a matter of urgency because without it, a lot can go wrong without chance of recovery even in only the next one decade, going by the fast pace of changes anticipated within the continent’s outlook.