Former South African President, Jacob Zuma has charged African leaders to fight for what belongs to the continent and erode itself from Western dominance.
The prominent African leader at the UPSA Annual Leadership lecture in Accra on Tuesday, August 19, 2025 said the time has come for Africans to take “ourselves to the final destination.”
“We believe that Africa has to do more so that we get what belongs to us” he stated.
The leader of the MK party in South Africa emphasised that Africans must hold the firm believe to be able to set itself free from external control.
“I believe that if you believe in Africans to be ready to be free, you will indeed at any given time do what people will not expect. Perhaps, it goes with how we all come across the lions in our countries, in our continents particularly,” he explained.
Jacob Zuma urged African leaders to ensure that resources belonging to African countries are utilized fully without relinquishing its usefulness to the West, which he described as “enemies.”
“We should utilize our own resources to us, if they don’t have them let us sell them to them. Let them not just take them away from us and make themselves wonderful when we are suffering while they take our own things,” Zuma noted.
He strongly cautioned African leaders not to allow the Western countries to take control of its resources, calling for unity and protection of the African resources.
“The problem is that our enemies know how to buy people to make them feel they are wonderful when they are actually killing a nation. We are very clear that our time has come in the continent. We need to be the ones who must lead the others, they must buy from us rather than us buying from them. It is our own, let us stop them before they take it all,” Jacob Zuma remarked.
“I think we need to be together on that and know what we are talking about. I think the time has come for us to be together,” he added.
Jacob Zuma stated that Africans “we have every possibility now to be ourselves.”
The lecture which was instituted in 2017 has hosted towering leaders including Asantehene Otumfuo Osei Tutu, Cardinal Peter Turkson, Former President John Agyekum Kufuor and now former South African President, Jacob Zuma, while deliberating on challenges bothering African continent, business and society.
This year’s lecture was under the theme:”The geopolitics and geo-economics of de-dollarization: BRICS currency strategy, lessons for Africa’s common currency and beyond.”
