Nkosana Moyo, Vice-President and Chief Operations Officer of the African Development Bank, believes Africa needs to understand that protectionism would be the wrong response with regard to what is going on in the rest of the world.

What is needed instead, he stated to a prominent International Affairs magazine, is Africa-generated clarity in terms of what the cost of African risk really is and what the opportunities are for attracting resources into Africa. The availability of the public sector or donor resources is going to be revised. Africa will have to pay attention to creating an environment that is conductive to private-sector investing, with a focus on improving the regulatory framework.

Succinct and yet spot-on, Moyo continues, answering a question on how the African response to the crisis should differ from Western economies- Putting liquidity in to the economic system and rescuing banks requires resources that African governments by and large don’t have. The mood and intervention has to be much more regulatory and fiscal: taxes should be reduced in a more judicious manner.

In the financial services sector of the western world, he states, regulations have become far too lax, but in developing countries it is also accepted that regulations are too constrictive. The key is finding that middle ground.

Overall, as we at CFP agree, the crisis has created opportunity. Opportunity to invest through understanding and reappraising emerging market risk. As he puts it, “the risk in developed economies is not as low as we thought it was, and conversely the risk in emerging economies is not as high as we thought it was. From an emerging market perspective, I will take advantage of that, I will create transparency to articulate and make that clear. I would also take advantage of this times of re-calibration to do things which place emerging economies in a better light compared to developed economies, by addressing the regulatory framework“.

Certainly, if these words were followed by actions from state players, the dynamically shifting world of geo-politics would veer far off current course and in to a well-deserved age of developing market investment and infrastructural change.