ABSTRACT
As already mentioned in the course of this book, it is generally agreed that economy and politics are interdependent; positive development in one sphere affects the other sphere positively, and negative development in one sphere affects the other sphere negatively. Hence, this chapter concludes the discussion in this book by looking at whether the African condition in the twenty-first century – both in terms of politics and political economy – will be positively different from the current negative one. The above description of the general aim of this concluding chapter is very broad. To narrow down the aim, the chapter is conscious that Africa is a microcosm of a world that has changed drastically due to globalisation, and digitisation is the pivot of this globalisation. Consequently, the chapter avers that due to the digitisation of our world, the future of African regional politics may be structurally different from the regional politics of both the past and the present. In future regional politics, we might be living in alternate coexisting worlds, one populated by physical political entities and the other populated by virtual political entities namely virtual states at time T1, virtual sub-regions at time T2, virtual regions at time T3 and a virtual global state at time T4.
