I have a little confession to make: I am an Afro-optimist. This means I am the diametrical opposite of Donald Trump, who, when he hears of Africans wanting to travel to the US, goes into a trance and starts seeing visions of our Nigerian brothers and sisters vowing never to return to their huts in the villages of their motherland once they set foot on American soil.

Okay, the bit about trances and visions is in the realm of hyperbole, but it is a reference to the US President’s appalling remarks about Nigerians, which were published in the highly regarded New York Times newspaper in December. He was grumbling about the 40 000 Nigerians who had received visas to enter the US since the beginning of last year, along with 15 000 Haitians and 2 500 Afghanistan nationals.

As an Afro-optimist, I reject the narrative that Africa is the ‘dark continent’, the world’s burden and a hopeless case. Granted, the continent faces a slew of challenges, such as poor infrastructure, corruption, bad governance and low standards of living. But the statistics paint a not-so-hopeless picture. According to the World Bank, Africa’s gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate will accelerate from 2.4% in 2017 to 3.2% this year and 3.5% next year, with much of this growth attributable to a recovery in commodity prices and economic reform programmes in many countries.

If one excludes the ailing top three economies – South Africa, Nigeria and Angola – African GDP growth in 2018 will come in at a higher 5%. But even the prospects for these laggards are not abysmal. Both Angola and Nigeria are heavily dependent on oil, and the oil price’s recent emergence from the doldrums has prompted the World Bank to project that the Nigerian economy will expand by 2.5% this year, up from 1% in 2017, and that Angolan GDP growth will be around 1.6%. The South African economy, which expanded at a sluggish rate of 0.8% last year, is poised to grow by 1.1% this year.

As the World Bank notes, six of the ten countries expected to post the fastest growth rates in 2018 are on the African continent. These are Ghana, whose economy is forecast to expand by 8.3%, Ethiopia (8.2%), Côte d’Ivoire (7.2%), Djibouti (7%), Senegal (6.9%) and Tanzania (6.8%). The four non-African countries rounding out the top ten are India, which is expected to grow by 7.3%, Cambodia and Bhutan, both of which are on course to expand by 6.9%, and the Philippines, where a 6.7% GDP growth rate is forecast.

Given such spectacular growth rates, who can fault me for being optimistic about the future of Africa? And this sentiment is shared by the majority of those who inhabit the continent, including the folk from the far-flung villages of Igboland and Yorubaland and other remote areas of Nigeria, whom Trump saw fit to denigrate in his briefing with top officials just days before Christmas. In its ‘Outlook on the Global Agenda 2014’, the World Economic Forum noted that the people of sub-Saharan Africa were the most optimistic in the world with respect to tackling the challenges they face.

This is backed by the 2017 World Happiness Report, which notes that the people of Africa, who comprise 16% of the world’s population, have “[exceptionally] high levels of optimism and resilience”, despite ranking lowest in the happiness stakes.

But a new report – released by the US-based Pew Research Center in January – shows that we Africans are actually a happy lot. The report is based on a survey of 42 000 respondents from across the globe, who were required to answer this question: “How would you describe your day today – has it been a typical day, a particularly good day or a particularly bad day?” Roughly half the African (a median of 49%) and Latin American (a median of 48%) respondents said that their day was particularly good. Actually, seventy-three per cent of the Nigerian respondents said their day was particularly good. So much for the citizens of that country becoming so dazzled by America’s splendour that they do not want to return to their huts!