The announcement that the UK will stop giving direct aid to South Africa in 2015 has been received with mixed reactions. The UK’s aid to South Africa stands at £19m a year (a drop from £40m in 2003) and has targeted reducing the mortality rate among women giving birth, as well as supporting businesses. South Africa remains one of the world’s most unequal countries, with crippling levels of youth unemployment and a six-fold gap between black and white household incomes. The jobless rate is a whopping 41.6% for blacks compared with 7.5% for whites.

While the UK argues that South Africa has made enormous progress over the past two decades, is the region's economic powerhouse and is able to fund its own development, some attribute the development to the current afro-optimism highlighted by such quarters like the World Bank, which projects that sub-Saharan Africa’s economic growth could accelerate to more than 5 per cent (reaching $54 billion by 2015, compared to $37.7 billion in 2012) and outpace the global average. According to the African Developmental Bank, "Africa has started to see an economic resurgence." McKinsey Global Institute projects that consumer spending in Africa will reach $1.4 trillion in 2020, from about $860 million in 2008.

South Africa should seize this momentum to recalibrate its economic activities towards increased investments within Africa as a way to spur growth and provide opportunities for its people. The country has an additional opportunity to tap from its membership in BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) to sustain its growth momentum. Global economic hiccups as exemplified by the Eurozone crisis offer African countries opportunity to re-organize their growth path and give meaning to the quest to have Africans solve their own problems.