The key difference between Western leaders and the emerging powers is summed up in a single word. Priorities.

In the West, the political elites agonise over transgender toilets, global warming where you will either freeze or fry, and ‘safe spaces’ for the cupcakes in our apparently sexist, racist and homophobic societies.

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The emerging powers consider how many Eton-quality schools they can build (China), how many science and maths graduates they can churn out (India), how much gas they can produce (Russia), or how to build a nuclear bomb (Iran).

So who is most likely to wrest control of the 21st Century?

The answer may be none of the above. The future of the planet is far more likely to be decided by a global phenomenon that has bomb-shelled behind our backs. The astonishing growth of megacities.

In 1900 London was the world’s largest city with five million people. In 1950 New York led with 10 million. Today there are 15 cities of more than 20 million, several million more than New York and London combined. And nearly all of them are in the Third World.

Any similarity between the modern megacity and Western capitals is largely coincidental, apart from masses of people.

For a start, today’s megacities have little or no formal infrastructure. In many neighbourhoods, councils are unable to collect rates.

Rubbish rots on pavements; water is from communal taps; and electricity is either nonexistent or intermittent.

Of particular interest for demographers is that the megacities are full of young people. They have to be. The streets are vehicular tsunamis where it is necessary to sprint across traffic that stops for nothing. People and cars miss each other by fractions.

Despite this absolute chaos, a vast ‘virtual’ world has taken root, undetected or misunderstood by Western elites. There is a sense of tight community, fierce independence, mistrust of authority, and a buzzing, almost dystopian creative energy that no nanny state will ever comprehend.

The megacities dance to their own beat. They have their own ‘ecosystem’, but the word ‘eco’ refers to economy. For example, every family from the humblest shack upwards has a pay-as-you-go smartphone, which even the most illiterate operates as expertly as a Silicon Valley geek. A quarter-billion Indians are on Facebook, while 70% of Filipinos use social media. Gates and Zuckerberg may operate from America but their growth is in the sidewalk shops and alleyways of the Third Word.

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The best example I can give is from a conservationist who regularly visits the DRC. He tells me that the chaos in Kinshasa makes a Mad Max movie look like Switzerland. But yet it somehow survives. There is no unemployment in the informal sector. Everyone is hustling for themselves, whether negotiating over a bag of homemade charcoal, or decanting tins of two-stroke oil for passing mopeds.

There is no serious crime. When you pay for a tank of petrol, the bundle of francs is left on top of the pump. Money lenders with bricks of cash operate from folding tables on the pavement.

In other words, beneath the collapsing infrastructure and decaying buildings, a vast social phenomenon — never before experienced — is evolving at breathtaking pace. And it’s defying all perceived wisdom.

The World Bank recently held its usual gabfest on how to control these exploding human clusters. Among the delegates were urban planners from Cape Town, which is itself a designated megacity of the future. This is no surprise — already there is no visible border between the Mother City and Somerset West

Predictably, the World Bank has missed the boat. It is thinking along Western lines.

While it is looking for Band-Aids by committee, in the backstreets of Khayelitsha and Kinshasa, young people failed by grossly inadequate state education systems are already evolving their own structures and solutions pertinent to their way of life.

So instead of megacities being spawning grounds of poverty, misery and Western guilt, they could be potential incubators of a giant work force that will re-ignite the economy of the world.

The biggest challenge facing the liberal Western elite is not how to deal with megacities.
It’s how to escape from last century.

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