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Becoming the seventh Rector of the United Nations University (UNU), South African professor Tshilidzi Marwala will serve as the chief academic and administrative officer at the academic and research arm of the United Nations (UN) in Tokyo, Japan.



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The office of the UN Secretary-General announced today that the renowned South African academic and researcher will assume office from March 1 next year.  



&#8220;In a world that finds itself in a flux and defined by great uncertainty, it is an honor to embark on a new journey that will seek to explore solutions to some of our most pressing global challenges,&#8221; Marwala says to FORBES AFRICA about the new role. 



“The decision to appoint Professor Marwala was taken after an extensive international search process,” Farhan Haq, Deputy Spokesperson for the Secretary-General, said at a Daily Press Briefing on July 25.  



Marwala will succeed Professor David M. Malone of Canada who has served as UNU Rector since 2013.&nbsp;



Marwala is currently the Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of Johannesburg, with experience that stretches over two decades. According to the UN, with multi-disciplinary research interests, Marwala is an accomplished scholar and “thought leader” in areas that include the theory and application of artificial intelligence to engineering, computer science, finance, social science, and medicine.  



“He has an extensive track record in human capacity development and is committed to leveraging technology and global connectedness towards the pursuit of the Sustainable Development Goals,” said the UN in a statement.  



&#8220;My time at UJ has entrenched my interests in working towards developing a sustainable future not only for this generation but for generations to follow,&#8221; Marwala adds to FORBES AFRICA. &#8220;I am certain that many of the lessons I have learned as the Vice-Chancellor of UJ will stand me in good stead.&#8221;



The UNU is a global think tank with 13 institutes in 12 countries.



Marwala is also author of the upcoming book, Heal Our World: Securing Sustainable Future In Africa.

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South African Vice-Chancellor Appointed Rector Of United Nations University

The city of Johannesburg was established in 1886 after the discovery of gold. Gold is a mineral that has been deemed valuable for thousands of years. It does not rust and it is malleable. 



Gold has been used in jewelry as well as in the semiconductor industry to build electronic circuits. You can bury gold for hundreds of years and the worst it can get is accumulate dust. 



Because of its durability, gold has been used to store value in the form of money. In many countries, printed and minted money used to be linked to stored gold, which was reserved in the central bank. This way, central banks used to print as much money as they had gold reserves. There had been many attempts to move away from the gold standard beginning in the United Kingdom in the 1920s.



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However, the first successful move from the gold standard
was in the 1970s during the Nixon Administration in America. 



At this time, the United States (US) ran out of gold and
moved from the gold standard and floated the US dollar. Floated currency is
regulated by the laws of demand and supply and is closely linked to the
economic productivity of a country.



The idea of gold as the most important economic asset has
passed. Instead of entrepreneurs going to California to look for gold, as they
did in the past, they now go to Silicon Valley to create companies that exploit
the acquisition and sharing of data. 



Facebook is one such company that has connected the world
and expanded our friendships – although, in my opinion, it lowered the quality
of those friendships. 



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">Facebook’s most valuable asset is not the software that connects people, which can easily be replicated, but the data of the over two billion active users it connects. </blockquote>



The most valuable asset of Uber, the ride-hailing service
that does not own a single taxi, is the data of the people who use it. The
prime asset of Google, the largest library, which owns no physical library, is
the index that takes customers to their desired websites. 



Therefore, the new valuable asset is not gold but it is
data. Data has become the new gold! With a population of 1.3 billion people and
a total purchasing power parity gross domestic product (GDP) of $6.74 trillion,
the population of Africa is growing at the rate of 2.6%. 



Much of Africa’s demographic is youthful. Much of this
population is increasingly connected to the internet. 



In 2017, Facebook had 170 million subscribers, which constitutes approximately 15% of the total population of Africa and this subscription is growing. Companies such as Google reportedly give accounts in exchange of subscriber data. These companies have been reported to have sold this data to entities such as advertisers, political parties etc. The exchange of personal data for an account is unfair trade because the value of personal data is far greater than the value of an account.  



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What do we do to commercialize the vast African database? 



Firstly, we need to develop technological capacity to
gather, process and monetize the African database. To achieve these, we ought
to improve and expand our educational institutions, paying attention to the
development of programs in data science. We need to embed data science subjects
such as data analytics and software engineering into primary, secondary and
tertiary education. 



Governments and the African Union ought to expand projects
such as the Deep Learning Indaba as well as the African Institute of
Mathematical Sciences that are developing mathematics, machine learning and
artificial intelligence expertise in Africa. 



To gather data, we need to politically organize ourselves to
create economies of scale. Regionally, organizations such as the Southern
African Development Community (SADC) and Economic Community of West African
States (ECOWAS) should create regional data banks that collect, protect and
store regional data.



&nbsp;Continentally, the
African Union should coordinate data gathering and develop data protection
policies. We need to create laws and policies that regulate data nationally,
regionally and continentally. 



– Tshilidzi Marwala is a professor and Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of Johannesburg. He deputizes President Cyril Ramaphosa on the South African Presidential Commission on the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

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South African Vice-Chancellor Appointed Rector Of United Nations University

Data Is The New Gold