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Poverty, Development and the Burden of Governance in Sub-Saharan Africa

Emmanuel Franklyne Ogbunwezeh, Ph.D - 8/3/2006

A cursory glance through Africa confronts us with the fact that the pervasive poverty ravaging Africa today represents an affront on social justice, insults the ethical sensibilities and traditions of sensitive consciences, and witnesses to the dearth of solidarity and justice in global socio-economic relations. Social justice screams at the naive hypocrisy that greets the issues raised by African poverty. How can justice not be insulted by a global relational equation, where our world spends over $900 billion Dollars annually manufacturing arms and trading weapons of death and destruction, while a litany of nauseating conferences, insipid summits, musical shows, sloganeering and compassionate showmanship, which only goes to advertise the poor as they go cap in handing begging for the paltry $50 billion Dollars annually needed to help Africa make a dent on poverty by 2015. The arguments that African dictators have embezzled Africa’s development fee may be potent in some quarters, but lack ethical waters as a basis for not helping Africa out of her dire straits. Ethics will go to question us for the timidity we displayed in allowing those Africa kleptocrats to go away with their loot. Even those who collaborated with them are not free from the blame.

Pursuant to this and in spite of prevailing political pretences and/or institutional hypocrisies; African politicians and their external collaborators must be made to realise that overcoming poverty is not an act of charity, but an act of justice1. This is because African poverty represents

a tragic failure of human solidarity. In a world called global village, global pillage remains the order of the day. Solidarity to human brotherhood has been replaced by a new ontological cross-breeding of the Hobessian Credo of “Might” translating to “Right” with the crude Darwinian ethos of “survival for the fittest”, to midwife a new global feudalistic divide, made up of the rich and the poor. In this metaphysic, the poor are game for the rich. They are condemned to be impoverished and exploited unto extinction. This is the tragic philosophy that has rendered African poverty a scar on the conscience of the world today. This situation of poverty in Africa is never a natural phenomenon. It is a man-engineered situation. A complex interpenetration of man-made factors conspired with bio-geographic factors to brew the scandal that is African poverty. This situation is a scandal to justice in all ethical traditions2.

Considering the facts submitted above, recounting Africa’s festival of woes tantamounts then to a sterile litany, which mimics and mocks the disadvantage of the African peoples. This continent designated by archaeology as the birthplace of man and the cradle of human civilization remains a class act in primitive socio-economic and political desolation. From Casablanca in the North to the Port Elizabeth in the Southernmost tip of Africa, and from Mogadishu in the Horn of Africa to Dakar in the furthest West, the continent broils in poverty, instability, hunger, ignorance and disease. In this direction, one would only be stating the obvious, if one observes that:

Africa's all round report card today reads like a royal litany of negatives sang at the doubly tragic occasion convoked simultaneously for the canonization of poverty and funeral of development. She is today suffused with pain and agony of a continent in a crisis of terminal proportions. Life and living there is now nothing but a collage of pain and liberalization of poverty among the mass of her population. All the sectors and ramifications of her existence today reek of primeval desolation and abandonment. Majority of the countries in Africa fall within the HIPCs-Highly indebted countries that dangerously envelop over Seven hundred million people, where, according to Jeffrey Sachs "a combination of extreme poverty and financial insolvency marks them out for a special kind of despair and economic isolation" A cursory glance at statistics no matter how cooked or doctored they may have been by rogue development agencies, to keep the cottage industries of aid churning, show Africa at the rear of the pyramid of indices that spell development3.

These observations at an earlier occasion remain irrefutable even today. “Sub-Saharan Africa is today the poorest, most turbulent and most war-torn and crisis ridden location on the earth's surface. It challenges superiority in turbulence only with the Middle East. As I am writing now, Sudan is being ravaged by a civil-war and a humanitarian crisis of great proportion, consequent on the government sponsored Arab-Janjaweed militia's blueprint of ethnic cleansing and genocide against the black Sudanese population in the West of that country. We need not celebrate the fact that Africa holds the inglorious record as the continent that played host to the fastest genocide in history; namely the 1994 Rwandan Genocide that saw the Hutus massacring over one million Tutsis within 100 days. The speed of the killing was extraordinary given that the weapons used were the most basic of implements”4

Getting down to basic data, one meets the fact that among the 54 countries in Africa, one can easily find a needle in a haystack than to find a single socio-economic or geo-political success story. Income per capita has not really improved in 2005, as it has really declined since Independence. The 2003 United Nations' Human Development Report (of 175 countries) found that positions 151 (Gambia) to 175 (Sierra Leone) were taken up entirely by African nations5. With her population standing close to 800 million, over 50% of this suffer from water related diseases like cholera and infant- diarrhoea6, and every 30 seconds witnesses the death of a child due to malaria, recording over 1million child deaths yearly. Need we talk about the ravage of HIV/AIDS? Of the 39.4 million people living with HIV/AIDS World wide in 2004, 25.4 million are in Sub-Saharan Africa, while adult prevalence percentage standing at 7.4% remains the highest in the world7. This is on the health sector.

In 1960 according to the UN Millennium project, Africa was a net exporter of food. Today it imports over a third of its grains. Over 40 percent of Africans do not even have the ability to obtain sufficient food on a day-today basis. Declining soil fertility, land degradation, and the AIDS pandemic have led to a 23 percent decrease in food production per capita in the last 25 years even though population has increased dramatically8.

The effect of poverty is most pronounced on African women and children. More than 40 percent of women in Africa do not have access to basic education. AIDS spreads twice as quickly among uneducated girls than among girls that have even some schooling. A woman living in sub-Saharan Africa has a 1 in 16 chance of dying in pregnancy. This compares with a 1 in 3,700 risk for a woman from North America. Every minute, a woman somewhere dies in pregnancy or childbirth. This adds up to 1,400 women dying each day-an estimated 529,000 each year-from pregnancy-related causes.9

In fact, most other development indices swing in Africa’s favour only in the breach.10 And to this end, Africa remains beset by serious problems that portend danger to the security, socio-economic and ecological integrity of the entire planet.

The painful paradox of it all is that this is a continent endowed with all the resources that make for greatness: human, ecological and mineral. A continent that harbours over 40 percent of the world's potential hydroelectric power supply; the bulk of the world's diamonds and chromium; 30 percent of the uranium in the non-communist world; 50 percent of the world's gold; 90 percent of its cobalt; 50 percent of its phosphates; 40 percent of its platinum; 7.5 percent of its coal; 8 percent of its known petroleum reserves; 12 percent of its natural gas; 3 percent of its iron ore; 64 percent of the world's manganese, 13 percent of its copper, vast bauxite, nickel and lead resources and millions upon millions of acres of untilled farmlands cannot legitimately and rationally claim, or feign to be poor. There is not another continent blessed with such abundance and diversity. Yet Africa remains the poorest continent on earth11


Why Africa Deserves a Fresh Look

Despite the headline hijacking impunity of Islamic terrorism, the attention span of the world was most recently deluged with the “Make poverty history”, the Tony’s Blair’s “Commission for Africa”, and the Live 8 Concert project of the rock stars, led by Bob Geldof and Bono of U2 fame12. The G-8 summit which followed on the heels of these had the African poverty as a part of its consideration. All these are welcome developments, which must be critically appraised so that the positive dimensions of it would not be swallowed up by the negative.

A fresh look on Africa by the global community is now not only necessary from the perspectives of enlightened or strategic self interest, but equally an ethical imperative, if justice and our common humanity is anything to go by. Obiora Ike was of the view that no part of the world can master its problems by being indifferent to the fate of other regions. For him, widespread poverty in the Southern Hemisphere swells the northward flow of people trying to flee poverty. Poverty equally drives people to over-exploit the natural sources of life, thus threatening a tremendous damage to the entire ecological system.13 His views here issues from the perspectives of enlightened self interest, global security and ecological integrity. The United States Catholic Bishops advocates the ethical imperative dimension for engagement with the poverty situation in Africa. For the Bishops, Africa today witnesses “less external intervention, but more neglect and indifference. While strategic rationale for intervention has diminished with the end of the cold war, the ethical imperatives for engagement with Africa remains stronger than ever. They were of the view that the US, the West and the global community should not write Africa off as having little relevance to their strategic priorities. But that they should embrace a broader vision of their interests in obligation to the world’s poorest continent.14 This fresh, ethically-gravitated look must be devoid of the prevailing Afro-pessimism, which has written Africa off as a hopeless continent. It must eschew the hypocritical and stereotypical lenses through which the rest of the world have viewed Africa, as a continent inhabited by inferior human beings. Derogatory philosophies and false epistemic authorities have so shamefully lent their incompetence and false expertise, to the perceptual degradation of the African in the course of our history. Hegel is an eminent example of men who pontificated with authority over an area that dwarfed their competence with the certainty which only profound ignorance breeds. It is time for an overhaul of these attitudes.

The attitudinal change advocated by the ethical imperative is not only of theoretical import. It is the most functional way of going about the solutions to Africa’s myriad problems. An environment and case-specific solutions to the African problems, can only be realised when the scales of pejorative prejudice, and the patron-mendicant relational equation which it nourishes; and which views Africa as a hopeless basket case, is offloaded from our perceptual faculties. This enables us to realise that only Africans can really drive their development. Alien models and blueprints of development designed by Washington or Whitehall-based technocrats, will always fail because accurate cognizance was not taken of the local situation, and the local knowledge requisite for crafting solutions to local problems. Gordon Brown’s approach to solving Africa’s problems despite its abundance of goodwill is roundly criticized for this attitudinal over-hang15. This overhang may lead to the exaggeration of the value of aid, in stead of emphasis on good governance, and other significant variables.

In taking this new look, what does social justice command? Primarily, it is our view that the International community must shear itself of the abiding hypocrisy, which has bedevilled its relationship with African governments in the past. The cold war era witnessed the celebration of crass hypocrisy on the part of the Western governments in their relationship with African despots. During the cold war, the United States government for example had a policy of unquestioned support for friendly dictatorships. The IMF and the World Bank have been what Michael Chege will characterize as a spectacular failure in pursuing governance reforms in Africa as basis for their credit extensions. This is because most Western governments allow their banks to be the laundry houses for these dictators and their cronies that steal their people blind. World Bank and IMF cannot claim ignorance of the fact that the credits they extended to these rogue dictators like Mobutu, Babangida and others ended up in numbered accounts in foreign banks very far and lost to the uses and intentions for which the credits were extended in the first instance. Michael Chege was right when he stated that “these institutions (namely IMF, World Bank as well as Western governments) knew perfectly well that the Mobutu regime was turning aid into the dictator’s villas in the French Riviera, and chateaux in Switzerland. But the aid dollars kept flowing. And despite the window dressing rhetoric from these institutions about the importance of “local ownership” of development programs, “capacity-building”, and “participation” in poverty alleviation programs, it is still business as usual behind the scenes. Their principal goal still remains to maximize the loan portfolio to the developing countries, in the guise of fighting poverty. And this is why despite outcry from the Kenyan opposition, Christian churches, and the press, the World Bank continued cutting deals behind the scenes with the incompetent and venal Moi government in Kenya –even to the extent of seconding Kenyan World Bank employees to Moi’s public service. The IMF and World Bank’s demands that those responsible for the massive heist under Goldenberg be brought to justice was put to rest as the regime was persuaded to adopt face-saving anti-corruption legislation so that aid can resume16


Jeffrey Sachs will argue that what Africa needs is money and massive infusions of it, in order to escape poverty, just like a rocket needs a lot of fuel to underwrite and power her thrusts to escape gravity. This analogy is interesting based on the fact that Africa has repeatedly failed to escape stagnant growth and poverty in spite of the massive infusions of aid over the past four decades. Representing Sach’s position and reacting to it, the Yaleglobal editors reacted as follows:

The cure for Africa’s ills is the one thing the continent lacks: money. According to Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, Africa’s health care problems could be effectively combated with an annual infusion of $25 billion dollars from the developed world, including $8 billion from the US. By bolstering the continent’s nearly non-existent health care programs, Sachs maintains that these funds would help curb the spread of AIDS and thus encourage economic development. Nevertheless, the US will only be contributing $2 billion this year to fight global poverty. Sachs therefore proposes that America’s richest individuals – who earn more annually than all the166 million people living in Nigeria, Senegal, Uganda, and Botswana – make up the difference using their recent tax cuts. Sachs asserts that such charity is both feasible and the moral imperative of America’s wealthy. Yet, in the face of such idealism, one has to wonder whether Africa’s plethora of problems – that also include corruption, demography, and infrastructure – can really be solved through cash alone17.

Our position is not far from the above position. Money can go a long way in helping Africa out of her morass of poverty quite right. But a massive infusion of huge amounts of aid money must be predicated on the presence and functionality of credible, basic, indispensable structures of governance, which only good participatory governance can create and sustain. This is unfortunately, what Africa despite democratic pretences lacks at present. Africa is not poor because she lacks resources, but because of the mismanagement of these resources, by her various shades of visionless leadership, which spanned her like bubonic plague, and seriously compromised her trajectory of development. According to Anna Borzello, the root cause of poverty in Nigeria for example, is not a lack of aid, not the draining effects of debt and not even, in an oil-reliant economy, unfair trade terms. Instead, it is the way that the estimated $360bn (£207bn) Nigeria has earned from crude oil since the 1960s has been squandered or stolen by successive regimes.18

Secondly it is unethical for the global community to stand and watch, as big business and Trans-national concerns fund conflicts in Africa to cheaply source their raw materials.19 All assessments seems that conflicts will never go away from Africa since the absence of conflict will signal bad business for Western Arms concerns and business, which is a $900 Billion Dollar net annual industry. To this end, why wait for conflicts to explode in Africa, instead of attacking and tackling the root causes of conflict, which have been traced not to ethnicity or other primordial factors, in the African corridor, but to poverty and economic disenfranchisement, laced with international brinkmanship and ideological wars.


The Major Causes of the African Predicament: A theoretical Appraisal

When the questions boil down to the cause of African poverty and predicament, many schools of thought are inadvertently called into being. They all come with conflicting and divergent theories about the origins and the factors that sustain the African predicament. The two broad categories of theorists are the Externalists who are vehement in their opinion that Africa’s problems was a Western invention superimposed on Africa, to ensure her eternal subsistence as a producer of raw materials and cheap labour, to fund or underwrite Western avaricious tastes; as well as cheap markets to cushion the effects of Western industrial over-production. These people blame colonialism and neo-colonialism. Chinweizu and Walter Rodney wrote out what could stand as the manifesto of the externalists.20 They could be recognized as great apostles of this school, which still finds some avid supporters today in the neo-externalists who advocate a return to African roots in search of solutions to our problems. This neo-externalist school has some iconoclastic bent which is helped along by Internet chatrooms, blogs and message boards. These forums are swarming with vehement apostles of the neo-externalist/Iconoclastic school that see Europe and the West as harbingers of woes in relation to Africa. One important credo of this school is their belief that the HIV/AIDS virus was an invention of Western laboratories hatched as a method of birth control to be imposed on Africa, and to that end teleguide her destiny for a very long time.

On the other end of the spectrum sits the Internalists, who blame African leadership, African cultural baggage, and bio-geographic factors environing Africa, as the major causes of African poverty. Here we have George Ayittey as an irrepressible apostle of this school. Samuel Hungtington equally falls within this group.

Another school is the moderate realists, who represent an attempt to strike a balanced interface between these two extremes. This school does not necessarily acquit the inglorious dimensions of the colonial experiment of blame in the African predicament. But dwelling there is not their manifesto. They recognized the role played by each factor in the African predicament, and have come to the conclusion supported by a broad range of evidence that there exists no mono-factor explanation, which could ever be validly canvassed as the cause of African poverty. For this school, colonialism, bad leadership and governance structures as well as biogeography all contributed to the present African predicament. Over and above apportioning blames, this moderate realist school has a very elevating Afro-optimistic bent, which views and advocates the strengths and values of Africa as a basis for a new dawn and renaissance for Africa and the world at large. This school peopled by scholars like Professor Obiora Ike; Ndidi-Nnoli Edozien; Ogbunwezeh Franklyne; and other members of the Nigerian-Frankfurter socio-ethical school of thought led by Obiora Ike and Johannes Hoffmann. They not only curse the darkness. They are lighting little candles of hope to dispel the darkness enveloping Africa on so many fronts21.

We have attempted an exploration of these schools elsewhere in detail22. These factors cyclically reinforced and consolidated each other. We now wish to x-ray how governance impacts on the African situation


Our Thesis

Africa is caught up in a vortex of socio-economic and geopolitical contradiction. This is a continent so very rich in resources: human, material, cultural and bio-geographic, yet so rapaciously plundered into poverty by a conglomeration of internal and external forces.

First among these forces of developmental anomie, were the slave drivers and their collaborators, followed by the colonialists, who jointly and severally plundered Africa into submission23. They compromised Africa’s developmental trajectory, bequeathing her a heritage of inferiority complex, which has always essayed to torpedo Africa’s drive to development. Today this excuse generously loses patronage as a valid reason for the persistence of the African predicament, although its contributions to Africa’s woes can never be historically retired.

The second range of rapacious forces, predicated on the first, were the crop of social renegades, intellectual Liliputs, and political scoundrels schooled in the colonial conceptual scheme of political leadership, which arose to occupy positions of power and authority at the disengagement of the colonialists. These crops of African leaders, who sucked the worst dregs of Machiavellian realpolitick24, arose as the greatest tragedy ever to befall Africa, and her march to development. History can never divorce contemporary African poverty from their inglorious governance styles.

That a continent with potentials for greatness has in the space of four decades taken great leaps and giant strides backwards, is thanks in great extent to the collaboration of these two range of forces. Brian Tomlinson had this in mind, when he averred that “the impoverishment of large numbers of people in the South has been the consequence of complex national and international economic, social and political processes”. And pre-empting our position contended that “action to counter impoverishment therefore is a political process”. And to that end “citizens, particularly the poor and the powerless, must have the political and civic freedom to negotiate with each other, with political elites and their governments, and with the world community, for policies that advance their livelihood and secure their future in their world.”25

From this standpoint one then realises that the challenge of combating poverty therefore is not so much “political will” of donor government, as it is strengthening the means to address unequal power, capacity, and access to resources for those whose rights are systematically denied26 And the means that has acquitted itself in addressing unequal power, capacity and access to resources for all in a given social space has been responsible governance, and credible socio-political system.

Inasmuch as we can never lose sight of the contributions of other factors, like historical, contemporary, and biogeography towards the poverty situation in Africa, our estimations yields the fact that the greatest contributor to the African predicament has been her leadership and governance.

The concept of governance that I choose to adopt, which absence is the trouble with Africa, and which should hold and apply here, is that well articulated by David Moloney as that, which “should be understood as a stool with three legs – political leadership, government institutions and capacity, and strong engaged civil society. Good governance requires all three of these legs. “It means developing a representative and participatory democracy with an accountable government, as well as an active and informed civil society. It means developing effective public machinery and institutions and their capacity. It means strengthening the rule of law, respect for human rights, a fair and transparent judiciary, universal access to justice, forums for complaint, appeal and redress and enforcement of property rights. Good governance does mean responsible economic management. But it means all of these other things as well”27.

The import of governance to the African predicament was so well attested to by Michael Chege that I could not resist the temptation of allowing him speak fully for himself. In his testimony before the US House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services, on May 9, 2002, he stated inter alia:

Bad national governance- -and dictatorship is the worst form of it-- - is now the acknowledged tap root of mass poverty and political instability in the developing world. Dictators achieve that infamy by exposing those they rule to a double jeopardy. By denying those they tyrannize their inalienable rights, such as free speech, access to a free press, freedom of worship and freedom of association, they confine the public’s mind to a stifling inward-looking provincialism that drives out the vigorous debate their complex problems cry out for. By denying those they tyrannize their rights, they also banish them from freedom to explore on the basis of free enterprise, novel and legitimate ways towards individual prosperity- - the most convenient path of out of mass poverty known to us so far. That double jeopardy is compounded when despots steal funds from their own people- - either by raiding the national treasury or by demanding commissions and bribes in large commercial transactions- -secretly banking the ill-gotten gains abroad. By stealing from poor economies, third world dictators not only deny their countries vital savings and investments, they also perpetuate a culture of perverse policymaking that leads to more poverty and more political discontent. That in turn calls for more repression, more payoffs for political turncoats, more torture chambers, and yet more multi-million rip-offs by the management of the dictatorships to finance all that. Dictatorial theft, bad policies and poverty reinforce each other in a vicious cycle.28

Today, the depth of poverty and hopelessness pervading Africa, which leaves Africa designated as the greatest economic tragedy of the 20th century29 ranks as nothing but a monumental scandal30 and an unforgivable indictment of African leadership and governance structures.

New ethical approaches to the poverty debate adopts and espouses a deeper appreciation of meaning, which views poverty as a violation of human rights and a condition that ought to be abolished. This philosophical insight really represents an integral paradigm31 as well as a new approach in the fight against poverty, not only in Africa, but in all its manifestations everywhere across our world. To this end, we are going to argue that pushing people into poverty represents a crime against humanity, which challenges serious comparison with war crimes and genocide, and should be elevated to the status of an actionable crime, at International Human Rights Court. It is our opinion that the ability to subpoena the appearance of despots and kleptocrats to face charges of impoverishing their lands would go a long way in helping Africa and the Third world navigate her way out of corrupt governance, which has really impoverished the people and manacled Africa’s drive to development.

We are placing this view for consideration based on its advocacy of praxis rooted in ethical sensitivity to the plight of, and the obligations we owe to the poor. This is accentuated by the fact that poverty is not only an economic or a social problem. It spans both in terms and in fact, an interdisciplinary space, and multi-dimensional implication, unparalleled by any other single human phenomenon. This accounts for why attempts at defining poverty are heavily influenced by the ontological values and nuances, which the varied perspectives and disciplines in question profess. We share this view in its entirety, and wish to erect our critical evaluation of the African political and governance structures vis a vis African development, on these scaffolds. We are equally emboldened by the realisation that since African poverty attests to the collaboration of complex factors, many of which have jointly or severally received specific, independent or general treatments32, its solution then invites a multi-disciplinary and multi-dimensional approach. It is our considered view that a refocus of our ethical lenses on the association between poverty, governance and development in Sub-Saharan Africa, with a view of exploring how this relationship could be positioned to lead to the emergence of a new dawn for Africa, in her drive to conquer poverty and its allied incapacities, is urgent and necessary.

This urgency is accentuated not only by the extravagant failure of over three decades of UN development assistance,33 but equally by the depth of the situation. If poverty in Amartya Sen translates to the deprivation of elementary capabilities34, Africa more than qualifies for an all round-designation, as a poverty-stricken agglomeration of failed states.35 This qualification is not a ventilation of Afro-pessimism. It represents a radical statement of the fact as it is today across Sub-Saharan Africa. As I am writing now, Niger Republic buries a large percentage of her future, as children who hold the key to the future progress of that country are dying in droves, consequent on hunger and famine, induced by drought, locust invasion and international short-sightedness. Furthermore global poverty trends released by the World Bank in 2004 for the years 1981-2001, shows dramatic reductions in poverty in East Asia; with the GDP per capita there tripling and the proportion of people in extreme poverty falling from 56% to 17% over 2 decades. The area according to the report experienced a long-term drop in poverty rates in the last 20 years with the number of people in extreme poverty dropping by almost 50 million. In the same duration under review, Sub-Saharan Africa witnessed a fall in GDP per capita by 14%, while the poverty rate rose by 46% in 2001, with the number of people living in extreme poverty increasing by 140 million36

We elected to consider this dimension of the poverty question in Africa, because of the fact, that leadership; governance, institutions and structures have played and continue to play crucial roles in the sustenance of the African predicament. Our appraisals were profoundly informed by the constructive vision of seeing how these coefficients could be remodelled to contribute their rightful quota, in the fight against poverty and underdevelopment in Africa. And our stance issues strongly from the fact that Africa and any continent for that matter, never signed a pact with poverty.

Most importantly, the fact must be reiterated ab initio that inasmuch as we share the views that political engagement on issues such as debt cancellation, trade justice, equitable governance in global institutions, and political, social and economic rights for the poor remains the foundation for making sustained progress to end poverty in Africa and in the Third world, strategies to end poverty will only succeed if they are rooted in an active promotion of good governance and democracy, including multilateral institutions and active citizenship at all levels37 And one theoretical basis for doing this lies in according recognition to poverty as a human rights violation, and from there establishing internationally recognized sanctions for the infringement of these rights by political actors, whose mismanagement and outright roguery pushes millions of people into the poverty quadrangle. That is what we intend to argue in relation to the African situation.

Our thesis here is that the whole wind of renewed interest blowing at this moment on the African predicament, as well as the proposed comprehensive plans to end Africa’s poverty, would take the path of past cycles of attempts, if the right models of engineering Africa’s escape from poverty are not patronized and followed, like was the case in the past. Africa’s problems are challenging. With tentacles stretching back into its history and colouring the entire trajectory of her socio-economic, cultural, and geopolitical evolution and development, the problem looks, and indeed is complex. In most instances, attempts at finding credible solutions to this problem assumed racial tonality of inferiority versus superiority38 and advertised a lot of sloganeering, politicking and strategizing that rose to worsen the problems it claimed to be alleviating.

In as much as we appreciate this fact, it is our opinion that Africa’s problems despite its complex nature, is today among other factors, being sustained and compounded by the destruction, compromise, or absence of credible structures of governance, which are the radioactive fallouts of bad, irresponsible, directionless and kleptocratic governance across Sub-Saharan Africa since Independence in the early and late 60s. With the non-distribution and tyrannical exercise of power, many African tyrants saw themselves as midget conquistadors, spanning empires like the Shakespearean Colossus, through whose legs; the people should pass to their insignificant graves. This accounts for why political atrocities like Mobutu Sesse Seko, Idi Amin Dada, Sanni Abacha and Ibrahim Babangida, Jean Bedel Bokassa, e.t.c., graced African power and leadership corridors.

The absence of these structures of governance may end up scuttling the theoretically brilliant proposals designed to consign Africa’s poverty to the museums of history. Supporting this opinion, William Easterly, writing in the New York Times,39 contended that big and comprehensive plans to end poverty in Africa, have all succeeded in failing because they missed the critical elements of accountability and feedback. In his views, this is accounted for by the fact that “poor Africans have no market or democratic institutions”, to shoulder the weight and responsibilities that development efforts necessarily impose. This may be a simplistic reduction of the facts, but they hold some truths that need further exploration.

We are of the opinion that whatever the West will see as their part in it, it fundamentally behoves Africa to drive her dash to escape poverty. Africans are wearing the shoes, and where it pinches them most remains their epistemic privilege. And the first line of defence in the fight against African poverty is accountable leadership and credible political structures. The most important scaffold for the construction of credible development blueprints and initiatives is good governance.

Governance profoundly touches the tangents of poverty and development of the African continent. To this end, we are of the belief that an accountable leadership supported with the establishment and consolidation of the right legal structures, both on the international and local scene, would form the first line of defence in the battle against poverty in Africa. More political honesty at the local level, and less of international hypocrisy, would collaborate in building up solutions to the incidence of scandalous poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa. And the role that leadership can play in developing and implementing a coherent program modelled to fight poverty and underdevelopment Africa can not be overemphasized. The complex relationship existing between poverty and compromises in the relevant socio-political structures that would have served as safeguard against corruption and the liberalization of pervasive poverty in Africa, can only begin to be unravelled by the establishment of good leadership and governance structures in Africa. This can only be achieved and Africa on the way to solving her myriad problems when a broad range of institutional reforms, structural capacities, , balances and checks instruments, as well as an accountable system and culture of governance is empowered across sub-Saharan Africa.


A Brief History of Governance in Africa