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Scandal of African Poverty

Franklyne Ogbunwezeh - 7/9/2005

The map of Africa tilted slightly looks like a huge question mark. This may be accounted for by a geographic or a tectonic accident. Nevertheless, the chronicles of African history as well as her contemporary situation, is a real, monstrous question mark of frightening and scandalous proportions, on humanity and human ethical values across all cultures and traditions. The face of Africa has been so brutally battered by a cross-pollination of fatally unfriendly, man-made forces, that she is today lying prostrate, aground and marooned in the sandbanks of underdevelopment. Africa, as was well articulated by Achebe, has been the most insulted continent in the world. Africa's claim to humanity has been questioned at various times, their persons abused, their intelligence insulted. These things have happened in the past and keep on happening. Sub Saharan Africa from the fringes of the Sahara desert in the North, down to the Cape of Good Hope in the furthest South, and from the Island of No Return in the West Atlantic to Somalia in the Horn of Africa, in the furthest East; has remained a long sad tale of woes ever since. Nowhere is poverty, ignorance and disease most clearly evident in concentrated, consolidated and more pervasive dimensions, than in Africa south of the Sahara. Commenting on this convulsively ugly and ethically obscene situation, Elsa Artadi and Xavier Sala-i-Martin lamented: "There should be no doubt that the worst economic disaster of the 20th century is the dismal growth performance of the Africa continen ... The total number of the poor in the world declined from 1.3 billion in 1975 to 900 in 2000. During this period of overall improvement, however, Africa's poor increased from less than 140 million in 1975 to over 360 million in the year 2000."

This situation has generated and continues to generate serious questions from across the broad spectrum of various disciplines. Chinweizu in 1978 captured the unrest in the mind of every right thinking African succinctly when he categorically stated that: "The hard realities of the Black condition kept insisting that I ask: Where did our poverty, our material backwardness, our cultural inferiority complexes begin and why? And why do they persist in spite of political independence."

Chinweizu posed his question in 1978. but the things for which his fragile sensibilities revolted against, has mutated and evolved to assume a very dangerous, complex and solution-resistant dimension. Summarizing the depth of the mires into which Africa is presently grounded, John Saul writes:

After 80 years of colonial rule and almost four decades of independence,
...Africa south of the Sahara exists in a capitalist world, which marks and
constrains the lives of its inhabitants at every turn, but is not of it .

That, continued John Saul, citing World Bank statistics , "is what explains why sub-Saharan Africa, with some 650 million people, over 10 percent of the world's population, has just 3 percent of its trade and only 1 percent of its Gross Domestic Product; and why income per head averaging 460 dollars in 1994-has steadily fallen, relative to the industrialized world, and is now less than a fiftieth of what is in the Organization for Economic co-operation and Development (OECD) countries

In recent times these questions that agitate different minds and fragile ethical sensibilities have criss-crossed different intellectual fora and ideological landscapes with their urgency and impatient demand for serious and concrete attention . These questions forcefully cast themselves on our convenience and consideration, consequent on the fact that they can no longer hibernate in the backwoods of irrelevance, in the face of rapidly and fatally deteriorating conditions. They demand answers. And today in this sacred halls of discourse in the heart of Africa; Owerri, Nigeria, the Sons of Africa and all opponents of structural injustice are gathered in conference to explore how and where the rain started beating Africa, in order to design ways of deflecting further beatings under these rains. To that end, I bow my head in humble gratefulness to the indefatigable efforts of Prof. Theophillus Okere, the brain and spirit driving the Whelan research Academy; a true African and a Philosopher par Excellence; for his boundless love for Africa and his avid love for the advancement of knowledge. The Igbos of South Eastern Nigeria, from whose stock I most proudly and gratefully arose, would say to that: O ga adiri gi mma, I ga na aga n'Ihu, Nwanne m.

Many who are irked at this ugly situation in Africa, have risen with explanations as to what essayed to render African dreams a fractured fairy tale of synaptic meanderings, that would never be realised. Some accused colonialism, others its neo-colonial dimension, some others posed culture, clime and bio-geographic factors as the explanation to the "why" of the African problems. This conference true to type, and rightly so, embosomed its project under the thematic umbrella, "The Scramble for Africa: The Scramble Continues . We would therefore explore some of the factors that are parts of this scramble for Africa. From the unholy portals of colonialism to the tragic doors of grotesquely incompetent leadership coupled with an emasculated followership; which invariably are parts of a cyclic network of factors that have done Africa in, we would lay bare the mechanics and dynamics of operation employed by this cycle of forces, that has aborted Africa's dreams of greatness. That is the task we have set for ourselves in this short expose, which is but a commentary on the major work we are doing at the University of Frankfurt, under the same title.

The Polychromic Face of African Poverty

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 reeks of primeval desolation and abandonment. Majority of the countries in Africa fall within the HIPCs-Highly indebted countries that dangerously envelope 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 development.

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 .

In the views of so many analysts, Africa is today that part of the world where everything worthy of being called historical forces are at work and more naked, than anywhere else. All religious, racial, philosophical, as well as major socio-economic upheavals, political emergencies and disputes that play around the world, are at war in Africa. Though the world at the end of the twentieth century is far poorer, far more unjust, and far more authoritarian than most people at the mid-century expected it would be , Sub-Saharan Africa comes out the worst amongst all competitors.

The painful paradox of it all is that this is a continent that is endowed with all the resources that make for greatness, human, ecological and mineral. A continent that harbours over 40percent of the world's potential hydroelectric power supply; the bulk of the world's diamonds and chromium; 30percent of the uranium in the non-communist world; 50 percent of the world's gold; 90percent of its cobalt; 50percent of its phosphates; 40 percent of its platinum; 7.5percent 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 earth.

In 2001, 313 million Africans lived in absolute poverty out of a total population of 682 million, a 63% increase over the 200 million figures for 1994. Life expectancy has dropped 15 percent since 1980 to 47 years, the lowest in the world. Over 40% of Africans suffer from malnutrition and more than half are without safe drinking water: Health care spending in the 42 poorest African countries fell by 50% during the 1980s. As a result health care systems have virtually collapsed across the continent, creating near catastrophic conditions with the arrival of HIV/AIDS. More than 200 million Africans have no access to health services, giving diseases a leeway and unrestrained opportunity to ravage and rage unchecked across the continent. 2/3 of the World's over 33 million individuals infected by the HIV virus are sub-Saharan Africans. This pandemic has claimed over 17 million Africans creating an excess of over 12 million orphans. Between 1986 and 1996, per capita spending on education in Africa fell by 0.7% a year and has been falling progressively ever since. On average, over 40% of African children are out of school, and the adult literacy rate in sub-Saharan Africa is 60%, well below the developing country average of 73%. In fact, it is estimated that over 140 million young Africans are illiterate

Synthesizing the triumvirate of factors that support the African Predicament: A Methodological Clarification

When the question shifts to the causes of the African predicament, many schools of explanation rises to prominence, each vehemently pleading its stand as the best possible explanation or refutation possible on the subject. In this regard, all the viewpoints and angles of opinion could be broadly classified under two headings, namely, the Internalist School and the Externalists school. The internalists are of the opinion that Africa's problems and solutions thereto lie squarely within Africa and upon Africans themselves. Their stand is reminiscence of the Shakespearean aphorism that "The fault Dear Brutus is not in our stars but in us that we are underlings" The Externalists on the other hand are in opposition to this ultra-narrow, extremely parochial and insular perspective. In refutation, they fell into the failure that they were rebelling against, though on the other extreme direction. They see Africa's problems as entirely imposed on Africa from without. These two stands in our estimation are mono-factoral stands and are notoriously inadequate as an explanation to Africa's woes. Let us excavate their sacrosanct sites to see what promise they hold for our exploration of the issues at stake here.

We wish to state ab initio that the different ideological schools that adopted a mono-factor explanation to the African problem sacrificed the whole gamut of factors sustaining African poverty for some part, which despite their vehement defence of these single factor positions, cannot contrive or suffice to fully account for the multi-dimensional nature of the problems bedevilling the Africa of today. The schools may not be wholly right, but they are not diametrically wrong. The weakness of their positions stem from the fact that it consists of a one dimensional approach to a multi-dimensional problem. Our research yields that any attempt at explaining the cause of African poverty must be an interdisciplinary effort, which must necessarily span across, history, politics, sociology, economics, Strategic studies, demography, geography, international relations and philosophy. This view is strongly supported by the august gathering here today in this conference, of various geniuses from of various ideological pedestals of our diverse disciplines, engaged in the onerous task of trying to diagnose Africa's ailments in order to prescribe the right medications to that effect.

This conference attests that we share the conviction that a one-dimensional approach to the African predicament, is too weak a pillar to support an edifice that was ontologically constructed on a tripod or triumvirate of factors. For Instance, the Externalist imputes all the guilt of the African predicament on external factors that has colonialism as a pivot and neo-colonialism as it modern imperialistic metamorphosis. The externalists in their avid propensity to blame all Africa's problems on the West are condemned to lose sight of, or downplay the inglorious roles of some African collaborators, who partnered with the colonial regime of rapacious plunder and exploitation of Africa. They equally sidestepped the fact that African underdeveloped technological situation was equally a factor that facilitated the conquest of Africa. The Externalists equally skim over the role of leadership in the evolution of the modern African predicament, which is the major argument of the Internalists who see African leadership as the fountain and the pillar supporting African retrogression and predicament. Supporting our considered stand here, John Okoye remarked as follows: "That there has not been too many good governors in Africa is not intended to lay the blame of the stupendous problems of Africa on the doorsteps of its administrators only. Certainly there are other factors at work, factors that are historical, geographical, bio-geographical, social, and human."

Facts on the ground equally support the thesis that there exists a tripod of major interpenetrating factors that under gird, nourish and sustain the inglorious and ethically obscene situation of abject poverty in Africa. These mutually consolidating cycle of factors are so intertwined, interconnected and mutually inclusive, that many scholars were confused and hoodwinked into misinterpreting or misrepresenting the parts for the whole. Their unilateral attempts to heap the whole blame on one constituent of this tripod, and the solutions they recommended or applied thereto consequent on this monochromic perspective was bound to be greeted with failure. This is explained by the fact that at certain times these three factors each take time and turn to keep sentinel at the gate guarding Africa's predicament. Many that come to the portal of the African predicament when it is the turn of one of the factors to keep guard, easily mistook a part for the whole and to that effect, their range of socio-economic or ethico-moral prescriptions did not even scratch the surface of the problems to ameliorate the symptoms let alone curing the illness. For instance, the June 2004 G-8 meeting posited corruption as the greatest problem facing African development. This for example invariably represents a wooden apology for the blindness of these leaders of the great industrial economies to see the role of their impoverishing neo-colonial economic policies on the continent as well as the role of their governments and countries in aiding and abetting this situation. Corruption in Africa is simply a symptom of bad governance, which is one of the factors underlying Africa poverty. But this cannot be divorced from the over all picture without some unhistorical and factual implications. Karl Maier had the crosspollination of these factors in mind when exploring the Nigerian socio-economic and political crisis. Africa's problems should not be laid squarely on one factor like the African leadership alone or on one minute symptom of decadent leadership. The role of the colonial and neo-colonial factors in creating, installing and supporting these type of callous leadership configuration and power matrix in Africa remains one of the greatest factors supporting the perpetuation of this cycle of poverty and underdevelopment; of which corruption remains only a symptom. The criminal complicity of many Western countries and businesses in perpetuating African misery can equally not be looked down on as a factor, in this bizarre festival of factors militating against African greatness and survival. He writes about corruption in Africa as follows: "It is hypocritical of the West to blame Nigeria for corruption, fraud and drug running and to demand that Nigerians own up to their foreign debt while at the same time allowing the funds garnered from such nefarious dealings to be deposited in Western banks. "A man who receives stolen goods is called a fence, but what do you call a country that is in the business of receiving stolen goods? They lend Nigeria money, somebody here steals the same amount of money and gives it back to them, and then they leave these poor Nigerians repaying what they never owed. The role of the Western powers had been totally disgraceful."

Our research yielded these consolidated network of factors, consequent on the adulterous liaison between Colonialism, Bad Leadership and Neo-colonialism as the fundamental culprits upon which all others causes and symptoms of African poverty, concentrically revolve. In Okoye's view once more: "Much of our problems (in Africa) is due to colonialism, neo-colonialism and economic and political domination, but we are of the view that our leaders have most often not done all that could be done to ameliorate the situation. It is true that some harbingers of foreign economic help to us only succeed in enriching their countries the more. Still it is the duty of our technocrats to see through this deceit and prevent it's noxious consequences even if doing so entails serious sacrifices on their part."

This stance invariably represents the views of many African thinkers. Walter Rodney in his Classic, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, stated as follows: "The questions as to whom and what is responsible for African underdevelopment can be answered at two levels. Firstly, the answer is that the operation of the imperialist system bears major responsibility for African economic retardation by draining African wealth and making it impossible to develop more rapidly the resources of the continent. Secondly, one has to deal with those who manipulate the system and those who are either agents or unwitting accomplices of the said system."

So much for a preliminary, now let us go over to the actual exploratory vivisection of the individual factors as they presented themselves in the history of Africa's socio-cultural, political and economic evolution

Exploring the Factors Sustaining the African Predicament

Nowhere is Africa's crisis more clearly evidenced than in her economic life. Many African countries are simply running or husbanding compromised economies, or nursing terminally ill social polities. Centuries of rapacious colonial plunder and continued neo-colonial tele-guidance of her destiny coupled with a spineless, rudderless and kleptocratically visionless leadership has ontologically sabotaged Africa's march to progress and development. Monolithic creditor institutions like IMF and World Bank have remained Africa's socio-economic waterloo on so many fronts. These economies one can see, are as stagnant as puddles of dirty water, without free outlet or functional capacities to meaningfully irrigate the lives of Africans with the kind of empowerment and enabling environment that could lead to the germination of real growth.

When, how and why did Africa get to this point?


A. The Rape that was Colonialism

Not everything that goes wrong with a people precipitates a crisis of self-identity; it is only the kind of reverse that injures human dignity and saps self-confidence that causes that type of soul searching. In Africa colonialism has been such an adversity.

It is common practice for many Africans to start reflections on our past from the period of the slave trade and colonialism because no other experience in the course of African history, deflected Africa's evolutionary march, with a far-reaching implication for our present and future the way this moment in history was able to do. That we are reviewing colonialism as the starting point of our exploration of what did Africa in, despite decades of political independence is simply because, this adversity not only affected Africa's past, but coloured the future trajectory of her development so much so that it ripped African history into two epochs, namely before the coming of the White man and After the coming of the Whiteman. Chinweizu is of the opinion that any attempt at initiating an African renaissance must be built on some clear re-examination of our past, our hopes and our present realities. He questioned the present realities in relation to what they are; how they came into being, how they are sustained and how they determine our priorities. For us to do a good job of understanding the present African situation, we must question the colonial experience based on the fact that

The culture-scape upon which a renascent Africa was to be erected was a heap of social debris from nearly five centuries of disintegration, slaving, conquests and colonization; debris accumulating ever since the sixteenth century, when autonomous African development was interrupted as the holocaust of western European expansion overwhelmed Africa.

It is on rational scaffolds such as this, that colonialism as a fact of the African experience is wheeled into this intellectual theatre for an invasive examination.

Africa prior to the advent of the Europeans was a pure traditional society that was content with life as it obtained within the enclosed social embrace of the diverse ethnic configurations and nationalities dotting it. This goes without downplaying the contacts necessitated by trade and other socio-historical dynamics between Africa and other continents. The trans-Saharan trade in African ivory spices and slaves were fallouts of this. Timbuktu in the heart of Africa on the banks of the River Niger was a famous centre of trade, commerce and learning. So was Alexandria in Egypt. The ancient Ethiopian dynasty in the Horn of Africa equally had enriching intercultural contacts with the Middle East and other ancient kingdoms bordering the Indian Ocean. Need we talk about the Nile valley and it's vital position as a major basin, and constituent of the triangle of enterprising civilization in the ancient world. This far from a sterile and nostalgic glorification of an expired past, functions here to underline the fact that the European adventure in Africa is not the first time that Africa has played host to strangers and traders. But none of these previous contacts did more either in factual actions or reaction formations to set Africa on a perverted trajectory of economic, socio-cultural and political development than Eurocentric colonialism did. Today, despite the growing and more brazen attempts to whitewash history and exonerate the debilitating legacy of colonialism , as well as the psychologically devastating impact of the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade and centuries of racial discrimination and vaporized racism on African psyche, culture and its subsequent trajectory of development, the causes of African poverty and predicament cannot bypass this historical epochal milestones without unhistorical implications.

Walter Rodney set out to explore the impact of colonialism on Africa . Frantz Fanon in his own way explored the impact of colonial exploitation on the psyche of the African. Chinweizu , Paulo Freire , and other African thinkers, all essayed to concur that European imperialistic colonialism especially as it obtained in Africa, was and has been a "metaphysics of exploitation authored in blood, plunder and pillage"

When some Internalists cite examples like Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong as basis upon which to discredit the impact of colonialism on African underdevelopment , they rather wilfully ignored the incontrovertible fact that: Whether we like to face up to it or not Africa has been the most insulted continent in the world. Africa's claim to humanity has been questioned at various times, their persons abused, their intelligence insulted. These things have happened in the past and have gone on happening today" . They most unfortunately pose a nelson's eye to the total devastation of cultural institutions, the irreparable psychological damage and torture of centuries of racial discrimination which instead of abetting has been institutionalized and transformed into "polite racism" , They did not tell us if the devastation and loss of identity which Africans South of the Sahara suffered, was extended to any other race of men in the same degree and pervasiveness: whether all these other countries suffered the same. They never equally told us whether the humanity of these peoples have ever been questioned on the level that of Africans are been questioned every day, even today; whether they have ever been subjected to the kind of racism that Africans have been subjected to, since they made contact with the Whiteman? Have they ever been equiperated to and actually treated as animals in the academy , in global power epicentres, in the media , and even in conceptual schemes.

The impact and fallouts of the Transatlantic Slave trade profoundly affected the socio-cultural evolution of the African psyche and society. This further torpedoed a process that would have unfolded differently, had the trade in Africans not occurred. One cannot lose sight of the fact that slavery was not unknown in Africa and many other traditional society once upon a time in the history of the social evolution. But in the case of Africa at the hands of the slave drivers, the greatest blow that has continued to re-echo across time, was not only the loss of its future represented by the carting off of its youngest and strongest men, women and children across the ocean, but the heritage of inferiority complex woven by the historical implications of the slave trade and consistently reinforced and consolidated by centuries of perverse supremacist philosophy and anthropology, racism, racial discrimination and apartheid. This was the heritage that mis-educated the African to loathe himself and see himself as a subclass of human beings.

Africans and people of colour were miseducated and conditioned by the colonial experience to view themselves as no good. Their socio-psychological faculties have been deluged by centuries of the worst form of miseducative propaganda spawned with the cobwebs of her traumatic experiences during the slave era. Sometimes through a wholesale misrepresentation of reality , suppression of facts; a mystifying, official misrepresentation of events and the world by colonial and neo-colonial interests. This miseducation has continued to surface and reverberate in African leaders and elites who were suckled and weaned on these curds, and have grown up to personify these complex of inferiorities that was the furniture of their unsolicited existential environment. This miseducation took its moments from a crosspollination of factors or rather a network of forces that mixed historical trauma of the slave trade with a denigrative anthropological metaphysics, found in the history and evolution of Western thought, philosophy and conceptual scheme. It was so "aerosolized" in ontology that it evades and beats our ratiocinative defences hands down. Almost all Africans both at home and in Diaspora breathed in this air of inferiority, without even realizing that their history was doctored, their humanity insulted and questioned, and their value as persons debased by a conglomeration of the forces of profit and conceit. On breaking out from this mould Chinweizu writes: "How do members of a group escape the suicidal mystifications of colonial miseducation if they are not even aware of them? Clearly, it is suicidal for lambs to see, think and act out of assumptions about the world that reflects and furthers the interest of the lions and the jackals preying upon them."

In trying to articulate the impact of this heritage of complexes, Chinweizu described this socio-cultural and psychological conditioning as,

a miseducation which under the mystique of "modernizing" me (Africans) into some "civilized" condition, had worked to infect me (Africans) with an intellectual meningitis that would twist my cultural spine, and rivet my admiring gaze upon Europe and the West. It was a miseducation which sought to withhold from me the memory of our true African past and to substitute instead an ignorant shame for what ever travesties Europe chose to present as the African past...It was a miseducation which by encouraging me to glorify all things European and by teaching me a low esteem for and negative attitudes towards things African, sought to cultivate in me that kind of inferiority complex which drives a perfectly right fine right foot to strive to mutilate itself into a left foot...And by such terms of supposed praise as "advanced", "detribalized" and "getting to be quite civilized", it sought to co-opt my sympathies and make me contemptuous of examining what it should have been my duty to change and alleviate

Our parts crossed that of the externalists on this score. The Inglorious colonial intervention in African history unwittingly engendered a sabotage of Africa's trajectory of social evolution, and engendered an arrested development of certain areas of African cultural buffers, which otherwise would have developed along other lines. The painful experience of the slave trade, bequeathed Africa a heritage characterized by an impervious complex of inferiority, and which sabotaged Africa's flight to greatness at the embryo.

When Internalists like George Ayittey argues in the following words: "In Africa, it is the leaders that are the problem, not the people. Colonialism, the slave trade and artificial boundaries do not explain our current predicament. Not is it just the West's fault-the Arabs exploited us too."

Their adopted views and standpoints here are seriously paralysed by some form of historical amnesia or a pathological denial of the subterranean forces at play. This view only addressed the symptoms of a structural problems instead of the roots of it. This is the major weakness of the Internalist stand. The Poverty of African leadership is notoriously as well as factually inadequate to explain the origin of the insurmountable heritage of psychological degradation bequeathed on Africans by centuries of exploitative Western domination which remains unprecedented in history. The Arabs may have exploited us, but the scale pales into an infinitesimal insignificance, and cannot challenge any rational comparison with the consolidated psychological trauma bequeathed to Africa and Africans as the fallouts of arrant racism of the West and the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade predicated on that. The Arabs never carried off over 40 million Africans as slaves. They never branded them with the red hot irons of slavery and the manacles of unfreedom. They never fomented wars and pillage in their dealings on slaves. They never banded together to scramble and carve up Africa among their competing avaricious rivalries, like Europe did to Africa on the conference tables of 1885 Berlin. They never designed an ideological system which mapped and profiled our mental frontiers with racial degradation of our colour and state, both in its arrant and polite dimensions, like the West did and continues to do today. In this regard, the Arabs never saw us as the Europeans did, through the visual-spectral prisms of superiority that destroyed our self-confidence and labelled us savages. One Early English historian, Richard Hakluyt had an occasion to write the following about the Africans.

They (the Africans) are black, beastly, mysterious, heathenish, libidinous, evil, lazy and smelly people who are strangely different to our superior white race.

Need I remind this community of Hegel, who televised his arrant racism by telling the world that the black man has no soul and cannot even approximate the basics of philosophy. We may crucify Hegel and other writers, like the Jews would crucify Hitler over the Holocaust, but it would tantamount to tackling a tip of the iceberg. What Hegel and others voiced out in their writings is the collective opinion of their communities, both in the past and most unfortunately in the present, though it has taken up polite forms today; just like Hitler was just the executioner of the collective hatred the Germans had nursed for the Jews centuries before the Second war
Ayittey analysis is a fractured one consequent on his sidestepping of the facts that

a. Colonialism effected the destruction of African cultural and ideological values replacing it with inadequate models that served colonial and neo-colonial interests up to the present time. This holds true because as Clarence Stone stated, " a brutally suppressed community over time is conditioned to coping with disappointment and frustration. Thus they lose the motivation to develop"
b. Under priced raw materials, and the vast capital flows from the "third world" sustained Europe during the 19th century and led directly to its modern industrial development.
c. Mineral wealth extracted from the third world laid the foundation of the capital markets in the West.
d. Over 20 million unpaid Africans forcibly enslaved, added to the surplus that drove the industrial engine
e. Markets were specifically geared to serve optimally the markets of the colonial metropoles and not the colonies
f. Colonialism destroyed local industrial take-off and wealth base, by forcing specialization in products, the prices of which could easily be manipulated to serve Western market.


B. Rudderless and Kleptocratic Leadership Structure

A History of The Second factor was fuelled in part by the first. The second consists of the whole range of visionless, Rudderless and Kleptocratic Leadership that Africa had had the misfortune of been saddled with. The Colonialists on departing had a very far-reaching agenda of perpetual dominion. For example, "Britannia to rule from Sea to Sea" was never an empty slogan. It summarized and embodied the ideological engine that drove the lust for perpetual domination of the colonies by Britain and other European metropolitan colonial bases, even if it comes by other means. The Colonialists on departing handpicked those that had all the good qualities of imbecilic vassals; who would conduce to their perpetual tele-guidance of these territories for the Master's benefit, and excluded those who could see through their treachery. Hence arose a whole spectrum of leadership in Africa already compromised to fail their people and enrich their colonial masters. Achebe had this in mind when writing about the destruction of the Igbo leadership structure by British colonial recklessness. In consequence, he wrote that: "The lack of real Igbo leaders goes back, of course to the beginning of colonial administration. Once the white man had crushed Igbo resistance it was relatively easy for him to locate upstarts and ruffians in the community who would uphold his regime at the expense of their own people."

Ikenga Ozigbo came to the same conclusion as Achebe. For him in traditional Igbo society, the chief was chief by virtue and fiat of the people. Under the British, many rascals were made chiefs by virtue of letters of appointment (warrants) offered them by the colonial officers , while the great Igbo historian, late Professor Kenneth Onwuka Dike and Felicia Ekejiuba in their famous academic voyage through the history of the Aros of South East Nigeria saw the same colonial desecrating stamp at work It was the destruction of African traditional leadership and governmental structures; replacing it with models contrived only to conduce to the avariciously exploitative blueprints of the colonial master, which paved the way for the rapacious plunder of Africa by these colonial clones in black skin. This was the kind of fluid situation which contrived the rise of inglorious politicians and military brigands like Mobutu Sesse Seko in Zaire, Emperor Jean Bedel Bokkassa of Central African Republic, Hastings Kamuzu Banda of Malawi, Houphet Boigny of Cote' de Ivoire. The same circumstance is what consolidates the culture of political kleptocracy we have all over Africa today. In tracing the colonial origins of Africa's leadership crisis, Muhammed A.Asadi described this stating that in Western circles,

when the third world is mentioned, the masses are referred to and not the elite that supposedly
rule over these countries. The elite in most of these countries are a part of the "second-tier" West,
a legacy of colonialism, intermediaries that translate the Western cause in perpetuating "Third World" Poverty. They are as far removed from their people, as the culture of the ghetto is from suburban America

These unhealthy political structures, which were the hangovers of our colonial experience, are still sustaining these ruling elite. Little wonder that thieves and brigands are still at the helm of affairs across Africa, wielding power with a kind of executive recklessness bordering on megalomanic god-complex. This colonially engineered circumstance yanked strange ethnic bedfellows from their pristine social felicity to weld them together into undefined geopolitical expressions that lacked all semblances of sense save for the fact that the colonial imperialistic machines needs to be oiled and their greed for resources consistently assuaged. This unwritten and sometimes written policy of divide and conquer (divide et impera ), was the basis, which conduced to the emergence of tribalized armed forces and political parties fragmented along ethnic lines; as well as the emergence of unstable and inharmonious geopolitical contraptions across Africa, where mutually exclusive interests and nationalities are very busy stewing themselves in the boiling broth of mutual suspicion and platonic hatred of each other, as the only centrifugal force keeping them together. This structure which served colonial interests well, was hijacked after political independence and deployed to avail the selfish elites, the opportunities of advancing their selfish interests on the crest waves of tribal sentiments. This explains why Africa has consistently witnessed grotesque incompetence and arrant thievery as was personified in rogues like Samuel Doe of Liberia, Sanni Abacha and Ibrahim Babangida of Nigeria; Vampires like Idi Amin Dada of Uganda; Buffoons like Joseph Kabilla of Zaire and other political elitist simpletons who like Nero, fiddled while Africa burnt.

Granted that African leadership models and government structures were jaundiced vestiges of colonialism, post- independence and contemporary African leadership have done more to set the continent on the path of retrogression on all fronts. James Kollie, Jr. Summarized the situation thus

The African leadership history is replete with examples of African leaders who grabbed power either through coup, civil wars or even sometimes elections (please don't mistaken my use of election to means democracy because they are totally different and I have my doubts about democracy existing on the continent even though there are numerous elections) and have promised their people freedom, liberation or emancipation just to find out that the real reason is quite different from the nominal reason. All these guys soon become despots, terrorists or tyrants. Ranging from Idi Amin and maybe others before him to Sani Abacha and then our own son Charles McArthur Taylor, there are many of them on the continent and believe it or not they have failed and hurt their people in ways unspeakable

And,

Greed for wealth, the quest for superiority and the unchecked power to crush opponents are the fundamental reasons why African rulers seek leadership of their countries

How then do we begin to assess this hydra that has eaten away the final fabrics of hope across the African Horizon? My undergraduate thesis in philosophy was a reaction to convulsively ugly, leadership-orchestrated impoverishment of Africa The assessment of African leadership in this work leaves a sour taste in the mouth. The Summary of our conclusions at that occasion are as valid today as they were in 1999:

Three centuries of depopulating and decimating slave trade, and the present legacy of trade imbalance that is superlatively unfavourable to Africa, are footnotes of the Machiavellic duplicity of the colonial masters; proving that they were never messianic but megalomanically exploitative. The gross incompetence, ineptitude, and political puerility of the freedom fighters are culpable ones. Africa's unrestrained slide into poverty during their tenure is inexcusable. This is evidenced by the fact that other parts of the world that were equally colonized and exploited, were able to fashion out stable geopolitical and robust socio-economic constructs. Take India for example…If the colonialists were termed machiavellic because they used Africa for the aggrandizement of their European fatherlands, African leaders are more qualified for that inglorious appellation because they used their fatherland in the service of individual selfish interest. The looting of African treasuries, squander and misappropriation of funds, are all weeping testimonies to this.

How could Africans ever forgive a crop of leaders that were nothing but a brigade of brigands and a consortium of thieves. Emperor Jean Bedel Bokassa of Central African Republic squandered over 20 Million Dollars of the country's wealth in an insipid coronation that has all the neurotic trappings of an advanced case of megalomania . Idi Amin Dada of Uganda butchered his way through the ranks and files of Uganda intelligentsia, convoking an inglorious banquet off the bodies of over 300,000 of his victims for the crocodiles of the River Nile. In his syphilitically induced craze, he succeeded in bequeathing Uganda a legacy of a huge death toll, an annual inflation rate of 200%, a national debt of US$320 million, an agricultural sector in tatters, closed factories, and ruined businesses . Mobutu stole over 22 billion Francs from Zaire in over two decades of arrant kleptomanic and debauchery of all political structures. Abacha stole over 120 billion Francs from Nigeria, Mengistu Mariam made away with over 200 Million Francs of Ethiopian people's money. Babangida looted Nigeria to the conservative estimate of over some 30 billion Francs. Even today, the transition to democracy in some African countries like Nigeria have increasingly left the people disillusioned and poorer for it as the grotesque incompetence and galloping avarice of African leaders play itself out. One wonders then how Africa could ever develop when she is wrecked on the sandbanks of political directionlessness, clutched in the thraldom of political bandits.


C. Neo-colonial agenda:

On this count, Africa today is simply nothing but a geopolitical chessboard for neo-colonial experiments and manipulation. Africans are mere statistical pawns moved around this chessboard. The debt crisis of the 1980s was the coup through which the West, through the Bretton Woods institutions, undermined the sovereignties of African nations and took over control of these nations in a more subtle and strangulating manner, than the slave and colonial era ever availed them.

The debt crisis of early 1980s was marked by simultaneous collapse of commodity prices and the rise of real interest rates. The balance of payments of developing countries was in crisis, and the accumulation of large external debts provided international creditors and "donors" with "political leverage" to influence the direction of country level macroeconomic policy.

The fad in vogue today, cutting across all dimensions of the existence of man, in this new millennium is nothing but globalization. But nowhere is the neo-colonial imprints and intendments of the West more pronounced, than in the structural, institutional and financial engines, conglomerates, Trans and Supra-national concerns driving globalization. There are no doubts, significant and laudable achievements on the heels of globalization; at least the closing of geographical gaps by technological marvels like the information superhighway availed us by the internet, general improvements in technology, communication, transportation and medicine are all geared towards human betterment. Equally, today, the world is now a global village at this behest or instance. Despite these laudable achievements, our world has equally witnessed a progressive deterioration on so many fronts like the merciless and unsustainable exploitation of the human environment , the ease of replication of terror cells and exportation of terrorism , etc. On another pedestal, despite the fact that since the end of the second world war, that "the world has witnessed a twelve-fold increase in global trade and a five-fold increase in economic growth, during the same period however, the world has significantly deteriorated in every aspect. Today at the dawn of the Third millennium, over 3 billion people survive on less than $2 a day. Per capita income continues to fall in 80 countries, while life expectancy has declined in 33 countries since the early 1990s. It has been observed that 24,000 people worldwide, 75% of them children under five, die every day from starvation or malnutrition, for want of basic food in this supposedly globalized world of plenty. Moreover, 7,000 people, mainly in Africa, die every day from AIDS for want of drugs that are available in the West . Against, the backdrop of all these threats to human life and dignity most especially in the world called third, "a handful of big corporation are ruling us, controlling our minds as well as our bodies. Globalisation for them, means giving big businesses access to the global market, to produce as cheaply as possible, and to make huge profits for their shareholders, with no regard for the rest of us. In their greed and worship of profit, they show no loyalty to citizens. They come and go as they please. What happens to a society or community as a result of their actions is of no interest to them"
Credence is lent the above submissions in the rampaging onslaught of monolithic conglomerates and supra-national corporations, business enterprises and industrial concerns gobbling up their weaker competitors in every part of the globe; creating in effect, a very unequal playing field for emergent economies to make any headway in this arena of rugged capitalism, that cripples competition in order to gorge itself rich, on their market shares. They leave not only weaker competitors writhing on the canvass of losses, but equally leave the consumers no choice in moderating the quality and quantity of goods and services offered by these ogres . They equally abuse and degrade the environment and grossly abuse human dignity in their labour practices and use of child and slave labour in order to produce cheaply and maximize their profits.

In the case of Africa, a continent ontologically sabotaged to fail by centuries of decimating exploitation, she limped into the kitchen of globalisation with an economic framework severely compromised and sabotaged by poverty, bad leadership, neo-colonial exploitation and debilitating debt burden which has continually rendered development an aborted dream. The global tyranny of big businesses and corporations has so much brutalized African economies and people bequeathing nothing but legacies of forlornness and decay, finishing the job that their colonizing forbears, commenced in Africa. On this Obiora Ike pointed out the fact that "globalization is another window through which the West hopes to perpetuate economic domination which, in the case of Africa, began with slavery to colonization and now neo-colonization. On this count he is not alone. The same economically adulterous liaisons that were intentionally designed at the highest levels, to bastardize African economies and perpetuate the paralysis and eternal subjugation of Third World economies, by Institutions like the World Bank and IMF, was largely the ethically malodorous filth, which detonated the payload of Joseph Stiglitz's revulsion and discontent. Advancing reasons for screaming out against the decimation of Third world economies by the IMF-World Bank and Multi-National companies-driven globalization, he stated painfully as follows;

I have written this book because while I was at the World Bank, I saw first hand the devastating effect that globalization can have on developing countries, especially the poor within those countries. I believe that globalization-the removal of barriers to free trade and the closer integration of national economies-can be a force for good and that it has the potential to enrich everyone in the world, particularly the poor. But I also believe that if this is to be the case, the way globalization has been managed, including the international trade agreements that have played such a large role in removing those barriers and the policies that have been imposed on developing countries in the process of globalization, need to be rethought

For Stiglitz, the 2001 Nobel laureate in Economics; a former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to President Clinton of the United States from 1993 to 1997, and a former Chief Economist and Senior Vice President of the World from 1997-2000; this is the much that can be achieved in the language of studied restraint, short of identifying the situation by its neo-colonial tincture and texture. While Stiglitz held court at the World Bank in 1997, Emeka Ngwoke and Obiora Ike took up issues with the World Bank, over the oppressive and imposed economic prescriptions of the World Bank on Nigeria In their considered view roundly supported by overwhelming evidence to which they were living local witnesses , in the Nigerian case, they were of the opinion that the world bank's report as it applied to Nigeria, is not "an unbiased or objective assessment of Nigeria's socio-economic situation, with a view to laying open policy options for the country's leaders. Rather, one notices a determined defence of an entrenched position and a thinly veiled attempt to sell or rather force down our throat a particular model of fiscal policies and macro-economic management . It was only in 2002 that Stiglitz saw in retrospect, the truth of the position of these two young African scholars. Their submissions were so compellingly true that he digested it and gave it life in his own words. He wrote as follows:

"The critics of globalization accuse the Western countries of hypocrisy, and the critics are right. The Western countries have pushed the poor countries to eliminate trade barriers, but kept up their own barriers,
preventing developing countries from exporting their agricultural products and so depriving them of desperately needed export income."

This realization one comes to see, is the major reason that informed his choice of laying down his discontent with globalization in print. He writes:

"As a professor, I spent a lot of time researching and thinking about the economic and social issues I dealt with during my seven years in Washington. I believe it is important to view problems in a dispassionate way, to put aside ideology and look at the evidence before making a decision about what is the best course of action. Unfortunately, though not surprisingly, in my time at the White House..., and at the World Bank, I saw that decisions were often made because of ideology and politics. As a result many wrong-headed actions were taken, one that did not solve the problem at hand but that fit with the interests or beliefs of the people in power."

For Ike and Ngwoke, the World bank Report that drew their response, was "quite on target in identifying the many ills of Nigeria's macro-management, but it woefully failed to give prominence to the greatest obstacle to Nigeria's continued economic development, namely, her insupportable debt burden which is at the root of the present crisis" Recounting the roots of the problem, which lay in allowing herself to be goaded into profligate contracting of debts by illegitimate kleptocracies that Nigeria had the misfortune of entertaining in the course of her history, they submitted that: "With the collapse of oil prices in 1985, Nigeria lay prostrate and by 1986 she was forced to submit to the IMF/World Bank's harsh therapy of economic Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP). What Nigeria has seen since 1986 has been an eternal lesson on how not to run a national economy."

This is because, "since 1986 when Nigeria's economy came under the regime of the World Bank and IMF, her economy has been plagued by the twin ills of spiral inflation and stagnation. These were occasioned by massive currency devaluation that has virtually wiped out the purchasing power of the vast majority of Nigerians, savings has dried up, and investment is non-existent. In spite of all these, Nigeria's debt is still a huge debilitating burden on her shoulders, and the World Bank Report prescribed option "is to use the positive windfall to repay Nigeria's external debts" And for the World Bank, Nigeria's government should not consider any other approach except this discredited option they prescribed until the debt stock has been reduced to a comfortable level And the comfortable level indicated here only embosoms the comforts of World Bank, even if Nigerians perish of hunger and starvation in the process. The report as they surmised was a "disaster since it ignores human capital enhancement that is indispensable for the development of a good economy, rather it is a carefully orchestrated plan of fiscal and macro-economic management aimed at ensuring continued repayment of Nigeria's huge external debts and paving the way for an eventual take-over of Nigeria's economy by Western international and monopolistic finance capital" This observation tends to support Jack Nelson Pallmeyer's view to the effect that.

The world is ruled primarily by two global forces: a military force dominated by the United States, and an economic force controlled by the United States and the Western powers. The "global eonomic cop" is the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which works closely with private Western banks and the World Bank to guide the international economy in preferred directions. Neither of these "global cops" is new, but their power have grown considerably within the framework of a new world order. Together they ensure a continuous transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.

The World Bank in the case of Nigeria, rejected what the report termed the Statist/Nationalist Approach as well as the Muddling-through Approach based on the following:
1. The Statist/nationalist Approach "is supported by interest groups hungry for power, and who benefit from rent-seeking activities that can be undertaken because of the excessive regulatory role of the state. And for the World Bank, such has led Nigeria to reduction in real income and increases in poverty.

2. The Muddling-through Approach "maintains an existing status quo in terms of existing economic and political power structure between the North, South an Middle Belt regions,...and it allows interest groups within the military and civilians to profit for personal gain

But the market-friendly/internationalist approach which it touts, which implies privatization, liberalization, divestments, exchange rate deregulation and removal of subsidies smacks of hypocrisy as it does not obtain anywhere in the Western world in the rugged capitalistic purity in which the World bank desires it applied to Nigeria. Stiglitz had such policy options in mind when he wrote as I cited earlier, which I would equally repeat here, that: "The critics of globalization accuse the Western countries of hypocrisy, and the critics are right. The Western countries have pushed the poor countries to eliminate trade barriers, but kept up their own barriers, preventing developing countries from exporting their agricultural products and so depriving them of desperately needed export income."

World Bank wants Nigeria to remove her subsidies on the major public sectoral spendings, which ameliorates the burden on the citizenry and asserts government control over public utilities, which unregulated competition would render unaffordable to the masses, while the Western countries continue to subsidise their farmers and certain key public sectoral utilities, and undercutting international competition in the process, with the excuse of protecting their farmers and saving jobs in their countries. But for the World Bank and IMF, the reverse should be the case in Africa because what is good for the goose remains a luxury unaffordable to the gander. For Stiglitz this and so many other liberalizing policy formulations of the IMF and by association, World bank was "based in part on outworn presumption that markets, by themselves , led to efficient economic outcomes without any atom of government intervention He stated categorically that his bureaucratic naivety does not dull his sharpened economic experience in relation to bad effects of a thoroughgoing liberalization of markets. He wrote:

While markets were at the centre of the economy, there was an important, if limited role for government to play. I had studied the failure of both markets and government, and was not so naïve as to think that government could remedy every market failure. Neither was I foolish as to believe that markets by themselves solved every societal problem. Inequality, unemployment, pollution: these were all issues which government had to take an important role

In the IMF and World bank, Stiglitz made a firsthand discovery of the fact that neither good economics nor good politics dominated policy formulations at these levels. He saw that: "decisions were made on the basis of what seemed a curious blend of ideology and bad economics, dogma that sometimes seemed to be thinly veiling special interest" and when crises hit, IMF prescribed outmoded, inappropriate, if "standard solutions without considering the effects they would have on the people in those countries told to follow these policies. Rarely did I see thoughtful discussion and analyses of the consequences of alternative policies. There was a single prescription. Alternative opinions were not sought. Open, frank discussion was discouraged-there was no room for it. Ideology guided policy prescription and countries were expected to follow IMF guidelines without debate."

This flawed dimension in the highest echelon of financial and political engines driving economic globalisation, namely the Washington-World Bank-IMF axis, portends a very serious obstacle to Africa's attempt to re-engineer an escape from poverty. Rather it encourges a window dressings and the occasional organization of "symbolic media blitzs and concerts of hypocritical concern" in which peanut are thrown at Africa and her situation, that only serve a public relation purpose without any intention of concretely addressing the African predicament at its roots. For instance, the G-8 summit in Kananaskis in June...pledged $6 billion a year in aid to Africa by 2006. The African leaders invited to the summit expressed deep disappointment that the plan did nothing to open Western markets, cancel debts of the poorest countries, or provide the financial aid needed to meet the UN targets for tackling global poverty by 2015. For Phil Twyford of Oxfam the G-8's action at Kananaskis was like "offering peanuts to Africa- and recycled peanuts at that"

On the front of the supranational corporations, they have been assaulting the African environment with oil spills as is Shell B.P's forte in Nigeria's Niger Delta . They have equally been fingered in the wars and instabilities in the Uranium -rich Congo Basin in their greed for Coltan , Diamonds, Copper, and Uranium. In reaction to this, Dena Montague, a research associate for the Arms Trade Resource Project at the World Policy Institute, writes:

International competition for scarce resources in general and for coltan in particular, is a key factor in the lack of state stability and the continuation of war in the DRC. Coltan is but one of the many resources illegally mined and sold onto western markets to profit invading armies and rebel movements. Coltan happened to be the most lucrative raw material, and more than any other mineral resource, it attracted the invading forces and lured them into establishing full-fledged commercial operations. Although ethnic tensions existed prior to the war, the heightened ethnic conflict and the dismantling of civil society currently underway are a by-product of international trade in this region.

In his own appraisal of the colonialism of the Coltan and the conspiracy of Western Powers in consort with Multi-national conglomerates, who are busy sowing corruption, ecological damage; fomenting and fostering wars in the Congo, Taranis' opinion drove to the heart of the problem as it faced Africa. He was of the view that blaming Africans for their rapacious plunder is nothing but a wooden apology for the Western Imperialistic pillage of this continent. He writes:

The mining of Coltan not only threatens the people of Congo, but greatly affects "The sensitive wildlife of the area as well...Whose fault is this? Should we blame the local people and warlords who simply are trying to make money to survive the only way they might know? Should we blame the local governments who turn a blind-eye to the violence and dangerous work conditions in favour of levying huge taxes in an effort to stabilize their faltering countries' economies...In truth I believe the answer goes much farther back. The existence of de facto colonialism that simply will not go away, create the atmosphere where survival at all costs is all that many people in Africa know. The disease that haunts Africa is perhaps a lack of self-esteem, a disbelief in their ability to rise above the crushing blows that have been dealt them in the past. Even if the people of the world don't call the Congo a colony, we perpetuate the ideal by ignoring the turmoil our convenience creates. We did it when we destroyed eons of African culture in an effort to "civilize" the African people. We did it when we forced generations of Africans into slavery all over the Western hemisphere. We do it when we rape the natural resources of countries who believe their only worldly asset is what they can sell."

These views expressed above, had a predecessor in Jean Paul Sartre, who in granting a preface to the "Wretched of the Earth", written by Dr. Frantz Fanon, confronted his imperialist brothers with their hypocrisy and urged the world not to be deceived by their affectations. He spoke for himself in the following words: "Let us look at ourselves, if we bear to, and see what is becoming of us. First, we must face that unexpected revelation, the strip tease of our humanism. There you can see it, quite naked, and it's not a pretty sight. It was nothing but an ideology of lies, a perfect justification for pillage; its honeyed words, its affectation of sensibility were only alibis for our aggression…You know well enough that we are exploiters. You know too that we have laid hands on first the gold and metals, then the petroleum of the new continents', and that we have brought them back to the old countries. This was not without excellent results, as witness our palaces, our cathedrals and our great industrial cities; and then when there was a threat of a slump the colonial markets were there to soften the blow or to divert it. Crammed with riches, Europe accorded the human status de jure to its inhabitants. With us, to be a man is to be an accomplice of colonialism since all of us without exception has profited by colonial exploitation."

The neo-colonial tele-guidance of modern African economies could be seen in the ethically obscene impositions of the World Bank and IMF on Africa economies consequent upon debts which were at best odious, and of which misappropriation Western Governments aided and abetted This and many more are some of the negatives, which globalization as it is presently been driven, has brought to Africa. Anyone who thinks that this pattern of decimating Africa is recent phenomena needs not go farther than Ali Mazrui. For him, Africa and the African people made a far bigger contribution to the technological revolution of the West than the West did to industrial change in Africa He may be re-echoing the Nigerian philosopher and mathematician, Chinweizu or Walter Rodney , both of whom exposed the trajectory of the Western exploitative plunder of Africa. For Mazrui, "each step in Africa's contribution to the development of the West was itself a stage in the history of globalization" This globalization commenced with the era of the labour imperative that saw the labour of Africa's sons and daughters as the basic requirement of the West for her industrial and agrarian revolution in Europe and the Americas respectively. This ended up costing Africa over 300 million of the crème la crème of her youth. "The enforced dispersal of Black people to serve western capitalism was itself part of the emerging globalization" That was the first era aptly named that of "labour imperative". In the second era, which was the era of the "territorial imperative", the West docked the slave ships away forever and launched the gunboats in their place. This was the era of imperialism and gunboat diplomacy. The West stopped exporting Africa's sons and daughters and colonized Africa itself. Imperialism and gunboat diplomacy were the ugly side of globalization. Raw materials for Western manufacturing industries became a major temptation. Then, came the era of the "extractive imperative". Africa's minerals became the next major contributor not only to Western economies but also to Western technology. Uranium from Belgian Congo was part of the original Manhattan project which produced the first atomic bombs For Chinweizu, Western globalizing enterprise was an assault on the rest of us. In the case of Africa, it destroyed her at the most vulnerably irreparable joint, namely, in the mind. Reviewing this eternal crime against Africa and her posterity, Chinweizu wrote that, the Western destruction of the African psyche was, "miseducation, which under the mystique of modernizing the African into some "civilized" condition, had worked to infect him with an intellectual mengitis that would twist his cultural spine, and rivet his admiring gaze upon Europe and the West…all in the strange belief that the view defined by their ruthless greed is the universal, rational, civilized and humanist interest This blunt view of Chinweizu found echoes in many African and Third world thinkers like Frantz Fanon, Paulo Freire, Pablo Neruda, Gustavo Gutierrez, Leonardo Boff and so many others. But Chinweizu's considered position of 1978 still finds echo in the views of modern African thinkers and philosophers. Little wonder that Kwasi Wiredu, a contemporary African philosopher from Ghana, called for a "conceptual decolonization" of Africans as the basic step towards any functional philosophy of development that would engineer Africa's escape from this vicious circle of poverty and directionlessness.

The stand of these African thinkers and third world thinkers, did not go unchallenged, especially against the backdrop of the fact that slavery and colonialism ended years ago, yet Africa's situation is yet to improve, and equally against the backdrop of the crop of visionless leadership that had remained the norm instead of the exception in Africa since independence. If their arguments held water and gained currency over previous decades, the countless opportunities being fritted today by African kleptocratic governments punctures holes on their arguments and renders the colonial argument an increasingly anachronistic explanation for Africa's continued grope in the dark grottos of underdevelopment. For instance, neo-colonial interests may have seen Mobutu Sesse Seko in power, and under girded his government and even aided and abetted his crimes against his own people, but that does not exonerate the galloping selfishness of this monumental rapist of the commonweal. To this end, harping on the colonial guilt as the only factor explaining Africa's predicament today, may sound anachronistic, as it has been adopted as a mantra and a refuge by non-performing and corrupt governments to explain away their grotesque incompetence, brazen roguery and monumental inefficiency. This rich humus of disenchantment at the affinity of Africans to blame every ill on colonialism, conduced to the germination and sprouting of writers like George Ayittey, Chika Onyeani on the African side of the divide. Both writers have consistently maintained that the bad effects of colonialism cannot for ever remain an excuse and refuge of bad leaders and gullible followership that hide under the slogan of "colonialism destroyed Africa" to perpetuate their regime of kleptocratic and undemocratic leadership on Africa. From without, writers like Dinesh D' Souza and P.T Bauer rose in defence of colonialism consequent upon what seemed to them a wooden apologetics offered by many, who are quick to nominate colonialism as the only cause of Africa's problems.

Today Africa is a backyard of poverty and pain. The human beings there are but only a piece of statistics for Western big businesses and governments…Their worth as irreplaceable human beings endowed with dignity is never a consideration worth anything; all because the West would always place profit before ethics. For R.H. Tawney, Business without ethics is a dangerous bulldog that is only bent on destroying. The Catholic Church saw the vampirism of big business at the commencement of the industrial revolution and came up with Rerum Novarum of 1891; that great social encyclical, in which Pope Leo the Great marshalled out the moral requirements of a just socio-economic order, where profit should not be placed before ethics.

Odious Debts; A neo-colonial Tool

Our reflection will never be complete if we fail to point out the greatest neo-colonial instrument that has left Africa haemorrhaging her life's resources like an impaled animal, in service to odious and immoral debts contracted or incurred on her behalf by kleptocratic leaders, and embezzled in the same breath, sometimes with the active connivance of Western governments, banks and conglomerates. These excruciatingly strangulating Debts overhang plaguing African economies like the Sword of Damocles remains one of the greatest and modernized encore of the slave trade since the slave ships were docked forever at the instance of the 1807 British Parliamentary Abolition of the Slavery Act. The 50 Years is Enough Network in calling for the cancellation of these odious debts, observed that: "The greatest barrier to Africa's economic recovery is the region's overwhelming debt burden, which amounts to about $230 billion."

A look at the trajectory of slavery and enslavement of Africa during the Transatlantic era, yields a clue to the socio-economic and political disembowelling of contemporary Africa. The ontology of the Transatlantic slave trade was propelled by the drive to source cheap labour for European plantations in the Americas. The Amerindians were considered physiologically weak to withstand the rapacious exploitation of the labour which working on the sugar cane plantations of the New World entailed. Alternative, cheap, disposable and sustainable labour source became imperative under this capitalistic ethic. Africans were discovered as made of a sterner stuff and could withstand the inclement climes and heavy workload that America holds in abundance. Then commenced the race to depopulate Africa to cause a river of wealth to flow into the Western coffers . The only difference between the Transatlantic slave trade and the new socio-economic and political slave trade of today lies in location and geography. Africans were in the former instance uprooted from their roots and transplanted into a life of agony in a country worlds away from the land of their ancestors. There they were pummelled to give up their labour in raw and physical terms without recompense. Today, Africans do not need to enter the slave ships anymore. That does not equally signify the end of their slavery, rather it has taken a more comfortable and respectable form. They are today compelled to remain in their backyards, and forced by the financial policies of World Bank and IMF to yield up their labours like their sons did in the Americas for the development of the West. The grotesquery of the whole structure of modern enslavement of Africans and most of the Third world, was captured Mofid Kamran's assessment: "Today, many parts of Africa, although rich in human as well as natural resources, remain among the poorest regions of the world with the highest debt burdens in the world. Half of Africa's peoples live in abject poverty and are subjected to occasional famine. Economic conditions for the majority-despite the so-called deregulated free-trade globalisation-have been getting increasingly worse over the last twenty-five years."

The reasons cannot be far fetched in a situation where, "a recent UN report...stated that creditor banks in affluent countries extracted from indebted countries $50billion annually in debt services alone. As a result of the present rules governing world markets, poor countries lose at least $500 billion annually to rich countries. And, this is nearly ten times as much as they receive annually in aid as they now spend $13 on debt repayment for every $1 it receives in grants."

The fact speaks for themselves here. In 1996 sub-Saharan Africa paid $2.5 billion more in debt servicing than it received in new long term loans and credit. The IMF alone has taken more than $3 billion out of Africa since the mid 1980s. In 1997, for instance, it received $600 million more than it put in. This invariably shows that the African poor are the ones bearing the rich West on their overburdened backs, as scarce resources are diverted to debt servicing. Most of these odious debts were accumulated by African countries in the 1970s, a time of reckless lending by Western banks and international agencies. Most if not all of these loans were taken out by illegitimate, unelected, unaccountable, undemocratic regimes. In many cases the ordinary people of Africa realised no benefits as the money disappeared into failed infrastructure projects, corrupt schemes, massive arms imports or unwise investments benefiting mainly the creditor countries.

Conclusion

These are the factors which can somehow attempt an explanation of the African Predicament and which if tackled properly would engineer Africa's escape from poverty. The task may be daunting, but not impossible.