Author: Kingsley C. Moghalu
Publishers: Bookcraft, Ibadan
Reviewer: Abdul-Ganiyu Garba
Emerging Africa: How the Global Economy’s “Last Frontier” Can Prosper and Matte is about the future of Africa in a broken and transiting world.
The author blends his African heritage and multi-national training, work and life experience to produce a book that challenges conventional wisdom about Africa, its current position, its future trajectories, progress indicators, who is responsible for Africa’s development, the international community, foreign aid, capitalism, markets, privatisation, growth, transformation, and so on. He cautions against what he terms “African optimism” — a premature and exuberant belief that “the end of poverty and under-development in Africa is imminent and that the Continent is on the verge of an immediate breakthrough as a major global economic player”.
Reading through, four key questions come to mind. First, what are the central argument and main message of the book? Second, how has the author justified his argument? Third, what substantive value has been added to influence the discussion on Africa’s future? Four, how should the African stakeholder engage the book?
The core of the book is the philosophical foundations where the idea of “thinking it through” is developed. Part I, which contains three chapters, make up the core from which two extensions are developed. The first is prescriptive, covering much of Part II (Chapters 5, 6, 7, 8 & 9) and Chapter 13 (in Part III). The second extension begins in chapter 4 (in Part II) with a conceptual analysis of transformation. It continues in Part III with the (1) argument that the “international community” is a myth (Chapter 10) and (2) an interrogation of the governance structure, interests and outcomes of the operations of the international society exemplified by the UN System and its core financial and trading architecture in Chapters 11 and 12 respectively.
In the Epilogue (Chapter 14), Emerging Africa offers the promise of a sequel. It rightly recognizes that “a completely non-historical approach to Africa’s challenges of economic development might be an important omission”. The value of the sketch it offers is three-fold. The first is the recognition of Achebe’s lesson of history: unless Africans tell their stories, they must live with a history that glorifies their conquerors and suffer the mental and psychological consequences. Second, civilisations rise and civilisations fall: Africa was not always the “south-end” of human civilisation anymore than the Anglo-Saxon civilisation was always at its “north-end”. There is therefore, no historical justification for the deep-rooted inferiorities that paralyse the African mind and hold it in mental bondage, the so-called “colo-mentality”. Third, a people that fail to learn the true lessons of history will relive it at increasing costs.
Central argument and main message
In my view, the foundational argument is the following:
1. Africa’s current progress is an opportunity, not an arrival at the desired destination.
2. Africans and not the “international community” have the responsibility for the future of Africa: it is the decisions that Africans make now that will shape the future of Africa.
3. The absence of a worldview in African nations and in the region is the fundamental reason for the under-development of Africa.
4. The sustainability of truly transformative progress in Africa is anchored in ‘the mind-set, the mental framework, the “psychological infrastructures” that we as Africans have or lack’. ‘Action that is not informed by a philosophical or conceptual compass is shallow and often unsustainable’.
5. Therefore, (i) proper reflection and development of a consensus by Africans about their future is necessary for truly transformational progress in Africa and (ii) if African countries take the first, essential step in upgrading their psychological and mental infrastructures with appropriate worldview, the potential trajectory can unfold in the next fifty years [by 2060]. If not, it will be nothing but a mirage … [because] “an opportunity does not a transformation make.”
Statements 1, 2, 3 and 4 are the fundamental premises that support the core claim [5]. If the argument is correct, as I believe it is, Africans cannot outsource the mental process that will shape the future of Africa or the hard work of consensus-building to some amorphous international community, “experts” or development partners that are neither interested in transformative development or in partnerships of equals.
The author asserts that the book “is written for all those with a voice in Africa’s future and with the influence and authority to make the choices that will determine the future of Africa”.
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