A city in a developed Country

Two articles in the July issue of the London, UK-based New African magazine about the need to have a new African development paradigm reminded me of President John Kufour's recent BBC World Debate forum in Johannesburg, South Africa where he envisaged the coming of a new African development philosophy, informed from its cultural idiosyncrasies, that will make over 2,000 African ethnic groups to see themselves as one.

The New African piece reinforces the growing thinking among  Africans that an “African Way” paradigm of development is needed to drive Africa’s progress. The “African Way” will draw from the African culture, colonial heritage and global prosperity process.

In China May be Right in Africa, Kwaku Atuahene-Gima, of the China Europe International Business School argues that Africa has to learn from the Chinese ability to mix, and positively deviate, from the dominant Western development orthodoxy (more economic and democratic/political) and create a unique development process that has seen China emerge as global economic superpower. Being a teacher of innovation and marketing, Atuahene-Gima is aware that the promotion of innovation creates economic and social prosperity.

In Obama Has Cleared the Way For Black Achievement, Cameron Duodu, a veteran journalist, analyzed that the US Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama, who has a Kenyan (African) father and a white mother, reflects Africa’s need to mix its development process from its cultural values and the global development ones. In Obama, as is expected of Africa, African culture wasn’t denigrated (with all its psychological implications). His white mother skillfully allowed him to “take in all cultures with respect” in his development process. The result is Obama  who is balanced developmentally, emotionally and intellectually.

Y.K. Amoako, the former chair of the UN Economic Commission for Africa, says that Africa is the only continent whose development process is dominated by foreign development paradigms to the detriment of its rich traditional values. For psychological reasons, the import of China and Obama is that Africa can re-tool its development process by creating an “African Way” development paradigm that mixes its traditional values and the global ones. Lack of clear and detailed “African Way” might have informed City University of New York’s Steve Panford to argue that Africa needs transformational elites to think out loudly from within African cultural ideals for progress. In Searching for Transformational Elites in Ghanaian Development, Panford says that Ghanaian traditional values should inform Ghana’s progress.Ghana pride itself as the “Black Star of Africa” but hasn’t demonstrated any attempts at an “African Way.”

The “Asian Way” was created by its transformative elites. Whether in Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohamad, Japan’s Akio Morita, South Korea’s Gen. Park Chung Hee, Taiwan’s Gen. Chiang Kai-shek, Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew or China’s Deng Xiaoping, we see Panford’s transformational elites as directors of progress who have a vast grasp of their cultural values and the global prosperity ideals.

No doubt, though there are some rifts between tradition and capitalism in Asians’ march to prosperity, the Asian miracle is now sometimes called “Confucian capitalism,” a reminder of their elites’ ability to play with their cultural values and the neo-liberal development paradigms. The result, as Robert Kagan indicates in The Return of History And The End of Dreams, is an “Asian arc of freedom and prosperity” stretching from Japan to Indonesia to India.

Minting an “African Way” doesn’t mean abandoning the good parts of Africa’s colonial heritage, but as Atuahene-Gima argues, Africa’s progress necessitates the need to “develop systems of government that take into account the peculiarities of Africa without throwing away elements of other systems that may be useful to us.” Already, Botswana has shown the way and the result is prosperity in the last 20 years.Time has come to tout credibly the “African Way” as a development paradigm.