Re-advancing a classic African thought can either be considered courageous, foolish, pointless, or all three. When the idea to revisit post-colonial Africa's biggest dilemma was actualized by James Shikwati in The Optimization Trap: Why Africa must extricate itself from Western and Asian Development Strategies, the essay's subject matter of global greed and internal moral emptiness made it appear a timely and pertinent venture. However, Shikwati’s  thorough result has proved the theory about redoing classics not all too provident.

Based on previous ruminations and disquiet by such Africans as Kwame Nkurumah and Ali Mazrui, this essay was inspired by the notorious African post-colonial narrative of moving from independence to straddling the heavens and earth of competing global politics and economics. In the years after independence, Africans were caught between following either the capitalist West or Communist Soviet Union. Shikwati's essays focuses on the destructive influence of Western-shaped African software; how it corrupts, dehumanizes and changes people and nations. It also focuses on the continuing impact of actions, interests and motivations of China's hardware in Africa's changing engagements.  While present African socio-economic and political systems exemplify many of the worst downsides highlighted in Shikwati's essay, the truth is the sentiment expressed would be timely at any point in history. It has as much to do with the nature of man as it does the venality of fluid international politics.

Western colonial and post-colonial decimation of the African person, spirit and self-interest are portrayed with one of Shikwati's more extravagant displays. Often one for restraint, and on occasion accused of propagating Western thinking, Shikwati dispassionately recounts the African tragedy as no less a major consequence of Western dominated roles in international affairs. But Shikwati is not merely bashing international capital and culture.  He's selling the African quest and need for holistic emancipation, grounded in an identity that transcends glib commentary from both Afro-pessimists and optimists. 

For Shikwati, Africa has been witness to the hardships of the challenges of nationhood, joined in the journey by the once idealistic Beijing whose background of ideological purity and later-day state-backed domestic and global pragmatism becomes an issue of existing and potential conflict when Africans endeavour to find their own place at the table (failure in which, he implies, they could still become part of the menu, as they have been to the West).

In the weeks following Shikwati's essay, no less than an ex-cabinet minister in Kenya – Dr. Mukhisa Kituyi – has, in a weekly column in a Sunday paper, asked Washington to re-calibrate its engagements with Beijing-leaning Nairobi. 

In the summer, the United Nations – part of Shikwati's focus in the essay – also adopted an instrument on international “land grabbing.” 

Shikwati's narrative is warm, even riveting. There's beautiful referencing, with echoes of the continent’s founding fathers' obsession with the unholy trinity of disease, poverty and ignorance. That Shikwati desires to re-ignite their prescient work to a new audience is to be applauded; those looking for a more accomplished interpretation would be better served by seeking to build on his proposed Act of Africa 2012.

Click: http://www.africanexecutive.com/pdfs/The%20Optimization%20Trap%20final.pdf

By Jesse L. Masai,
Limuru, Kenya.