Virtually bypassed by the benefits of prosperity and modernity that is enjoyed by the North, Africa survives and exists on the fringes of global economy and politics. Once undisputedly regarded as the repository of culture, the cultures of African people are fast being relegated to the margins as the MacDonald culture, fiercely promoted by cinema and television takes over.

In May 2000, The Economist treated the world to a picture of a young man uneasily holding a rocket propelled grenade launcher on his shoulder. His picture filled the whole map of Africa accompanied by the issue’s title: ‘The Hopeless Continent’. With this one stark phrase, all of us Africans, from diligent farmers along the Nile Delta to cattle breeders in Botswana, from dutiful fisher folks in Lake Victoria’s Kano plains to Merchants at Nigeria’s Kano market, were summarised and relegated from the ranks of civilised humanity to one single, dishonourable reality: self-destruction.

While most people in industrialised countries are affluent, most of the African people are impoverished under-nourished, illiterate and without decent shelter and clothing. While the economies of industrialised countries of the North are strong and resilient, those of Africa are weak and vulnerable. While the countries of the North are in control of their resources and destinies, those of the South, more so Africa, are vulnerable to external factors and lack functional independence and sovereignty.

The global economy is managed in a manner designed to maintain an international division of labour established during the slave trade, improved during colonialism and perfected in post-colonial era – which confines Africa to extracting and exporting primary commodities and importing and consuming value-added products. In other words, the people of Africa specialise in producing what they don’t consume and consuming what they don’t produce.

The decision making processes that govern the international flow of goods, services, knowledge, finances, capital and technology are controlled by the major industrialised countries of the North and by the international institutions under their tight control. African countries – and the entire global South – are placed in unfavourable and therefore hopeless position in the global economic system. The countries of the South are linked economically mainly to capitalist economies of the industrialised Northern countries – both a legacy of slave trading and colonial pasts sustained by the relative economic strength of the North and a consequence of development strategies adopted by post-independence governments of the South. Africa is particularly entangled.

At independence, Africa inherited an edifice that promoted heavy dependence and corruption, both on the economic and political fronts. The continent inherited inordinately backward economies based on subsistence farming dominated by the peasantry and cash crop production and export, almost solely in the hands of alien commercial farmers. Mining and export of minerals in ore form and oil in crude state was also rampant in some of the countries (For example Zambia’s economy almost solely depended on copper). Small-scale commodity production dominated by a backward-looking, highly superstitious peasantry that was emerging from the nightmare of decades of oppression and dehumanisation was the predominant character of Africa’s rural setting. The vast majority of the population was helplessly underdeveloped economically; their agriculture fragmented into tiny plots, each hardly sufficient to support a single household. For any meaningful development to occur, it was necessary and urgent that this problem be tackled as a matter of priority. Instead, the newly independent African states relied on Western “experts” and business manuals authored by Harvard-trained economists, rather than from the reality of the situation. Consequently, the new African leadership succeeded in perpetuating the colonial division of labour where Africa extracted and exported (unprocessed) primary commodities and imported and consumed manufactured and processed goods.

On the political front, the new African leadership inherited a state that was monstrously oppressive, designed to serve the interests of colonial oppressors; a state that was not geared towards the improvement of the people’s social welfare and the countries’ economic progress, but coercing them into accepting and submitting to colonial subjugation so as to produce, through forced labour and other coercive mechanisms, for the metropolitan economies. It was a state that was designed to instil fear, subservience and diffidence in the people by destroying their self-esteem through dehumanising and degrading treatment.    

Since Ghana’s independence in 1957 to the time of South Africa’s liberation from apartheid in 1994, many painful and largely unsuccessful attempts have been made at trying to put the economies of the fifty-plus African countries on the path of independent development. In virtually all cases, these attempts at socially and economically altering the state of existence have met immense internal and external obstacles. As has already been observed, the economies of newly-independent African states were weak and fragmented, mirroring centuries of colonial subjugation and exploitation. Industries and physical infrastructure – road, energy and communication – were virtually non-existent. The infrastructure for developing human resources through education and training was also grossly inadequate. Education, literacy and skills development levels were pitifully low.

Public opinion is unanimous that the industrialised North is trying its best to help an impoverished South. Africa, particularly, has been singled out as the theatre for hunger, brutal civil wars, diseases (particularly AIDS), witchcraft and cults. Many moralists – from religious missionaries to non governmental organizations – therefore argue for special assistance to Africa. In the views of these latter day moralists, Africa is on the path to self-induced extinction and has to be saved from itself. The assistance envisaged and attempted has always been financial and in the form of “technical assistance. Yet at the G-7 Summit in Naples in 1994, none other than French President, Francois Mitterrand declared:

Despite the considerable amounts spent on bilateral and multilateral aid, the flow of capital from Africa towards the highly industrialised countries is greater than that which flows towards developing countries.

In fact, Mitterrand put it quite mildly. The reality is that the countries of the Third World are bleeding – and that blood is flowing northwards. There is a massive transfer of the social surplus created by wage earners and small producers in the South towards the ruling classes of industrialized and Third World countries.