The reason why African values and experiences have not gained prominence in the continent's policy making and development process is that her elites have misunderstood what progress is.

It's not for nothing that Dr. Raphael Odom, a Nigerian-Canadian former Policy Planner with Human Resources Canada and currently Assistant Professor of Public Service at America's DePaul University, told me that Africans do not want to be Europeans. Variously, Dr. Daniel Osabu-Kle, a Political Scientist at Canada's Carleton University, also has the same feelings. These views have come about because in the wake of Africa's development process and the continent's encounter with the Western world dating back to the 19^th century, the impression is to make Africa like the West. This notion, which is wrong, has seen African elites and their Western counterparts' chunk all kinds of Western-created development paradigms on African development without considering Africa's values and experiences.

Africa has seen all kinds of development paradigms that have never fully factored in her rich values and experiences, unlike places like Japan, South Korea, and Malaysia. Why should Africa be made to go through all these non-African-created development paradigms? Because the Western world thought that Africans are not developed, or more appropriately, not "civilized," and that they could replicate their values and experiences in Africa in their self-imposed "civilizing mission." They did this without factoring in Africa's values and experiences because they wanted to play God by re-creating Africans in their development image.

The French, for instance, created the "assimilation" policy, based on their concept of "mission civilisatrice," which aimed at re-creating Africans in their colonies as French. This failed because it did not factor in African culture and experiences. Confused, the French abandoned their African assimilation project and floated the concept of "association," that attempted to "instill French pride and love of the mother country in Africans without forcing them to abandon all native ideas and culture." Like assimilation, association also failed because the French could not mix African values with theirs. Generally, Africans elites failed to either tell the West to mix its values with Africa's or African elites themselves mix their innate values with West's.

Still, in terms of Africa's development progress, almost all the foreign development paradigms are not bad. The problems have been how to mix Africa's environment with these development paradigms so as to facilitate a better sustainable development, as advocates of the modernization theory say. This inability of African elites to creatively mix their values and experiences with their colonial legacies and the enabling aspects of the global development values, have not only seen Western governments continue largely with the modernization theory but also international development agencies' programs that come in the form of foreign development aid.  

Recently, I happened to work with some Canadians in Ghana in a development program funded by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), which like such prominent international development outfits like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, is an extension of the West's development paradigms. Canadians do not know Ghanaians values well enough to help Ghana. They almost always demonstrated serious misunderstanding of Ghana's development process and attempted to replicate Canadian values and experiences in Ghana in an arrogant way (What I saw and heard is not printable). CIDA is under intensive criticisms from such global international development experts like Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, of Columbia University's Earth Institute, to re-think its African foreign aid programs by factoring in African values and experiences. And so should thoughtful African governments, the private sector, elites, non-governmental organizations, bureaucrats and policy makers as key directors of Africa's progress.