African values should drive the continent’s progress and as Washington University’s John W. Meyer and associates would say, enabling aspects of World Development Model via cultural and associational processes. Recently, millions of words have poured into these debates: Ghana’s Minister of Health, Courage Quashigah, Kenya’s The African Executive, Sierra Leone’s Patriotic Vanguard to Mozambique’s the Observatory of Cultural Policies in Africa. There is growing advocacy to increasingly appropriate African cultural values and experiences in her development process in order to overturn many an earlier errors in Africa’s progress.

Amos Safo, Editor of Ghana-based Public Agenda whose bi-weekly brands itself as Ghana’s sole advocacy and development newspaper, in a series of feature articles on re-branding Africa, argues that the negative branding of Africa by the colonialist, and elites as “underdeveloped, poor, primitive continent” and the pushing of “western development paradigms down the throats of Africans,” without regard to her values, has undermined Africa’s progress. In the larger development game, values and images are everything, and they are heavily foreign in Africa’s progress, resulting in the rolling misunderstandings of Africa’s development process. Dr. Y.K. Amoako, former chair of the UN Economic Commission for Africa, and some experts will tell you that Africa is the only region in the world where foreign development paradigms dominate her development process, resulting to developmental confusion. 

To extend Safo’s argument, the need to re-brand Africa for her progress rests not on the overburdened media alone but also on her elites who are yet to demonstrate a real sense of African progress by their grasp of the continent’s values and experiences, from the ground up, as the Japanese and the Chinese are doing. Using home-grown values and experiences as the foundation, African elites will be able to appropriate World Development Models or enable aspects of global development values to fit into their environment for progress. The Japanese and other ex-colonies have done that, opening their values for progress.

The global development values are universal. Everyone’s human, and not necessarily Western, and it is up to each nation-state’s elites to appropriate them for progress. Prof. Eda Kranakis, Lecturer University of Ottawa, says Western progress is an amalgam of values from all parts of the world to enrich their own in their development process. 

African elites’ inability to tap their values for national development emanate from their education systems, which do not emphasize African values, and have blinded the elites from seeing the relevance of their rich cultural values in policy-making. In Cultural Troubles (2006), Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz, renown Africanists for their groundbreaking work, Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument (1999), throw more light on the need to look more intensely at culture in the development process. Grounded in anthropology and using Nigeria, Sweden and France to illustrate how the State came to be constituted, in the development sense, and how cultural approach is crucial to appreciating the State and its progress, the writers say since culture refers to systems of meaning that people use to manage their every day living, it’s right to factor in these meanings when talking progress, especially policy-making, since the State is the central political manager. 

In this context, do African states understand Africa in development sense? If yes, why haven’t African states heavily appropriated for their political management of the progress of state, as centre of authority and order, what they know first – that’s their values – before any other? How can you develop if you don’t understand yourself first but always attempt to understand somebody else?  

The heavy criticism of the African elite in relation to Africa’s progress is that they are the frontline directors of progress and, as intellectuals, are the main players of development ideas for progress. They should be questioned about Africa’s development troubles. Whether they are playing with ideas or directing development, the elites should be informed by African values first. Because of their education system or their own inability to think within their values first, especially in policy-making, African elites have projected “debilitating intellectual incoherence” in tackling the continent’s development. They are skewed, more or less, towards talking Western values or thinking of Western values when tackling Africa’s progress. 

The challenge for African elites, as the continent increasingly gets enmeshed in the World Development Model, is whether talking about the failed Structural Adjustment Programme or its remodeled Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers, is how they re-think a new policy-making regime that seriously incorporates their indigenous values and experiences with their Western.