AFRICAN ELITES
ON THE DEVELOPMENT TABLE
Kofi Akosah-Sarpong,
GhanadotThere is gradually emerging the thinking that African values
should drive the continent’s progress informed by her colonial
legacies and, as Washington University’s John W. Meyer and
associates would say, enabling aspects of World Development
Model via cultural and associational processes. Of recent times,
millions of words have poured into these debates. From Ghana’s
Minister of Health, Courage Quashigah, to Kenya’s
africanexecutive.com to Sierra Leone’s thepatrioticvanguard.com
to Mozambique’s the Observatory of Cultural Policies in Africa,
there are growing advocacy continent-wide to increasingly
appropriate African cultural values and experiences in her
development process in order to overturn many an earlier errors
in Africa’s progress done by the colonialists and African
elites.
As part of the on-going processes, the editor of the Accra,
Ghana-based Public Agenda, Amos Safo, whose bi-weekly brand
itself as Ghana’s sole advocacy and development newspaper, in a
series of feature articles on re-branding Africa for her
progress, argues that the negative branding of Africa by the
colonialists, and partly deepened by her elites, some 500 years
ago, as “underdeveloped, poor, primitive continent” and the
ensuing pushing of “western development paradigms down the
throats of Africans,” without regard to her values, has
undermined Africa’s progress. For in the larger development
game, values and images are everything, and these values and
images in Africa’s progress, at the national level, are heavily
foreign, 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 part of the reasons why there are development
misunderstandings in Africa is that Africa is the only region in
the world where foreign development paradigms dominate her
development process, resulting the continent’s 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
increasingly on her elites, who are yet to demonstrate a real of
sense of African progress driven by their grasp of the
continent’s values and experiences, driven from the ground up,
as the Japanese and the Chinese are doing. The thinking here is
that using their home-grown values and experiences as
foundation, African elites, as key directors of progress, will
be able to appropriate World Development Models or the enabling
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. For the
global development values are universalistic, everyone’s, human,
and not necessarily Western, and it is up to each nation-state’s
elites to appropriate them for progress. As Prof. Eda Kranakis,
who teaches Understanding Development at University of Ottawa’s
MA International Development and Globalization program, says
Western progress is an amalgam of taking values from all parts
of the world to enrich their own in their development process.
Part of African elites inability to tap their values clearly and
openly for national development emanate from their education
systems, which do not deeply emphasis African values and have
blinded the elites from seeing the relevance of their rich
cultural values in their development process, especially in
policy-making. In Cultural Troubles (2006), Patrick Chabal and
Jean-Pascal Daloz, renown Africanists and known for their
groundbreaking work, Africa Works: Disorder as Political
Instrument (1999), as part of the growing need to give cultural
meaning to progress, 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 is 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, then 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 as other
states such as Japan have done. To trouble is, and there are
many troubles in Africa’s development fronts, how can you
develop if you don’t understand yourself first and always
attempting, as Africa’s education system currently demonstrates,
to understand somebody’s. Recently, I have been receiving
telephone calls and e-mail from some folks who have been trying
to know why I have been critical of African elites in relation
to the continent’s progress.
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. So they are to be questioned about Africa’s
development troubles. The fact is whether playing with ideas or
directing development the elites should be informed by African
values first, as the emerging economic giants China and India
are doing, and any other second especially the appropriation of
the enabling global development values. For whether 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. It seems to me that
African elites are not balanced in relation to Africa’s
progress. They are skewed, more or less, toward talking Western
values or thinking of Western values when tackling Africa’s
progress.
The challenge for African elites, as the continent increasingly
get 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.
By Kofi Akosah-Sarpong, November 15, 2006
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