NEW PARTNERSHIP FOR AFRICA’S DEVELOPMENT:

The African Paradigm.

By

Alloy .S. Ihuah PhD*

Dept of Religion and Philosophy
Benue State University,
Makurdi.
Benue State,Nigeria.
E-mail: alloyihuah@yahoo.com

1. Abstract
A renowned Nigerian political philosopher, Professor Ogundowole (2005:142) once
argued that, Africa’s contribution to global GDP today is less than 2% and its
contributions to world trade has declined from 4% to less than 2% and it attracts less
than 1% of global capital flows. This is without prejudice to the fact that debt
repayment mechanism ensures more capital flight. Today, there is poverty in the land,
infrastructural breakdown, wars, insurgency, hunger, diseases and deaths far more in
number than it was under colonial rule. Although over thirty development strategies
have been attempted in the last 30 years alone to translate Africa’s abundant natural
resources into prosperity and deliver the continent from the throes of
underdevelopment, they have all recorded catastrophic failures.
This paper argues that, the broad assumptions of the New Partnership for Africa’s
Development are commendable though, the wider context of the imposition of
Predatorial behaviour of free market under the banner of neo-liberal orthodoxy runs
short of the important local content that can instigate Africa’s development. The
NEPAD like many continental initiatives is foreign in concept and practice, and so
lacks the capacity to engender a civilization of sustainable development in Africa.

2. The NEPAD Genesis.

The advent of the NEPAD is rooted in the post cold war drama and the post Apartheid
era in Africa. The post cold war experience ravaged African children and women and
terrorized and dehumanized rural/civilian populations. Similarly, the post Apartheid era
in African politics instigated the widespread feeling of liberation, of alleviating poverty
and promoting economic development. But more importantly, the expected benefits
from the much trumpeted peace dividend that was to be heralded by the collapse of the
Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the United Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) came to
nothing. On the contrary, African nations harvested conflicts in large numbers.
Adebayo Olukoshi (2004:11) adds to this that, “more than this, the appetite of the
international community for intervening to assist African countries with the resolution
of these conflicts seemed to have diminished considerably”. It was obviously in the
face of the challenge of massive humanitarian emergencies accompanying the conflicts
and the cynical display of selective indifference by the powers that were themselves
heavily implicated in the unfolding drama of violence engulfing the continent that
African leaders challenged themselves to take responsibility to tackle the economic,
political, cultural and social problems of the continent. This is in addition to the decline

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in the foreign aid receipts flowing to the continent from some US$ 17.2 billion in 1990
to US$ 12.3 billion in 2001(Olukoshi 2004:2). Africa as it were was no longer in doubt
that unless it adopts measures from within itself to develop its continent, nobody else
would rise to the challenge. Perhaps the clear statement in the communiqué issued at
the end of the Denver, Colorado Summit of the Group of Seven (G7) countries became
a direct source of challenge to the African political and policy elite; to extricate itself
and the continent from the malaise of underdevelopment and exclusion in a globalizing
world.
This informed thinking was the tonic of Thabo Mbeki‟s call for an African Renaissance
which stirred a considerable amount of discussion across the continent. Two initiatives
resulted from this agitation. The first, known as the Millennium Partnership for the
African Recovery Programme (MAP) is associated with President Thabo Mbeki of
South Africa, President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria and President Abdulaziz
Boutaflika of Algeria with Hosni Mubarak of Egypt joining later. The second initiative
known as the Plan Omega was launched by Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal. These
initiatives were designed to tackle the problems of socio-economic development and
political stability on the continent. The two initiatives were later consolidated into the
New Africa initiative (NAI) as Africa‟s strategy for achieving sustainable development
in the 21st century by the Organization of African Unity (OAU) Lusaka summit in July
2001.On 23rd October, 2001, NAI was revised and adopted as the New Partnership for
Africa‟s Development (NEPAD) in Abuja, Nigeria, as a collective African response to
the call for an African-driven effort to transform the fortunes of the continent for the
better.
The NEPAD thus became the African equivalent of the Marshal plan that enabled
Europe, with American financing, to recover speedily from the devastating
consequences of the Second World War. Expectedly, explains why African leaders
declared while launching NEPAD that Africans have out of their volition, taken their
destiny in their hands. That the continental initiative emphasizes that development is a
participatory process involving the people, that development is about empowerment
and self-reliance. And that Africans must be the architect of their development and, its
sustenance has to rest on them and not the foreign benevolent guardians. The NEPAD
document thus emphasizes market access to the developed economies as a strategy for
Africa‟s ability to achieve sustainable development, equitable trade, increase in capital
flows and debt write-offs. Articles 174-188 of the document state the objectives more
correctly thus,
1. That Africans have to set up, own and manage development plans for Africa‟s
renewal with a call from the international community to compliment their
efforts.
2. That the development plans must be based on national sub-regional and regional
priorities and through participatory process involving the people
3. To develop the capacity to sustain growth and development thereby halting the
marginalization of Africa in the globalization process
4. To promote the role of women in all activities; and
5. To enable the continent catch up with the rest of the world.
These set objectives, laudable though demands answers from the following questions:
(i.) Is the NEPAD wholly African in concept and implementation? (ii) Can Africa
Indeed be de-entrapped from within the double-faced globalized world for sustainable
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growth and development through the instrumentalities of the NEPAD (iii) If, and when
the NEPAD fails to engender sustainable growth and development in Africa to catch up
with the rest of the world, what paradigm(s) offer(s) itself/themselves as alternative(s)
to Africa‟s human sustainable development?
3. African Origin of the NEPAD?
It is the convinced conclusion of students of African development that no socio-
economic transformation of the continent will ever be possible without the determined
effort by Africans themselves to sort out the domestic political dysfunctionalties facing
the continent. The articulated view point of African leaders in the NEPAD document of
implementation is therefore is a commendable effort. On cross examination of the
NEPAD philosophy, priorities and implementation modalities, (African Peer Review
Mechanism (APRM), one is not left in doubt that some of the high hopes generated by
the NEPAD document have being seriously undermined by the essentially neo liberalist
pitch of its economic blue print, and the limited scope of its political agenda. This is
because the theoretical framework of the NEPAD philosophy is cast in the kinds of
governance managerialism that has become the hallmark of neo-liberalist political
economy. The designers of the new development agenda and the basis of the needed
partnership rely on monetarist theories, commanding the relentless pursuit of profit at
whatever cost. Studies carried out reveal that Africa required about US $ 64 billion to
be sourced annually through Direct Foreign Investment (DFI) to achieve 7% growth.
(Gambari 2000:5) This itself signals that Africa is not only entrapped by foreign
financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank
(WB), and the World Trade Organisation (WTO), but that the new initiative itself is not
wholly African.
The argued fact here is that, a country‟s economic infrastructure that is premised on
domestic resources and which ensures that its entrepreneurs have access to requisite
factors of production is more likely to engender a powerful motor of development.
Unarguably, Africa‟s partners and foreign “benevolent” benefactors like the IMF, the
WB, WTO etc virtually preach the opposite to African government. The very fact of the
opening statement of Article 174 of the NEPAD document that “Africans have set up,
own and manage development plans for Africa‟s renewal with a call from the
international community to compliment their effort” is itself as defeatist and inauthentic
living as it is eurocentric in conception and implementation.
Expectedly, the first port of call by African Leaders to sell the NEPAD to Europe was
Genoa, Italy where the G8 summit was taking place. The NEPAD is one most recent
attempts at African‟s de-entrapment designed for the backward countries within the
world capitalist (market) economic system which guarantees the sustenance of
economic growth of industrially advanced parts of the system though, holds down the
growth of its backward parts. Throughout the 1980s and in the early 1990s, African
Leaders have paraded a number of so-called home initiatives to address all dimensions
of the multifaceted developmental challenges confronting the continent though with
catastrophic failures.
The Lagos plan of Action for the Economic Development of Africa, 1980-2000 and the
Final Act of Lagos 1990; Africa‟s Priority Programme for Economic Recovery
(APPER) 1986-1990, The African Alternative Frame work to Structurer Adjustment
Programme for Socio-Economic Recovery and Transformation (AAF-SAP), 1989; The
African Charter for Popular Participation for Development; and The Compact for
African Recovery, 2000 are a few of the many foreign induced developmental

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Strategies aimed at easing out the advanced Countries who have been locked in a zero-
sum game. Ogundowole (2004:163) explains this Scenario better thus
the advanced countries appropriate the major part of the latter’s incomes
through transnational corporations and by shackling credit terms, thus have
enslaved the backward people in a web of technological and food
dependence and erected obstacles to manufacture exports from the
backward countries to their advanced countries own home markets; pass
unto the backward countries the cost of all economic crises; rampant
inflation and currency instability in the advanced countries
This notably explains the wave of economic, political and social crisis visibly ravaging
every part of Africa. The question of origin, ownership and possession of the NAPAD
is contentious. That a few African leaders paraded the idea, consolidated and
popularized it on the continent does not and cannot translate to ownership. And even
that Africans originated the idea does not and cannot translate into actual possession of
the NEPAD, just as possessing the idea does not and indeed cannot mean African
ownership of the NEPAD. It is a known fact that the process leading up to the adoption
of the NEPAD document mainly involved only a small group of African Leaders who
themselves are presiding over failed states, and their equally small circle of advisers
who are at best political jobbers and contractors. By comparative analysis the NEPAD
can be said to be a bastard child of globalization; less African in origin, ownership and
possession than the Lagos plan of Action, for example. As Olukoshi (2004:18) argues
in support,
the document and its promoters seem to content themselves with the rhetoric of
ownership as though its mere assertion is tantamount to its actual realization
and practice. It is also not to take into account the challenges of grounding
policy into domestic policy and political process so that all claims to African
ownership can stand to critical and regorous scrutiny.
What the NEPAD is not is that, it is not an African Initiative and it has no African
agenda. The NEPAD‟s wholesale embrace of the kinds of orthodox, narrowly focused
market economic policy framework that underpinned the adjustment programmes
pursued by the Bretton Wood institutions across Africa during the 1980s and 1990s
serves as the case in point. These programmes have been carried over into the 21st
century through the poverty reduction strategy papers (PRSPs) that African Countries
have been encouraged one after the other to adopt in order to qualify for bilateral and
multilateral aid (Olukoshi P.19). The decisive suspension of Zimbabwe from the
commonwealth by African leaders as a precondition for funding NEPAD by the United
States of America (U.S.A), and some members of the European parliament more than
anything demythologizes the ownership theory. This is aside from the ocular fact that
many of the areas that the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM), an organ of the
NEPAD adopted in 2002 to foster adoption of policies, standards and practices that lead
to political stability, high economic growth, sustainable development and accelerated
sub regional and continental integration are fairly covered by the WB, IMF and WTO.
While the APRM emphasizes the deployment of African expertise in the Peer review
process (Paragraph 11, APRM Base Document 2001) it also acknowledges that there
may be instances where the services of non-African experts, individuals or institutions
or organizations will be used. It argues on this score that the NEPAD initiative is
framed and interpreted in the neo liberal manner which implementation cripples and
destroys the post-colonial African State institutions which had been weak before. The
essentially neo liberal frame work that informs the economic principles and direction as

4
spelt out in the NEPAD document represents a set back in the African quest for return
to the Path of sustained economic growth and development. Africa‟s development is
not through debt reduction as advanced in the NEPAD document. It is not so much the
marginalization of Africa from globalization as proudly agitated in the NEPAD
manifesto. Such are mere cosmetic palliatives. The failure of the World Bank and other
foreign investors to deliver growth and development to developing countries should call
for more serious structural, far reaching beneficial policies. Africa like every other part
of the world need assistance and collaborative efforts for growth and development, but
such aid should be granted not on the basis of imposition of naked predetorial
behaviour of free market under the banner of neolibeal orthodoxy,
4. Africa’s Development And The Challenge Of Globalization
By 2005 all 189 UN member states have pledged to
 Develop further an open trading and financial system that is rule based,
predictable and nondiscriminatory. This includes a commitment to good
governance development and poverty reduction-nationally and internationally
 Address the least developed Countries special needs. This includes tariff and
quota-free access to their exports; enhanced debt relief for heavily indebted
poor Countries; cancellation of official bilateral debt; and more generous
official Development assistance for Countries Committed to poverty reduction.
 Address the special need of land-locked and small island developing states.
 Deal comprehensively with developing countries debt problems through
national and international measures to make debt sustainable in the long term.
 In co-operation with the developing countries, develop decent and productive
work for youth.
 In cooperation with pharmaceutical companies provide access to affordable
essential drugs in developing Countries.
 In cooperation with Private sector, make available the benefits of new
technologies-especially information and communications technologies.
The quip above captures correctly that the present state of the world economy is not just
interdependent but more so integrated. With integration, the wold has become one big
state. Interdependence on the other hand is the mere mutualism of states. This
obviously explains the contraptions of the NEPAD as Africa‟s Marshall plan in
anticipation of foreign assistance for authentic liberation from economic slavery and
bad leadership. Sadly though, Africa‟s “benefactors” and partners are wont to
acknowledge Africa‟s contribution to world civilization and constructive engagement
with the rest of the world though, they are unwilling to lose the blinkers of the
prejudices of their forefathers.
Development itself is the desire and ability to use what is available to continuously
improve the quality of life, liberate people from the hazardous power and influence of
natural, geophysical, socio-historical, and world environment. This ability is a thing
that cannot be borrowed, or received as a gift from others in a ready-made form. It has
to be evolved through a process of interaction with the environment. In the very words
of Julius Nyerere, (1973:5) the person must develop himself. It is self-liberation, it is
self-realization. Hence, self-reliance through intersubjectivity.

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This concept of development entails a conscious attempt to advance the African quality
of life from the within. Ogundowole (2004:93) puts it analogously thus, “development
is like ambition. It cannot be received by people from another people… and the
characteristic feature it assumes are necessarily the product of self–awareness, self-
motivation and self-drive of the people, the agent of such ambition”. It is not, and
cannot be a state in which Africa has access to finished goods of advanced foreign
countries.
It remains to be proved whether the assumptions of the NEPAD fulfills these
characteristics features. The NEPAD sets out to develop a socio-economic and political
environment conducive for economic growth and sustainable development though, this
mandate has inadvertently advanced the neo-liberal philosophies of the Bretton Wood
institutions, which are supported, with the new order of internationalization of
economic activities to globalization of national cultures and politics, environment and
security issues. So used, globalization is a metaphor for the aspiration and
determination to render idea or way of life applicable and functional throughout the
world.
Globalization in its neo liberal vision leads to undermining the national civilizational
identity of millions of Africans, formation of the vacuum of values and senses in their
consciousness, and as a result cultural marginalization of their society, increase in
crimes and drug addiction. Globalization encourages free market and open society, as
advanced in the Millennium Development Goals though, it suffices to ask how Africa is
squared in this equation. Economically, many African countries have taken their
“rightful” places in the world system as troubled and peripheralized enclave economies
with its middle class and low-income groups devoured. In Nigeria, as elsewhere in
Africa, there is a rat race for fraudulent acquisition of public corporations and
government houses. Expectedly, Africa is implementing to the letter the dictates of the
borrower countries and organizations whose only language of interaction is money and
greed economics. The dogma here is that, profitability, or the insatiable urge to make
more and even more money at whatever cost is the apotheosis of money as an end in
itself. In this sense, the invention of money is the original sin of economics. Thus, the
urge to obey the commandment of this dogma as the only way out for humanity is to
say the least nihilistic.
Rather than benefit all Africans, globalization has promoted a culture of mass poverty;
instead of sharing the benefits of uncountable wealth for the suffering and hungry
Africans, and ensuring that material welfare, spiritual upsurge, health and access to
education for the teaming African population, globalization is spreading weapons of
mass destruction and perfecting ways of promoting and protecting the interest of the
minority supper-rich nations and international organization as against the absolute
majority of the mankind who populate the African continent. Thabo Mbeki‟s voice is a
summarizer: “the phenomenon of globalization occupies pride of place in today‟s
international dialogue. The all round integration of the global community is proceeding
at great pace. This encompasses our continent but not necessarily as equal partners in,
or beneficiaries of this process (Ntuli 2004:173)
Today, our open society is suffering degradation of the environment and devaluation of
the human person. The new stage of techno-scientific civilization has mutated the
African and made him/her a standing reserve to serve the interest of the west. Whereas
in their old form the negative forces of globalization engendered the World War I, then
Nazism and the World War II, the forces of techno-scientific economy with its

6
character of world-wide armed conflict today may become nothing but mankind‟s
suicide. The US.A. today makes the rules and maintains the institutions that shape the
international political economy. Economically, the U.S is the world‟s most important
country; militarily, it is not just the most important country, it is the decisive one. These
two of the most important tools of oiling the global system that is controlled by the
countries of the Northern hemisphere informs Thomas Friedman‟s blunt statement that:
the world is sustained by the presence of American Power and America‟s willingness to
use that power against those who would threaten the system of globalization… The
hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden fist” (1999:373).
It is thus understandable to reason that the NEPAD which implementation philosophies
are grounded in the hidden hand of the market forces of the west does not have the
capacity to instigate and sustain Africa‟s development. Ramose (2002:143) offers a
ready support here that, “even the blind can see that the largest majority of humanity
lives by the side of and not through a globalizing economy as popularized in the
NEPAD initiative”. Growth and development is achieved when the great majority of
citizens of a given nation, regardless of its status or background, has been allowed to
freely participate in the development process of that nation. This realization calls for
the transformation of the present global system, to conduct the African back into his
humanistic heritage, into something more stable and humane, based on the
civilizational values that are common to all mankind. These concern the essential
values of inter-subjectivity. It is what Ogundowole (2004:183) calls self-reliancism
which offers a short-cut to advancement and progress. Development does not ensue
through dependence on foreign capital investment. In itself, foreign capital investment
is diversionary. It stultifies development efforts and renders a people ineffective and
without control of the substance as well as the pace of their development. Moreover,
FDI has a negative effect on domestic savings. Its gives room for the recipient country
to increase its consumption. Although FDI brings capital, it also leads to immense out
flow of profit and other investment income. Alozie (2005:75) concores on this point
that “too rapid build-up of FDI could lead to denationalization where the foreign share
of the nations wealth stock increases relative to the local share”. This is aside from the
obvious problem of balance of payment that follows the exhaustion of privatization
linked FDI and continued increase of remittances of profits abroad.
It goes to argue therefore that the demand implicit in the NEPAD that African countries
must be globalization compliant is smack of Uteen Kpev Sha Gondu we i.e dubiosity.
Globalization itself is no respecter of nations. Its originators and major beneficiaries
themselves often fall victim. The percentage that enjoy globalization in any of the
industrially developed Countries are usually less than forty percent of the population.
William Greider (1992) testifies that the economic consequences of globalization
production have already been experienced by the million of the U.S.A industrial
workers. In Nigeria, the global economic system has tsunamised a reasonable
population and has kept our aged civil servants permanently in a State of suspended
animation as their pension entitlement and or severance allowances pile up for month
and years unpaid. This is aside from the very angry fact that less than 40% of Nigeria‟s
capital budgets since 1999 has been implemented. (Daily Independent Nov.7, 2005:1-
2). Thus, the foreign economic prescriptions have brought about total annihilation and
the near total lack of the capacity of the masses to revolt.
Nothing is farther from the truth than to argue that the NEPAD agenda is to say the
least a wholesale pauperization of majority of African generations. On the streets of
African cities today are poverty stricken individuals who are apparently disenchanted

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with life in the environmentally abused set-ups. Human development as it were reverts
to its opposite of the human underdevelopment with many African Countries being
scored very low on the index of human development. Moeletsi Mbeki (2004:35) sadly
reports that “while china had lifted 400,000 people out of poverty in the past 20 years,
Nigeria had pushed 71 million people below the poverty line”. It is no surprise then that
Nigeria is ranked 151 out of 177 Countries amongst the poorest in the world in terms of
human development. In Africa, famine pervades the population, health services are
terribly poor and inadequate and the mortality rate remains high. 340 million Africans
or half of the population live on less than U$ 1 per day and only 58% of the population
gave access to safe drinking water.
Obviously, the capacity to impact positively in the improvement of human welfare,
which qualifies as development, does not lie in foreign aid. It lies with the Africans
themselves, and they must not remain passive in the cause of saving themselves.
However, the problems of leadership deter sustainable development in Africa; a
democratic, people oriented, visionary leader in the sense of what direction to follow
and what goals to seek as well as the capacity to inspire and mobilize citizens for
development. Most African leaders suffer from legitimacy problem and so are
psychologically incapacitated to effect changes in the global economic framework in
fevour of domestic growth and development.
Sustainable development in Africa cannot ensue by mere screaming and raving about
economic and social marginalization as typified in the NEPAD document of
implementation. The future of the advancement of Africa lies in upholding the principle
of self-reliance. The evolution of an indigenous economic and development agenda that
expresses the aspirations of the African is more likely to engender human sustainable
development. Thus argued, indigenous knowledge systems presents itself as the best
policy framework with respect to the forces of liberation and globalization for poorer
African Countries. It is not to seek rapid and close integration but rather to re-negotiate
selective modalities of integration or what is commonly called “strategic integration”
which encapsulates a philosophy of human integration; a philosophy which task is to
lop off the reactionary tendencies of the so-called African leaders. This philosophy
seeks a wholistic development that is far beyond the prism of our leaders who are euro
centric in thought and practice and who have fast become learned salesmen of the
economic reforms of the IMF, the WB and the WTO that have long enslaved Africa. It
is argued here that, de-entrapping Africa from the international subjugationist spider‟s
web can only be done from the within; through African indigenous knowledge systems
(AIKS). Even the so-called humanitarian aid flowing from the western democracies is
still subject o the egoistic calculus of profit making.
5. Towards a Development Paradigm for Africa
The world, we are always told, is a global village. This cliché entails that we are more
mutually dependent on each other than ever before. We are further made to know that
ours is the Age of information, and the age of knowledge of science and technology. In
today‟s world too, information, knowledge and science and technology connotes power
and tools that engender development. The question of relevant importance here is the
African contribution. In this enterprise, Asia faced this problem squarely and profited
from it by subjecting western technology and knowledge to the Asian spirit. In
particular, the Japanese harnessed their indigenous knowledge systems to develop
themselves. It is argued here that Africans can do the same by developing a relevant
and appropriate technology that will pursue a wholistic agenda away from the mere
econometric deterministic paradigm.

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Agreed, globalization connects people, ideas and goods. It is generally understood as
“a panacea for all our ills”. So understood, there are those who view it as a new
economic system with the power to redistribute income and wealth in a more equitable
basis, capable of solving alarming industrial, labour and unemployment problems. But
of course this assertion is not true even in Europe and America. In Africa, the situation
is worse. Our Universities and other institutions of learning produce unemployable
graduates because our system is irrelevant to our needs.
Others view globalization as new moral, social, political and legal codes stabilizing
diplomatic relations promoting the spread of democracy or drastically reducing the
production of arms and nuclear weapons (Schafer 2000:125). Yet there are those who
view it as a new information or communication system, one capable of dealing with the
shift from verbal to visual literacy, phenomenal accumulations of data, global
networking, internets, the computer revolution, electronic highways, cyberspace and
mind-boggling changes in communication (ibid). Similarly, globalization is seen as a
new environmental system, with the capability to conserve resources, control pollution,
protect the biosphere, and radically alter attitudes and practices with respect to the
natural environment and other species.
These assumptions are reflected in the NEPAD document with the believe that the only
way Africa can achieve growth and development at the speed that its people want is by
trapping into the global stock and bond markets, by seeking out multinationals to invest
in the continent and by selling into the global trading system what its factories produce.
It suffices to ask; where does Africa with its technological backwardness and its status
as a dumping ground for Europe‟s nuclear waste fit into this equation? What of the
economic regimes of the IMF, the WB and the WTO? How can the robber equitably
redistribute income and wealth? How can a system that Mechanizes everything and
advocates learner, meaner quotas create employment? We argue though that
interdependence is a necessary ingredience of development, it is only one aspect of
another most important part (i.e African indigenous knowledge systems) of a whole
which cultural philosophy is here argued as a development paradigm that should truly
guide the NEPAD Vision. AIKS stresses instead the essential interrelations and
interdependence of all phenomena- biological, physical, psychological, social and
cultural. Ntuli (2004:175) adds his voice more correctly in this regard that,
Indigenous cosmology centers on the co-evolution of the spiritual, natural,
and human words. Thus many indigenous peoples in Africa still practice the
ritual of burying their umbilical cords and immediately planting trees at the
same spot in order to establish a relationship with the plant life. IKS holds
that there are sacred places that have to be avoided and must be conserved.
There are places where people are not permitted to fell trees, hunt wild life
or to collect wild fruits for commercial purposes. Natural phenomenon like
rivers and mountains play a significant role in the psyche and constitution of
our people
This cultural philosophy entails a functional attitude of the collective knowledge
and spirit of Africa, to trace its own footprint so as not to walk in the shadow of other
people‟s progress, but to forge its own way into the future over which it alone can claim
reasonable measure of control and self-determination. Africa can only act African and
from within its traditional African politics to engender a people centred development. It
means then that the question of identity is critical to the implementation of the
NEPAD ideals, the absence of which makes the NEPAD a foreign body in the African
body system. AIKS is central to everything we do and think. It is what we do and

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reason why we do it, what we wish and why we imagine it, what we perceive and how
we express it, how we live and in what manner we approach death. It is our
environment and patterns of our adoption to it. It is the world we have created and are
still creating; it is the way we see that world and the motives that urge us to change it. It
is the way we know each other and ourselves; it is our web of personal relationship, it is
the images and abstractions that allow us to live together in communities and nations. It
is the element in which we live; it is the totality of our cultural values.
Under the NEPAD initiative, the capacity for growth and development is essentially
lacking. This is because the primary elements for Africa‟s sustainable development i.e
cultural values have been eroded by rampaging colonizers, and who have also effected
a total domination of a subjected nation. In our post modern world under the banner of
globalization, multi-National Corporation; the WB, WTO, IMF etc have achieved
effective global governance by virtue of their control of economic power, financial
market, of the new global trade bureaucracy, of media, and increasingly of education.
The WTO has placed for example all governments in the world in a virtual hostage
situation; it has the virtual power of Vito over member nations‟ laws if their laws are in
conflict with the provisions of the organization. The implications of this on Africa‟s
development are varied; total underdevelopment of African nations, poverty, diseases,
insecurity, corruption, political violence, and rapid spread of HIV/AIDS among others.
Acting from without the African continent conducts Africa and its population outward
away from growth and development, and self-determination. To act in a way that the
effect of our action will be compatible with the permanence of an authentically human
life on earth is to act in ways that are relevant to Africans and their needs; it is to act
within the cultural values of the African, to be guided by AIKS. This much is what
Africans have in their indigenous educational system. An educational system that is not
only relevant to Africans and their needs, but one that is linked to social life, both
materially and spiritually. This epistemic system is collective in nature, it is poly-
dimensional, it is sustainable and in conformity with the successive stages of physical,
emotional and mental development of its recipients. It places emphasis on the
development of wholistic or well-rounded personalities to fit that society. This form of
education contrasts with the western form of education that is “designed to produce
workers sound in learning and skills, indispensable to modern bureaucratic and global
economy, and not character formation, which was the priority of priorities of African
traditional education” (Ayandele,1998:178).
Unlike the atomistic mind set of Europe and America, AIKS promotes a synthetic
intellectual culture which task is to discriminate in fevour of relevant needs as against
exaggerated materialism of the West. AIKS guides the African mind to produce but
only such goods and services their society and economy needs. As for the Western
education, Ayandele (ibid) speaks of
mentally enslaving exotic formal education yielding young men and
women eternally banished to the cultural and physical limbo: a public
health system that diagnoses diseases rather than deliver a cure ; an
economy which internally does not deliver bread to the greater part of
the present, but externally has already mortgaged the welfare of the
future generations; a morally void and spiritual bankrupt society in
which the brawn browbeats the brain, belting the latter with filthy lucre;
an uncontrollable social engineering process determined by the so –
called elite who, far from promoting societal harmony and cohesion,

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 had undermined traditional moral and social values, without an effective
replacement.
In Africa, and for Africans, knowledge must necessarily be combined with wisdom and
Metaphysics to engender growth and development. Tiv wisdom literature reflects this
development paradigm as Mzehemen i.e. progressive or positive upward upliftment of
the masses through the necessary conditions of bugh–she (wisdom), Mfe (knowledge)
and Mkav (understanding). The NEPAD may be a home grown initiative to surmount
the age – long obstacles to African development. However it has disconnected itself
from Africa by adhering to the unstated conditionalities of the Bretton Wood
institutions. Moreover, the NEPAD initiative has distanced itself from Africans by
implementing the neo – liberal economic agenda of the multinational corporations.
Claude Ake (1981:74) succinctly corroborates this view when he says,
western capital encourages the propaganda of the ideology of
development and gives some aid to ensure a barely credible
performance, as well as the persistence of existing exploitative ties
between African economies and Western economies.
Partnership between Africa and the Group of Eight (G8) industrialized countries is at
best founded on greed economics which itself does not change the social well-being or
real life of a people in a positive upward direction. What needs to be done is a
conscious effort at transforming the present global system into something more stable
and humane based on the civilizational values of the Africans. This epistemic approach
enables Africa to pull itself out of the cycle of poverty, instability, insecurity and
internecine strife.
Globalization must here be redefined as a genuine and mutually beneficial imperative
that creates a capacity or possibility for each nation, continent or region of the world to
seek its own self – determination and elevation without whatever conditionalities from
the without, and thereby have the power to make its invaluable contributions to the
development of its own people. Here understood, AIKS could be diverted to serve as
the cardinal source of global financial and material empowerment to improve the
quality of human life of the African population. Africa truly need to define, promote
and export some of its valuable socio – cultural beliefs, institutions and materials, i.e.
communalism, clothes, food, artifacts, traditional medical practices and democratic
culture, agricultural and engineering practices on their own terms to other parts of the
world. This when done, will create resources and improve human welfare and thus
qualify as sustainable human development which here means a balance of quantity with
quality.
Unlike an instrument of dichotomization and imperialism (visibly captured in the
NEPAD initiative) which promotes the culture, values, science, art and ideologies of
the dominant cultures or nations, AIKS engenders a development paradigm that entails
an ongoing commitment to advance from the less human conditions of disease, hatred,
crime, war, ethnicity, poverty, oppression, injustice, corruption, faithlessness, etc, to the
more human conditions of health, love, peaceful co – existence, equity, justice,
community fellow – feeling, faith and hope etc. This means a genuine comprehensive
mobilization of all available indigenous resources: natural – material, human – material
(physical) and human spiritual (mental) in the development of the human person.
Africa‟s development constructed in the NEPAD document of implemental emphasizes
the physical aspects to the exclusion of the soul, the spirit of Africa. It exaggerates
materialism and consumerism thus leaving ugliness and destruction in the land,

11
corruption and poverty, diseases and death, misrule and political violence everywhere
on the African continent.
Obviously, the question of good governance, democracy and human rights as well as
poverty alleviation and fight against corruption which form the major planks of the
NEPAD are largely unattended to in practice. African leaders seem to share a
membership of cryptic club in which there is little inclination to castigate but grater
tendency to empathize with members. While President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria
kills and maims in Odi in Rivers State, Zaki-Biam and Gbeji in Benue State, Nigeria,
his peers hail and acknowledge his “people oriented” programmes of good governance.
And while Nigeria under its president Obasanjo act as a peer reviewer of its neigbour‟s
governance policies, its presides over a dysfunctional, failed state. While Robert
Mugabe of Zimbabwe violently dismantles a state that was, until recently, functional,
his peers applaud. It goes to argue thus that, the NEPAD suffers credibility problem
because it is neither independent nor indigenous.
It suffices to argue here that AIKS is the tonic that the NEPAD surely need to engender
a civilization of sustainable development on the African continent. The NEPAD ideals
of good governance, constitutional democracy human rights, poverty alleviation and
anti corruption are most assured and sustained by the traditional African principles of
oneness, consensus, openness and humility as well as traditional African constitutional
thought and democratic tradition. Unlike the western tradition of democracy in which
council the NEPAD seats, African democratic political culture is grounded on the
philosophy of Tor veren yor na ga, that is, a king without the people is neither a symbol
or reality of kingship. In Africa, to be a king is to accede to that position because of the
consent of the people and to remain so for as long as the people have not withdrawn
their consent. As a continent in want of de-entrapment and liberation of the indigenous
conquered people of Africa, its leaders must rise to the challenge of responsible and
accountable leadership in the tradition of our ancestors for our continent today is too
dangerous for silence. Africa‟s best resources; human, material and spiritual, must not
be used to nourish other nations while it continues to dry up and wither by the day.
African jurisprudence represents a far superior way of linking law and society as it is
based on restorative justice. It incorporates a philosophy that caters adequately for the
reabsorbtion of the offender into the traditional African society after the punishment.
Tiv wisdom literature reflects this Philosophy thus, wan ka una nyia-u ambi sha nam
kpa u gberku u te kela ga. Meaning, One does not amputate one‟s leg because his/her
child defecates on it. Understood as such, the human person for whom development has
meaning desires being more in the same manner that he desires having more .
It is argued here that harnessing African knowledge systems for sustainable human
development represents a far more better option for Africa‟s overall development.
Ntuli‟s (2004:72) – clear-eyed analysis of the deficiencies uncovered in modern fishery
science and other disciplines calls for a wholesale adoption of AIKS as a paradigm for
Africa‟s renewal and de-entapment from the whims of foreign Transnational
Corporations and Financial Institutions. Traditional fisheries for example can contribute
contemporary knowledge to development and management planners as follows:-
i. Traditional Management Methods: Often ensure equitable access and
management measures that include limited entry, seasonal, spatial, gear, size or
species restriction; appropriation rights; and the concept of community based
sole ownership.

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ii. Conservation: includes measures such as the widespread use of closed seasons
and areas and harvestable size limitations.
iii. Stock Assessment: Local knowledge often provide a useful basis for
understanding local fish stocks and their population dynamics (especially about
the timing, location and behaviour of spawning aggregations of reef and lagoon
fishes).
iv. Environmental Impact Assessment: Local knowledge of spawning migrations
and aggregations sites indicate the likely impact of coaster engineering projects
v. Local Hydrography: Local knowledge is often rich in information on water
qualities and physical behaviour.
vi. Mapping: Local knowledge of living coaster resources also include intimate
spatial familiarity with the physical environment, including local currents, sea-
bed conditions and other such phenomena.
vii. Fishing Methods and Technologies: The indigenous knowledge expressed in
fishing methods and technologies affords an alternative to high technology
development approaches. Furthermore, the knowledge of fish behaviour on
which traditional methods of fishing are predicated can be adopted to modern
technology.
viii. Fish Systematics and Biology: Local fish names and the taxonomies they imply
as well as empirical knowledge behaviour often embodies in local nomenclature
can be of immense practical usage.
It goes to argue that these knowledges are based on long term empirical local
observation. They are practical and behaviour oriented, focusing on important resource
types and species. More importantly, these indigenous knowledge systems like other
indigenous knowledge types involve the balance of short term thinking and immediate
gratifications with long term thinking for future generations. It shifts the balance
towards improving the quality of human life on earth. African knowledge systems
acknowledge a symbiotic relationship between humanity and other members of the
biotic community; the animals, land and plants. This to us is what counts as sustainable
development. Development does not ensue in the neo-liberal culture of consumerism,
pollution and resource depletion as popularized by the internationalization of economic
systems and globalization of cultures. The logic of contemporaneous inclusion and
exclusion paraded in the bounded reasoning of globalization has created dangerous
boundaries rather than demolish existing ones. It has few takers but marginalized and
pauperised many thus conducting humanity outward away from its essence on earth.
This may have instigated the informed conclusion of an author;
“There is no original state to return to, it has moved. The most
pragmatic way is to search for a third space of articulation. With new
configurations and new identities based on the old. – Bica (1998)
Africa, it must be said is in urgent want of new configurations and new identities
though, as the quip above asserts, such new configuration and new identities must be
based on the old. The NEPAD approach in addressing both political and governance
problems i.e. poverty alleviation, corruption security and environmental issues among
others does not promise any desirable positive achievement. Attempted solutions at
Africa‟s chronic developmental problems cannot be made from the without. That
Africa suffers from numerous problems i.e. moral bankruptcy, economic slavery,

13
political parochialism and religious bigotry is no longer news. What is news is that,
solutions to Africa‟s problems cannot be crafted by foreign benevolent guardians in the
name of partners. Africa‟s development is necessarily connected to the idea of African
renaissance, to reclaim its identity, to struggle and strive to define, engage and also
respond to social challenges that are relevant to the African peoples in body and soul.
The inspiring voice of Chinweizu most cryptically captures this idea; that African
societies be reorganized on eco-viable ethical principles, abandoning the modern
European mania for organizing society on principles that serve avarice. In his words:
We must reconstruct our societies, not for the relentless pursuit of
profit beyond even the dream of avarice, but rather for the pursuit of
contentment and social peace and happiness to create new African
societies whose overriding value is eco-moral uprightness, not the
socially and economically destructive accumulation of private wealth
(Chinweizu, 1988:7).
What this entails is that the evolution of a development paradigm that fails to take into
major consideration the religio-cultural milieu of the Africans is bound to be
ineffectual. This itself calls for the rebirth of an African development State which is
also by definition democratic and whose economic foundations are built on policy
heterodoxy and domestic political consensus Unarguably, this broad political and
policy framework has the capacity to assure sustained development on the continent. It
also has the greater possibility of ensuring that partnership, (if any), between Africa and
the rest of the world takes as its starting and end points the aspirations of the citizenry
as opposed to an uncritical, even opportunistic pandering to an external donor
community that is as cynical as it is self-serving.
Africa has the capacity for self-sustainability. It is one of the main regions which make
up about 65% of the earth land area the world resources; it has a proven natural gas
reserve of 8,222 billion standard cubic metres as at the end of 1989; a figure well ahead
of North America, Latin America and Western Europe with 7,578;7184;5,459 billion
standard cubic metres respectively (Maciois, 1991) There exist other recourses such as
gold, silver, bauxite, iron-ore, uranium, Tin, Silica and Copper among others. Added to
the above, Africa is blessed with one of the most fertile soils, rich forest resources, a
fair balanced distribution of rainfall all years round and a near complete absence of
natural disasters like earthquake and tornadoes to mention a few. Africa need not
partner with foreigners to extricate itself. It need only reclaim itself and re-engineer its
abundant resources to de-entrap itself from the double-faced globalized world for
sustainable development.
6. Conclusion
The NEPAD and its step-child APRM offer themselves as the alternative to Africa‟s
underdevelopment. However, the lack of clarity and vagueness by the NEPAD and the
APRM about the issue of sanction makes it a toothless bull dog that can only bark but
cannot bite, and potentially rendered in effective (Akokpari,2004:468) Implementation
of the NEPAD agenda means the continued underdevelopment and dependence of
African continent, which, according to Olukoshi (2004:32), no amount of foreign
charity, however altruistic, can redress. The choice words of President Benjamin
Mkapa of Tanzania are revealing here. He warns that, “the way things are going, we in
Africa will soon have no linage beyond geography, no identity besides colour and no
decency except flags… worse, we will end up competing to do the master‟s urging in
the neighbourhood” (Ibid).

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Between the two alternatives, the choice is ours though, one is inclined argue
categorically that, Africa is the sphere of interest of the Africans themselves. They must
therefore act from within the African humanistic heritage, to cause development to
ensue from within Africa. „We must end our allegiance to white gods, white prophets,
white religions and white ideologies,‟ says Chinweizu, „for these are psychological
instruments of white supremacy; and we must return to the black gods, black prophets,
black religions and black ideologies of our African ancestors‟(1998:3). This is a call for
a functional attitude of the collective and individual knowledge and spirit of the people
in retrospective dialogue with the past; a decision to awaken our primal source, to find
our way back to ourselves and to help ourselves by inner action to fight for our inner
independence and to free ourselves from economic, political and cultural exploitation
by foreign capitalist powers and institutions. It is a rejection of the neo-liberal
philosophy of allowing the strong (Africa‟s partners, foreign donors) to do what they
want and can, while the weak (Africa) suffers what they must. It is a rejection of
economic fundamentalism which commandment is that money shall be an end in itself.
It is a rejection of the dogma of globalization which holds that the only way our for
humanity is to obey the deadly commandment of money which has become the “god”
towards which every thing must move and before whom everyone must submit. The
defining principle of African philosophy calls to question an African human centred
sustainable development namely, nyalegh ki been kpa or been ga. Meaning, wealth;
material prosperity diminishes in value though, the human person does not. It is a
statement of the fact that sustainable development is oiled by the philosophy of
humanism which itself acknowledges the centrality of man though points to a
consciousness of the limits in which he must live in order not to conduct himself and
his environment out of existence.
The NEPAD may claim African ownership and control. It may strive in collaboration
with benevolent partners from the within and without to develop the capacity to sustain
growth and development and alleviate poverty in Africa. It may further promise to halt
marginalization of Africa in the globalization process, and to enable the continent to
catch up with the rest of the world though, its grounding on the philosophies of
economic fundamentalism and the cherished dogma of the Bretton wood institutions
disqualifies it as a capacity building African initiative and policy framework that can
assure sustained development on the continent. The NEPAD like previous African
political and economic initiatives has not and cannot promote social justice, equality
between African nations and grater democratic control for the bulk of the African
people. Indeed, to argue that African leaders (or rather rulers) have, through the
NEPAD, acted in the promotion of the above ambitious goals would be to contradict
the true essential meaning of governance, which true definition is “the control of an
activity by some means such that a range of desired out comes is attained (Hirst and
Thompson, 1996:184).
Sustainable human development on the continent as envisaged in the NEPAD
document of implementation can be forged though, via a new cultural synthesis of ideas
and values and a conscious release of the inner energies of the African peoples as
expressed in their indigenous knowledge systems. The global spirit that informs the
NEPAD agenda only helps to advance the economic and political interest of foreign
benefactors and a few local collaborators to the exclusion and pauperization of the mass
African population. But as Hirst and Thompson (1996:182) warns, “A world of wealth
and poverty with appalling and widening differences in living standards between the
richest and the poorest nations, is unlikely to be secure or stable”. African nations must

15
therefore choose wisely to advance its growth and development from the aspirations of
its people, to promote the good of its people, every person and the whole person. This
paradigm of development restores meaning and wholeness not just in human
community but in the entire Cosmos. It is a philosophy of human integration which
priorities ethics over technology, persons over things and the superiority of spirit over
matter.

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African Peer Review Mechanism Base Document 2001

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* Alloy S. Ihuah teaches Philosophy at Benue State University, Makurdi. He is on the

Editorial Board of SWEM Journal of Religion and Philosophy. He
specializes in Applied Philosophy of Science.

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