Don’t Cry for Me Africa - Hutchins Centerdubois.fas.harvard.edu/sites/all/files/Pages from 08ohiohenuan.pdfDon’t Cry for Me Africa preamble of a memo to the African Prince ...

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Don’t Cry for Me Africa

preamble of a memo to the African Prince

John F. E. Ohiorhenuan

The AfricAn enTered the new millennium rather apologetically, even shamefacedly. In this era of globalization, with everyone in everyone’s busi-ness via CNN, BBC, and Al Jazeera, everyone is in Africa’s business, and it is the business of hunger and famine. It is the business of wars: wars of greed, wars of grievance, wars of religion, wars of ethnicity. Africa is the home of corruption, the continent of tin-pot dictators, the territory of ego-maniacal despots, the land of eternal famine. Everyone has seen the net-works’ African child: starving, belly swollen by kwashiorkor, bulging eyes, and open mouth awash with flies. And Africans, seeing themselves as the world sees them, entered the new millennium in shame, guilt, and defen-siveness. Shame that, on average, most Africans are worse off today than they or their parents were forty years earlier; guilt that we are an embar-rassment in the comity of nations, and a defensiveness that insists with passion but no conviction that we are like everyone, everywhere.

Since the era of its Independence, the whole world seems to have been concerned about Africa, eager to help the unfortunate Dark Continent. In the United Nations, Africa has always been of special concern. When President John F. Kennedy proposed to the UN General Assembly in September 1961 that the sixties be designated the “Development Decade,” Africa was as much on his mind as was the Cold War. The General Assembly called for a flow of international development assistance of about 1 percent of the combined national incomes of the economically advanced countries. When the decade ended in 1970, it was clear that its major objec-tives of an average growth rate of 5 percent had not been attained. Noting that this was partly due to the absence of an international development strategy, the twenty-fifth session of the General Assembly (in 1970) adopted a resolution outlining such a strategy. That resolution exhorted each eco-nomically advanced country to progressively increase its Official Development Assistance (ODA) to developing countries and to “exert its best efforts to reach a minimum net amount of 0.7 percent of its gross national product at market prices by the middle of the decade.” That was the origin of the magic number that has become the Holy Grail of aid advocacy.

Ohiorhenuan • Don’t Cry for Me Africa 141

Since then, Africa has become the recurring decimal in the business of the United Nations. The General Assembly agenda was heavily dominated with the question of independence for colonies and apartheid in South Africa. Once a large number of African countries joined the UN in the 1960s, mobilizing resources for economic development became a major component of the “UN program for independence and development.” By the 1980s, Africa had become a “Special Case.” In the face of such good will, Africa got into the habit of explaining itself and apologiz-ing for its miserable existence, both to show appreciation and as a way to earn this help. The dynamics of Africa’s engagement with the world became one in which Africa’s leaders—politicians, civil servants, and intelligentsia—responded to, sometimes even anticipating, the signals, messages, and initiatives from the North. Acceptance of deficiency replaced critical self-understanding. The long-term future of the continent became no more than a series of short-term frameworks determined by the logic of the interna-tional political economy. The few leaders who questioned the paradigm were vilified as spoilers or quietly consigned to the margins.

Following a series of discussions within the Organization of African Unity (OAU) and under the auspices of the UN Economic Commission for Africa, the Lagos Plan of Action (LPA) was adopted in 1980. The LPA aimed to anchor the future development of the continent on two pillars: self-reliance (and collective self-reliance) and self-sustaining development. That document, taking its reference point from the teratological legacy of colonialism, blamed the continent’s poor economic performance on exter-nal forces. Despite that combative posture, African leaders seem to have expected that the international community would engage with the continent on that basis. The expectation was not realized.

Rather, the response to Africa’s deteriorating economies was the World Bank’s 1981 report, “Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Agenda for Action.” The report had been produced in response to the request by African Executive Directors at the World Bank that the Bank specifically consider what it could do for Africa. That report, popularly called the “Berg Report,” after its main author, reviewed African economic development since the 1960s and concluded that the root of poor perfor-mance lay in critical domestic policy inadequacies. These included trade and exchange rate policies that overprotected industry, public sector growth that was not aware of budget constraints and fiscal policies that were con-sistently biased against agriculture. Accordingly, it proposed a policy matrix that was Africa’s version of the “Washington consensus.” Thus was born the structural adjustment program that was soon to become the vehicle for thinking about and financing African development.

The long-term future of the

continent became no more

than a series of short-term

frameworks determined by

the logic of the international

political economy.

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Meanwhile, the United Nations General Assembly, noting the “critical economic situation in Africa,” resolved to convene a special session on the matter. In the midst of the tension between the LPA and the Berg Report, the OAU prepared a document, “Africa’s Submission to the Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly on Africa’s economic and Social Crisis,” in response. Through that process, the self-determination essence of the LPA was abandoned in favor of the neo-liberalism of the Berg Report. Claude Ake in his inimitable eloquence, observed that “Africa’s Submission” was precisely that, a submission born of the utilitarian calculation that the West would be magnanimous to a humiliated African leadership ready and willing to play the game the Western way. The outcome of the Special session was the UN Programme of Action for African Economic Recovery and Development 1986–1991 (UN-PAAERD). It was the first UN program for a specific region of the world. It was billed as the UN’s response to the program that had been adopted by the OAU in 1985, “Africa’s Priority Program for Economic Recovery (APPER).” But that program itself was little more than an imple-mentation plan for Africa’s special session submission.

In 1991, the final review on the implementation of UN-PAAERD indicated that its results had fallen far short of expectations. Two years later, the United Nations New Agenda for the Development of Africa (UN-NADAF) was launched. The New Agenda was billed as a compact involving the African countries, the international community, and the UN system. A distinguishing feature was the setting of specific goals that the partners implicitly committed themselves to meeting. The overall objective was an average annual real growth rate of at least 6 percent, the attainment of which would require a minimum net ODA of $30 billion in 1992, growing at an average of 4 percent per year thereafter. African governments undertook to assume primary responsibility for the continent’s development, promoting peace and social stability, democracy, gender equality, and inclusiveness.

The Last King of Scotland (2006), directed by Kevin

Macdonald


This was UN–speak for accepting the basic premises of the Berg report. Not surprisingly, therefore, they also committed to implementing economic reforms for sustainable growth and development, a.k.a. “structural adjust-ment.” In return, developed countries committed to reducing Africa’s debt, providing the necessary aid and working toward a target 0.7 percent of their respective GNP, improving market access for African products, and sup-porting African efforts toward economic diversification and integration. For its part, the UN system committed to aligning its programs with these objectives and mobilizing additional resources to Africa’s development.

• • •

in 1996, SecreTAry General Boutros Boutros Gali launched the UN Special Initiative for Africa (UNSIA) as his contribution to the UN’s continuing bid to mobilize political and financial support for African development. It also sought the orientation of the work of the entire UN in a coordinated fashion in support of Africa’s development priorities. The Initiative estimated that $25 billion would be required over ten years to meet the continent’s chal-lenges. There was some uncertainty about the relationship between UNSIA and UN-NADAF, with sceptics seeing the initiative as no more than a re-election ploy by the Secretary General. In the end, the initiative was repack-aged and presented, in classic UN fashion, some would say, as the operational arm of UN-NADAF.

The Last King of Scotland (2006), directed by Kevin Macdonald

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At the UN Summit of September 2000, the Millennium Declaration was adopted, giving additional intensity to the efforts to help Africa. Indeed, Section VII of the document on the “Special Needs of Africa” pledged

to support the consolidation of democracy in Africa and assist Africans in their struggle for lasting peace, poverty eradication and sustainable development, thereby bringing Africa into the mainstream of the world economy.

It resolved, accordingly, to support the political and institutional structures of emerging democracies in Africa, to encourage internal mechanisms for preventing conflict and promoting political stability, and to make special efforts toward debt cancellation, improved market access, increased Official Development Assistance and Foreign Direct Investment, as well as technol-ogy transfer.

Meanwhile, African Heads of States launched the “New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD)” in 2001. In a sense, NEPAD is the African response to being in the global spotlight. It is at once an assertion of owner-ship and an acceptance of the global consensus. African leaders pledged to place the continent on a path of sustainable development, anchored on the determination of Africans to extricate themselves from underdevelop-ment and global marginalization. Insisting that a major reason for the failure of past continent-wide efforts is “questionable ownership,” NEPAD was self-consciously centered on “African ownership and management.” Through NEPAD, African leaders argued, they were presenting an “agenda set by African peoples through their own initiatives and of their own volition to shape their own destiny.”


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In June 2002, the United Nations “adopted” NEPAD, declaring that it should, henceforth, be the framework for international support to African development. The General Assembly unanimously adopted the UN Declaration on NEPAD, welcoming it as an African Union–led, –owned and –managed initiative, and calling it a serious commitment to address the aspira-tions of the continent. The Declaration wel-comed the commitment of African countries to take effective and concrete measures through the establishment of various insti-tutional mechanisms and the development of strategies for the implementation of NEPAD. That commitment would reflect the recognition that the primary responsibility for the implementation of NEPAD rested with the African governments and peoples. By the same terms, it affirmed that inter-national support for the implementation of NEPAD was essential, and urged the UN system and the international community, in particular donor coun-tries, to assist with the implementation of NEPAD.

Financing for Development was the theme of a UN–sponsored World Conference held in Monterrey in 2002. The Monterrey conference was par-ticularly significant because heads of states and governments emerged with a consensus laying out the foundations for a compact between the rich and the poor. The consensus called on developing countries to adopt sound economic and social policies that will help mobilize resources from all sources, and exhorted developed countries to support those efforts through an open trading system, private capital flows, and additional development assistance. Once again, the consensus urged “developed countries that have not done so to make concrete efforts towards the target of 0.7 percent of gross national prod-uct as ODA to developing countries.” Once again, the conference document had a section on “Meeting the Special Needs of Africa”:

We welcome the substantial progress made by the African countries in fulfilling their commitments and emphasize the need to carry forward the implementation of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development to promote sustainable growth and development and deepen democracy, human rights, good governance and sound economic management and gender equality and encourage African countries, with the participation of civil society and the private sector, to continue their efforts in this regard by developing and strengthening institutions for governance and the development of the region, and also

African leaders pledged

to place the continent

on a path of sustainable

development, anchored on

the determination of Africans

to extricate themselves

from underdevelopment

and global marginalization.

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welcome the recent decisions taken by Africa’s partners, including the Group of Eight and the European Union, in support of Africa’s development efforts, including commitments that will lead to an increase in official development assistance to Africa of 25 billion dollars per year by 2010. We reaffirm our commitment to address the special needs of Africa, which is the only continent not on track to meet any of the goals of the Millennium Declaration by 2015, to enable it to enter the mainstream of the world economy.

The year 2005 was an extraordinary one for Africa in terms of global concern. The United Kingdom labeled it the “year for Africa” and used its presidency of both the EU and the G8 to bring the challenges of African development to the discussion table. The Commission for Africa, estab-lished in 2004 by Tony Blair, published its report, “Our Common Interest,” in March 2005. Some wondered why that Commission was necessary, given the undertaking of both the UN and the G8 to work with and support the implementation of NEPAD. The report outlined an ambitious package to achieve the Commission’s goal of a “strong and prosperous Africa.” In his March 2005 report titled “In Larger Freedom,” Secretary General Kofi Anan urged developed countries to establish timetables to achieve the 0.7 percent target by no later than 2015. In response to these calls for action, G8 governments, meeting at Gleneagles in July 2005, committed to dou-bling aid to Africa by 2010.

European Union Development Ministers, meeting in Brussels in May 2005, committed to attaining the 0.7 percent target by 2015, aiming for 0.56 percent by 2010 (again, with half of those funds going to Africa). The UN World Summit in New York in September 2005 brought it all together in its Outcome Document, which included a section on “Financing for Development.” That gathering of world leaders again placed particular emphasis on the challenge of development in Africa, and dedicated a specific section of its Outcome


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Document to “Meeting the Special Needs of Africa.” The World Bank, in September 2005, presented an African Action Plan that addressed the Gleneagles call for international coordination of increased assistance to Africa to meet the Millennium Development Goals. The most recent meeting on implementing the Monterey Consensus was held in Qatar in November and December 2008. The declaration of that meeting reaffirmed a commitment to provide and strengthen support to the special needs of Africa. It stressed that eradicating poverty, particularly in Africa, is the greatest global challenge facing the world today and (again) underlined the importance of bringing Africa into the mainstream of the global economy.

• • •

The hiSTory of African development appears to have been one of Africa continuously negotiating its destiny and forming compacts to that end with the international community. This is the funda-mental contradiction of Africa’s “specialness.” To be clear, we are not insisting that an externally driven agenda is, by its nature, antagonistic to African development. We merely state that it is Africans and their picture of African interests that should be driving the agenda. The story of devel-opment financing is retold in the areas of international trade and economic policy generally. It is the same story of continuing African subservience within the international political economy.

In The Truman Show, a 1998 Oscar-nominated movie, Truman Burbank, an insurance adjuster, discovers, after a few decades of existence, that his whole life has been a reality TV show. Truman has lived in a giant TV studio since he was born. Indeed, his very birth was as much a TV event as it was a medical one. Since then, every movement of his life has been captured on film and broadcast. Everyone Truman spoke to, worked with, or made friends with was an actor. Everyone but him was (knowingly) an actor. In one of the most moving scenes, Truman finally discovers that he is merely a participant in a TV reality show and tries to escape on a small yacht. The vessel is caught in a terrible sea storm, and it appears as if Truman is going to drown. Indeed, we see him keeling over apparently unconscious, but he has tied himself to the stern. The audience applauds when he comes to and stands up. And then he discovers that even his valiant attempt to escape was entirely a studio event. The director had merely turned up the special effects. The director explains to Truman that “out there” there were no more truths than in the show, but at least in the show the director is able to protect him.

Viewing the continent through a prism of deficiency and delinquency, Africa experts invariably end up in a “they-won’t-make-it-without-us”

Africans and their picture

of African interests should

be driving the agenda.

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scenario about the continent, at least the part south of the Sahara. French President Nicolas Sarkozy shared his insights in Dakar in 2007:

The tragedy of Africa is that the African has not fully entered into history. The African peasant, who for thousands of years has lived according to the seasons, whose life ideal was to be in harmony with nature, only knew the eternal renewal of time, rhythmed by the endless repetition of the same gestures and the same words. In this imaginary world, where everything starts over and over again, there is no place for human adventure or for the idea of progress. In this universe, where nature commands all, man escapes from the anguish of history that torments modern man, but he rests immobile in the center of a static order where everything seems to have been written beforehand. This traditional African never launched himself toward the future. The idea never came to him to get out of this repetition and to invent his own destiny.

It is not always as explicit as this, but Africa’s “specialness” reflects a deeply ingrained paternalism. It is reflected even in the work of many Africa experts.

Consider, for instance, the recent work of three of Africa’s best friends. Jeffrey Sachs, in The End of Poverty (2005), calls for a quantum jump in aid for the very poor, mostly African, countries because they are stuck in a “poverty trap” from which they cannot extricate themselves without outside help. For this “big push,” Sachs proposes a comprehensive plan to spend about $200 billion annually on interventions in education, malaria preven-tion, nutrition, sanitation, and rural infrastructure. There is an obvious problem of feasibility with such large numbers, given the experience with previous calls for increased development assistance. There is also the ques-


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tion of whether the capacity exists to spend such sums in the short term, or whether it will require armies of expatriate personnel to run the pro-grams. The real problem, however, is not the lack of realism, but the image of Africa implicit in the contention that massive external handouts would somehow translate into self-sustaining development.

William Easterly disagrees, in his The White Man’s Burden (2006), with the idea of both a poverty trap and a big push. According to him, “we have already seen this movie, and it doesn’t have a happy ending.” Reviewing Sachs’s book for the Washington Post, Easterly had invoked Karl Popper’s distinction between social utopian engineering and democratic reform, describing Sachs as the intellectual leader of the utopians. In his own book, he clearly favors the democratic reformers (“searchers”). A market funda-mentalism permeates the whole book, in his disdain for planners and glo-rification of searchers, and in his extensive documentation of state failure and total omission of examples of market failure. While Sachs may be looking at Africa through rose-tinted glasses, Easterly is viewing the conti-nent through very dark glasses. At bottom, however, Easterly, like Sachs, still gives aid exceptional significance. The difference is that Easterly would provide it in a different way to ensure greater effectiveness.

In The Bottom Billion (2007), Paul Collier argues that the really poor countries (the bottom billion countries, mostly African) suffer from more than a poverty trap. They are caught in a series of mutually reinforcing traps: armed conflict, dependence on natural-resource extraction, poor governance, and geographic isolation. He would like to see a comprehen-sive response framework for the West to help Africa. For him, aid is part of a larger solution that should include several “charters” empowering the West to enforce compliance with certain norms and standards, additional assistance in the area of trade policy to help African countries compete with Asia, and selective military intervention to help development stay on track.


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Collier proposes five charters. The first one, on natural resource revenues, will provide certification of origin as well as enforcement of transparency in payments and in government expenditure. A charter for democracy will empower the international community to promote checks and balances. A charter for budget transparency will promote international and national scru-tiny of budget processes. A charter for post-conflict situations will commit donors and the international security regime to supporting the country for at least a decade. In return, the country undertakes to reduce its military budget, include opponents in government, and establish truth commissions. Finally, an investment charter will commit the poor country government to an agreed-upon set of principles on the treatment of international invest-ment. Collier’s latest book, Wars, Guns, and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places (2009), pushes further for an international standard of democracy that allows the West to intervene militarily if elected leaders are threatened by a coup. Never mind that the African Union has already adopted a policy of ostracism in such situations.

Critics have pointed out that Collier’s recommendations are really no more than an aggressive neoliberalism plus an international policy enforcement police. Sachs and Easterly also adhere to the same neoliberal paradigm, although not quite as aggressively as does Collier. The audience is consciously Western policy makers and their constituencies. The tone is as if there were no Africans in the room. It is the tone of speaking about a slow child in his presence, as if he were not present. The story is about what is best for Africa and what the West should do for Africa. They are all variations on a theme that has played through the various UN, Breton Woods, and G8 meetings over the past fifty years. The underlying picture of Africa, from Sarkozy to Collier, is one of a people totally resigned to fate and a corrupt and absolutist leadership that is impervious to its people’s misery.

The real tragedy, from an African viewpoint, however, is that this view on Africa, backed by such intellectual and political firepower, crowds out

other perspectives on Africa’s destiny. Africa is subject to what has been called a “global intel-lectual hegemony.” To use a neoliberal turn of phrase, Africa is caught in a paradigm trap, a position of hegemonic subservience. We use the term hegemony in the Gramscian sense of the leadership of a group that is maintained not so much through coercion, but via a culture that

projects the values and symbols of the leading group as universal, as mere “common sense.” The identification with these “universal values” by a significant section of the African leadership helps to maintain the status quo. In the context of contemporary international political economy, the notion of “globalization” serves as the flagship vehicle of this hegemony. A small group of players with global reach, power, and ambition dominates

The underlying picture of

Africa is one of a people

totally resigned to fate and

a corrupt and absolutist

leadership that is impervious

to its people’s misery.


the narrative of globalization, including its descriptive and evaluative con-tent. Their perceptions, interests, and agenda provide the overarching intel-lectual framework or paradigm of globalization. A leading section of the African leadership has bought into this paradigm.

For the rest, it deters leaders from considering more fundamental struc-tural impediments to African development, and from pursuing a less ahis-torical approach to African development. Critics occupy various positions along a spectrum of critical opposition to this hegemony, from the mildly critical to the radically opposed. Consider NEPAD, for instance. The African nationalist credentials of its original champions are impeccable. And yet the document they championed was unveiled first at a G8 summit, before it was launched on the continent. The bulk of its annual estimated $64 billon investment requirement was expected to come from outside the continent. Its basic premise was a compact between Africa, on the one hand, and the G8 and the international financial institutions, on the other. The idea was that Africa would undertake to promote democracy, protect human rights, strengthen conflict prevention and management mechanisms, and pursue orthodox macroeconomic policy. In return, the international development community will finance African development. This seems remarkably like the recurrent theme of all those efforts since the 1960s. Not surprisingly, some critics felt that NEPAD’s assertion of African ownership rang a little hollow. Over the last eight years, of course, the process of implementing NEPAD has provided its own clarification. African owner-ship is gradually asserting itself, for instance, in the implementation of the Peer Review Mechanism.

African intellectual leadership is drawn away from examining how the ordinary African, her community, and her social networks are coping with the business of life, and how they are resisting and pushing for account-ability from the state. It shifts focus away from the millions of ordinary people who go about their daily life like people all over the world: who care about politics, but will not necessarily die for it; who do not depend in any way on the generosity of aid agencies, and who resist oppression in their various ways. In short, the narrative dynamic of African development has become one of advocacy rather than analysis.


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• • •

By engAging wiTh the narrative of African “specialness,” African leaders abrogate the fundamental leadership responsibility for Africa finding its own way. Authentic African development can take place only on the basis of an indigenous African development agenda, not on the basis of para-digms and strategies suggested, recommended, demanded, or imposed by its development partners. We must fundamentally rediscover the notion of self-determination as the key to understanding the dynamics of Africa over the last fifty years and recognize that real ownership is the imperative condition for Africa’s authentic development. Even this notion, however, is being increasingly compromised as Africa’s partners assume the lead in

promoting it. Ultimately, therefore, the minimal condition for self-determination requires that prognosis and specific diagnosis of development challenges and the corresponding policy inter-ventions be generated by local actors on the basis of local realities. These ideas must be informed, of course, by history and comparative experience. But they cannot be the simplistic

adoption of so-called universal norms, such as “democratic governance” or “free markets.” In our view, the most consequential error that African leaders have made, and continue to make, in their management of external relations and international cooperation is the failure to insist on that condition.

The current global crisis brings home with a vengeance Africa’s intoler-able vulnerability within the international political economy and the paucity of new ideas on overcoming underdevelopment in Africa. Growth rates of around 7 percent over the last five years are expected to decline to around 3 percent this year. Most African countries are experiencing growing deficits on their budgets and their current accounts. Shortfalls in export revenues are expected to reach about $251 billion in 2009, and $277 billion in 2010 for the continent as a whole, with oil exporters suffering the largest losses. Growth rates are projected to decline significantly, and capital inflows, including worker remittances and tourism receipts, are also declining. Foreign reserves have dwindled dramatically, with countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) down to a few weeks of import cover. International banks are refusing to issue lines of credit, or even fail-ing to confirm pre-committed ones. Many critical projects have been delayed, such as a $1.5 billion mining investment that would have created thousands of jobs in Liberia. In the first quarter of 2009, 6,000 mining jobs were lost in South Africa and almost a quarter of a million in the DRC because of mining sector closures.

real ownership is the

imperative condition

for Africa’s authentic

development.

leadership that is impervious

to its people’s misery.


In their submission to the April 2009 G20 Summit, African leaders described the measures they are taking to minimize the impacts of the crisis, such as providing fiscal stimulus packages, revising budget expendi-tures to target key sectors, and strengthening banking regulation. Fundamentally, however, they argued that Africa simply did not have the ability to preserve the foundations of growth over the next few years. They estimated that the continent would require an additional $100 billion over the next two years just to maintain pre-crisis levels of growth. To get the 7 percent growth rate estimated as necessary to achieve the MDGs, Africa would need about $20 billion over the next two years. Their headline mes-sage to the G20 leaders was a plea to deliver on their previous commitments to increase aid to Africa and to unlock “new and additional resources.” The response of African leaders to the crisis has been eminently sensible. But it is unlikely to go to the structural roots of Africa’s crisis. The global financial crisis is on top of the underlying crisis of development, which could not be properly apprehended within the prevailing paradigm.

A period of crisis ought to encourage creative, even radical, thinking. It ought to give new impetus to ensuring policy effectiveness. For instance, all African leaders are committed to the elimination of corruption. The current crisis is an excellent occasion to intensify efforts to eliminate waste and inefficiencies, and install anticorruption systems and mechanisms that may have been thwarted in the past by powerful interests.

The crisis ought to give new life to old ideas that have been put off as too difficult. An obvious one that cries for attention in the era of globaliza-tion is the idea of African economic integration. For the first generation of African nationalists, African unity was a logical extension of the anticolo-nial struggle, even if the pursuit of it was beset by so many contradictions. Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah was only the most dogged and insistent pan-


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Africanist, but many of the leaders of that period favored the idea for one reason or another. Julius Nyerere of Tanzania also believed that a united Africa would be incomparably stronger internationally than it is with its multiplicity of very small states. The problem is, of course, recognized by contemporary African leadership. But progress toward an African union has been hindered by unwillingness among African states to surrender some of their sovereignty. The crisis ought to be a wake-up call to accelerate progress in that direction. The historical realities that underlie contempo-rary international economic relations, the obvious contradiction between the one-global-village ideology and the heightened efforts to curtail South-North migration, have rendered the issue and objective of African self-determination more salient and more urgent.

The African leader needs to engage the African people in the search for a long-term solution. To break out of the paradigm trap requires the blooming of a million flowers. The starting point is recognition that, in today’s world, the legitimacy of the leader derives not from divine authority, nor from tradition, nor from the mere fact of having been elected. Legitimacy derives from the fulfillment of a social contract, from the delivery of what citizens want. Unlike Machiavelli’s Prince, it cannot be assumed that the African Prince/Princess knows what his/her people want. Political leaders are expected to engage in dialogue and consultations with a large number of actors in order to define the common good. The African Princess must


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engage her people in dialogue on the critical issues of Africa’s future. Some obvious issues for such dialogue would include: The role of leadership—what is the moral responsibility of the African leader? How, and by what agency, do we free Africa from the paradigm trap? How do we negotiate self-determination in an interdependent world? How do we reconcile the oppos-ing tensions of national sovereignty and African integration? What is the optimal relation between population growth and human wellbeing in Africa? What are Africa’s best options on the climate change problem? What are the economic, social, political, and developmental costs of pov-erty, excessive inequality and widespread social deprivation?

The African entered the new millennium in shame, guilt, and defensive-ness. There is no need for guilt, shame, or defensiveness. The problem is not in us—that we are Africans—but in our leadership, in our intellectual leaders who have forgotten that independent thought is the foundation of develop-ment, in our political leaders who fail to recognize that the people are the foundation of African development. The solution is in the African Prince who embraces the sacrifice that goes with the privilege of leadership.


Don’t Cry for Me Africa - Hutchins Centerdubois.fas.harvard.edu/sites/all/files/Pages from 08ohiohenuan.pdfDon’t Cry for Me Africa preamble of a memo to the African Prince ...

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