ABSTRACT
In 1980, the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) adopted the Lagos Plan of Action (LPA) and subsequently made the Final Act of Lagos the cornerstone of Africa’s development strategy (ECA [UN Economic Commission for Africa], 1992a, 1996a; OAU, 1981; UN, 1986, 1991). The Plan’s advocacy of self-reliance and self-sustainability stresses the importance of regional cooperation and integration of national and sectoral plans to turn Africa’s development aspirations into actuality, i.e. ‘Africa, be your brother’s keeper’. The political and economic reasons for this idea are obvious (Dieke, 1995) and include the belief that dependence on external resources alone cannot develop Africa in any significant way; and the need to reverse the economic decline which has afflicted the region since the 1970s-the so-called ‘lost decade’—in order to strengthen the capacity of the economies to participate effectively in the evolving global linkages and interdependence. Further, the lessons of the ‘scramble for Africa’ are well known (Afigbo et al., 1992), not least being the political balkanisation of the continent into arbitrary nation-states. Taken together, the imperatives present Africa with immense challenges: small internal markets, fragile borders, vulnerability to external shocks, narrow economic resource bases, etc. In this sense, regionalism has been perceived as the key to solving these problems and difficulties.
