ABSTRACT
This chapter presents Africa’s pervasive under-development and weakened prospects within their external and internal contexts. It provides a set of imperatives that African governments and peoples must address in order to reposition the continent positively in the twenty-first century. Even within the New World Order, African people and their governments have little leeway to shape and articulate their programs to reorganize their societies and resuscitate moribund economies. The chapter argues that Africa’s weak political economies operate in a hostile and anarchic international environment with self-help political and economic systems. It discusses the close relationship and interactive nature of the causal factors. One of the raging debates about contemporary African politics and development is centered on the twin issues of democracy and economic reforms. The indigenous civil servants of the Indian colonial state were allowed to develop ‘an indisputable professionalism, sophistication, and proficiency that have no real counterpart in colonial Africa’.
