ABSTRACT
The development experiences of most Third World countries in the last three decades or so have been unimpressive if not disastrous and tragic at times. The burden of underdevelopment, in Ali Mazrui’s terms, is probably most felt and experienced in today’s Black Africa (Mazrui 1992). The human misery of some of this continent’s countries like Somalia, Ethiopia and Sudan has become very familiar, especially through television news reports, to the citizens of the whole world. Drought, internal conflicts and the AIDS epidemic have certainly contributed to the deteriorated state of other African countries. But those factors are hardly adequate to account for that ugly state of affairs that has prevailed in several African countries in the last few years. Their grim situation could have surely been otherwise, in spite of the odds of internal conflicts, AIDS and droughts, had they scored average or better on the development achievement scale. In other words, those natural, political and health negative forces have come to unveil that development and nation-building have been far from being a success story in those societies. None the less, the pessimist image of development in Somalia, Ethiopia and Sudan constitutes obviously the extreme negative case of failure in development projects in today’s Third World.
