ABSTRACT

It is a sad fact that many African countries were, in relative terms, economically worse off at the beginning of the twenty-first century than they had been at independence in the 1960s. A lamentable record of poor governance, manifested in political instability, endemic corruption and civil strife, together with environmental catastrophes, such as drought, has had a disastrous effect on economic and social progress. For the majority of ordinary Africans, ‘development’, in the shape of a recognizable improvement in quality of life, has simply not occurred. In fact, some writers have described the 1980s in particular as the ‘lost decade’ as far as development in Africa is concerned (Onimode, 1992: 1). In many sub-Saharan African countries, life expectancy is still less than 50 years (compared with 79 years in the UK), infant mortality is over 100 per 1000 live births (UK is 5 per 1000) and the adult literacy rate is below 50 per cent (UK is 99 per cent) (UNDP, 2007). At a time of increasing globalization in so many different ways, Africa generally lags well behind every other region of the world. For example, in the area of telecommunications, it is a staggering fact that in the mid-1990s, before the massive advances in mobile-phone technology, there were more fixed land-line telephones in New York City than in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa (APIC, 1996).