Awakening Giant Africa

"This book, by a Zimbabwean, deals with four paradoxes about Africa: Poverty in the midst of abundant natural wealth; stagnant standard of living, despite billions of dollars of “development” finance or foreign aid pumped into Africa over the past 50 years; the gap between borrowed Western development patterns and the real aspirations and needs of Africa’s majority poor; and why neither Western democracy nor Eastern socialism works well in Africa. Rewriting national constitutions to try to improve democratic governance in some countries has also not made much difference. This path has been pursued from a paradigm that ignores the differences in culture, social relations, relations of production and property relations between Africa and northern countries. Much less energy has been devoted to identifying, within that African context, the real aspirations and needs of Africa’s majority poor themselves, and tailoring economic development policy, strategies and action plans to meet those needs. It continues to baffle political scholars the world over why – even with successive changes of regime or political leadership in several African countries – Western democracy just does not seem to work for Africa. The basic aspiration of Africa’s poor is to be free. The most important thing for them is security and peace, and they also want to be able to improve their standard of living. They want to lift themselves out of poverty, and they want to make the effort themselves. For far too long in the past there have been all sorts of charlatans, governments and leaders who have promised to do things for them and have betrayed them. A Lesotho chief expressed it best: “Here in Lesotho, we have two problems: Rats and the government.”"