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| The 2005 G8 Summit Echoed the Need for Participatory Development Approaches in Africa |
 PRINTABLE VERSION |
Investment policies should also be drastically reviewed in Africa. There should be investment laws put in place such that foreign investors willing and able to exploit the nations’ resources are legally bound to fully process these said resources before marketing them abroad. This would ensure that the African nations get value for their produce rather than selling them as raw materials at paltry prices in the international markets and later buying the fully processed products at more than thrice the original price. On page 2 of its economic policy paper ‘The Ten Point Program,’ the National Resistance Movement of Uganda notes that “while 200-500 years ago African slaves were being exchanged for beads and trinkets by the African chiefs of the day, today African coffee, cotton, gold, copper, oil or uranium are being exchanged for toys, wigs, perfumes, whisky or Mercedes Benzes…. In fact, this tendency is being reinforced and the gap between the developed economies of the world and ours is ever widening.”
The ‘Ten Point Program’ further states that “while a hundred years ago we possessed, at least, enough technology to extract iron from its ore and use it to make agricultural tools (e.g. hoes and pangas), now even these most primitive tools must be sold to us by foreign firms, and we must, in order to get them, pay in precious resources, many of them exhaustible (e.g. copper, gold, oil where available, iron, uranium, etc).”
The policy paper asserts that “there is, therefore, a qualitative regression…what some people call “development.” African countries should diversify their global trading partners and venture into the Asian Tiger economic waters. These countries will not only give the continent a fair trading platform but also serve as blueprints for their development prospects. The fact that these emerging economies had very little resources years back but are currently causing economic waves in the international trading platform should serve as a positive pointer for the African and other Third World nations.
The current salient economic issues in Africa and the Third World include unemployment, poverty and food insecurity, inadequate energy, socio-economic gender disparities, illiteracy, inadequate health facilities, and inaccessibility to adequate clean water, among other brutal deficiencies. Only Africans themselves can tackle these issues, as they know what their own shortfalls and problems are and the ways in which they can appropriately solve them.
The solutions however should be modified to suit the dynamism in the continent. These should be systematically formulated to spur growth and development in these disparaged parts of the world. As Mr. John Maliti, the Kenya Private Sector Foundation Chairman advocates, only by developing their own version of the Marshall Plan, as did post-WWII Europe, will Africa and the Third World be able to see concrete change in their development prospects.
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Antony Felix O. Simbowo
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