Reviewer: Canute A. Ngwa, Ph.D, Senior Lecturer in Economic History, University of Buea.
Ngwane, George (2003). Way Forward for Africa: A Revolutionary Call to Reject Predatory Politics and Actualize the Renaissance. Colorado Springs, USA: International Academic Publishers. 106 p.
Africa is a continent replete with amazing contradictions; it is generally acclaimed to be the cradle of civilization, it possesses huge and mouth whetting human and natural resources. In fact, it is a continent blessed with nature’s prodigality. Yet, it is also a continent that habours a third of the world’s poorest countries and a population which has been emasculated socially, politically and economically.
African scholars as well as their Africanist counterparts have been alive to the debate as to why the continent’s fate has remained on the edge of a precipice. Through prismatic spectrums such scholars have appreciated Africa’s problems from Afrocentric, Eurocentric, radical and conservative perspectives. The culmination of their collective efforts is an avalanche of literatures on Africa.
Useful as these contributions are, most of them have remained at the conceptual / theoretical and intellectual levels, offering very little practical solutions to the continent’s ever-increasing problems. George Ngwane’s Way Forward for Africa is a refreshing departure from the stereotype. It is a compendious and kaleidoscopic appreciation of the continent’s problems, suggesting the way forward. Shorn of any rhetorical obfuscation and verbiage, the study, in ninety eight pages, four chapters, and in scintillating language diagnoses and prescribes practical solutions to the woes of the continent.
The first chapter, which centres on the African youths, is an insightful categorization of the youths into three groups: the complacent, wasted and critical generations. The first two categories have been caught up in a web of docility and are inextricably entangled in a morass of dialectical materialism. They see themselves as a generation under perpetual siege and, accordingly, have to dance to the dictates of the moment. They hold no promise for Africa. The critical generation, perhaps, holds the magic wand; it is charged with charting the continent through the contours of its development efforts. The cruciality of youths in the development process of any given society is not a matter opened to debate: no country ever thrives without the active participation of its youths in this process.
Chapter two, like chapter three, centres on democracy with a razor thin distinction between them. The former argues that Africa’s pristine governing institutions had all the trappings of modern democratic practices. Unfortunately, however, with the intrusion of colonialism there was a wholesale imposition of Western democratic values which were not only incongruent with the African reality but which were tailored to meet Western designs.
Against this grim background, the latter chapter, the penultimate, surveys the various democratic options opened to Africa in what Ngwane styles “Innovative choices”: umbrella democracy, no party democracy, consociational democracy and monarchical democracy. The author’s critique of the “Conservative Choice” i.e. multiparty democracy under such rubrics as “multiparty politics and state paralysis and multiparty democracy and state authority” is most instructive and paradigmatic of the political quag mire in which Cameroon has been submerged.
Chapter four, the last, attempts to align individually country-based development efforts in the continent with a holistic, continent-oriented strategy under the aegis of the African Union. Ngwane, a consummate Pan-Africanist, proposes two alternatives: a five –tiered federation of African regions based on the existing North, South, West, East and Central regions to replace the fifty-three countries in the continent; and an African Union akin to the European Union (EU).
The author has remarkably made a long and tortuous story short and simple without smothering complexities. His grasp of the travails of the continent is impressive, so is his objectivity and even handedness. His literary style is crisp and a sheer delight. His study is not intended to portray Africa as in a state of dystopia as most works do. A huge continent with a prickly and dynamic population, Africa enjoys tantalizingly bright potentials. She could compare with other advanced continents of the world if its economy as well as other socio-political variables are repositioned and refocused on their proper growth paths. With a potentially huge market, the labour absorptive capacity of its economy can be vastly energized and made more resilient than at present. This is what Ngwane’s Way Forward for Africa advocates. This book should be amongst the prized collections of any library worth its salt on African issues.
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