Unleashing Africa’s Resilience: Pan Africanist Renaissance In a New African Century

By Costantinos Berhutesfa Costantinos

Africa includes five of the world’s fastest-growing economies, as well as a treasure chest of natural resources. Those very things, however, have caused multinational corporations to flock to the continent in an attempt take control of those resources.

An African renaissance is hard to conceptualize, but that is exactly what is beginning to effect real change, with the assistance of both public officials and ordinary citizens. This study theorizes an African renaissance as the dynamic interaction of strategy and process and seeks to motivate researchers to shift analysis in that direction. This shift emphasizes the task of broadly structuring African renaissance as a geopolitical system is more important than that of promoting it within a specific program of nations.

Unleashing Africa’s Resilience provides the necessary tools for research-based policymaking and the critical thinking needed to help Africa build a vibrant economy and become a more prominent player on the world stage.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Apr 28, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483410111

Book preview

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Prologue

More than 700 leaders from business, government, civil society, academia, media, and the arts from over 70 countries met at the 22nd World Economic Forum on Africa in Addis Ababa, from May 9 to 11, 2012. Ethiopia is home to the African Union and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. This offered an exceptional opportunity to bring together pan-African and global leaders to discuss the future of the region. Under the theme Shaping Africa’s Transformation, the meetings integrated three pillars: strengthening Africa’s leadership; accelerating investment in frontier markets; and scaling innovation for shared opportunities (Berhanu, 2012:1).

This meeting took place against the fact that for so many, African states are systems of patronage and are closely associated with rent-seeking activities.

The design of their external relationship is to generate funds that oil this network of patronage. The design of their trading system is to collect revenue to oil the system. Much of the productive activity augurs in a system of irrational licenses and protection that augment the possibilities of rent collection. Much of the private sector in the continent is an active and central element of this network of patronage and rent-seeking activity… (EIIPD, 2005:3) After all, there was no denying postcolonial governments had been corrupt and incompetent. Weak economies had no option but to take the medicine from the International Monetary Fund. Today the Fund has other matters on its mind, preoccupied as it is with saving European economies. Moreover, for the first time, Chinese soft loans to Africa have overtaken loans from the World Bank, the reward for taking the IMF medicine. The stick once used with abandon is now little more than a twig. As Africa changes, there arises a niggling question. Could memories of the days when the colonial bwana knew best, influence Britain’s response to the opportunities on the continent? (Holman, 2012:5)

Nonetheless, Africa is shedding its impoverished image as an emerging market for trade and investment.

Six of the world’s ten fastest growing economies over the last decade were African countries with a collective population of 300 million. This year’s United Nations Human Development Report says that over the next four decades, Africa’s progress in human development — the indicators that mean a better life for its people — could outpace that of every other region. Africa’s future resources will likely dwarf existing ones — with Africa yet to discover perhaps three-quarters of its sub-soil reserves. Standard Bank estimated earlier this year that Chinese investment in Africa could reach $50 billion by 2015, a 70% increase from 2009 — and larger than the current U.S. stake of less than $40 billion. The bank also expects China’s trade with Africa to double by 2015 from the current $150 billion a year. The projection is the number of households with discretionary income will rise by 50% over a decade, reaching 128 million. The continents’ cities could have a combined spending power of $1.3 trillion. Africa offers a higher return on investment than any other emerging market. (Ward, 2011:2).

Despite the hurdles, there is no doubt that the continent is at an exciting stage in its modern history. Yet something is missing. To many African officials and business, leaders have been slow to respond to the challenge posed by the new era and, unable to see the need for a fresh relationship. Part of the reason may be the malaise that still hangs over the continent, a legacy from past disappointments. Many diplomats see Africa as life in the slow career track. Academics struggle for research funds. Retired colonial civil servants take their knowledge to the grave; journalists drop in and move on and business leaders who once forged careers on the continent now see a stint in Lagos or Luanda as a hardship post; resulting in contracts lost, markets seek new suppliers, old ties count for little and old friendships go unnourished (Holman, 2012). The Financial Times on the war torn Sierra Leone reports as follows

The country’s GDP is expected to grow by a sky-high 32.5 per cent in 2012. That is revised down a few notches from the 35.9 per cent reported by the IMF earlier this year. However, growth might be a bit more down-to-earth in 2013. The increase is on the back of listed iron ore companies London Mining and African Minerals, both, which have begun exporting iron ore from large-scale projects. African Minerals has the Tonkolili project, while London Mining focuses on its Marampa Mine. With a strengthened mines, minerals law, and amended contracts with several mining companies, Sierra Leone is looking at around $98 million in taxes, royalties, and fees this year, according to Minister of Finance Samura Kamara. The figures make Sierra Leone the second fastest-growing economy in Africa.

Discussions about Africa’s evolution tend to measure the continent’s ‘gradual’ assimilation into the global mainstream. This may have been understandable in the mid-eighties when every indicator saw African economies seen as hopelessly distorted and hence the need to salvage them with what became known as ‘Structural Adjustment’.

Nevertheless, African countries today appear more aligned with the Washington Consensus and Globalization’s ‘best practices’ than the West. On many of the macroeconomic indicators used to judge conformity with the mainstream — debt to GDP ratio, current account balance, fiscal balance, and inflation — Africa is closer to the mainstream, while key OECD countries drift away. Data tracking other kinds of flows — in cultural, innovation and labor flows — point to a continent becoming a key player in the Global South — not just assimilating into the global mainstream, but helping to shape it (Pence, 2012:2).

Problems of mal governance and a civil society rendered decadent in this process notwithstanding, it is easy to follow the current trend within the international community and advocate enlightenment as a desirable form of progress paradigm that promotes critical thinking. Nor is it difficult to make normative judgments about how nations should behave if enlightenment is to grow into a positive agent of change. Nevertheless, it is not so easy to conceptualize enlightenment as a working process, balanced against strategy, to determine what makes for real, as opposed to vacuously formal process. As a way of contributing to the overcoming of these difficulties, one may theories enlightenment as the dynamic interaction of strategy and process.

At pivotal moments in history, shifting the principles of the political game has been a vital gesticulation of organized state capture, propounding to impel a new social order out of latent concerns, as well as develop the means to alter the grammar of politics. If democracy means rule by the people for the people, it has broken down. All we have today is rule by national and transnational élite, marked by periodic social eruptions that fail to add up to anything transformative. The élite bounce back regrouped, the protestors are silenced or appeased and electoral victories promising radical change end up captured by stakes. The Arab Spring has yet to bring spring to the masses; the uprisings around the world against financial capitalism and austerity have only served to strengthen ties between banks, international financial institutions and the powerful states. The millions of people crushed by the current economic crisis and its handling by the authorities are told that their sacrifice is needed for a return to better times, while reforming governments trying to protect the less well-off rely on the approval of lenders, rating agencies, the media and powerful states. These failures of democracy are worldwide, a feature also of so-called ‘mature democracies’. People everywhere are not doing much of the governing, while those supposed to be acting on their behalf are doing nothing of the sort. The consequence is growing social misery and injustice (Amin, 2012:2).

The author further asserts that, "left to its own momentum, this state of affairs will end in more authoritarianism or in revolutionary breakdown. A safer option would be to renew the democratic contract, clearly an aim of little interest to self-serving élite (and parochial movements) but presumably of some attraction to political forces committed to the fair and equal society. I say ‘presumably’ because it is not clear that the established wing of these forces, for example, socialist and social democratic parties and labor unions have shown much interest of late in making common cause out of embedded social injustices or in working with the insurgent movements that daily rail against the colonization of élite power.

What do we have left to say about democracy, equality, justice, or the good society? It is as though the fracture of the democratic contract, the reduction of politics to electoral posturing and populist appeasement, the inevitability (perhaps the thrill) of sitting at the table where élite and their ideologues gather, in the hope of small crumbs of social reform. In the process, it is indeed devoid of a vision of society beyond the status quo, detached from the subjects, trials, and tribulations of everyday life, oblivious to political struggle and organization beyond the rituals of corporatist management (Ibid). The Economist Intelligence Unit, in July 18, 2012 states

The unfavorable global economic outlook represents the main threat to prospects in Sub-Saharan Africa. Specific risk factors include a reduction of trade credit, declining commodity prices and contracting demand for the region’s exports, in addition to falling remittances, aid, FDI and tourism receipts. Any significant slowdown in the pace of expansion in China—a crucial economic partner for Sub-Saharan Africa in terms of trade, aid, and investment flows—would be of particular concern. Our assessment, overall, is that this will be a challenging but not disastrous year for prospects in Sub-Saharan Africa. Furthermore, the medium-term outlook for the region remains positive. Rising external inflows (capital and investment, particularly from Asian sources) and high commodity prices will support growth. Economic reform programs will continue, boosting the role of the private sector in the economy. By 2013-16, the regional economy forecast points to an average growth of around 5% a year. Nevertheless, Africans needs to tackle, the general operating environment that remains difficult in a large number of Sub-Saharan states. Government bureaucracy, corruption, infrastructure bottlenecks, skills shortages, and structural difficulties will continue to present major challenges.

Eliot Pence (2012:2) asserts that, even under these conditions, today, the picture is changing fast. Stories of African migrants struggling to find a route to Europe contrast with recent reports that Europeans are struggling to find working permits in Africa.

According to NYU’s Development Research Institute, between 2006 and 2009 the number of visas issued for Portuguese entering Angola increased from 156 to 23,000. In 2012, there were nearly 100,000 Portuguese living in Angola, more than triple the number of Angolans living in Portugal. No longer seeing the US as their best opportunity for professional development, waves of Nigerian-Americans vie for top spots in the new Lagos offices of JPMorgan, McKinsey, and Blackrock. Reverse innovation, a concept describing inventions that are adopted first in the developing world, is creeping into western corporate boardrooms (and publishing houses).

Plans to develop a ‘Silicon Savannah‘ in East Africa build on widely successful innovations emerging out of the banking and telecom sectors and now being rolled out in US and European markets. Images of Joseph Conrad’s Dark Continent are receding as the broadband industry turns to Africa for global growth and sustained demand. African policy innovations, too, offer lessons to Europe’s troubled economic union. A recent IMF review of the health of the ECOWAS suggested Europe might learn something from how Africa’s economic unions have fared (Ibid).

Africa is gobbling up distressed assets in the West, although largely still the recipient of foreign direct investment (Perry, 2000; Carkovic & Levine, 2005 & Hewko, 2002).

Gatwick, the United Kingdom’s second largest airport, was recently purchased by a Nigerian and Africa’s richest woman, Isabel dos Santos (daughter of Angolan President Jose Eduardo dos Santos),is the new majority shareholder in a leading pay-TV and Internet provider Zon Multimedia in Portugal. Increased traditional financial flows, such as remittances from Africans working abroad are also changing. Already larger than official development assistance by a substantial margin, reports suggest remittances are now flowing to Europe from Africa. Underscoring these trends is reduced dependency on multilaterals (China lends more to Africa) and that BRIC-Africa trade increased from $20 billion to more than $250 billion in the past 10 years (Pence, 2012:3).

Indeed McKinsey Global Institute also highlights Africa’s transformation (2012:1)

Africa is the world’s second-fastest-growing region. Poverty is falling, and around 90 million of its households have joined the world’s consuming classes—an increase of 31 million in just over a decade. Job creation and inclusive growth shows that the continent must create wage-paying jobs more quickly to sustain these successes and ensure that growth benefits the majority of its people. Despite the creation of 37 million new and stable wage-paying jobs over the past decade, only 28% of Africa’s labor force holds such positions. Instead, some 63% of the total labor force engages in some form of self-employment or ‘vulnerable’ employment, such as subsistence farming or urban street hawking. If the trends of the past decade continue, Africa will create 54 million new, stable wage-paying jobs over the next ten years—but this will not be enough to absorb the 122 million new entrants into the labor force expected over the same period. However, by implementing a five-part strategy to accelerate the pace of job creation, we estimate that Africa could add as many as 72 million new wage-paying jobs over the next decade, raising the wage-earning share of the labor force to 36%.

Even as a major western newspaper openly wonders how Africa will ‘join the larger world on its own terms,’ across virtually all indicators, evidence suggests it is doing so largely on its own terms. If the West is stuck in low-growth and political paralysis, while Africa enjoys an economic renaissance, a more pressing question for Western observers might be when will the West join Africa (Pence, 2012).

Costantinos Berhutesfa Costantinos, 2013

Part I

Philosophical Pitches & Challenges to an African Renaissance

•   Philosophical Foundations for African Enlightenment

•   The State of Public Policy and Development Governance in Africa: The Developmental State, Issues and Potential Trajectories for Transformation

•   Meritocracy Review of the African civil service

•   The Challenges of Civil Service Political Neutrality and Its Effects on Good Governance

•   Economic Adjustments, Multinational Resource Plunder & Coup d’états in Africa

•   Creed & Secularism: The Rise of Political Islam & Citizen States

•   Devolutionary Dynamics of Terrorism in the Greater Horn of Africa

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Chapter ONE

Philosophical Foundations for an African Renaissance

Because there is always a tendency to find a solution that is smart, simple and immoral to every human problem in Africa, pundits, states and the international community tend to have a linear way of thinking that is inadequate to unravel the many complex inter-relationships underlying enlightenment that should bring forth the African renaissance.

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1.   Challenges to African Enlightenment:

1.1.   Analytical problems in perspectives of enlightenment

1.1.1.   Dynamic interface of strategy and process:

It is easy to follow the current trend within the African community and advocate African renaissance as a desirable form of African progress. Nor is it difficult to make normative judgments about how societies and polities should behave if African renaissance is to grow into a positive agent of change. Nevertheless, it is not so easy to conceptualize African renaissance as a working process, which one can balance against strategy, to determine what makes for real, as opposed to vacuously formal process. As a way of contributing to the overcoming or lessening of these difficulties, we may theories African renaissance as the dynamic interaction of strategy and process.

It is possible to see African renaissance as the playing out of objective and critical standards, rules, and concepts of economic, social, and political conduct in the goals and activities of all participants, those of public officials who make and administer the rules as well as those of ordinary citizens. The issue here is not simply one of ‘application’ of rules to particular activities. Nor is it one of dissolving agent-catered strategies of African renaissance into ‘objective’ principles and norms. It is rather the production or articulation of process elements and forms within and through the strategic (and non-strategic) activities of various participants.

Highlighting the mutually constitutive and regulative articulation of strategy and process, we shift the centre of analysis away from the two as separate formations that enter only external relations with each other. This shift of analytical focus serves to emphasize the critical point that the task of broadly structuring African renaissance as a geopolitical system is more important than that of promoting it within the specific national program of a particular nation. The making of broadly inclusive African renaissance should consist of an articulation of process and agency, which we can sustain, in its structure or system by any party or government operating within it. That is why current discussions and analyses of transition to African renaissance and generally are marked by the following limitations. Primarily, it is

•   a tendency to narrow African renaissance to the terms and categories of immediate, not very well considered, political and social action, a naive realism, as it were and inattention to problems of articulation or production of global systems and process within local politics rather than simply as formal or abstract possibilities;

•   Additionally, it is the nearly exclusive concern in certain institutional perspectives on African renaissance with generic attributes and characteristics of social, economic, cultural, and political organizations. This results in the consequent neglect of analysis in terms of specific strategies and performances of organizations in processes of transition to African renaissance;

•   Moreover, it is the ambiguity as to whether civil society is the agent or object of global change and concerning the role of the state;

•   Finally, it is the inadequate treatment of the role of transnational companies and the Breton Wood Institutions and of relations between global and indigenous aspects or dimensions of African renaissance.

1.1.2.   Agency

Participants in and around projects of African renaissance generally constitute a network or intersection of institutions and groups. These include indigenous governments that preside over formal African renaissance processes, organizations not affiliated with ruling coalition’s and intellectuals that operate outside official channels and struggle for a share of influence. In some cases, other components of society and polity are included: a free, though constitutionally and legally not very well protected, press, CSOs involved in promoting grassroots work; professional associations; and multilateral and bilateral agencies and private international aid groups, which collectively exert far-reaching external influence over reform. Generally, the larger the number and diversity of participants actively involved, the greater the variation.

Uncertainty and complexity of forms of agency and activity possible notwithstanding, a more open and free the renaissance process is likely to be in its formal as well as informal aspects. Admittedly, the actors typically have their own primary ‘functions’ quite apart from their role in promoting African renaissance. All players gear their activities toward specific interests, concerns and activities. They do this beyond or outside the ends of reform. Even if they are expressly committed to promoting reform, it is always possible for participants to lose themselves in the specifics and ‘forget’ the process as a whole.

Yet a particular actor in pursuit of a limited objective within the global network, as a condition of maintaining coherence and effectiveness and enlisting cooperation from other participants, will have to modulate its agency and intentions. This has to come in such a way that their complex, differential play in alternative institutional practices and in varying forms and contexts of activity is possible. Each actor must formulate its own project in a spiral form that to some degree allows the project to ‘escalate’ or to open into other activities within the reform network. To restate the basic point, the breadth of the range of available participants and the degree of uncertainty and complexity that characterized their agency and functional relation condition the extent and nature of openness of African renaissance.

1.1.3.   Polity

There are countervailing currents and pressures within the intersection of participating organizations and groups however, which tend to work against or limit transition to African renaissance process openness. These forces of process closure manifest themselves in the structure of the network of participants and in their activities. The forces may or may not be transparent to the consciousness of the actors that channel them.

At the structural level, a certain hierarchy of agency and activity is evident within the network of African renaissance participants, such that some actors assume primary position relative to others that are by comparison limited players. For example, indigenous governments are involved more commandingly and directly in running ‘African renaissance projects’ than local nongovernmental organizations. Certain international agencies range their activities and influence across the network extensively while others become local. As global authorities on development, with massive financial and intellectual resources at their command, the IMF, USAID, World Bank and the European Union in particular are major players in reform with whom indigenous governments and other recipients of their assistance must cooperate or come to terms with; at the expense of their philosophical assets so well grounded in their histories.

This hierarchy of agency effectively places some participants in the reform network in positions of subordination. It also places limits on the range of agents and forms of practice, which form a network through domestic and international support. Thus, although it is common knowledge that their legally recognized existence and growth are crucial for African renaissance and good governance, the powers to be neglect other parties and academia tend to neglect or marginalize them. Often, they force them into the background (or underground) of the formal African renaissance process, or into partial or total exclusion.

African nations, on the other hand, while they have to reckon with external aid conditionality, donors support them into becoming the source of laws and policies. It is also ironic that based on this that the agency and activities of alternative and opposition groups regulate their participation in determining the rules of the game whether the state allows or disallows them. In some cases, this augurs on in narrowness within the structure of global and local regimens and organizations whereby African renaissance process creates participants and participants in turn create processes in self-enclosed, formalistic, reciprocally constrictive articulation. In short, the uncertain and, potentially at least, open political, institutional and intellectual environment in which enlightenments will have to evolve is generally counter-balanced by a significant degree of stratification of organized actors and by relatively settled relations of power and authority into which the actors enter.

2.   Structural constraints to African enlightenment:

Specific, more or less conscious, uncertainty, and complexity reinforce possibilities for enlightenment by reducing activities of key participants, particularly the governments, and their foreign backers.

Constant flux

As an interval between one regime of thinking to another on a higher level of critical thinking during which competing actors claim and contest over power, African renaissance may be characterized by rules and forms of engagement that are ‘in constant flux’ and may lead to ‘any number of unpredictable alternative outcomes’. At the same times, however, the interval is marked by aspiring parties that seek to quickly get their hands on the flux of events and circumstances, often succeeding in immediately securing themselves in and projecting power;

Real or imagined threats of violent opposition

There is a strong incentive for emergent African regimes, connected to real or imagined threats of violent opposition to African renaissance, to engage in activities which short cut or pre-empt the development of an open and level ‘democratic’ playing field for enlightenment. These activities include the reduction of an entire environment of change to a specific program of enlightenment, all too often guided (or misguided) by non-African thinking; with all the pre-emptions, displacements and substitutions of agency and activity this implies and effects of process closure it contains. The truncating of the protracted and complex passage from declared enlightenment intentions to effective and open societal and political process may involve the use of public media and institutions available to governing élite.

Often states use them to villainize intellectuals and opposition groups and exclude them partially or entirely from the formal enlightenment process as necessary condition for maintaining peace and stability during reforms. It is always possible for the flux of transition to enlightenment events to turn overly ‘orderly’ very quickly through the activities of governing élite.

External actors

In engaging in uncertainty reducing activities which short-cut the full emergence of open and transparent process, regimes often enlist the support of outside participants in reform, notably Western governments and international agencies. External players and actors may support enlightenment through a variety of mechanisms. The range of supportive measures they take may even be expanding beyond efforts aimed at government renovation into broader areas of reform, including the support to civic organizations and press freedom and independence. Nevertheless, international agencies also worry about political instability, civil strife, and economic disorder to which such transitions might lead.

2.1.   Militarism, ethnicity, pseudo democracies

David Livingstone summarized the autocratic African predicament eloquently; to overdraw its evils is a simple impossibility…. We passed a slave woman shot or stabbed through the body and lying on the path. [Onlookers] said an Arab who passed early that morning had done it in anger at losing the price he had given for her, because she was unable to walk any longer. We passed a woman tied by the neck to a tree and dead…. We came upon a man dead from starvation…. The strangest disease seen in this country seems really to be broken heartedness. It attacks, captures and enslaves free men (O’Neill, 2001). Livingstone estimated that 80,000 Africans died each year before ever reaching the slave markets of Zanzibar. Zanzibar was once East Africa’s main slave-trading port and under Omani Arabs in the 19th century, as many as 50,000 slaves were passing through the city each year (BBC, 2010). The trading of children has been widely reported in modern Africa.

The demise of human, social, cultural, economic, and political capital has led to the abject poverty where all countries that fall below the red mark in human development indicators are African. Globalization of public policy, the debt crisis, mal governance, HIV/AIDS, the lack of operational credit and capital markets, a very high belief in peasant economy has rendered the continent undevelopable.

States make life even more exacting and demanding by the knowledge that only; a few of the millions who struggle for survival outlive the next subsistence meal. Over-dependence on external funding sources and the search for external funds also greatly erodes the capacity and commitment of African nations and civil societies to mobilize and achieve consensus around issues of common interest for autonomous development (See later sections for detailed rendition of the challenges in ethnicity, traditional leadership crises, and failed states). In the words of Julien Randriamasivelo,

The poor and the rich, separated by growing gap, are forging a new relationship of their forces. On the one hand, the force of the poor are their number, the accumulation of their non-utilized intelligence, their working capacity is formidable but seriously handicapped by imposed socio-economic conditions and finally the solidarity among themselves and at the international level. On the other hand, the force of the rich is undoubtedly superior in terms of accumulated wealth accrued day by day at the expense of the poor. Nevertheless it is increasingly getting to be doubtful whether the rich will continue to enjoy their accumulated wealth without jeopardizing global security and hence the livelihood of the rich (Inder Sud, 2005:2).

This is the rationale for external aid to play crucial catalyzing roles. Hence, animators of development should be more alive to their role as a channel of empowerment of the local constituencies they serve.

2.2.   Failed states

Notwithstanding the slavery and colonial legacy, that is still taxing the continent, new faces and forces of vulnerability and poverty haunt the Africa region. Conflicts, corruption, disasters, poverty, and pandemics now threaten the region with a calamity unforeseen even during the Great African Famine of the eighties, so much so that the G8 has made this a basket case for international action. Northern DRC, Darfur, Somalia, etc., have become a new insignia of human ‘bestiality’. Hence, the need for the fundamental change on how we deal with the internecine crises…

When has a State failed…?

When the basic functions of the State are no longer performed, they breed widespread internal conflict, revolutionary wars, ethnic wars, adverse regime change, genocide, politicides and de facto or de jure loss of government legitimacy. The consequences are domestic effects — ‘conflict trap’, neighborhood effects — conflict spill over; arms spending; economic consequences and Global Effects — havens for terrorists. In responding to this, one observes massive inflow of foreign aid to improve services and create jobs to ‘show quick and tangible results to cement the peace’, significant technical assistance to build government functions and bold economic and political reforms. Determinants of potential state failure are: (Ibid)

•   Material well-being of citizens: unfulfilled expectations, difficulty of delivering quick results, urban bias and security constraints

•   International influences: openness to trade, conflicts in neighboring countries, large influx of money, corruption, foreign aid footprint, local élite

•   Regime type: autocracies vs. democracies

•   Re-building country vs. the state: alternative delivery mechanisms de-legitimize government, institution building is slow, unrealistic reform agenda, focus on pseudo-democracy, multiple and varied Development partners agenda;

While pundits and humanitarians alike have formulated many proposals for remedial action, real commitment to positive and collaborative processes at continental and organizational level has always been limited. Mobilizing the action required has also remained a daunting challenge, as many practical and structural constraints militate against commitment by individual groups to organizational initiatives nationally and regionally. Furthermore, the tragedy taking such a heavy toll of life has highlighted fundamental weakness of the development strategies.

Pundits and humanitarians alike have also questioned many preconceived notions and new ideas proposed. They have also made efforts to improve our understanding of human insecurity, to estimate the risks resulting there from, accurately and to make adequate preventive measures ahead of time. Because there is always a tendency to find a solution that is smart, simple and immoral to every human problem in Africa, states and their international backers tend to have a linear way of thinking that is inadequate to unravel the many complex inter-relationships underlying enlightenment (Costantinos, 1996:237).

It is neither popular nor scientific. Hence, the issue is about the need for collective learning about responses and the responsibility to those whose suffering provided the basis for that learning which will never be more urgent than it is now. Unfortunately, such lessons, which pundits and humanitarians alike may learn through the shocks administered by an uncompromising reality, rarely translate quickly into personal or organizational memories and the inherent will to change. The reasons for this are rooted in human inertia, weakness, and self-interest and are equally often the products of a genuine confusion about how to act most effectively in an environment that is growing more complex.

3.   Enlightenment

The illumination of knowledge came into use in English during the mid-19th century, with particular reference to French philosophy, as the equivalent of a term then in use by German writers, signifying officially the philosophical outlook of the 18th century. The Age of Enlightenment is the era in philosophy and intellectual, scientific, and cultural life, centered upon the 18th century, in which reason was the primary source for legitimacy and authority. Developing simultaneously in European nations, the movement got its uplifting by the success of the American Revolution. Most of Europe and Latin America rose into the pedestal of instigating an intellectual revolution that has brought about the enlightenment.

Set against this background, the challenges and prospects for an African enlightenment are numerous and the task of penning such a paper equally cumbersome. While Africa is rich both in its physical endowment and cultural resources, the challenges to African enlightenment have their roots causes in the driving forces of slavery, colonialism, militarism and barbarism, pseudo elections, the role of international development agencies and regional political establishments, globalization and the politics of rights, state fragility, failure and collapse (Costantinos, 2012:3)

Nonetheless, enlightenment plays out objective and critical standards, rules, and concepts of economic, social, and political conduct in the goals and activities of all participants, those of public officials who make and administer the rules as well as those of ordinary citizens. The issue here is not simply one of ‘application’ of rules to particular activities. Nor is it one of dissolving agent-catered strategies of enlightenment into ‘objective’ principles and norms. It is rather the production or articulation of process elements and forms within and through the strategic (and non-strategic) activities of participants.

Highlighting the mutually constitutive and regulative articulation of strategy and process, we shift the centre of analysis away from the two as separate formations that enter only external relations with each other. This shift of analytical focus serves to emphasize the critical point that the task of broadly structuring enlightenment as a global political-economic system is more important than that of promoting it within the specific national five-year national plans of a particular nation. The making of broadly inclusive enlightenment should consist of an articulation of rules, institutions, process and strategy, which can be sustained, in its structure or system by any party or government operating within it. Indeed this explains why current discussions and analyses of transition to enlightenment generally have several limitations.

The chapter hence highlights the background to the enlightenment, presents the analytical limitation and challenges of composing an African enlightenment and the paradigmatic shifts necessary to achieve it.

3.1.   Background to Enlightenment:

Enlightenment principles motivated the authors of the American Declaration of Independence, the United States Bill of Rights, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and the Polish-Lithuanian Constitution of May 3, 1791, were by (Palmer, 1959). However, the German term Aufklärung was not merely a retrospective application; it was already the common term by 1784, when Immanuel Kant published his essay, answering the question: what is enlightenment? Kant answers the question quite succinctly: ‘enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity, a self-inflicted phenomenon, not from a lack of insight, but from the lack of purpose and courage to employ one’s reason, intellect, and wisdom without the guidance of another. The maxim of enlightenment is Sapere aude! Dare to know (Hackett, 1992).

Kant, whose moral philosophy is centered on the concept of autonomy, here distinguishes between a person who is intellectually autonomous and one who keeps him/herself in an intellectually heteronymous, i.e. dependent, and immature status. Kant understands the majority of people to be content to follow the guiding institutions of society and unable to throw off the yoke of their immaturity due to a lack of resolution to be autonomous. It is difficult for individuals to work their way out of this immature, cowardly life because we are so uncomfortable with the idea of thinking for ourselves. Kant says that even if we did throw off the spoon-fed dogma and formulas we have absorbed, we would still be stuck, because we have never ‘cultivated our minds.’

The key to throwing off these chains of mental immaturity is reason. There is hope that the entire public could become a force of freethinking individuals if they are free to do so. Why? There will always be a few people, even among the institutional ‘guardians’, who think for themselves. They will help the rest of us to ‘cultivate our minds.’ Kant shows himself a man of his times when he observes, ‘a revolution may well put an end to autocratic despotism … or power-seeking oppression, but it will never produce a true reform in ways of thinking.’ The recently completed American Revolution had made a great impression in Europe; Kant cautions that new prejudice will replace the old and become a new leash to control the ‘great unthinking masses.’

The ‘Enlightenment’ was not a single movement or school of thought and was less a set of ideas than it was a set of values. These philosophies were often mutually contradictory or divergent. At its core was a critical questioning of traditional institutions, customs and morals and a strong belief in rationality and science. Thus, there was still a considerable degree of similarity between competing philosophies (Wikipedia, 2012) Some historians also include the late 17th century, which is known as the Age of Reason or Age of Rationalism, as part of the Enlightenment; however, others consider the Age of Reason to be a prelude to the ideas of the Enlightenment (Hackett, 1992). Modernity, by contrast, refers to the period after The Enlightenment, albeit emphasizing social conditions rather than specific philosophies.

3.2.   Renaissance

The predominant scholarly advance of the Renaissance was humanism, a philosophical underpinning that humans are rational beings and emphasizing the dignity and worth of the individual, an emphasis that was central to Renaissance developments in many areas. Humanities disciplines focused on expression, poetry, and ethics against the more traditional education that concentrated on the study of logic, natural philosophy (science) and metaphysics, or the nature of reality that based its claims on scholasticism.

The Renaissance was a great period of revival of classical-based art and learning in Europe that began 14th century. As a cultural movement, it spanned the period roughly from the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. Though the invention of printing sped the dissemination of ideas from the later 15th century, Europe did not uniformly experience the changes of the Renaissance across the continent.

As a cultural movement, it encompassed innovative flowering of Latin and vernacular literatures, beginning with the 14th-century resurgence of learning based on classical sources, which contemporaries credited to Petrarch, the development of linear perspective and other techniques of rendering a more natural reality in painting, and gradual but widespread educational reform. In politics, the Renaissance contributed the development of the conventions of diplomacy, and in science an increased reliance on observation. Historians often argue this intellectual transformation was a bridge between the Middle Ages and the Modern era. Although the Renaissance saw revolutions in many intellectual pursuits, as well as social and political upheaval, it is perhaps best known for its artistic developments and the contributions of such polymaths as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, who inspired the term ‘Renaissance man’.

Scholars often clashed sharply over systems of education. Far more was at stake in these academic controversies than the content of education. As scholastic training prepared students for careers in such fields as medicine, law, and theology, the humanists believed that this course of study had a too narrow focus on only a few professions. They claimed that scholastic courses did not base sufficiently on practical experience or the needs of society, but relied too heavily on abstract thought. The humanists proposed to educate the whole person and placed emphasis not only on intellectual achievement, but also on physical and moral progress.

The humanists also stressed the general responsibilities of citizenship and social leadership. Humanists felt that they had an obligation to participate in the political life of the community. In sum, humanism reflected the new environment of the Renaissance, its essential contribution to the modern world was not its concern with antiquity, but its flexibility and openness to all the possibilities of life. Renaissance humanism was complex, with few unifying features beyond a common belief that a new kind of education based on a study of the classics could improve humanity and society through (Tu Wei-ming, 1979 & ENCARTA, 2013:6)

Aesthetics, the other dominant theory of human beauty asserted that reality consists of archetypes, or forms, beyond human sensation, which are the models for all things that exist in human experience. The objects of such experience are examples, or imitations, of those forms. The philosopher tries to reason from the object experienced to the reality it imitates; the artist copies the experienced object, or uses it as a model for the work. Thus, the artist’s work is an imitation of an imitation — thinking had a marked ascetic strain… art affects human character and hence the social order. If happiness is the aim of life, a major function of art is to provide human satisfaction. Renaissance is closely associated with achievements in literature, art, and music. On poetics and drama, tragedy so stimulates the emotions of pity and fear, which border on the morbid and unhealthy, but that by the end of the play the spectator is purged of them. This catharsis makes the audience psychologically healthier and thus more capable of happiness (Ibid).

Aristotle’s Poetics influenced neoclassical drama since the 17th century, a concept that dominated literary theories up to the 19th century. In painting, sculpture and architecture the Renaissance tended to break with medieval traditions as they were no longer considered crafts to be used exclusively for the embellishment of cathedrals; instead, they became independent arts on a level with the highest intellectual accomplishments. In retrospect, we may always think what imaginations of the loved ones would be if the Renaissance did not invent art in human form rather than ascetic pictures of biblical representations… (Ibid)

4.   Composing and African enlightenment:

4.1.   Personal purpose is the foundation of enlightenment:

Indeed philosophers from Plato to Hegel and Marx have augured purpose in life as the primary engine that drives human growth, development, and well-being in many ways. Henry David Thoreau, Mitch Albom, Og Mandino, and British mathematician Alfred North Whitehead… have long been on record saying,

The way you get meaning into your life is to devote your life into loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning — arts, music, intellectual development and service of the community. Many beings go fishing all of their lives. They know that it is the fishing and not the fish they are after. Our minds are finite, yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite and the purpose of life is to grasp as much as we can out of that infinitude. Life without a purpose is languid, drifting thing; every day we ought to review our purpose saying to ourselves — this day let me make a sound beginning for what we have hitherto done is naught… US President John Kennedy caps it all by saying, I believe in human dignity and the source of national purpose, in human liberty as the source of national action, in the human heart as the source of national compassion and pride and in the human mind as the source of our invention and our ideas…(GAIAM, 1963)

Finally, we have a scientific proof that a purpose driven life has a vision of human transformation, happiness, safety, and security. More than semantics, even the streak of millenarianism, conjuring apocalyptic visions of a perfect new world rising from the ashes of the old, that has run through much of Ethiopian faith history, may now have found some logical grounding more than ever (Geda, 2010).

4.2.   Civil society ripeness

A major problem inherent in the enlightenment process in Africa is the extreme weakness of the social movements and their failure to develop coherent strategies for promoting broad based and well organized citizenry. For the lack of opportunities for self-organized civil associations, whose functions are to preserve basic rights of its constituents and the society, educate the citizens and advocate popular claims, build a consensus and promote political and moral ethical values and disseminate them among the populace, it has become difficult to nurture a sense of civil society.

Practices such as free elections, the formatting of political parties, free and open discourse on public issues are all foreign concepts that democrats needed to install in the minds of the majority of the populace. The disarray and inability of the ‘opposition’ forces to achieve internal unity is a manifestation of lack of political culture. Thus, the preoccupation with ethnic and cultural communities in Africa represents a larger issue having to do with the restructuring of the African polity as a whole.

It concerns the ‘liberation’ of Africa as the understood and operational concept, not one of simply changing or improving the position and status of ‘nations’ or, in simpler terms, ethnic groups; but the radical transformation of the values, traditions and institutions of the African nation-state itself in their historic and contemporary forms. It is wrestling at once with the question of the ethnicity and the problem of national unity connected with it. For the ‘liberators’ of Africa, popular unity was deeply flawed, established and maintained at the expense of nations and peoples by

•   the subjugation of communities in military conquests;

•   economic exploitation and political tyranny in which the machinery of a centralized state was used as an instrument of national oppression; and

•   cultural domination which devalued and suppressed the languages, customs and religions of diverse citizens,

Hence, it state formation and governance did not take into account the distinctive identities, interests and aspirations of various nationalities; rather, it reflected the domination of a small ruling class.

Because pressure for regime transformation comes from society, it yields the spontaneous interests, demands, and institutional mechanisms of change. The states’ function will not be to manage society’s enlightenment aspirations and activities, but to create the enabling conditions for their free play. Institutions and groups in civil society must form and run themselves. When they begin to address longer socio-economic and political issues beyond their limited sectional concerns, or to co-operate with the state on certain matters, they should be able to do so in terms of their specific interests and competence, not as mere instruments or extensions of states.

Alternatively, the underdevelopment of civil society in Africa and the incapacity of institutions within it are major barriers to democratization. The activities of some social institutions may have the salutary effect of bringing into transparency the work of state and of opening up state institutions and practices to public suiting. On account of this view, the state assumes a large role in democratization. It is assigned the task of nothing less than ‘cultivating civil society’ itself through political education and mobilization.

In reality, a rich associational life characterizes African society. However, the richness of such forms of associational life does not imply the presence of a strong civil society as concealed here. The kinds of associations prevalent in the context of African authoritarian or hegemonic regimes tend to reflect the weak character of the state. Informal associations are fragmented and disengaged from the state institutions. In these sense, civil society in many African countries is weak. While associations exist, they have not developed structures that are formal and not openly presented themselves in the public area.

The weakness of the state meant that few incentives existed to form autonomous organizations to engage with the state rather the ‘exit’ option prevailed as individuals preferred to remain outside the reach of state institutions. We have then divergent representations of civil society accompanied by somewhat conflicting conceptions of the role of the state in the passage to democracy.

•   The perception of society as producer of the spontaneous interests, demands and institutional resources of enlightenment to some degree conflicts with the view of civil societies in Africa as weakly developed social and institutional structures in need of cultivation and support by state institutions.

•   The conception of state institutions as creator of the enabling environment for the free enlightenment activities of individuals and groups diverges from the view of state as political educator of society.

Moreover, these conflicting perspectives commonly tend to confuse representations of ‘civil society’ and ‘the state’ as conceptual or ideal categories with actual communities and regime fuelling the transition. The categories are often conflicted into the immediate stuff of African political and social experience. This is not to deny that there are representations of civil society and state institutions in current perspectives on democratization in Africa where the elements categorized are more evidently those of really existing African social formations. It is to note a disabling analytical tendency in which current thinking pre-empties or displaces the actualities of African politics by the very conceptual categories used to describe them otherwise.

4.3.   Edifying democracy as a realm of enlightenment

4.3.1.   Genesis of state crises:

Claud Ake (1990:7) underpins the fact that, Africa’s problem is not so much a problem of character defect or ethical failure as it is one of misunderstanding arising from decontextualizing and dehistoricizing social phenomena. We are making judgments based on false analogies and false comparisons on the separation of meaning from social context, behavior from cultural milieu and action from social structures. Judgments are based on representations especially the perception that the Western state and its correlates, market society and bureaucratic organization exist in Africa or ought to exist. They are not based on the realities on the ground.

The project of establishing a specifically Western form of political domination has not succeeded in Africa because of the colonial legacy and the determined resistance of African culture. What the colonizers of Africa established in the cause of the state project was not so much a state in the western sense as an apparatus of violent repression. The colonial state needed a great deal of arbitrary power to subordinate the colonial territory, to exploit it and to protect it from the hostilities unleashed by its dehumanizing treatment of its victims that put it in a permanent state of war against indigenous society (Ibid).¹

Culture is always subject to change since it is human creation, although, states might believe that citizens cannot change it in any significant way, because Africans are awash about the enormity of their problems and this can be disabling. Overwhelmed by the magnitude of poverty, violence and other oppressive forces, they tend to go passive — or to strike out in usually futile individual acts of rage; thus, maintaining the tyranny of those who benefit from the status quo. Hence, a deeply radical idea that is the definitive augmentation of the idea of enlightenment underpins the fact that each cultural community has rights that deserve respect and that each must have a voice in the vital decisions that affect the quality of lives.

Cultural democracy inspires a vision of humanity, which embraces all humans. Each being is as complex and fascinating as the multiple factors and influences, which have shaped identities. Each is creative, gifted and potentially powerful. Communities are creative organisms that dynamically change in response to the appearance of new people, ideas and circumstances. It calls forth our most loving selves, illuminates place where healing is needed and challenges us to develop the best in ourselves, to be respectful of the harmonious interrelations of all life on the planet. It is not just about ideas, though, it is also about action

Edifying democracy inspires a vision of humanity, which embraces each creative, gifted and potentially powerful being as a complex and fascinating as the multiple factors and influences, which have shaped identities. Human communities are creative organisms that dynamically change in response stress and shocks administered by the environment. Edifying democracy calls forth people’s energy and illuminates the community rules and institutions they build to be respectful of the harmonious interrelations of all life on the planet (adopted from Webster, 1998:1).

Those who command a lopsided share of supremacy would not be content to hear this brainwave put forward, for it burdens them to account to those who are locked out by the current order as this sphere is a threat to a state with an all-pervasive regulation of society (Havel, 1986).

This is not to deny the influence of cultural factors, but culture is dynamic, not static and responds to changing material conditions. Africa has folklore, legends and narratives (expressionism such as the one that had prevailed in Europe since the Renaissance) through which its people invest their history with meaning and value. People have subjected them to materialist criticism from the perspective of its ‘scientific’ standards of historical knowledge and truth as if they were simply epistemological categories. Africa is rich in the visual, literary and performing arts, that strive to express subjective feelings and emotions rather than to depict reality or nature objectively.

An African artist tries to present an emotional experience in its most compelling form — with its inner nature and with the emotions aroused by the subject, frequently caricatured, exaggerated, distorted, or otherwise altered in order to stress the emotional experience in its most intense and concentrated form.(Ibid)

4.3.2.   Culture as a Realm of Enlightenment

The concept of edifying democracy comprises a set of related commitments:

•   protecting and promoting cultural diversity and the right to culture for everyone in society and around the world;

•   encouraging active participation in community cultural life; enabling people to participate in policy decisions that affect the quality of cultural lives; and

•   assuring fair and equitable access to cultural resources and support;

Institutions and culture are two faces of the same coin. Of the two aspects of culture identified, cosmological beliefs have been as important as material beliefs in determining economic outcomes. Material beliefs can change rapidly, as can the institutions based on them. Cosmological beliefs influence the polity. The initial resource endowments of the ancestral civilizations governed the form of their polities and engendered cosmological beliefs, which provided political legitimacy. There is great hysteresis in cosmological beliefs and ‘ipso facto’ in transferring one type of polity into a region with a differing cosmology. Nevertheless, paradoxically, the multiplicities of political forms as long as they do not represent an ‘enterprise association’ in themselves do not hinder economic growth. Thus, a particular political form such as democracy is not essential for development.

After all, hereditary monarchy and not democracy delivered the Industrial Revolution. What matters for intensive growth is that the market should function. Here the sages of the Scottish Enlightenment were clearheaded about the link between the polity and the economy. They recognized the importance of good governance, which for them government that promoted opulence through natural liberty by establishing laws of justice, which guaranteed free exchange and peaceful competition provided. However, the improvement of morality being left to non-government institutions, but they were quite undogmatic about the particular form to promote these characteristics of the State seen as a ‘civil association’. On this view of the State it is not seen as the custodian of laws which seek to impose a preferred pattern of ends (including abstractions such as general welfare, or fundamental rights), but which merely facilitates individuals to pursue their own ends (Deepak Lal, 1999:7).

4.3.3.   Education, citizenship& legal empowerment:

Citizenship is an important concept in the late twentieth century. The natural rights announced by the concepts of ‘liberty’ ‘equality’ and ‘fraternity’ and their attempts to found the modern nation state constitutionally on the will of the people helped to construct the modern conception of citizenship. In the global market economy, the importance of globalization (UNCTAD, 1997 & 1998) continues to grow and multinational companies whose turnover often exceeds the economic resources of small domestic economies are gearing themselves to global business strategies; every day on the international money markets, billions of dollars are traded, only a fraction of which goes into trade in commodities (Korsgaard, 1997).

Movements of citizens striving to realize or to redefine their citizenship rights and citizen community largely produced the historic changes set in motion since the late eighties in Africa. Increasing economic, legal and political integration will begin to challenge national sovereignty and will begin to involve the creation of a new transnational sphere of citizen’s rights, institutions and community.

In many developing countries, laws benefiting the poor exist on paper but not in practice. States do not implement them unless the poor or their allies push for the laws’ enforcement. Legal empowerment, as opposed to the rule of law orthodoxy (ROL), is an alternative paradigm in the use of legal services to amplify peoples’ voices — a materialization of community-driven and rights-based development, grounded in grassroots needs and activities that can influence national laws and institutions. It prioritizes civil society support because it is typically the best route to strengthening the legal capacities and power of the poor. At the same time, it does not preclude important roles for states.

However, still exceptions to the rule, there are increasing instances of this ‘mainstreaming’ taking place in ways that benefit human rights, development and project performance. This alternative approach puts community-driven and rights-based development into effect by offering concrete mechanisms, involving but not limited to legal services, which advance enlightenment of the disadvantaged. It makes the ROL more of a reality for them that so far, mainly consist of diverse civil society initiatives rather than deliberate donor programs (Golub, 2003).

Quality Education for critical thinking:

Quality education and research: Quality education and learning throughout life have become apparent as the keys to the 21st Century. The mission of guaranteeing quality of education is to safeguard the public interest in sound standards and to encourage its continuous improvement. Public self-assurance in academic standard requires public understanding of the achievements represented by higher education qualifications.

This dwells on quality education and lifelong learning; the notion of naive realism; neglect of analysis of specific strategies; process openness; agency and ideology. It discusses the purpose of the framework, number of levels in the framework, qualification descriptors and the need to develop a code of practice for the assurance of academic quality and standards in higher education.

Within Africa, the supply of ideas of education may be artificially deflated by particular strategies and mechanisms used by the incumbent to manage entire reform processes. Conceptual possibilities may be unrealized, or sub-optimally realized, insofar as governing élite are preoccupied with filling out those spaces of uncertainty in quality thought, discourse and action that alternative groups would occupy in the course of their own engagement. The crux of the challenge is creating an intelligent and critical mass of human qualities and ensures their effective participation in the development process, retaining and putting it to productive use. It is about having the ability and willingness to carry out development priorities and programs in the face of limited human, financial and institutional capacities. The results would lead to the creation of a strong nation, active in both domestic and world transactions.

4.3.4.   Eminence of education — Irrupting into History:

In the sixties and seventies saw most of engaged in a romance with left-wing politics as advanced by Marx and Freire. Its pledge was to methodical and far-reaching analysis of the source of human suffering ‘walking with history,’ one that ‘shared a uniquely common ground with biblical concepts such as idolatry’ and the notion of an apocalyptic deliverance (revolution) to a new life. This has inspired creativity and renewed vitality among grassroots thinkers. Accepting Marx’s interpretation of history, they announced that they were encouraging the poor to ‘irrupt into history’ by rising up to intensify class struggle and seize a fair share of the economic bounty’ (Spretnak, 1996).

Quality education, which hitherto connected education to a certain phase in life, has now become a lifelong necessity. This implies that the whole life span, which educators so far had not given priority in educational policies, has now become the cornerstone in the renewal process of society. Quality education for critical thinking, empowerment and the development of conscious praxis based on responsibilization is the key to 21st Century competitiveness (Freire, 1960). "As the global marketplace promotes the acceleration of international linkages… and other forms of transnational education, quality remains the key to their sustainability" (Lenn, 2004).

4.3.5.   Shifting concepts of scholarship:

Historically, there are two different and important theoretical and ideological strands, which