The Failure of Leadership in Africa's Development

Ike Okonta

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2020
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781978788886
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Failure of Leadership in Africa's Development examines the dominant scholarly theories about the cause of Africa's underdevelopment and argues that none of the traditionally invoked causes—an alleged black racial inferiority, the colonial and neo-colonial expropriation of Africa, purported natural defects in Africa's geography—is plausible as the explanation of the main cause of the continent's underdevelopment. Rather, the book argues that the chief cause of the continent's lag is the failure of leadership of Africa's ruling classes. This failure of leadership, the book shows, is most evident in the historically traceable indifference of a long succession of Africa's ruling classes to the scientific and technological advances that were emerging from Europe and Asia during the most critical periods of Africa's history. It was this indifference, the book argues, that set the stage for the subsequent conquest, expropriation, and technological stagnation of Africa. The book recommends a blueprint for the continent's future development.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Africa’s Underdevelopment
• 2 A Crippled and Comatose Giant
• 3 The Cause of Africa’s Underdevelopment
• 4 Africa’s Historical Indifference to Technological Progress
• 5 Monarchs of “The Encounter” and Their Feeble Responses to Europe’s Technological Superiority
• 6 A Blueprint for Africa’s Development
• 7 The Poverty of Contemporary African Political Thought
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author