This paper is not an exoneration of Western Imperialism, and neo-colonial sabotage of many African economies, which is one of the great factors that have crippled African development over the decades. But a critique of the timorous leadership that has not only allowed African to be exploited as a chessboard of global geopolitical wolves, but also collaborated in the enterprise of wrecking Africa.
Joseph Stiglitz and Jeffrey Sachs remain some of the Washington suckled technocrats, who boldly proclaimed the truth of what people like Chinweizu, Noam Chomsky and others have been hammering on, as regards the West’s relationship with Africa. Sachs summarized Western collaboration and hypocrisy beautifully thus: “The Outside world has pat answers for Africa’s prolonged crisis. Everything comes back, again and again, to corruption and misrule. Western officials, including the countless “missions” of IMF and World Bank to African countries, argue that Africa simply needs to behave itself better, to allow market forces to operate without interference by corrupt rulers…(But) Western governments enforced draconian budget policies on Africa during the 1980s and 1990s.
The IMF and World Bank virtually ran the economic policies of the debt-ridden continent, recommending regimens of budgetary belt tightening known technically as structural adjustment programs. These programs had little scientific merit and produced even fewer results. By the start of the twenty-first century, Africa was poorer than during the 1960s, when the IMF and World Bank arrived on the African scene, with disease, population growth and environmental degradation spiralling out of control. When it comes to charges of bad governance, the West should be a bit more circumspect.
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