Resolving the African Development Sclerosis: Two Strategies, No Future

Abstract

At independence, African countries adopted various development strategies.
Unable to generate the desired development, African countries embraced
regional and economic integration as the alternative approach and adopted
the Lagos Plan of Action in 1980. Due to its inherent contradictions and
Western opposition it was abandoned. In 2001, Afrocrats crafted the New
Partnership for African Development in tune with the predominant neoliberal
ideology. This discourse critically compares the Lagos Plan and
NEPAD. It argues that the adoption of NEPAD is revisionist, an
abandonment of the Lagos Plan crafted in the womb of the dependency
paradigm for the prescriptions of the initially rejected Bretton Woods
Institutions’ sponsored Berg Report wrapped in the garment of the
modernization ideology. The discourse concludes that in the NEPAD
framework exist fundamental contradictions similar to those that frustrated
the Lagos Plan.