Jude Azuka Orinya
Department f Philosophy
Nnamdi Azikwe University, Awka
+2348030441373
judeazuka@gmail.com


Abstract
With Africa the most-underdeveloped of the continents in the world, theoretical and practical
discourses about development has become pertinent among scholars. The paper examines the
place of Jared Diamond’s Theory of Development on the African predicament. The paper agrees
with Diamond that environment plays some important roles in development. However, in the
case of Africa, the paper argues that Africa is currently the cause of its own misfortune because
the worst forms of exploitation and dehumanization have been directly supervised by African
leaders themselves. It pointed out the predicaments Africans faced after colonialism and how the
Blackman have remained a woe onto himself. Using the expository and analytic methods, the
paper concludes that environmental factors alone cannot explain development and
underdevelopment. Moreover, the African continent is blessed with a favourable environment
and abundant natural resources to be the world greatest but mismanagement of these resources
have been a bane on development. Thus, African leaders must be responsive, inclusive and
selfless if Africa must develop like other continents.
Keywords: Development, Underdevelopment, Theory, Africa, Predicaments
INTRODUCTION
The glaring underdevelopment, poverty, hunger, disease, corruption among African
nations is a disturbing phenomenon. These ugly predicaments of Africa have raised various
questions concerning why Africa is in such state. What is the cause of world inequality? Is it
from nature or man’s creation? Why do some people spend a lot of money to keep their weight
down while others don’t know where the next meal is coming from? How did rich countries get
so rich and poor countries get so poor? Why did Europe take the lead in changing the world? The
gap between the rich nations and poor nations keeps widening everyday and the need to answer
the question of how and why we are where we are is necessary. Scholars have expressed their
minds on the reasons why many countries in Africa is still underdeveloped when compared to
other countries in Europe. Some blamed African’s underdevelopment on the slave trade and
colonialism she suffered in the hands of the Europeans, others blamed it on leadership,
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corruption, ethnicity, wars etc. However, for Jared Diamond; the riches in Europe are not due to
their ingenuity or intelligence. For him, the gaps in development, power and technology between
human societies originate primarily from environmental differences. This stand has been known
as environmental determinism of development. Diamond used historical facts to illustrate and
prove that poverty or riches of a country are dependent on its natural environment or geography.
This view was captured in his award winning book; Guns, Germs and Steel.
This paper is an attempt to unravel the African predicament and examine Diamond’s
view on development in an attempt to discover if Diamond’s position can be attributed to the
current state of Africa today. The work examines the views of other scholars and concludes that
although nature has a significant role to play in the development and underdevelopment of
nations, human activities play greater role in determining where the pendulum of development
swings to. Drawing inspiration from Acemogul and Robinson’s Why Nations Fail and Lee Kwan
Yew’s From Third World to First the work shows that mans actions and inactions moulds
history and determines whether a nation succeeds or fails. The paper therefore concludes that the
determinants of development cannot be mono factorially explicable. Rather, development and
underdevelopment works with a retinue of factors which include cultural, religious, institutional,
environmental and ethical factors etc.
The African Predicament
Predicament is a difficult situation, especially one where it is difficult to know what to
do. The concept of African predicament therefore is the aggregate of plights that threaten the
African people. Africa has been bedeviled with numerous plagues in the past, thus, Africans are
in constant search for scapegoats to apportion blame in other to gain psychological relief. The
concept of African predicament can be approached from different dimensions. This is because,
no single scholar has exhausted in totality, this problematic theme. However, from their relative
perspectives they always came at a consensus which depicts the African predicament.
Although, the predicament of the African people ranges from cultural, political,
economic, religious, historical and psychological factors, they are all bonded together in the
psychology of the African. Thus, until the African is able to psychologically liberate himself or
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herself, it will be a case of window dressing trying to address other factors that have helped in
keeping Africa in its present condition.
Various Dimensions of the African Predicament
One of the greatest challenges of Africans is the affirmation of their true identity. Having
been brainwashed to believe that white is synonymous with good while everything black is evil,
Africans now suffers from inferiority complex and sees her economy, education, culture, religion
and everything that is African as inferior. Hence, the richness of their identity as Africans is not
dependent on what they make of it but is dependent on what the American or European says it is.
Emefiena Ezeani writes that Africans suffers from a disease of the mind which makes them
unconsciously despise or look down on themselves (eg. their names, languages, culture, religion
colour) and has instead an inordinate love or irrepressible desire to be like the white man or the
colonizer1
. The disease is what he called colonialysis2. Ali Mazuri also calls it cultural
dependency which is exemplified by the African becoming ‘black European in dress, language,
ideology and style’. All these militate against human and economic progress in the continent of
Africa. The different themes which African predicaments can be divided into are: Economic
enslavement and crisis of leadership; mis-education of Africans and falsification of history,
culture, religion and identity crisis.
a) Economic Enslavement and the crisis of Leadership
One of the major problems Africa has is an imperial-centered economics. Africa had no freedom
to take the destiny necessary for its economic prosperity in their hands. The colonial masters
control every economic life of the Africans. During the era of colonization, colonial masters
supervised peasant farmers on the peasant farmers own soil. The land which they labored to
sustain themselves and their families, the colonial supervisors decided how much they earn,
quantity of food that they will take home on daily basis and the price of the goods in the market3
.
Oguejiofor stress that this is the process of satellization of Africa, where every economic activity
on African soil is directed towards the needs of Europe4
. In the 21st century, neo-colonialism
replaced raw and naked colonialism. The neo-colonialists used European financial oligarchies
like the international monetary fund (IMF), World Bank (WB) Paris and London Clubs as agents
to lend money to African countries. These loans come with stringent conditions which keeps
Africans in perpetual underdevelopment. African countries are lured into adjustment
programmes that lead to currency devaluation, high interest rates, privatization of state
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enterprise, liberalization of imports and so on5. The lack of vision and corruption among African
leaders makes it impossible for Africa to develop. Chinua Achebe in his book; The Trouble with
Nigeria had earlier argued that:
The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership.
There is nothing wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or air or
anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its
leaders to rise to the responsibility and to the challenge of personal
example which are the hallmarks of true leadership6.
The Nigerian problem is the same with all other African nations. The failure of leadership
in Africa is due to the agency role that African leaders play for the imperialist.
(b. Mis-education of Africans and the Falsification of History
Education is the driving force of any nation. The type of education the people receives will
either make or mare them. Colonial education alienated the people from their environment,
culture and themselves. Ezeani defines colonial education as a totality of influence and
experiences of the colonized in a colonized environment7
. Fortunately, while the education
received in other advanced countries prepares them to meet the needs of the society, the
education that Africans received kept them in a static position. This is why Rodney called it
“education for underdevelopment”
8
.
African history was also distorted and passed to Africans by the colonial masters. For
Jochannan, “colonialism brings us to a kind of history written by the conqueror for the conquered
to read and enjoy. When the conquered looks around and finds that even God speaks from the
heart of the conqueror, the conquered then becomes suspicious of Gods” 9 Therefore, Africa need
a new historiography, not a history that is based on the adventure of Europe but that premised on
life of the African and the things that constitute the essence of their being.
(c) Culture and Identity Crisis:
Africans suffers from identity crisis because they now carry the identity that is alien to them and
an inbuilt inferiority complex. But this deliberate inferiority complex that is institutionalized has
an aim, for it leads to dangerous brainwashing that further leads to self erosion, shame, and selfalienation. Its negative impact is very broad since it erodes the relational character which identity
seeks to create.
10 Africans was made to belief that their culture is barbaric and savage. The black
Africans who went to America was made to believe that Africa was a land of people with
barbarian instinct and primitive ties, where the consumption of human flesh is the order of the
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day11. This made Africans to now believe that modernization, civilization and exposure is defined
in terms of a total disconnect from African culture.
Who is Jared Diamond?
Jared Diamond is an American ecologist, geographer, biologist, and anthropologist. He was
popularly known for his books Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997, awarded a Pulitzer prize), The
Third Chimpazee (1991), Collapse (2005) and The World Until Yesterday (2012). He was born in
Boston, Massachusetts, United States to a Jewish family who migrated to the United States from
Eastern Europe. His father, Lous Diamond was a physician and his mother, Flora Kaplan, a
teacher, Linguist and Lonart pianist. He attended the Roxbury Latin School and earned a
Bachelor of Arts in anthropology and history from Harvard College in 1958 and a PHD on the
physiology and biophysics of membranes in gall bladder from Trinity College, University of
Cambridge in 1961.12
After graduating from Cambridge, Diamond returned to Harvard as a junior fellow until 1965,
and, in 1968, he became a professor of physiology at UCLA medical school. While in his
twenties he developed a second, parallel, career in ornithology and ecology specializing in New
Guinea and nearly Islands. It was during his research in the New Guinea that a question from
Yali was thrown to him. This question gave birth to the book; Guns, Germs and Steel.
Later in his fifties, Diamond developed a third career in environmental history and
became a professor of geography at UCLA, his Current position.13 He also teaches at Luiss
Guido Carli in Rome. He won the National Medical of Science Award in 1999 and Westfield
State University granted him an honorary doctorate in 2009.
Jared Diamond’s Theory of Development
Diamond’s view on development was represented in his book Guns, Germs and Steel:
The Fate of Human Societies. This book was an attempt to quench young Yali’s curiosity about
European dominance in world affairs. For Diamond, the current fate of human societies has a
historical and pre-historical connections, he narrowed them down to conquest, epidemics and
genocide. For him: “For example, much of Africa is still struggling with its legacies from recent
colonialism. In other regions including much of Central America, Mexico, Peru, New Caledonia,
the former Soviet Union, and parts of Indonesia, civil unrest or guerilla warfare pits still
numerous”.14 Development can only take place in a serene and peaceful environment, thus these
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areas are less developed than others that are peaceful. In the book, Diamond further gave reasons
why germs played a role in nation’s inequalities. He writes that:
First, Europeans have for thousands of years been living in densely populated
societies with central government, police, and judiciaries. In these societies,
infectious epidemic diseases of dense populations (such as smallpox) were
historically the major cause of death, while murders were relatively uncommon
and a state of war was the exception rather than the rule. Most Europeans who
escaped fatal infections also escaped other potential causes of death and
proceeded to pass on their genes. Today, most live-born Western infants survive
fatal infections as well and reproduce themselves, regardless of their intelligence
and gene they bear. In contrast, New Guineans have been living in societies were
human numbers were too low for epidemic diseases of dense populations to
evolve.15
Therefore, whenever there are epidemic diseases, because they are not resistant to the disease,
they often die off. Meanwhile, the traditional New Guinea societies suffered high mortality from
murder, chronic tribal warfare, accidents and problem of procuring food.
Diamond was working in Papua New Guinea, studying members of a culture. As he
became acquainted with them, he recognized that as individuals they were as smart, hardworking, creative and talented as the members of western civilization. This made him to wonder
about the origins of the differences between Papua New Guinea culture and Western cultures.
What crystallized the issue for Diamond was when his friend Yali asked him: “Why is it that you
white people developed so much Cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had
title Cargo of our own?”16 The term Cargo in this context means variety of goods from packaged
flour to metal tools to cell phones. In his book, Guns, Germ, and Steel, Diamond’s summed up
the inequality in nation’s development as follows. Firstly, there were “continental differences in
the wild plant and animal species available as starting materials for domestication”.
17 This was
because Eurasia was most well-endowed due to its size and diversity and it did not suffer a large
mammal extinction phase when humans first came into contact with in the Late-Pleistocene era,
as it happened in other continents. Secondly, Eurasia’s “east-west major axis and its relatively
modest ecological and geographical barriers” which greatly enhanced the possibility of diffusion
and migration”.18 Moreover, both crops and livestock depend heavily on climate and therefore
are more easily transferred across latitude than longitude.
Furthermore, Eurasia is a home with much less drastic environmental obstacles which
could bar political and linguistic unification or communication, and therefore, complicate
diffusion. This is also connected to the third factor which is the possibility of inter-continental
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diffusion. This was difficult because the continents lacking animals and plants for domestication
differed in their capacity for acquisition from elsewhere; this made them develop in isolation.
More so, the total population size and area is another influential factor. Larger
endowments in both of these means “more potential inventors, more competing societies, more
innovations available to adopt and more pressure to adopt and retain innovations, because
societies failing to do so will tend to be eliminated by competing societies”19 Eurasia had most of
these areas and population. This area according to Diamond has fertile lands and favourable
climate in relation to the distribution of grains. He dismissed tropical region because tropical
domesticates are mainly non-grain crops. Furthermore, Diamond argues that these differences
make the diffusion of crops difficult northward between mid latitude Eurasia and the African and
Asian tropics because; this requires movement between regions that are ecologically very
different. This means that mid latitude staple crops will tend not to grow well in tropical regions
and vice versa because they are accustomed to different temperature and rainfall regimes.
Germs are also other factors that enhanced the development of Eurasia. Diamond argues
that once societies began to evolve from hunters and gathers to food production and farmers, the
societies will then start domesticating animals which they usually use to plough their fields.
These animals carry bacteria and germs which were passed on to people. The people became ill
from these germs and the weaker people died while the stronger people developed immunity to
the germs. The Eurasians became the stronger race and colonized more land and gained more
development because they gained immunity to these germs first.
Summarily, for Diamond, “Environment molds history”.20 He is of the view that
everything important that has happened to humans from the Paleolithic era is due to
environmental influences. The ultimate causes of the three primordial environmental facts; the
shapes of the continents; the distribution of domesticable world plants and animals, and the
geographical barriers inhibiting the diffusion of domesticate. The major problem with the shape
of the continent is its axis. A continental landmass with an east-west axis supposedly is more
favourable for the rise of agriculture than the continent with a north-south axis. Diamond divided
the world into three continents: Eurasia, Africa and Americas. Eurasia has an east-west axis; the
other two have north-south axis. He argues that the east-west axis was able to make progress in
history because it has a climatic advantage. The world’s largest continues zone of temperature
climates lies in a belt stretching across Eurasia from Europe in the west to China in the east.
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Therefore, crops that survived in one part will also do well in another because they have the
same climatic condition. But in continents like Africa that has a north-south axis, there is always
a change in climate as you move upward or downward, this makes the survival of crops across
the zone difficult.
Diamond is of the view that “History followed different course for different people
because of differences among people’s environments, not because of biological differences
between people themselves.”
21 He claims that this view is largely eschewed by most academics.
Historians in particular think it diminishes the importance of human action and argue, according
to Diamond, that it is deterministic. In other words, some say that Diamonds view seems to
suggest that a people’s environment determines everything else about their development, from
their culture to the technology they develop. Diamond wanted to write what he calls a “unified
synthesis of a range of disciplines, including human genetics, history archeology, evolutionary
biology and epidemiology22
. For the lay reader, one who is not familiar with modern scholarship
on the development of human societies, one facet of Diamond’s argument is especially
important. He wants to underscore the idea that it was not the cultural, moral or racial superiority
of Europeans that enabled them to develop the technology that enabled them conquer and
influence peoples around the world. Rather, it was accidents of geography that facilitated the
development of crops, and even pathogens that made it possible for them to do so. Diamond
believes that historians have over-emphasized the importance of culture without considering the
scientific foundations of its origin among different peoples.
The Place of Diamond’s Theory on African Predicament
When we place Diamond’s theory, side by side with the views of some scholars who
painted the real picture of African predicament, we will find out that it will not fall into place.
For instance,
In his book; How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Rodney makes us understand that;
Every people have shown a capacity for independently increasing their
ability to live a more satisfactory life through exploiting the resources of
nature. Every continent independently participated in the early epochs of
the extension of man’s control over his environment….Africa, being the
original home of man, was obviously a major participant in the process in
which human groups displayed an ever-increasing capacity to extract a
living from the natural environment23
.
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Rodney’s major objective is to prove that Africans were capable of political administrative and
military greatness even before the white men entered the African scene. But as soon as they
entered, Africa’s political acumen, her administrative genius and her military might vanished. To
substantiate his claim, he reminds us of the description of Africa in the 15th century by some
historian, the Egyptian civilization and so on. He concludes that “Any diagnosis of
underdevelopment in Africa will reveal not just a per capita income and protein deficiencies, but
also gentlemen who dance in Abidjan, Accra and Kinshasha when music is played in Paris,
London and New York24. This position implies that Africa was doing well until Europe came and
destroyed Africa. This did not agree with Diamonds view that geography was the major cause of
Europe development and African’s underdevelopment.
Also, in his book; The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon blamed Europe for Africans
predicament. For him without consultation European nations came together and shared African
continents among themselves as people would share war booty. He argues that the worst thing
colonialism does to its victims is that it never stops with imposing its rule on them and letting
them live. It goes further to distort their psycho-affective equilibrium and to make them
speechless and servile robots who must be perpetually dominated by their colonial masters in his
own words he states:
Perhaps we have not sufficiently demonstrated that colonialism is not
simply content to impose its rule upon the present and the future of a
dominated country. Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a
people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain to the past of the
oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it25
.
For Fanon, this psychological effect of colonialism still haunts the continent years after political
independence. Diamond’s environmental theory is also ruled out here as the cause of unequal
development.
However, Oyebola Areoye in his book: The Black Man’s Dilemma tries to synthesize the
views of Fanon and Rodney. He agrees that slave trade and colonialism is the cause of the black
man’s backwardness. He writes that:
the social effects of colonialism have dehumanized and subjugated black
people. The great historical wrong done to blacks through the slave trade
and colonialism constitutes an important explanation for our
backwardness26
.
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But, Oyebola refuses to agree that such suffering is enough to make him a perpetual
backward human being. He contends:
But the strange thing about our race is that other races have, in the past,
been similarly ensnared and colonized, but these other race broke the
shackles of slavery and domination, reached great heights and in many
case excelled above their oppressors in contributions to civilization.
However, the black man has, for too long, looked for scapegoats for his
many problems. He has, therefore, become his own worst enemy.
27
Oyebola’s view did not also blame the weather, climate, disease or soil but Africans
themselves.
How Africans Underdeveloped Africa
One may agree with Diamond to some extent that geographical and ecological factors to
some extent contributed to the reason why Europeans dominated the rest of the world but we
cannot sweep aside the roles played by African leaders after independence as the cause of
Africa’s underdevelopment. Looking through Africa, the continent has produced a lot of leaders
that have destroyed it, the question we need to answer is; what foundation made it possible for
these bad leaders to emerge? The likes of Idi Amin of Uganda, Francis Macias Nguema of
Equatorial Guinea, Emperor Jean Bedel Bokoas of Central African Republic, Mobutu Sesse Seko
of Zaire, Ibrahim Babangida and Sani Abacha of Nigeria, Samuel Doe and Charles Taylor of
Liberia and many others of their kind. Most of them were military dictators and with little or no
education. The truth is that as of the time most African countries are getting independent, there
are no experienced educated leaders in Africa. So most of them were ignorant and didn’t know
what to do or what governance was all about, thus they resorted to looting their country dry. For
example, Zaire became independent on June 30, 1960 under the leadership of Patrice Lumumba
who emerged as their first prime minister. As the prime minister, Lumumba appointed Mobutu
as chief of staff to the commander of the Congoless army. Mobutu plotted and assassinated
Lumumba in January 1961, just eleven months after Zaire’s independence. He consolidated
power and ruled like a powerful emperor. He made people see him as the Messiah and gave
orders that his portrait be displayed in churches beside the portraits of Jesus Christ. Also, in
schools, there was a compulsory subject called Mobutusim where children are though that
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Mobutu was sent by God as a messiah. Zaire is rich in copper, cobalt, uranium, oil, and diamond.
Earnings from there were diverted into his personal account overseas. As far back as 1984 the
United State treasury revealed that Mobutu personal money is up to $4 billion. His landed
properties are mind-boggling. He has nine Luxurious estate in Belgium, and Switzerland, a villa
on French Rivera, a castle in Spain, a Coffee plantation in Brazil, a ranch in Portugal, fleet of
aircraft and more than 50 Limousine cars. These are outrageous properties acquired through
corrupt and ill gotten dealings. They have nothing to do with geography and ecology as Diamond
postulate. The same goes with other present African leaders like Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe,
who was recently forced to relinquish power after thirty seven years of impoverishing and under
developing his country.
The role that institutions play in the development and failure of nations was also
identified by Acemoglu and Robinson in their book; Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power,
prosperity and Poverty. They jettisoned the ignorance, culture and geography hypothesis and
called them theories that don’t work28
. For them, the success and failure of any nation depends
on how extractive or inclusive their institutions are. Inclusive institutions engender development
and progress while extractive institutions breed underdevelopment and failure. In their own
words:
Nations fail today because their extractive economic institutions do
not create the incentives needed for people to save, invest, and
innovate. Extractive political institutions support these economic
institutions by cementing the power of those who benefit from the
extraction.29
Although they did not rule out growth under extractive institutions like the case of China, but
they predicted that it will not last. Looking at African countries today, we will see that they run
an extractive political and economic system. It is of recent that democratic elections are
gradually taking over the military dictatorship as was obtainable after independence.
Furthermore, in his book: From third World to First, Lee Kuan Yew gave a firsthand
information of how he transformed Singapore from third world after independent to a thriving
Asian metropolis with the world’s number one airline, best airport and busiest port of trade.
After their independence, Singapore was the smallest country in South East Asia. Many think
they are destined to become a client state of their powerful neighbours, if indeed they could
preserve their independence. However, Lee Kuan Yew substituted superior intelligence,
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discipline and ingenuity for resources to develop Singapore from third world to first. Today,
Singapore’s annual per capital income have grown from $1,000 at independence to nearly
$30,000. Singapore now plays a major role in the politics of economics of South East Asia and
beyond. Yew’s massive stride in transforming Singapore is a clear indication that the action or
inaction of leaders can make or mar any nation.
Odey writes in his book Africa: The Agony of a Continent that the black neo-colonialist has
not proved himself to be better than the white imperialist. “The African political, social and
economic scene considered in its entirety has become a violent microcosm of the black man’s
inestimable failure to manage his own affairs on his own”30
. A look at African countries will
expose a catalogue of military dictatorship, corruption, naked lust for power, reprisal and
murder, deprivation of fundamental human right, poverty, tribal chauvinism, nepotism, ethnic
hegemony, embezzlement of public fund, unfulfilled promises and despair of the masses.
Evaluation
From the foregoing we can all agree that underdevelopment is not the original state of
African. But we cannot continue to bask in the euphoria of African civilization of yester years.
Did Africa go to sleep after they discovered that civilization started from Egypt? Or that
archeological evidence shows that the first man came from Africa? Or that their Ancestors built
pyramids, skyscrapers, good roads etc. Where were Africans when Europe was developing
superior ships and canons? After Europe had developed all those and turned them against Africa,
what did Africa do toward them off? What prevent Africa from developing her own superior
ships and cannons even up to the 21st century and use them to ward off European intrusion and
destruction? If Africa is the cradle of civilization, why will it not contribute same to its own
development? When we reflect on these questions we cannot but agree that Africa is the cause of
its problem. When Rodney wrote his book, his thinking was mainly determined by the euphoria
of joy which greeted the rapid succession with which African states were getting independence.
Then, he was perfectly right because he was dealing with the realities on ground. To believe in
them today will never help us as Africans. I am convinced that if Rodney were to write a followup today he will most likely title it: “How Africans underdeveloped Africa”. This is because
Africans has been his own enemy. This is in line with Oyebola’s view that slave trade and
colonialism is not enough excuse for the black man’s underdevelopment today.
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Conclusion
From the forgoing, underdevelopment and underdevelopment is not an original state of any
country or continent. Moreover, the complex nature of development cannot be mono factorially
explicable. There are different factors which combine to bring about development. From the
origin of the world, everything was the same, but human activities and inactivity made or marred
mans existence. Although, natural and environmental factors played great role in the
development of some part of the world but that cannot be enough excused to be underdeveloped
in this 21st century when man have almost conquered nature. Man is in a consistent search of a
way to develop, build and make his environment a home. However, natural and human factors
joined forces to mould the destinies of different continents. The dominance of Europe may not
only be because of the continental slope, it may be because they had selfless leaders who knows
what leadership is all about and channeled their energies into developing the continent.
This work concludes that the geographical and ecological factors alone cannot explain
underdevelopment in Africa because every African country has enough natural resources that
should develop the continent, but greed and corruption has made African leaders to impoverish
Africans by diverting these resources into private aggrandizement.
Thus, development now depends on how inclusive the economic and political institutions
are. This work concurs with the view of Acemoglu and Robinson in their book; Why Nations
Fail: The Origin of Power, Prosperity and Poverty, that Nations fail due to extractive
institutions. A cursory look at African countries will reveal high extractive nature of both
political and economic institutions. Until African leaders become inclusive and selfless, until
leadership is seen as a service to the people and not an opportunity to cut your own part of the
national cake; until African leaders crave for power is tamed, Africa will always take the back sit
in the world development index.
END NOTES

  1. Emefina Ezeani, Iqusim: Intelligent Questioning as African Liberation Philosophy,
    (Veritas Lumen publishers: London, 2014), 25.
  2. Ibid., 25.
  3. Andreski Stanislav, The African Predicament: A study in the Pathology of
    Modernization, (New York: Atherton Press, 1970), 26.
    Logos: African Journal of Philosophy and Studies. Vol. 3, 2020
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    89
  4. Obi Oguejifor, Philosophy and the African Predicament (Hope Publications: Ibadan,
    2001), 39.
  5. Wilson Amos, The Falsification of African Consciousness: Eurocentric History,
    Psychiatry and the Politics of White Supremacy (New York: African World Info system,
    2014), 368-369.
  6. Chinua Achebe, The Trouble with Nigeria (Enugu: Fourth Dimension Publishing Co,
    1993), 1.
  7. Emefina Ezeani, Philosophy of Education for African Nations: Recovering from the
    Negative Effects of Colonial Education (London: Veritas Lumen Publishers, 2013), 17.
  8. Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Lagos: Panaf Press: 2005), 290.
  9. Josef Ben Jochannan & Henrik Clarke John, From the Nile Valley to the New World.
    Science, Invention & Technology: New Dimensions in African History (New Jersey:
    Africa World press inc, 1991), 60.
  10. Obi Oguejiofor, 69.
  11. Kofi Awonnor, The African Predicament. (Legon: Sub-Saharan publishers 2006), 48.
  12. Jared Diamond, Concentrating activity of the Gall-bladder (PhD Thesis, University of
    Cambridge, 1961).
  13. The prize winner, 1998 Expo-Cosmos, http://www.expocosmos.or.jp/main/cosmos/jyusyou/1998_e.html, Accessed August, 2017, 8-17.
  14. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies (London: W.W.
    Norton & Company 1999), 17.
  15. Ibid.
  16. Fredrick Erington & Deborah Gewertz: Yali’s Question: Sugar, Culture and History.
    (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2004), 6.
  17. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel, 406.
  18. Ibid., 407.
  19. Ibid.
  20. Ibid., 352.
  21. Ibid., 18-22.
  22. Ibid., 25.
  23. Rodney, 11.
  24. Rodney, 36.
  25. Frantz Franon, Wretched of the Earth, (New York: Grove Weidenfield, 1968), 210.
  26. Areoye Oyebola, Black Man’s Dilemma (Lagos: Board Publications 1982), 12.
  27. Ibid., 13.
  28. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power,
    Prosperity, and Poverty (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2012), 45.
  29. Ibid., 372.
  30. John Odey, Africa: Agony of a Continent, Can Liberation Theology Offer any Solution?
    (Enugu: Spaap Press 2005), 150.

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