The Communal Challange in Africa's Economic Development

The African society is highly communal. This presents both an opportunity and a threat to economic development. Advantages of a highly communal society are many. Collective education and information sharing is possible by utilizing existing informal leadership structures. On the other hand, highly communal societies can become a liability especially where structural differentiation is not possible and community subunits are not organized for mutual benefit through functional specialization and interdependence.

The four factors of production as we know them, land, labor, capital and entrepreneurship, interact within a productive society to create wealth. In Africa, however, especially in rural Africa, some of the factors of production are not developed or there is just so much of one factor in relation to the others. To ensure economic development, the four factors of production need to be developed into meaningful production linkages. In order to do this, a few changes must take place. First there is need to increase differentiation of production units into patterns of functional specialization and interdependence. Second, new mechanisms of integration, coordination and control should be developed. Thirdly, there is need for structural changes to the key features of society such as cultural values, goals, and distribution.

Countless efforts are being made today to bring about economic change in Africa. One of the most popular ones is micro finance. Large amounts of funds are being pumped into small villages to improve food production, crop yields, and healthy living. What such interventions lack though is the facilitation of structural adjustments which must go with any financial or moral support. There is need to create inter-village linkages to foster productivity, differentiation and specialization. The economy needs to be looked at as a sum-total of individual specialized units. Eeconomic interventions should put the responsibility of, and resources for, development into the hands of villagers who manage their resources through collective responsibility. In order to create wealth, technical expertise using existing structural/cultural arrangements must be strengthenedThere is need to create economic activity through providing access to external market linkages between neighboring villages.Fostering cross-village communication by expanding general social norms, and creating functional and responsible democratic associations could be an added advantage as well.

French Electronic Music

Justice, a French electronic music duo consisting of two friends, Gaspard and Xavier, warms up the crowd on a chilly French evening. French being my fifth language, I can hardly put two words together to understand what in the world these two are singing about. I don’t care as much for French music any ways as I do for French poetry. On this warm western evening though, watching Justice from my SONY VGN, I know I should not be dreaming in French; unless, of course, I am Julie Delpy or Adam Goldberg in “Two Days in Paris”. Of course I can’t stand a whole two days in Paris unless my smart pumpkin has fallen off my shoulders.

Back to Justice. I am stuck with a wrong name (Justice) singing the wrong kind of music (electronic music) in a wrong language (French) from a wrong city (Paris). But the name of the band arouses an impressive imagination. The name “justice” reminds me of the unattractive sounds that we all make to the children of the world; children suffering from Malaria, Kwashiorkor, HIV/AIDS; children from war-ton countries striving to keep their skin on their bones. We sound like a French electronic music band when we kneel down beside our beds and say the Lord’s prayer, wishing well those far away, as if they are too far to be touched. There is French electronic band music in each and every one of us. It sounds unpleasant to the hungry and sick listeners. And we love to play our depressing electronic music. We play it from the pulpits, in our political speeches, in our leftovers tossed in collection baskets with everlasting noises. We play too much French electronic music we have lost touch with real music- real lyrics from the classics of love and the country ballads of tenderheartedness.

There is a song in each and every one of us. That song is calm, kind, tenderhearted, compassionate, and caring. It’s the song of humanity. The peaceful sound of “I will do something to end the suffering of the world”.