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Sarah Colegrove

SOC 350

10/16/2012

Ayittey: Internal Explanation

The antidevelopment environment that prevails in most African countries is

characterized by political tyranny, instability, chaos, senseless civil wars, horrible carnage,

corruption, and capital flight. (p. 32) A variety of individuals have tried to understand and

explain what has occurred in Africa that has kept many of the nations within Africa from

developing. Most blame external factors but others like George Ayittey take an internal view of

why there is poverty, oppression, and underdevelopment in Africa.

Africa has become the lost continent. While Africa is a very large continent with not only

a lot of people but also with a wide variety of natural resources, it is also a place where disease,

poverty, and corruption are present throughout the continent. It has become lost between the

competing sectorsthe traditional and the modern. Most of Africas problems emanate from its

modern sector. They spill over onto the traditional, causing disruptions and dislocations and

claiming innocent victims. (p. 14)

Africa faces what Ayittey calls the vampire state which is the cause of many of the

problems that Africa faces. What keeps Africans poor is their powerlessness to rid themselves

of predatory governments or force existing ones to adopt the right politics in a peaceful

waythose highly educated Africanswho ought to be the watchdogs have themselves joined

the official gangsters and rodents. (p. 21)This vampire state, where Government as an entity

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is totally divorced form the people, perceived by those running it as a vehicle not to serve but to

fleece the people. (p. 150) Nations who have been termed as vampire states, such as Equatorial

Guinea, are having the life sucked out of the nation, but such means as allowing the people to

starve or even violence by the government against the population stemming from the leaders.

These predatory and vampiric nations have allowed corruption, embezzlement, capital flight, and

repression to occur within the nation.

The leaders in Africa are functionally illiterate according to Ayittey. While many of the

leaders and elites in the various African nations have been educated. However, many of the elites

are not able to take the ideas they have read about and turn them into functional practices. They

do not know how to think critically nor creatively. They struggle to take what they have learned

in the classroom and adapt it to the culture, practices, and landscape of the people within the

nation.

The West has played a role in all of this and has actually made Africas problems worse.

Ayittey argues that the West needs to leave Africa to its own devices. The continued interference

and help has created more problems than would be present ifthey did not interfere. The IMF

and World Bank have given funds to these countries but the funds do not address the issues.

Ayittey says that they are the wrong doctors to fix the problem as they have not only been

described as Trojan horses for the penetration of Western capitalism into Africa (p. 252) but

also because the World Bank and IMF have suffered from the same corruption and overly large

bureaucracies that they accused the African countries of having.

Ayittey offers a solution to Africa and at the core of his argument are intellectuals. First,

he believes that the West needs to stop interfering in Africa. Second, intellectualsleaders and

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