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by Emmanuel O. Onuegbe (Author)
This book is about Africa's opportunity to feed and fend for herself. It is not true that opportunity only knocks but once. What is true is that it is not good to botch opportunity's first knock and then go praying for a repeat encounter. The second knock may never happen. Or, it might: following her independence from colonialists, Africa saw her first opportunity at technology diffusion that would create the needed skills for industrial expansion, but that opportunity got squandered amidst ethnic conflicts, corruption, despotism, balkanization, and the apathy of a royalty-oriented elite; today a convergence of pleasant bounties presents a new opportunity for Africa to extricate herself from poverty's straight jacket. This book represents the clarion call by a single witness that the time is now. This book is asking for more witnesses. The author feels the surge of excitement that accompanies the emergence (from isolation or poverty) of communities that were once someone else's colony or backwater. In America, following the end of the war of 1812 and a period of industrial progress, external critics and chroniclers such as De Toqueville, Ms. Trollope, and Charles Dickens came to America to observe and add their voices to America's new-found upward mobility. Britain's consul to Japan, Alcock, predicted that the Japanese were such quick studies at everything technological that it would be impossible to stop them from attaining the ranks of world powers before China. The Japanese did just that. They repeated the performance after World War II, a war that left them destitute and poorer than most African communities at the time. China is on the same trajectory: In 1976, The Economist predicted that industry would go East by the end of that millenium. That has happened as an entire supply chain for electronics manufacturing has moved to China and South-east Asia. Similar post-independence predictions for Africa did not come true. In any case, the postman has arrived once again in Africa with the good news: one more opportunity. This time, natural resource abundance and the firming of commodity prices are bringing needed cash to poor countries like Mozambique, Angola, Namibia, Ghana, Uganda, Guinea, and a host of others. This book digs back to what made America and Japan great. We examine their industrial policies and skill acquisition methods and compare those to the utopia that everyone likes to peddle these days. One aspect of the utopia is the suggestion that all Africa needs is development - which will supposedly arrive as soon as Africans use the cash from commodities to purchase all the right consumer and capital goods and infrastructure from others. They say to forget the so-called local content and to forget lengthy training of the natives; the external technology sellers only need "free trade zones" and "build, operate, transfer" projects. How did America and Japan attain their own utopia - assuming there is such a thing? With greater introspection one asks how ancient African communities like Egypt, Haya, Carthage, Axum, Nok...became technology bastions of their time. These were prosperous communities. A combination of lessons learned - from both ancient and modern prosperous communities - may not solve all of Africa's problems, but they help distill an approach that will make Africa rich by 2030. The goal of this book is to motivate such a conversation and the drive toward a common goal of eliminating Africa's poverty. While technology is not everything, it is the crucial tool for poverty eradication. Emmanuel Onuegbe
