Regionalism in Africa: A Short Study of the Record

With the end of the 1980s as well as the third decade of the post-colonial era in view, the contours of the African predicament are not hard to decipher. The facts and figures on high rates of population growth, urbanization, unand underemployment, inflation, debt servicing and interest payments, and low levels of food supply, productivity, research and development, and foreign exchange are, by now, quite familiar. Environmental vicissitudes desertification, soil runoffs, silting, and denudation of forest belts cast a long shadow over an already gloomy landscape. The political horizon neo-patrimonialism and personal rule, tenuous institutional and administrative capacity, short-term quick fixes ranging from military putschs and socialism by decree to the desperation of ubiquitous stabilization programmes is no less depressing. The viability of the region's largely undiversified economies based on one or more commodities whqfce terms of trade have shown a consistent tendency to decline is doubtful. As the region's disappointing performance continues to give cause for concern, descriptions of its precarious state and predictions couched in such terms as a 'paralysis of multiple debilitating crises' cannot be simply dismissed as mere hyperbole.1 We cannot ignore, however, the pervasiveness of ideological