Ehiedu Iweriebor, Hunters College, New York:

Africa's Transformative Development:The Irrelevance of the World Bank and the Concert of Imperialism

The creation of material prosperity in Africa will depend exclusively on the determined and sustained efforts of liberated Africans who are able to envision a free and self-directed Africa. This new liberatory coalition will be responsible for fashioning the new liberatory ideology and strategy for Africa's third wave of nationalism and national and continental liberation struggles. This is the struggle for self-actuated national and continental transformation from poverty and subservience to prosperity, power and freedom.     This new struggle is based on the fact that between 20 and 30 years after independence, following in the failure of African leaders to build the foundations of economic independence and prosperity, Africa fell into debt slavery. This gave the Western concert of imperialism: the World Bank, the IMF, the London Club and the Paris Club, the unique opportunity to establish hegemony and economic control over Africa from the late 1970s. Today, Africa is little more than a recolonised continent of the concert of imperialism. This, of course, was accomplished with the full complicity and collaboration of contemporary African leadership who individually and collectively demonstrated servility, slavishness, absolute lack of faith in Africans, developmental incapacity and preference for external ideological and programmatic direction by their white masters. That is why Africa is where it is today.    It is not surprising then, that it is not African Union or any effective and credible African leader or group of leaders who are leading the movement for the eradication of poverty in Africa and Africa's technological self-equipment for self-transformation and prosperity generation.

     Instead, today the campaign for the eradication of poverty in Africa is led by an assortment of Western forces which are ideologically and practically committed against Africa's self-direction and development. Hence we have the World Bank - Africa's contemporary primary colonial master whose policies contributed to Africa's present sorry state; Tony Blair, the leader of Britain, the once expansive but now shrunken imperialist power,who is desperate to recover some global role for the shrunken Britain; British and other Western musicians as well as Western NGOs and other assorted practitioners of western colonial humanitarianism, now in the fore-front of the campaign for the "eradication" of poverty in Africa.

    But any elementary fidelity to the course of national transformation - past and present - makes it quite clear that it is only through the concerted and relentless ideological, organizational, technological and economic efforts of a people that they can raise their societies from poverty to prosperity. There is simply no other way. To assume or expect that any external power, country and agency will genuinely contribute to Africa's freedom from poverty is to engage in self-delusion. The way forward therefore is to understand the World Bank and its president for what they are. Organizationally and ideologically, they are determined obstacles to and opponents of African freedom and self-development and a happy imperial power promoting destructive policies in Africa that are intended to maintain Africa in conditions of  permanent poverty, servitude and disempowerment. In short, the internal and external forces of African poverty and subservience have to become the targets of practical marginalization and ideological dimunition by the new African liberation movement that has to begin to constitute itself and propagate a new vision and praxis of African freedom, self-development and self-created prosperity.