+44 330 818 7254Szumbah Mwanaongoro and Redempta A. J. Munyendo
To catch up with the rest of the world in economic development, African countries must be focused on human capital development and transformation of their sluggishly growing economies through industrialization. The obtaining situation is that most African economies are predominantly super markets for imported goods and services. On the other hand, from the agricultural sector perspective, African economies are largely ‘peasant economies.’ However, the latter is commonly regarded as the backbone of such economies. The prevailing situation has occasioned non-growth economies, growing unemployment, and related social woes, especially among the youth. African cultures have what the researcher calls common denominators which cut across tribal lines. These can be synthesized and harmonized into acceptable national values geared towards fostering cultural homogeneity, human interrelationships, nationalism, and pan-africanism. Noticeably in every African country some tribes/groups of people are relatively more developed socially and educationally as evidenced by their predominance in the economic and political scene. On the other hand, the majority of other tribes/groups are held back by various factors like poor leadership, wide-spread corruption, conflicts and their own cultures which tend to condition them to the unchanging past. This has intensified the incidences of poverty, ignorance, and disease. To overcome the above scenario requires transformative leadership, deliberate government policy measures, and innovative management practices/strategies at all levels of national governance spectrum. This has to be within the framework of what the researcher has called a new model on: National Humankind Conscience and Principles for Responsible/Accountable Social Behaviour. The issue is, why this model or formulation? Its rationale lies in the distortion of the original African Cultural values by foreign colonizers and successive postindependence rulers for political/administrative and survival expediency. This has led the majority of people especially the youth into a state of “anomie”, people without behavioural standards and “alienation”, people removed from the rest of society. This situation has been prevalent in most African countries since political independence about 50 years ago. Simply put, the lack of improved moral/ethical infrastructure from childhood to adulthood in African countries has remained a missing link in Africa’s development equation since political independence. Hence, the purpose of the study aimed at filling in the knowledge gap.
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