Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaften und öffentliche Angelegenheiten
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The Crisis of Underdevelopment in Sub-Saharan Africa: Multi-dimensional Perspectives

Augustine AO

This paper compliments the literature of underdevelopment in Sub-Saharan Africa. Besides adopting the qualitative method, the paper hinges on Modernization Theory, the Dependency Theory and the Center-Periphery Theory. There are divergent perspectives on the crisis of  underdevelopment in the Third World. Plausible as these theories may appear, they seem not to have taken into account the contemporary factors responsible for underdevelopments in post-colonial Africa; they failed to explore the endogenous causatives of African underdevelopment. That is where this paper departs, by attempting a multi-lineal perspective to the underdevelopment discourse in Sub Saharan Africa. This paper concludes that the orientation of the political leadership in Sub-Saharan Africa is incompatible with peace and development; endogenously, the values they stress and the governance priorities they pursue impede development. As a way forward, African political leaders must reconceptualize their notions of leadership anthropocentrically to bring the people to the policy agenda of governance (the region’s greatest resource is its people).