Servicing debt 

The gap, disconnecting Africa's resources from African citizens, occurs when state revenue is diverted to service odious debt, draining over $560 billion each year from developing nations, according to the Jubilee Debt Campaign, coupled with ill-designed structural adjustment policies imposed by the same multilateral creditors that have shaped the "development model" for non-Western nations.

One such policy can be evidenced in the impact of liberalization on Ghana's poultry industry where the UN Food and Agricultural Organization reported more than 400,000 poultry farmers were forced to watch, as over a period of two decades, "dumped" goods artificially flooded Ghana's economy, catalyzing a loss of market share for local farmers from 95 percent (1992) to less than 11 percent (2001). The country remained a primary recipient of the European Union's heavily subsidized poultry industry, receiving almost one-third of exports, estimated at 26,000 tons by 2003, nearly doubling to 40,000 the following year. But a few weeks after the Ghanaian Parliament passed a law raising tariffs by a further 20 percent to slow "dumping," the IMF intervened, stating that higher tariffs would hurt Ghana's "poverty reduction program."

In that same year, major EU "poultry" multinationals were subsidized to the tune of 43 billion euros annually. Despite the fact that the IMF overruled the country's democratic law, Ghana's raised tariffs were not actually in violation of the country's commitment to the WTO agreement on agriculture tariffs, allowing for Ghana to raise tariffs to 90 percent.

According to a report by Christian Aid (2004), "tariffs would need to be 80 percent, four times their current level" for Ghanaian farmers to compete with dumped poultry. Though Judge Ivy N Ashing-Yakubu subsequently ruled in favor of the farmers - many of them family units, parliament would quickly void the Act a few days later.

The process of liberalization, costing the continent just under $300 billion during the past two decades, through, for instance, eliminating trade taxes generating some 30-50 percent of developing nations' budget, has come at a heavy price. The process began in the 1970s when African nations - having achieved political liberation, were brought back into the folds of former colonialists via the voting shares of creditor institutions such as the World Bank and IMF.

Artificial poverty 

Paradoxically, at the time Africa experienced a 10 percent incidence of poverty. These days, the system of aid dependence, diminishing the sovereignty of African governments as well as the political capital of citizens through domestic taxable industries, has manufactured a state of artificial poverty. As Anuradha Mittal, Co-Director of the Institute for Food and Development Policy, said, "Kenya, which had been self-sufficient until the 1980s, now imports 80 percent of its food, while 80 percent of its exports are accounted for by agriculture."

Aid and debt repayment has, through distorted framing of the continent as a "poverty project," also crucially divested higher education from priority status - the product of a 1980 World Bank policy, declaring universities did not yield high rates of return in Africa, therefore donors should not finance such institutions.

The World Bank reports that presently, the value of social and human capital contributes 80 percent to the "wealth" of high-income countries, estimated at $353,339 per capita, while for low-income countries the figure was just $4,434 per capita, implying the low worth of human resources caused by lack of investment in state services. Thus, while the youth constitute over one-third of Africa's working population, limited opportunities, such as lack of infrastructure and transport to schools, limited access to secondary and tertiary education, few apprenticeships and skills trainings opportunities and collapsing domestic sectors, have undermined individual and social development - and in the process undermine Africa's vast potential. The International Organization for Migration estimates that brain drain from Africa costs the continent $4 billion annually via 150,000 foreign professionals.

Ironically, it is not foreign investors but the "African Diaspora" that has been recognized by the IMF as the single largest source of "investors" in Africa through remittances. The UN revealed however that an African professional working in the United States contributes about $150,000 to the U.S. economy, 40 times more than remittances to Africa. Meanwhile, the continent's own "informal" economy holds the equivalent of almost half the continent's GDP (43 percent - 2003).

The nature of the informal economy expansion is the deliberate product of resource-dependent economies unable and oftentimes, as in many rent-seeking states, unwilling to "negotiate" with citizens capable of threatening usurped political power.

"A young lady summed it up best for me when she said Kenya's current draft constitution may be really good on paper but it cannot help the youth in their everyday lives because access remains denied," said Waris.