The Problems of Nation Building in Africa Since 1945: An Interpretive and Analytical Perspective of Ali Mazrui’s Four-Fold Conception

Abstract

In the search for nation-building strategies and development alternatives, Africa particularly has fared badly and the circumstances and conditions of the continent and its people have been despondent and tragic. Thus, the African states and its leadership have failed at various stages to lay the fundamental basis for its people’s survival, prosperity and human advancement. This has been the result of leadership deficit in identifying and diagnosing the African condition. It is this development that has formed the subject-matter and focus of the paper. The paper’s findings reveal that identifying the major problems of Africa in order to find lasting solutions has been what seem an unending intellectual debate and discourse among scholars, policy makers, analysts, commentators and various interest groups and research organizations in the western world,
Africa and Asia. The paper advances the position that the leadership of African states must redouble efforts in the period of growing democratization to build orderly, stable and prosperous societies that could sustain the great promise of democracy and good governance. Considered through the historical research method, multidisciplinary approach, positivist and critical social science, and theoretical perspectives on the modern state, this paper also used secondary sources to realize the objectives of its focus. It has demonstrated that this knowledge of postcolonial African predicaments will spur the leadership towards reforms in
public policy, identification of the specific needs of human social development, and inter and intra-African cooperation for growth, stability and progress.