Today all over Africa, the question that still lingers in the mental faculties of people in our four corner rooms, schools, workplaces, farms, among others is whether our dear African continent is indeed independent?

But I shudder to think that, AFRICA our beloved continent is still colonized under the whims and caprices of the West.

I believe by now we would remember one of Africa’s great sons Dr. Kwame Nkrumah if we are to allude to what he termed neo-colonialism which dominates our system today. Neo-colonialism is a political economic system which significantly influences the development of the third world countries. A system that invariably works in favor of the west, because it perpetuates the economic dependence of the developing countries. Nkrumah literally bemoaned the underdevelopment of Africa in the context of its vast natural resources.

According to Walter Rodney, underdevelopment is a paradox. This means those countries bless with natural resources and are expected to be developed are not and those countries without anything are rather developed. He argues that the only solution to developing countries predicaments is a complete break with the current system which is responsible for their past and present conditions.

To Gunder Frank, there is an inverse relationship between developed and developing countries in that the more the advanced countries develop the more the third world under develop. Thus, development somewhere generates underdevelopment elsewhere.

To Us Pan-Africanists, the interest of the West is to keep the third world backward as an indispensable hinterland to provide the West with raw materials and opportunities to extract further economic surplus.

In general, all these scholars’ advocate for the third world to delink or disassociate itself from the West by severing the umbilical cord that binds them. China and Japan are developed as a result of their separation from the West and the utilization of their internal resources, structures and institutions to develop.

As Julius Nyerere, former Tanzanian President rightly puts it; they (the West) will always prescribe bitter pills like quinine for as to swallow. It is time for AFRICA to liberate itself once again from this new era of neo-colonialism.

If the African is capable of managing his own affairs, the likes of Kwame Nkrumah and Moamar Al-Gadafi would still have been alive. But unfortunately enough they have been plucked like green lives. The least we talk of our numerous African leaders dying of cancer the better.

Do not get it twisted, in order not to continuously serve as hewers of wood, drawers of water, tillers of land, and of course as cursed to be beasts of burden we need to stand on principles, the philosophy of what can be but not what has been. Do we agree that our leaders have lost the locust then, we need to change our minds, our attitudes; AFRICANS MUST UNITE AGAINST THE WORSE OF THE WEST.

Hon. PETER WORLASI ADANU CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY