This book reflects on Africa’s previous experiences with alternative paradigms to structural adjustment and explores their implementation in the 21st century. The stated intention is to “learn from the past in order to chart viable new policy directions for the future, including critically assessing the prospects for the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) measuring up to the challenges involved.”

The book takes a critical look at broad issues such as external influences on corporate governance, development in the context of globalisation, and the African path to sustainable human development. It also studies some specific issues such as the role of women in policy-making and barriers to participation, water and sanitation, poverty, HIV and AIDS.

This series of essays by scholars primarily from west and east Africa focuses on mobilisation for implementation of indigenous alternative paradigms, governance and development, obstacles to governance and development, and regionalism and development.

The introductory analysis entitled “Forty years of development illusions” by Professor Mbaya Kankwenda, says the three guiding principles for African development should be: internalisation of the accumulation base; enlargement of the social base of development; and peace and political stability.

He says these should constitute the base of three main development objectives of the continent in the 21st century namely: the building of peace and political and social stability; a sustained, endogenous and equitable economic growth; and improvement of human wellbeing and ending of human poverty.

Some of the challenges he identifies are: control of population growth, good governance and democratisation in the idiom of development socialisation rather than structural adjustment; the development of an African tradition of excellence in science and technology; and the successful management of environmental resources.

In an Epilogue on NEPAD, the book questions whether it is “a Vision, a Programme or a Strategy”, and whether it is created around the same basic principles as the Lagos Plan of Action (1980). The book concludes with a critical analysis of its chances for success.

The conclusion stresses collective self-reliance and says that industrial development and manufacturing should be given higher priority through the urgent need to integrate Africa’s production structures and its markets.

The book also concludes that there should be more linkages between NEPAD’s five priority areas in the productive sector (infrastructure, energy, education, health and agriculture), and that the plan should be more concerned with wealth creation on a sustainable basis rather than on attracting foreign investment.

The occasion for the essays is to pay tribute to one of Africa’s most eminent economists, Professor Adebayo Adedeji, on his 70th birthday. Former Executive Secretary for the Economic Commission on Africa and UN Under Secretary General as well as a distinguished scholar and author, Adedeji is best known for his pioneering work in developing the African Alternative Framework to Structural Adjustment.

The book has become a commemoration also of the work of the late Professor Bade Onimode of Ibadan University in Nigeria, a noted author on African economic development issues, who died before this book could be published. ?

African Development and Governance Strategies in the 21st Century: Essays in honour of Adebayo Adedeji at Seventy, by Bade Onimode et al, published by ZED Press in collabora - tion with the African Centre for Development and Strategic Studies (ACDESS), 2004.