PROLOGUE

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Prologue

Throughout the period of colonialism in Africa and the 1950s and 1960s, the levels of economic development of Asian countries emerging from colonialism were at about the same levels as those of most sub-Saharan African countries which were equally emerging from colonial rule. Like the newly emerging states of Africa, most Asian states adopted one-party or dominant political party systems of governance to provide the political substructure and policy environment for their economic reconstruction and development. Asian states such as Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea which was emerging from Japanese occupation and cold- war aggravated civil war, India and Indonesia had one or dominant-party political systems much like Senegal, the Ivory Coast, Ghana and Mali in West Africa, the two Congo's, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Zambia in East and Central Africa. The success of the Asian states in identifying their true interest, defining their vision and objectives and effectively organizing and managing state-sponsored free-market but highly regulated and supervised economies and subjecting their policies of trade liberalization, finance capital movements and their domestic markets to national priorities within the framework of their dominant- and single- party states, lifted their people and societies within one generation from economic backwardness, inefficiency and poverty to modern industrial high- income economies. A tour around the country-side of Malaysia and the outskirts of the city-state of Singapore and South Korea, with their combination of labour- and capital-intensive industries and busy ports, fills one either with a sense of regret and despondency about the waste to which we in Africa have put our opportunities or with an optimist's foretaste of palmy days still ahead if only our African countries could, with more integrity, efficiency and ethical, transparent conduct, be more honestly and efficiently governed, with resources more judiciously and accountably managed, the geography, climate, and topography of West and Central Africa and South-East Asia falling within the same tropical equatorial belt.

If it was argued that it was the espousal of socialism that led to economic collapse of countries like Ghana, Guinea, Tanzania and Zambia then it should follow that countries like the Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Kenya and the two Congo's which espoused liberal free-market policies should have been Africa's success stories. That both central planning and free-market liberalism failed in Africa means that any search for the true causes of Africa's failure and collapse, must go beyond economic ideology. We may be once again deluding ourselves with apparent superficial causes in supposing that by abandoning dirigiste central economic planning for the liberal free-market, capitalism would bring the economic success which socialism failed to deliver, unless we address the human causes at the roots of both failures in African socialism and capitalism alike.

The Asian economic and technological successes do not cease to amaze African observers. But what many in Africa fail to appreciate in our admiration of Asia is that while even under the yoke of colonialism the Asians developed and retained their own authentic native labour-saving and efficiency-enhancing devices, our African societies abandoned their own pre-colonial discoveries and inventions. Leonard Pole of the Ghana National Museum documented evidence that the introduction of ready-made iron objects and bars of iron by Europeans led to the complete demise of iron-smelting in Ghana. These are the words of Leonard Pole: "There is an increasing amount of archeological evidence coming to light each year to demonstrate that iron-smelting was formerly practiced by blacksmiths in most parts of that area of West Africa now known as Ghana. Yet today there are no communities supporting blacksmiths in the execution of this craft. The complete demise of iron-smelting in this country has been due primarily to the introduction of ready-made iron objects and bars of iron by Europeans at the coast.

There is evidence that the local smelting of iron became unnecessary for this reason in the Cape Coast-Elmina area as early as the seventeenth century. The technique appears to have existed until the late eighteenth century in Accra region, and in parts of Western, Ashanti and Brong-Ahafo Regions until the mid- nineteenth century. In what is now Volta Region iron-smelting ceased soon after the arrival of Germans in the area in the 1880's…, the work continued as a regular feature of the economic life of the people of Upper Region until well into the twentieth century''.

It appeared as if with the advent of colonialism, dignity of labour came to mean to the African mind a dignity of subjecting one's physical energies to the oppression of the fatigue of physically crushing labor. So the budding smelting technology died.

Throughout history, various modes of information, knowledge and wisdom acquisition, preservation in permanent form, their critical appraisal and transmission from generation to generation, have always been central to the progress of civilizations and cultures. While African societies like the Akans of West Africa lost their culture of recorded literature and wisdom preservation, some of which took the form of Adinkra imagery and symbolic hieroglyphs, the Asians preserved and transmitted knowledge in their native tongues through their cultures of writing. While information and knowledge became the close arcanum of isolated sprinklings of Africans here and there, information and knowledge spread and cut across social class lines in Asia. This enabled their local elite to expand and disseminate information and knowledge in their native tongues to reach a wider spread of their common people literate in local languages while elite Africans struggled to communicate with each other in the foreign languages of their colonial masters. Even in highly anglicised India under colonialism the formally educated elite remained literate in their local languages such as Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Urdu and even in Sanskrit. This made debate of public affairs and public policy-making in Asian societies more truly public events at various levels of social interaction in contrast to Africa where debate of public affairs, conducted as it was in the language of the colonial masters, was restricted to a tiny fraction of social groups formally educated enough in that language to appear to comprehend it and sufficiently communicate in it. To the vast majority of us Africans, otherwise enlightened and wise in our native cultures, lack of understanding of the colonial master-languages even in contemporary times, reduces many of us to dumb observers and objects of social processes which only go to alienate us from public discourse and debate.

As a result of the Asian countries' resilience, adaptive localization of foreign concepts, and creative application of knowledge to their economic development, they have developed modern technological break-throughs and confident self-reliance which does not shrink from utilizing bamboo in various forms to serve as food, to make shirts, to construct durable bridges and scaffolding for constructing high-rise buildings. Many enlightened opinion leaders, politicians and economists of Africa stand bewildered by what they call the Asian miracle.

In contrast to the Asian success, the equally one-party and dominant-party systems of Senegal, the Ivory Coast, Ghana, and Nigeria under the dominant rule of the Emirs and Sultans of the North, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia and the two Congo's, have all been monumental failures which have plunged majority of their people into conditions of poverty and deprivation worse than under colonialism. The Ivory Coast once a model of rising free enterprise buoyancy of West Africa to emulate, now stands as a sad tragedy; Ghana, once the beacon of African pride, is now, as we write, an emaciated, highly indebted tramp of a nation, unable to manage any aspect of governance such as public services and utilities without foreign human resources and budgetary subsidies, thanks to self-inflicted political wounds, unable to find its economic bearing, touring the globe for hand-outs from international charities and well-wishers, or waiting for debt- forgiveness by foreign creditors and suppliers, and pleading for foreign assistance before she could get potable water and vaccine for children and gratefully serving as the refuse-dump or flea markets for sale of North American and European discarded goods ranging from men's and women's used underwear, men's suits, shirts, socks, shoes to discarded European and Asian motor vehicles and throw-away parts. American and European used cloths which Ghanaians buy with precious money, Asian governments like Nepal reject when they are offered free in times of national disaster.

Once the refreshing intellectual home of active and retired European, Asian, American, Russian Soviet, and Eastern European poets, philosophers, literary men and women, scientists, jurists, musicians, singers and boxers like Cassius Clay alias Mohamed Ali, and of course, the home of inspiration of freedom fighters and American human rights movement leaders too many and too famous to be named individually, except, of course, Ernesto Che Guevarra and the Madiba himself, Nelson Mandella, Ghana now serves with the Gambia, Senegal, and Nigeria as homes for American and European rehabilitated ex-convicts, drug pushers and drug addicts resettled as flea-markets hawkers. Nigeria, always a country of naturally outspoken, ebullient, exuberant people full of ready contentment in minding their own business and yet ready to lend a helping hand to vulnerable people in their midst who risked being pushed around for not being Nigerians, vocal and bellicose in appearance and yet accommodating and readily at peace with themselves, Nigeria has become, like Ghana, a metaphor for mismanagement and waste of abundance, corruption, graft and profligacy. The two countries, Ghana and Nigeria, appear always on the precipice of crises, veritable tinder-boxes of religious, political and ethnic animosity, ready to explode, thanks to a perverse understanding of liberal democracy which translates in practice as mere formal electoral processes, bigotry, chauvinism and neo-feudal chieftainship and lordship.

In reaction to the dismal picture of failure, poverty, disease, squalor, famine, lawlessness and civil disorder in many parts of Africa, in contrast to peace, discipline, order and stability, prosperity in growth and progress, in Asia, many African leaders and politicy-makers now purport to design for African states models of governance and economic management paradigms claimed to be based on what is perceived correctly or wrongly as salient political foundations, economic formulae and ingredients and systemic structures which were thought to have produced the Asian successes. In Ghana, no discourse on good governance, economic reconstruction and development takes place without copious references to Singapore, Malaysia and South Korea. While Malaysia serves as source of inspiration for Ghanaians on how to develop into modern industries the oil-palm and rubber both of which Malaysia obtained and learned how to cultivate and pollinate from Ghana, South Korea serves as the model of modern technological development in an environment of spiritual revivalism which combines Christianity with oriental superstition, spirituality and psychology for that material success and its enjoyment in the here-and-now, and assures of salvation in the here-after. India provides a model for a blue-print for Ghana's information and communication technological development.

The textile and garment industries of India, Bangladesh and Vietnam are held out as models for African countries which want a share in North American markets under Bill Clinton's African Growth and Opportunity Act. While aspiring peanut roasters and cassava growers are on pilgrimage to Thailand, rice growers are in Vietnam, manufacturers and exporters are exhorted to look to the tiny island city-state of Singapore which, with hardly any natural resource except their human minds, performs the intermediating functions of trading all types of commodities and raw materials which it does not produce, and transshipping more goods than are manufactured on its soil in exchange for handsome earnings. In consequence of which Singapore has a share of world trade much higher than that of the entire sub-saharan Africa excluding South Africa.

For errors to avoid, African leaders are advised to study the political disasters of Cambodia and Burma that is Myamar and study I.M.F and World Bank mistakes and fiascoes in the Philippines and Thailand. As to confidence-building and self-reliance, African rulers and policy- makers are urged, the examples of Kwame Nkrumah and Acheampong of Ghana notwithstanding, to turn to Malaysia and South Korea for examples of success that may be achieved by boldly defying and resisting I.M.F and World Bank blandishments to economically hard-pressed nations of easy short-term financial solutions which in the long-term lead to the making of sclerosised strait-jacket raw material exporting economies within the global economic system and entrenching their position as primary raw materials producers in the entire global economic and industrial value chain.

It seems as if in all this, our African rulers and state decision-makers, out of penury of ideas and originality, have now to imitate Asian models, having been disappointed by the European and American blue prints. But one basic truism that is overlooked in the post-Cold War well-meaning neo-liberal imitative blue-prints is the self-evident fact that no good seed germinates and thrives in poor soil. While foreign success-strategies are canvassed, studied, analyzed and adapted for adoption, our anti-developmental cultural weaknesses, our human resource strengths and weaknesses, the true foundation for success, are either glossed over or addressed only marginally.

The search for solutions to our woes in Africa has ignored a trite fact that while competent people can make success out of poorly conceived plans, no perfect plan can ever succeed in the hands of incompetent persons. We spend much time counting the natural resources Africa is blessed with; but we do not give sufficient thought to the decisive natural resource that is the mind and the intellectual exertion necessary to transform all other resources into products which would enhance the quality of our lives. We have no coherent, sustainable plans for cultivating and adding value to our minds which constitute the ignition keys to true development.

These are grievous omissions. Our aim in this book is to contribute towards redressing the lacunae. While the burden of the book may on face value be described superficially as anatomy of failure, more than that, the argument underlying, animating and motivating the book is that a good understanding of our failures and of their causes as primarily emanating from ourselves, should wake us up to strengthen our internal capacities for success.

The starting-point, we argue, for a search for enduring solutions to our problems is a pathological study of the morass of domestic contradictions which often frustrate our best endeavors. Candid bullet-biting admission of our failures with no indulgence in cover-up, denials and excuses, understanding why we fail and learning from the failures will certainly take us a step closer to the road to success. For failure is never final until the final moment when we stop trying. Every available moment in human life, à fortiori, in the greater longevity of societies and states, is an opportunity for building success so long as we steadfastly hold on to our determination to succeed and we see every failed attempt as a step closer to success. Thus undaunted by failure, we keep on trying as we gather courage and tenacity to explore initiatives which may not readily appear to hold any sure guarantee for success.

The book is therefore animated by the proposition that it is from the careful study of the numerous, and sometimes quite debilitating, failures and errors which we make that we learn to acquire the perseverance which eventually leads to success.

Providing sound footings for that study requires a clear understanding of

what has been producing the African failure. This in turn calls for an equally good understanding of what is meant by the development which we claim to seek. Development is a concept many of us assume we understand and appreciate when all along we only take products of development as development or identify physical tools and instrumentalities as development in the way we identify policemen as the police, court buildings as law courts, school buildings as schools, governments as governance and states, or territories as states. Thus sky-scrapers and dizzying high-rise apartments, plate-glass shops and filthy offices surrounded by filth and squalor, manufactured goods of all kinds, imported processed foods and decaying raw chicken-backs on sale in grubby, stinking, garbage-filled road-side markets, state of the art air-conditioned cars rampaging on dusty, pot-holed roads, and asphalted boulevards alongside buffaloes, cows, sheep and goats, all these products and side-effects have been taken to constitute development or identified as veritable indisputable hall-marks of development. In West Africa, politicians, their spokesmen and ill-informed traditional rulers declare their communities to be having their share of, and thereby participating in, development when they have abundantly on sale for consumption by their citizens fat-filled pork-belly, meat off-cut, offal and turkey-tail fried in deodorized, bleached palm-kernel oil, unmindful of the health hazards. We delude ourselves we are developing when all we do is to consume imported products of development. Thus in the discourse of politicians and policy-makers, the development process is often approached as if development were an objective tangible product which could be sold and bought with money and installed for enjoyment by backward people who thereupon attain development; or as if development were a nirvana of materialism attained by cultivating and satisfying an appetite for imported products of modern technology in a social environment of constant confrontation between privileged economic and professional elite groups living in electrically charged razor-wire barricaded prison-style homes and communities on one hand and deprived frustrated groups to whom armed robbery is a legitimate means of income distribution. When they have confidence in you, armed robbers will tell you all they are doing is to have the means to enjoy what the rich, some of them their former schoolmates, are enjoying.

We pierce through misleading veils and distinguish between two definitions and models of development. The first concept and its model of development we define as a constant and continuing process of progressive education of the mind, consciousness and capacities of a people to apprehend and actualize purposive higher levels of intellectual, moral, spiritual and material refinement, modernization, productive efficiency and quality of life in well-being.

Development thus defined and actualized is made to endure as a constantly on- going social process by means as much as possible of ethically and environmentally friendly and functionally efficient devices, structures and sustainable human-need oriented procedures for attaining those higher levels. This model of development we categorise as authentic, genuine or true development. In this model, the mind applies itself on itself and other minds in an exercise of pure reason, epistemology, philosophical and metaphysical speculation and analysis to enhance the cognitive capacities of individuals and whole communities and to stimulate in them motivation to assimilate and adapt to more ethical, efficient and more desirable goals and ways of responding to challenges, solving political problems and doing things.

In the application of this model the mind applies itself to theorization, to ideas and to matter in a practical intellectual exertion to discover and evolve new laws and principles and advance on existing principles of nature, science and technology, which enable people to elevate themselves and the quality of their living conditions and their lives to higher, more desirable and satisfactory levels of existence. By the criterion of this defination the advanced economically and technologically developed industrial societies, of Europe and North America are in constant flux of development. They are developing even more actively and faster than we, the so-called developing societies, are doing, though we are also chalking up some culturally spectacular successes. Thus, instead of squatting in muddy kraals to suck milk directly from under cows, as we used to, now from the comforts of our kitchens and sitting rooms or lounges we drink the same milk, now sanitized, from well packaged aesthetically attractive hygienically handled containers which show hardly any affinity with the raw material whether clay, sand, pulp or crude oil from which they were manufactured. Thus while previously we consumed African "wagashi" as a composite product of solidified milk, now we ourselves differentiate and isolate its various components as functions of the practical application of our minds through systematized knowledge to matter, and consume the same wagashi now differentiated as cream, butter, cheese, yoghurt or skimmed milk.

Our definition of development brings out the essence of development as (i) a constantly on-going process of applying mind to matter for progressive understanding of nature and laws showing how nature works and (2) using the resultant understanding, classified as knowledge, to make products and devise ways which enhance efficiency in fields of endeavor so as to improve and uplift the quality of work and life of as many people as possible.

The development process in England during the Industrial Revolution, with its dehumanizing excesses as a cost notwithstanding, was sufficiently captured by the early nineteenth-century poet John Keats in his poem, The Fall of Hyperion, in his words ''on our heels a fresh perfection treads''. Thus wind-mills, sail and steam-traction, as knowledge-driven devices spectacular in their days, gave way to more efficient mechanized and electrical modes of traction and manufacturing to improve upon productivity and raise production in quantity and quality for more profits, In the way Isaac Singer's invention, the sewing machine, did the work of several persons, so our contemporary age of instant global information and communication technology may be superseded by higher efficiencies which may render our technologies obsolete. Contrary to much erroneous assumptions and thinking in African planning, development is, therefore, not an end, or goal, or status to attain or a product which can be acquired. It is a never-ending process marked by various stages or degrees which are erroneously perceived in backward societies as status.

In our definition and model of development as progressive and ethical application of mind to matter for efficiency and quality, finance capital or money is itself a materialized abstraction of the mind which symbolizes a conceptual and material unit or value by which every sovereign society or state quantifies the return on, or outcome of, or proceeds derived from, the application of mind and physical energy to matter for reward. Money thus is basically a concept or a means or unit for quantifying and valuing, storing and transferring the outcome of, or reward derived from, one's intellectual and physical exertions. So the price at which a man sells or exchanges his energies, physical or mental, symbolized or encapsulated in his labour, goods, products, property and services, signifies fundamentally the value of the quantified outcome of the mental or physical exertions of other people, which he is willing to accept in a form denominated as money, in exchange for the outcome of his own exertions symbolized or expressed in his goods and services or in his labour.

While the primitive man counted his wealth in primary terms such as the number wives, children, farms, cattle and harvest which resulted from his exertions, the developed or civilized man counts his wealth in the money-value of his farms, harvest, cattle, enterprises, stocks and shares, the outcome of his physical and intellectual exertions. On this basic and this fundamental definition of money, emotive stimuli such as ethical values, greed, envy, markets, supply and demand, ego and status, power, domination and control, ambition, manipulation and pressure, exert various degrees of influence and impact on the organization of production, productivity and the distribution and exchange of goods and services and modes of appropriation of profits and rewards, to give to money its modern complex definitions.

Of course, people sometimes become instantly wealthy without exertion; but more often and on the whole, the wealth of individuals, groups, communities and societies, and nations, is the aggregate outcome of their Individual or group intellectual and physical exertions, except slave and exploitative societies where slave-owners and exploiters made wealth out of the exertions of slaves and the exploited. The money-and wealth-creating implications of the definition and model of development raise issues of autonomy and dependence for peoples who have not long ago emerged from colonial domination. Admitting that the aggregate value of goods and services and resultant wealth produced by a people are largely the outcome of their intellectual and physical exertions, it follows that the person who has the capacity to determine the price or value he places on what other persons produce has control over those persons and their development through the control which he has over their exertions.

Brokers who determine their own purchase and sale price have no need of formalized institutions of domination, colonialism and slavery to maintain economic power over their customers. In fact such institutions may only create for them charges, alimentary obligations and moral dilemmas. On the basis of this, once it is accepted that every added value is the outcome of somebody's intellectual or physical exertion, it would follow that to situate oneself in a position where one is able to wield the power, directly or subtly through ostensibly consensual legal means, to determine and control the rules governing the movement and exchange of labour, finance, goods and services, is to assure to oneself a dominant position over the physical and intellectual lives, exertions and output of the people whose goods and services and finances are being considered.

This renders nineteenth and twentieth-century concepts of domination and exploitation unnecessary, in both domestic and foreign transactions. Colonialism thus stands in the same relationship to twenty-first century modes of domination as the steamship would stand to modern travel. To address contemporary methods and strategies of domination and economic exploitation in terms and structures of nineteenth and twentieth century structures of domination such as colonialism, is to address an extant and palpable phenomenon in terms of dead concepts and forms in which the phenomenon once appeared.

Neo-colonialism, the scion of colonialism, is an appropriate term but for the manner in which it unprudishly exposes the phenomenon in a nakedness which its modern practitioners seek to cover with an acceptable neologism that is called globalization or neoliberalism.

Our definition of development and its model thus lead us to considerations of domination and control in the contempory globalised economy of instant information technology and genetic modification, which cannot but be radically different in form from domination and control in the age of cable telegraphy and the steamship. A firm or an individual in a distant industrial society, who holds a patent over a genetically modified seed which underdeveloped tropical farmers plant--such an individual has more control over the economic and social quality of life of the farmers more than colonial commissioners had over colonial planters and natives. Globalisation as the structural and functional response of the world's multinational political economy to the digital and biotechnological revolutions in science and technology, thus ceases to be the monopoly of giant multinational companies. Individuals like Akio Morita of Sony Corporation of Japan, and Bill Gates of Microsoft, and the Chief Executives of companies like Monsanto, Rio Tinto, Nestles, ExxonMobil and Unilever, are the modern emperors of globalization in the way Queen Victoria was the empress of the world-wide colonial empire of Britain.

Again, our definition of money raises moral philosophical questions about time, life, and existence. When rulers of African developing countries go to borrow money from the developed societies, we, like Philip of the Christian Bible, dare ask our rulers whether they understand the meaning and implications of what they are doing, beyond the obvious face-value economic transactional implications. Since money is, as we defined it, the stored outcome of exertions, capacities and value created by actualized potentialities of individuals and nations, public money encapsulates the value created by the collective exertions, labours and endeavours of people. Inasmuch as productive time spent to produce the goods and services whose value are converted into what we call money, like the primitive man's cattle in his kraal, that is the primitive man's equivalent of the civilized man's bank, productive time spent in producing the money and wealth is a portion of life and existence irretrievably lost in the production process.

Borrowing money, therefore, raises questions about the moral justification of borrowers asking lenders to place at their disposal portions of their lives, existence, energies and opportunities for leisure and pleasure foregone and transformed into money through production, distribution and exchange. On what moral platform do borrowing countries stand to question conditions which lending institutions and governments attach to such transactions? Can any condition be too onerous to fulfill in exchange for money thus defined?

For how long should lending nations continue to lend to borrowing African nations? Could the answer be for as long as is necessary, because for more than four hundred years from the 15th to the 20th Century, Europe and North America exploited the human exertions and the resources of Africa to build their nations and create wealth and leisure which liberated their minds and gave their people the economic security, leisure and independence to bring about the Reformation, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment which emancipated Europe from the barbarity of the Dark Ages and papal oppression? Questions like these transform the concept of self-reliance of nations from pedestrian and mundane levels of political slogan and economic rhetoric into a concept in moral philosophy. The definition also shows how, the mind apart, time is the most precious and very limited non-renewable natural resource which every human being, since creation, has been endowed with in equality. But as with other non- renewable natural resources, the ability to identify time as a precious but constantly diminishing natural resource and make maximum use and yields out of it, depends upon the level of enlightenment of mind and consciousness which, alas, men are not equally endowed with.

True and genuine development may also be defined as complex multi- stage, multi-dimensional combination of mental processes which often start from the faculties of spontaneous intuition moderated and tempered by sober reflection and reasoning, in an atmosphere of detached stillness of mind. In this atmosphere the mind firstly searches for, studies, apprehends and understands laws of nature in their abstract essence and how they operate, distinct from the matter and natural phenomena in which the laws manifest their actions. Secondly, the understanding and insight thus gained and the wisdom derived from understanding how the laws work,combine to give men and women the capacity to replicate and apply the abstract laws so discovered to produce refined and efficient products and facilities which are in turn applied and utilized to further enhance efficiency and, in their results, to enrich quality of life, leisure and hopefully contentment. Proper understanding of the laws of nature and how they work and interactively rejuvenate and propagate nature to make it a continually self-sustaining mutually complementary cyclical process, gives men the capacity to extract maximum benefits out of nature without disturbing the order, balance and harmony which exist in nature and on which the sustenance of all life and ecosystems depend.

In maintaining the order, balance and harmony, discernment and ethical responsibility play major roles. Problems arise when greed, irresponsibility and insensitivity set in to disturb the order, balance and harmony.

In sum true development is the application of laws of nature to matter through the medium and instrumentality of mind. This definition is as applicable to the stone- age man as it is to contemporary twenty-first century men and their cultures. The difference lies in degree. To the stone-age person, rubbing together two specially selected stones to produce fire was a satisfying feat of mental ingenuity and development to him no less than the production of electrical energy from rivers, nuclear fission, solar power, wind and tidal waves, is to modern man.

In this definition, religion, philosophy, science and technology and all inventions, various forms of governance known to man, law and order, literature, poetry, aesthetics and art, all constitute expressions and manifestations of various stages of man's road from understanding of the abstract laws which propel nature to his practical application of the laws, through his beliefs, thought and imagination, to produce what is palpable and demonstrable. Development thus comprehensively defined is enriched and its frontiers progressively extended to heights of nobility and excellence when the study and understanding of physical laws of nature and their practical application are mediated and crowned with the study, understanding and appreciation of metaphysical laws which surround and animate the universe and encompass natural laws.

Man's study and application of metaphysical laws, when used to guide the application of physical, natural laws, inject ethical values which proper understanding of metaphysical laws impart to man, into the application and uses of the material structures and facilities to which man applies the laws of nature to produce. Development which runs counter to a true metaphysical law of nature expressed as ethical norm, is development run wild; such development becomes a threat to the very survival of the human species which cannot continue to be sustained by the very nature which he abuses through his failure to allow the ethical metaphysical to guide his exploitation and use of the physical. The satisfaction of genuine need, as a law of nature, translates at the metaphysical plane, as the redress, elimination or healing of an imbalance, which ensures the sustenance and balance of vitality and fitness throughout nature in all species. But where lust manifesting as want, desire, ambition, overindulgence or greed, takes the place of genuine need and disregards nature's laws, envy, hatred and war follow.

The teachings of Jesus, the Christ, and prior to him, the teachings of the sage of Hinduism, Vyassa and then Gautama the Buddha, are fundamental metaphysical laws of nature. If men had had the enlightenment of mind to properly understand the concept of neighbour as taught by Jesus Christ two thousand years ago, and to answer the question, who is my neighbour, broadly to include all nature as neighbour of humanity, we now would have no environmental pollution, degradation and attendant problems which threaten humanity with self-destruction. In studies of nature and metaphysics, Christians are still struggling to fully understand, Jesus Christ's amplification notwithstanding, the full meaning, scope and application in human relations of the laws of cause and effect which Moses packaged to suit the level of comprehension of his Jewish followers from Egypt some four thousand years ago. To free Christians from taking responsibility for their acts, christian teaching still clings to pagan scape-goating dualist concept of satan as the source of all evil in constant opposition to the eternal goodness of God. Christian faith has jettisoned the teaching of James, the brother of Jesus, that good and evil, like hot and cold, are two ends of the same continuum, so that our evil deeds and all our succumbencies to temptations are not the works of any satan but the outcome of our own desires and intentions run wild or stretched too far.

Thus the judicious application, in human interaction and relationships, of metaphysical laws of nature leads to harmonious and well-balanced ethically friendly material development and advancement of people and their communities. It is a qualitative development which may be summarized definitionally as the union of ethically selected apparently value-free manifestations and operations of equally apparent value-free physical laws of nature with value-packed metaphysical laws of nature and the universe, within the mindset, culture and way of life of a people and their efficiency of doing things, through the medium of cultivated intelligence and thought, initiative and creativity, guided by wisdom.

The just-adverted to metaphysical law of neighbor was taught by Jesus as an eternal spiritual truth. It then existed as a Christian religious, moral and ethical rule until Lord Atkin, in 1932, after closing from church and while sitting at lunch with his wife and children, but quietly seeking to answer a question in a case in the law of Negligence, found his answer in Jesus' teaching of the neighbor principle. Lord Atkins' christian spiritual answer to a secular question has become a cardinal land-mark rule in the law of civil liability in all Common Law jurisdictions throughout the world.

Science has now discovered it as a law of nature on which the entire ecological system of Planet Earth depends. Two thousand years after Christ, it is now realised that the concept of neighbour taught by Jesus Christ is an undeniable fundamental law of being without which human existence is threatened and no human endeavor, progress and development can endure. It is a teaching which, beyond its application to humans, applies to include as neighbour to mankind, every created thing in nature which may be affected in one way or another by our conduct, the condition, interest and well-being of which we must take into account in order, as Jesus taught, to avoid doing to them what we would not want done to us and in the process to love or treat them as we would love or treat ourselves and would want others to love or treat us. In the exposition of Jesus, plants, tropical forests, rivers, seas and oceans, mangrove crabs and fishes, the air we breathe, the soil, the ant and then of course, the ozone layer, ramsar sites, and arctic glaciers, are all our neighbors whose integrity we endanger at humanity's own peril. Consciousness, operating in combination with ethics as good conscience, applies the neighbour principle inherent in metaphysical laws, which we denominate here as development ethical law, to regulate, direct, balance and guide the use by man of physical laws of nature known as science. These are, we dare suggest, considerations which discourse on post-colonial development must take into serious account to avoid errors made by our seniors-in- development, the past guiding today's planner of the future.

Post-colonial development is thus a function of entire human survival, not of Africans and Asians alone.

Physical laws of nature often appear to be amoral and value-free. They also appear to operate inexorably in accordance with their own conditions without reference to man and his interests. Ignorance of these truths breeds superstition and makes ignorant persons live on earth like they are in condemned cells or on death-row. Man's understanding of physical laws of nature and his apprehension of metaphysical laws of the universe, ignite his consciousness to levels of awareness and confidence which motivate his mind and thinking to find fulfilment and contentment, peace and rest in ennobling results he obtains from his probing of nature and the universe. This leads to better understanding of the interaction of the physical and the metaphysical laws and understanding of the economy of nature in which nothing ever gets lost or wasted. If it is accepted that our minds and the thoughts which our minds think and meditate upon are motivated, conditioned and influenced by the quality and levels of our prevailing consciousness, and that quality and levels of consciousness are determined by our individual, group and community socialization and cultural conditioning over time and space, the following deduction would follow from our definition of true and genuine development: that genuine development is first and foremost a consciousness-driven process of thought which starts, and quite often is refined and accomplished, in the mind in thought-forms before the thought-forms are actualized in concrete, material, tangible and palpable manifestations and forms in our lives and ways of doing things.

It would follow that backward societies which want to develop genuinely must commence the tasks of development by addressing the quality of their systems and processes of education. By applying the resultant education which their minds acquire, under more enlightened conditions, circumstances and inspiration, to thoughtful examination of their individual and group consciousness, they will elevate their consciousness to still higher levels of illumination and enlightenment. In all this one must bear in mind the salutary caution that sources, systems, contents, and procedures of education exercise consciousness and awareness-conditioning and mind-shaping impact on those being educated. Thus, while systems of imitative education dull the initiative and the creativity, mind, consciousness and the very cognitive capacities of the educated, providential men and women yet appear from the ranks of such groups.

Daring to break away from their accustomed conditioned channels of thinking and mental and physical drudgery, they are able to heighten and deepen their individual consciousness and that of whole communities and societies by means of knowledge gained from insight and intuition. This knowledge they obtain when rays of intuitive illumination open the eyes of their minds to apprehend new dimensions, new meaning and deeper understanding and implications of hitherto unquestioned conventional knowledge, ideas, received truths, beliefs, experience and occurrences about themselves, their environment and even about mundane objects which surround them. This makes them change the course of history as inventors, discoverers and liberators.

The illumination, knowledge, insight, and wisdom thus gained, energise and motivate their individual and group institutionalized minds to think thoughts which their minds visualize to create thought-forms which appear as if they had real material forms. They then proceed to actualize the subjective abstract thought-forms into objective material forms and into practical processes. The road from the Burning Bush through the confrontations with Pharoah, the Exodus and the Red Sea to Canaan must be travelled by every person or society who wants to move on, whether from oppression and slavery to freedom, from backwardness to modernity, or from poverty to wealth.

The objectivisation or externalization of thought-forms, in other words, the projection into matter, into structures, systems, conditions and processes, procedures and ways of doing things, of subjective mental images and thought-forms of a person, for example an artist, a poet, an inventor, liberators, engineers, surgeons or wood-carvers, or of the collective and cooperative minds and thoughts of people, are indicators of the level of development and advancement of the mind, consciousness and thought of the particular person or people. Art, sculpture and architectural works, aeroplanes, science and technology, lasers, information and communication systems, modern economies and industries, systems of governance, microbiology and biochemistry, medicine and health facilities, games, leisure and relaxation facilities and services, are in themselves not development, and do not constitute development; they are products of developed minds. They are objectivised products of advanced or developed individual or group consciousness, mind and thought-images of individuals, groups and societies. Development thus understood is an eternally on-going internalized intellectual and aesthetic condition of being which expresses and manifests first in consciousness. The mind applies thought, feelings, perception, desire and notions and visions of efficiency, of aesthetics, art and beauty to actualize the thought-object, thought-forms and processes conceived by the mind, into practical, externalized and objectivised physical and tangible devices, tools, processes, poetry, arts, crafts, music and choreography, and facilities for enriching life which the uninformed mind, incapable of apprehending concepts that lie behind forms, mistakes for development. The definition and explanation of development which, properly ethically and responsibly actualised from mind into matter and socialized, leads to efficiency, advancement and modernization of individuals and societies, takes us into realms of platonic and neoplatonic definitions of reality which cannot be pursued here.

This should not, nonetheless, mislead us to conclude that by the logic of our argument development is a mental function of elitist egg-heads living most of the time in their heads in ivory tower and secular cloisters. Although discoveries, inventions and art masterpieces are often initially accomplished in the contemplative seclusion of woods, ivory towers and unobtrusive laboratories, the development, progress and qualitative expansion of the capacities of mind and consciousness, of efficiency of work and enlargement of recreation and leisure, which creative works, discoveries and inventions bring to people and communities, is a complex societal function in which all and sundry play cooperative roles. George Stephenson, the inventor of the railway locomotive, and his son Robert and nephew Gorge, James Watt, father of the steam engine, George Washington Carver, the prolific African-American inventor and discoverer befriended by heads of states of both East and West, the then Soviet Union and the U.S alike,

Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein, were all great men of science and development, who lived in the hustle and bustle of their times much like James Dewey Watson, the father of D.N.A and R.N.A. In Ghana engineer Colonel Abaka Jackson and Apostle Kwadwo Safo could be seen at boisterous fishing communities and beaches of Chorkor in Accra and the Central Region testing the engineering designs and models they had conceived and materialized from isolation of their thought-forms and workshops. Keen audiences were always grateful to have Engineer Woode, the Ghanaian, dilate on the correlation between various aspects of science and technology and economic and social development.

True development, distinct from but like intellectual speculation, curiosity and pure research, is a continual practical multi-sectoral function in our day-to-day lives. In this function the serenity of consciousness animates and activates the mind to transfer into our ways of doing things, mentally conceived processes and designs, practical products which enhance our understanding of life, our work efficiency, quality of life and leisure. This makes development a never-ending space-time continuum in which material objects of scientific invention and knowledge are bi-products which the momentum of development soon renders obsolescent, momentum which will never abate until man's consciousness, mind, knowledge and understanding attain the fullness of the universe or God's image of Himself planted in man at creation. Using Christian figure of speech, development is a process which started when the consciousness of Adam and Eve opened to the embarrassment of their nakedness and their minds first thought of covering their nakedness by inventing loin-cloth out of leaves. The potential of going to the moon was as much in the stone-age cave-man as it was in contemporary man.

By the yardstick of the model of development categorized in our definition as true and genuine, the material poverty of our people, the ignorance, disease, squalor and filth which overwhelm us in our suburbs, cities and the environment generally, are objective material manifestations and reflections of our inner underdevelopment and poverty of mind, consciousness, awareness and thought regarding hygiene, sanitation and good health. It follows that no amount of importation and installation of the most modern technological products for maintaining sanitation and public hygiene, unaccompanied by appropriate education and reorientation of mind, conduct and habit, can ever redress the filth and squalor in which many parts of Africa wallow except only sporadically, superficially and temporarily. It follows also that our understanding of true development must stretch beyond head-knowledge in science, technology, financial outlays and economies.

Our understanding of true development must embrace the entire range of people's habits, belief systems and culture. Development as expression, reflection or manifestation in material terms of the level of enlargement or of the prevailing condition of a people's mind, consciousness and thought, may also be spiritual. The history of Judeo- Christian religion is the history of the progressive enlargement of the mind of certain groups of humankind regarding concepts of God. From Abraham's God who could ask for human sacrifice and blood and burnt-offerings similar to the contemporary religious rituals and liturgical practices of the Yeve worshippers of Ghana, Togo and Benin, Judeo-Christian concept of God developed through the God who would not accept the offer of a temple from the blood-stained hands of David, the warrior-king, to the God of Jesus Christ who, being spirit, enjoins His faithful to worship Him, not in temples, but in spirit and in truth, without temples nor the sacrifice and smoke of bulls and rams.

True and genuine development is thus coextensive with eternity itself, never ending till probably the mind, consciousness and thought of man enlarges to the level of his creator's. Development will continue so long as there is something, occurrence or phenomenon in nature or the universe, which the mind does not understand. All debate and talk about backward nations and people catching up with the advanced industrial nations is, therefore, a redherring. What matters is that we in backward societies activate and enlighten our minds, consciousness and thought to certain threshold, platform or levels which we can progressively elevate to improve our work efficiency, quality of our lives and our environment.

This must necessarily be so because even in the societies which we denominate as developed, development never stops. The development of the developed societies, as progress in industrialization, in productive efficiency and in economic advancement and technology, has hitherto been a largely one-sided process on the material side ever since scientific inquiry and philosophy parted company with religion in the West. True development is waiting to be enriched, balanced and harmonized with the results of man's growing consciousness of spiritual and metaphysical laws and extra-sensory phenomena, to which man's consciousness is still awakening and which Western science is beginning to acknowledge. A vast hardly explored field of metaphysical and spiritual development of mind and consciousness still lies ahead, from identifying, and studying the 'how' of the laws of nature to their "why". It is a field which man's proper understanding of the laws of nature and how they work, may help him to further explore and apply to define and edify the ethical application of the laws of science.

The complementarity of the laws of the physical order of the universe and the laws of the metaphysical and spiritual order makes the development process infinitely eternal. In this eternal infinity in which the physical and the metaphysical or spiritual complement each other, man's capacity to experience, to know and to create or replicate, is constantly enlarging. Man's capacity to apply metaphysical, spiritual or ethical laws, for example, to affect and channel the use of atomic energy from being an instrument of hatred to kill and destroy into being a facility to promote peace and loving cooperation, gives man both moral vision of the world and at the same time a measuring rod for ascertaining and evaluating the level of quality of man's development and advancement.

In the actual world, the borderline between the physical and the metaphysical, that is between natural and supernatural, is a very thin one which science has compartmentalized behind strict boundaries for purposes of objective, critical, rational, productive and demonstrable inquiry. In the Christian world, the compartmentalization translates in practice as the separation of science from religious doctrine and dogma, which took place in Europe during the period of the Enlightenment from the European Dark Ages. It enabled science to make spectacular advances which in our time are assisting spiritual inquries, especially,into metaphysical, and extra-sensory phenomena, be it mammalian, vegetal or ethereal, organic or inorganic. In certain non-Christian religious worlds, continued subordination of scientific inquiry to religion (many aspects of whose laws and norms are not necessarily spiritual but rather expedient and pragmatic in the context of time and space), has retarded progress in mathematics, astronomy and science which scholars of those worlds introduced to Europe of the Dark Ages then under the domination of worldly and sensual popes and clerics.

So far, the discussion has been about the implications of our definition of our first model of development which we described as true, authentic or genuine development. Another model of development is what we proceed to define as consisting in the pursuit of loosely formulated and uncoordinated public policies and decisions which lead to the installation of economically and productively unlinked and unintegrated physical structures and industrial enclaves and facilitate production for export or for consumption by largely backward peoples, of modern technological products which are delivered and distributed as development. In formally democratic African countries where models of this definition may be seen, while vocal citizens claim their "share of development,'' populist politicians proudly boast of "bringing development" to their people as their ''share of the national cake''. Examples of this model are usually found in states and societies where royalties, rents, and taxes levied by governments on extractive ventures and raw material exports are spent on the importation of all manner of consumer and fancy goods, air-conditioned four-wheel drive vehicles and limousines, luxurious aeroplanes and the construction of high-rise office buildings and apartments, palatial mansions and cable television systems, alcohol consumption and prestige services.

In societies where this definition and its model are the driving force which animates and motivates public policy, political, economic and social, the modern technological vade-mecum, the cell-phone, is perceived not so much as a swift facilitator of productive communication in decision-making in matters like economic and financial decision-making, wealth creation and urgent health delivery services, as a status symbol which facilitates consumption of wealth and precious time in idle talk. Communication technology in Africa, caught in this model of development, is gradually reinforcing idleness which is translated as leisure, provided one is able somehow to get money to purchase data or phone-credit; no questions are asked of unemployed able-bodied adults who have no money to buy food and medicament for themselves and their children but have money to buy cell-phones to talk to friends in distant lands. Politicians and economists proudly display national statistics to show the magnitude of inflow of foreign remittances into the economy by non-resident citizen migrant workers in the industrial countries; but no reference is made to the quantum of that financial inflow that is repatriated by the foreign-owned telecommunication companies to the owners of the intellectual property in the technologies.

In the false development implied in this second definition, it is the technology and the goods and services consumed that are modern and developed, which politicians bring to the people and make them believe they are developing. Meanwhile the people whose cognitive capacities, consciousness and purposive will remain undeveloped are dulled by soft pleasures of effortless consumptive life-styles in which modern technology is applied to reinforce a backwardness that is engrossed in superstition and ill-understood nature. In the second definition and its model lies a paradox where science and technological advances serve to reinforce the cultural, ethical and ethologically static existence of many a natural resource-rich African society. This second model is patently a misconceived and false development in which what are described as development policies, development priorities and efforts are no more than the direction of resources to procuring goods, services, facilities and physical structures rather than cultivating the mind whose elevation should liberate us from sclerosising hold of tradition into the adventure and creativity which add value to natural resources.

In the first definition modern goods and services are the outcome of the development of minds and their ingenuity. In the second definition, modern goods and services are perceived as development while mind, thought and consciousness remain largely uncultivated, more accustomed to consumption than creation.

Banal and platitudinous as the distinction may appear to advanced developed societies, it is important in our predominantly pre-literate African societies where tradition and centuries of conditioning make even formally educated persons accept a world view and order in which it is natural for Europe and North America to be scientific, advanced and developed while it is equally of the order of nature that Africa remains undeveloped. The distinction enables societies seeking to break out of this dichotomy to identify the true and authentic starting- points for the development and modernization of their people and societies as a function of cultivating and elevating the mind, intellect and individual and societal mindset rather than importation of physical facilities and all manner of consumer products. In this distinction most of what is objectively perceived as development effort in the first definition and its model is the cumulative externalized physical and material stage of an antecedent abstract mental conception which takes place in the deep recesses of the mind.

What becomes objectivised or externalized as true or authentic development, therefore, starts as subjective idea or conception in the mind before it is actualised into objective physical and material products which undeveloped minds regard as development. Like foetal pregnancy, development as a conception in the mind has to be progressively nourished and brought to actuality and nurtured to grow in refinement and socialization to make it humane and community-friendly. It then grows and elevates the people and their community and society to higher levels of qualitative living that is above mere existence. The Wright brothers would be amazed to find how the simple products their minds gave birth to have been nurtured, refined, socialized and globalised into the comfortable and luxurious jets, Boeings, Airbuses and Concords of today, such that even in Africa nobody seriously contemplates writing a will before travelling by air, which one may have to do travelling by road in Ghana and many parts of Africa.

One of several questions which arise from the first definition is whether any African country can develop within the meaning of that definition when, in the present state of affairs, most of the intellectual and human resource capacities that are educated and cultivated at great expense and sacrifice, die young or emigrate. Social policy questions about education, health, welfare and longevity arise which we dare not relegate behind economic policy. Many African rulers and their bureaucrats fail to appreciate that in the national development process, the health and welfare of their citizens, the workforce and the skilled, artisans and technicians, the professional groups, the doctors, engineers and various managerial groups, are all national assets whose development, sustenance, retention and continuous upgrading are too important for the future of their societies and states to be left in the hands of the individuals and their families. In Africa where schools, hospitals, police stations and all public services which make states and societies viable, are still inadequate, should the state, that is, the keeper of society's treasury, leave teachers, doctors, policemen, professionals and providers of public services in both private and public sectors of the society's economy, to atrophy, die or emigrate because they cannot afford satisfactory healthcare while their rulers take care of themselves in expensive foreign hospitals?

Under conditions of scarce and limited national financial resources, the challenge is how to elaborate and manage both economic and social policies to make them mutually supportive to simultaneously advance the economic and social policies and their objectives with a balance which ensures that one does not stifle the other. Of course, this itself is a question of clear and thorough thinking. It means that investment in quality of education and public policy-making which advances and retains a society's intellectual and human resource capacities on sustainable basis, must underpin economic development policy making.

Where is our sound judgment or common sense in countries like Ghana and Nigeria when precious medical equipment are rightly and safely kept in properly ventilated and well secured rooms and laboratories free from dust and humidity? Meanwhile the doctors, nurses, medical engineers and technologists on whom the equipment depend for functional efficiency and benefit to the sick, are stifled in hot, leaking and humid apartments and hovels, with hardly enough facilities to motivate them and keep them abreast with developments in their disciplines, and are exposed to criminals. The question we must answer is; what is post-colonial development about?

More often than not, our political leaders and their economic policy advisers do not address themselves and their national economic agenda to sustainable production and productivity, and simultaneously to the minimum human quality of life and social services which must be available if their stated goals of economic development are to be attained. The question of quality of life, when it is addressed, is often confined to the accessibility of more backward people to consumer products of the developed economies, facilitated by World Trade Organization rules of free trade within the neo-liberal global economy. Considerations of human well-being are jettisoned from national policies when foreign debt repayment obligations and balance of trade deficits incurred in the importation of dog food, tooth-pick, and processed fanciful junk, leave no surpluses and margins to finance genuine public needs beyond what creditor-nations are willing to offer.

What ends and whose interests are served by national policy decisions which have hardly any room for integral human consciousness development, well-being and quality of life? This question all the three parts of the book seek to address. Parts One and Two of the book are devoted to discussing how in setting out to actualize the first definition of development and the model it entails as a goal of post-colonial governance and national reconstruction, conscious decisions and purposive policies and acts of many post-colonial rulers have resulted in attaining the second model. Part Three is given to proposing and exploring a new constitutional theory we denominate as substantive constitutionalism and an entailing paradigm of political framework equipped with its own concepts, legal framework, processes and teleology for animating public debate and action towards achieving the goal of genuine and authentic human development within the meaning of the first definition and its accompanying model.

The conception of the book is the outcome of a conviction that true and genuine development of any country as both a private and public function of purposive application of mind, by means of knowledge, to matter and all phenomena for private and public well-being, requires a sound system of orderly constitutional structural arrangements and political underpinnings for well-coordinated, harmonious, mutually complementary private and public action. In such a configuration, planning for and delivery of technologically produced goods and services that are available to society are, it is pointed out ,end-products of a complex interaction of sober private and public debate, decision-making through harmonization of interests, compromises and difficult choices and eventual execution.

The conception of the book also emanates from the belief that in societies with scarce resources, complementarity in public and private decision-making produces best results, and the pursuit of private and public goals is more easily reconciled with less friction, within a constitutional framework of transparent, broadly consultative and accountable democratic governance; that the final or ultimate determining principle in a society's ethical system, to justify its raison d'etre, cohesion and allegiance of its people, is the society's purposive and manifest commitment to progressively enlarging opportunities for elevating the cognitive capacities and consciousness of its people to enable them in their own legitimate ways, and through their own initiatives, to achieve spiritual and material contentment in life. Primacy of public opportunities for cultivating the mind is made the summum bonum of the proposed constitutional order because it is the individual person's mind and its level of socialization, acculturation and intellectual efflorescence which determine whether the individuals who cumulatively constitute a community or society are developed or underdeveloped; and also because quality of life and all forms of true and lasting wellbeing are outcomes of developed creative minds imbued with knowledge and edifying, ethical values. Spiritual content of development is here emphasised as we learn from the Soviet Union's fall, and from other secular societies, the barrenness of material development without spiritual content.

It is argued that it is possible for a person, i.e a mind, acculturated in a modern, truly developed environment irrespective of his race, religion or origin, to contrive a reasonably healthy, decent and simple life-style and manage a reasonably good quality of life based on good hygiene, co- operation with nature and on simple but balanced nutrition if he is exposed to a primitive, backward and uncultivated environment without his accustomed developed convenient amenities, ready facilities and comfortable conveniences. Such a person is able to stay above the vortex of the slough of underdevelopment unless he degenerates into the mentality of the undeveloped culture in which he finds himself. On the other hand, a person acculturated in a primitive, backward, unhygienic and superstitious environment, living through a constant repetition of a monotonous existence in which everyday is a new beginning without continuity, where unquestioning submission of the mind and self to tradition and vagaries of nature is a virtue to be cultivated while an inquisitive mind is perceived as a self-destructive vice to be voided — such a person cannot but live a backward and primitively unhygienic life even in a technologically advanced, industrial and sanitized environment, until his consciousness is aroused to appreciate even if without fully assimilating, the higher modern culture.

In other words, while the developed mind carries his modern, developed mindset and consciousness with him wherever he happens to be tossed unless he degenerates, the primitive person, equally carrying his backward mindset with him into a developed and more technologically endowed environment, can only succeed in making for himself a self-contented but uncultured way of life out of all the available facilities and opportunities, delighting in the bones, fat and trotters, more than the steak, loins and rump, bewildered by the modernity surrounding him. Thanks to a combination of his primitive and unquestioning mindset and the material abundance at his disposal, the underdeveloped person thus considers the developed environment a nirvana to be enjoyed in amazement, awe and submissiveness rather than to study and understand.

It is therefore argued that in the development hierarchy of priorities of our states and societies, cultivating the mind to lift it out of its accustomed cultural stagnation and stupor, must take precedence over preoccupation with procuring material and physical goods which add nothing fundamental to education and modern acculturation of the mind. They are only conventionally accepted as indicators and symbols of development. This should be the priority because a properly educated mind, once exposed to the meaning and view of true development even in underdeveloped conditions, never rests until it finds ways and means of emancipating itself from underdevelopment, even if it should entail emigration and change of citizenship and name, like refugees and persecuted persons do, in the way Mister Odenkey, the Ghanaian footballer, became Monsieur Dessaille, the French football national hero. This is not new. That was what famished and persecuted migrants from backward regions of Europe to tolerant, industrializing and peaceful Britain did when they changed their names to Farmers, Woodman, Wheel- or Cartwright, Waterman, Steels and Stones, Blacks and Greenes, Shakespeares and Wordsworths, as if shaking their spears in Africa or juggling with words from India where Marg in Hindi becomes Margin in English.

The logic of the argument leads to saying that development can never be brought or transferred to backward peoples through neo- liberal policies of unregulated importation of processed goods and installation of modern technological devices as are often suggested by leaders of both underdeveloped and developed states, the votaries of the International Monetary Fund (I.M.F), contemporary World Bank discourse on economic development and poverty alleviation, and the current practices of non- governmental organizations. Underdeveloped minds reduce modern technological facilities to mental levels of their underdevelopment. Thus while in certain African societies sick and injured persons are conveyed to hospital in wheel-barrows, taxi-cabs or push-carts, modern air-conditioned ambulances are used as hearses to carry the dead for burial, consistent with a culture of reverence for the dead more than for the living, reminiscent of Ancient Egyptian preoccupation about the dead.

Sick persons are kept at the homes of native medicine men till they die whereupon they are conveyed to modern hospitals with mortuary facilities to await the planning of elaborate funerals to be celebrated with money that was not made available to buy medicine. In some cultures, funerals are accorded more importance than birthdays.

The criterion of mind and consciousness as the fundamental determinants of development or underdevelopment of a people is poignantly illustrated in the cultivation of the palm tree in West Africa and Malaysia. The oil palm has always been native to Ghana and West Africa. Until recently, the species of insect which alone is capable of pollinating the oil palm flower could be found in West Africa only. Unlike cocoa that was plagued by diseases in West Africa because it is new to West Africa, the oil palm is highly resistant to diseases in West Africa. While Malaysians have applied their minds to oil palm production and processing in various ways and have successfully converted the oil palm which they borrowed together with the exclusive pollen-carrying insects from West Africa, into a multi- purpose, multi-million dollar agro-technological high-value industry, Ghanaian people in a perennially financially strapped economy, still make little economic use of the oil palm beyond satisfaction of their elementary subsistence needs. Ghana's President Kufuor visited Malaysia and triumphantly returned with a Malaysian oil-palm shoot and with pomp and ceremony planted it at the seat of government, Osu Castle, to exhibit to Ghanaians, as he and his ill-informed political entourage put it, one of the keys to the economic development of Malaysia, as if the plant were a novelty to them. It was clear that our innocent well-intentioned President missed the point: that the secret of the Malaysian development miracle lay, not so much in the oil palm or in any other natural resources, as in the relevant and applied education, determination, and thoughtful innovativeness which the Malaysians gave their minds as their most important natural resource to expand and heighten their capacity to go into novel high value-adding ventures with the same raw material and natural resources as tropical African people are equally endowed with. Co-incidentally President Kufuor's home-village, Nkawie, in the parliamentary constituency that the President represented in Ghana Paliament, Atwima-Nwabiagya, is not far from the busy town called Bekwai, meanng 'Forest of oil palm tree' all in Ashanti Region. Three years of Oxford education alienated him from the five years that he spent studying at Prempeh College, situated conspicuously on the Kumasi-to-Bekwai Road. The halpless President of Ghana had to travel to Malaysia to learn what was directly next-door to him in Ghana. Tragically, colonial education curriculum followed with three years at Exeter Colloge, Oxford, closed the sharp mind of our tall, palmy President from knowing what every illiterate farmer knew in Bekwai, close to his native village and school, Prempeh College.

Cultivation of the mind, as the only natural resource of the people of Singapore, has raised Singaporeans' levels of material development beyond the dreams of many natural resource-rich African states. While Africans watch helplessly as the seas erode their territories, Singaporeans apply their mind and claim land from the sea to build airports, factories, apartments and recreation gardens and boulevards, thanks to their creative imagination, daring and enterprising minds. While Singaporeans apply the education of their minds to searching for efficient ways of creating value out of low-value natural resources and raw materials which they import from all parts of Africa, we in Africa waste precious time in endless disputes, conflicts and litigation over ownership of natural resources in the making of which we contributed nothing. We design concepts and systems like "abusa", "abunu" and "nubua" as land tenurial devices for appropriating by idle allodial landowners farm-produce which is the outcome of the labour of migrants from less hospitable lands.

Many manufacturing industries would collapse if they were to be highly taxed and exploited in the ways Ghanaian landowners deploy traditional tenurial systems to fleece migrant farmers. In many an African culture, cunning, admired as wisdom, has been institutionalised into ways of life above which the collective societal mind hardly seeks to rise.

Unlike our African ruling elite, Malaysian and Singaporean leaders and policy makers went beyond promoting research which, in Africa, were left to gather dust in impressively bound jackets which eventually became food for worms and moths. The Asians, unlike Africans, did not allow themselves to be persuaded and won over by well-intentioned international advice and financial inducements which only went to sustain the colonial economic status quo, militating against their long-term interests. Malaysians refused to be bullied and cajoled into abandoning their goals.

With their confidence and long perspective of time derived from their long history of civilization unmatched by Western civilization, the Asians translated their thoughts and researches into workable plans which they resolutely executed and dispassionately evaluated with much prognosis and continuity. Unlike many African leaders, the Asian leaders saw education and thoughtful planning as preparation for purposeful result-oriented action which is not only quantifiable in economic and statistical aggregates and averages to satisfy theoretical paradigms, but also equally and importantly subject to value-assessment, to be appraised by criteria of the quality of life which these plans brought to their people.

The primacy of cultivating, educating, and training the mind and consciousness envisaged in these opening remarks is not confined to formal academic education for acquiring head-knowledge evidenced by paper-certificate. It is the quality of upbringing, socialization and training which transforms the capacity of people to dispassionately understand, situate and solve their manifold problems of life from sun-drying and frying fish, from dog-catching and grave-digging through modern medicine and brain-surgery to space research and technology for landing men on the moon and returning safely. Development necessarily entails that quality of education which solves practical problems, creates and adds to conveniences of life and enables us to move from fermenting corn and millet to produce "pito" and beer and from mixing sugar with carbonated water and selling it as "soft drink", to the sophisticated chemistry of analyzing and synthesizing the complex tastes and fragrances of orange, passion fruit and banana to produce fruit drinks without over-burdening the soil to yield more natural fruit than it can sustain. The implication of dedication, discipline and application implied in the concept of development as a function of applied mental capacities of a people in no way implies intellectual arrogance or regimentation. It is a function of establishing a well-thought out environment for opportunities.

So, for example, Ghana's Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, as an intellectual corps of indigenous applied research scientists, do a great deal of research into livestock breeding and crop farming and their potential for the country's agro-industrial take-off, no less than the Malaysians are doing. But since 1982, the perception in Ghana of politics and governance by rulers and their advisors as functions which require not so much brain-power as violent aggression and brutality to hold on to power has kept Ghana down throughout a whole generation of repressive rule under a flawed Constitution customized to serve the arbitrariness of one demagogue. The result has been instability in formulating and sustaining any long-term policies.

Thus although Ghana, like other African states, has since 1993, been experiencing periods of peaceful constitutional regime-change, the vast majority of the able-bodied formally educated population of working-age have only been regularly treated by their governments to celebrations of endless beginnings in which year in, year out, everything is started afresh with fan-fare in which promises of yesteryears are glossed over with new flamboyant promises of palmy days ahead. Old policies are repackaged and relaunched with the euphoria of new beginners.

In Parts One and Two, we probe some of the causative factors of the instability of post-colonial policies. In Part Three we suggest conceptual strategies for enhancing governmental institutional capacities to promote participatory and accountable constitutional democracy as a sine qua non for genuine human-need-oriented modernisation and development.

In international economic transactions, educating the mind for practical tasks for our true development requires of us a necessity not only to acquire head-knowledge, but also to acquire relevant capacities needed for evaluating, selecting and applying the head-knowledge to gain true understanding and wisdom which in turn should give us informed insight and that judgment which enlightens the eyes of our minds. This will enable our minds to have the capacity to pierce through veils of apparently justifiable national laws which are sometimes perverted to pursue covert foreign interests that are built into international cooperation agreements and treaties. The quality of education under consideration here is that quality which enables us, pre-industrial societies, to be able to identify various ways in which the technologically advanced industrial states rely on treaties to protect their interests and property rights within the jurisdictions of the less developed states. It is also a quest for education and expansion of mind and consciousness which enables us not only to offer erudite hindsight explanations for past mistakes but also endow us with capacities to foresee and anticipate future events with wisdom to provide judiciously appropriate anticipatory responses and remedies.

In the management of our domestic affairs, proper education for development should enable us to rise above the cheap complacency of consumerism and rise above the mental indolence of being wise after the event. Necessary development education which leads to perceptive wisdom should be designed to transform and equip society with capacity to go beyond indulgence in hindsight pontification about past errors and omissions, and engage in the perilous task of addressing difficult questions as to future choices. Lack of perceptive knowledge-based wisdom, distinct from folk-wisdom, leaves societies, no less than individuals, to become wise only after the event, making men dwell expansively more on what went wrong than what should be done right. The book makes suggestions as to how this type of development-oriented education can be institutionalized as without it, it becomes easy for political adventurers, with no credible plans of their own for the future to offer, to ride to power on the crest of noisily orchestrated populist indignation at, and denunciation of, past governments discredited for their failures and omissions.

Out of eagerness to hasten what is often-times poorly perceived as the developmental process, our policy-makers place carts before horses. We fail to probe deep into the core of our problems to properly identify, understand and define them. Mistaking effects for causes, we prescribe solutions to undoubtedly unsatisfactory visible conditions which turn out to be only superficial and manifest symptoms and consequences of deep-rooted causes which casual and shallow observation cannot identify.

Like guinea-worm, palliated blister conditions recede only to bore the skin and appear elsewhere. In the body politic, we find political and economic guinea-worms of problems appearing in forms which we are unable to relate to earlier forms, thanks to education systems and curricula which only equip us to be routine managers of status quo. Thus we in Africa delude ourselves we are making progress and developing when we spend precious time, resources and energies on treadmills of endless repetitive beginnings.

Much of Africa such as the Ivory Coast, Ghana, Nigeria and Congo (Zaire), after more than half a century of costly development effort, are in essentially the same human resource and material under-developed conditions in which they were like the Belgian Congo(Zaire) in 1960. One major difference lies in the changing forms in which global information and communication technology and global trade have complicated old problems, making many states in Africa more dependent than they were under colonialism.

We seek to alleviate poverty and eradicate undoubtedly unsatisfactory conditions of living when the people whose living conditions are concerned are either not dissatisfied enough with their poor conditions to the point of wanting to change them, or have not the faintest idea of the dimensions and implications of the change which they need, let alone the capacity necessary to efficiently manage the change. We fail to appreciate that our undoubted poverty and unsatisfactory living conditions are the inevitable effects of people's sleepy consciousness, ignorance and deterministic attachment to primordial ideas, values and practices. By these values we encrust ourselves from the stream and flow of contemporary world history, preferring to grope imitatively in the ideological graveyards of Western European and North American history to pick skeletons of discredited and discarded political and economic ideas.

These fundamental weaknesses of mind our solutions fail to address as flawed cognitive sub-structures. On such flawed foundations, no developmental super-structured policies and strategies however well-conceived and designed they may be, can endure. Thanks to our conventional systems of imitative artisanal-style systems of education and conscientisation, many supposedly far-reaching reforms have only scratched surfaces without essentially disturbing the substance, to the point where the planners and decision-makers may be sufficiently aroused to change.

While we fault neither the good intentions of the decision-makers and carriers of change nor lack of commitment of the ultimate beneficiaries of change, we admit and emphasise that no meaningful change can take place unless there is conscious dissatisfaction with prevailing conditions and people are not content to reconcile themselves to the status quo and conventional solutions. A seminal starting-point for enduring change is to induce a transformation of mind and consciousness. A caveat is that societies and people fall prey to political confidence-tricksters when people who constitute majority in society are marginalized in the social process. Political adventurers thrive when a vocal minority become dissatisfied with the status quo and have developed an awareness of and desire for change but have little or no ideas as to what and how changes are to be brought about, have hardly any credible choices to offer and have hardly any understanding of implications of alternatives placed before them.

When all that people know is that they are dissatisfied and want change for a better life of greater abundance but have no capacity to exercise sound judgment as to choice and quality of change, they are easily seduced and led astray with changes which promise everything but deliver nothing except the comforts of the purveyors of the promises.

Thus the injection of finance capital, modern technological facilities and various forms of subsidies as incentive packages into disadvantaged communities to promote change in living conditions, in accordance with World Bank-I.M.F wornout cliché-slogan of poverty alleviation, is helpful where the injection is purposively directed to assisting transformation of mind and consciousness. In other words, the assistance should promote quality of community education which makes the community aware of the benefits to themselves and their self- esteem of savings, efficiency and better ways of doing things. This will make them sufficiently motivated to want to be able to grow, by their own efforts, not by charitable donation which cannot continue forever, the material objectives of stimulation and incentive packages and adapt their mindset and attitudes to new ways as they begin to jettison some of what they themselves begin to see as negative, unproductive and unhelpful aspects of time-capsuled cultures in which they have hitherto proudly encrusted themselves as if it were their contribution to world culture.

The developmental educational contents of motivation packages, properly inculcated, will make them become desirous of making sacrifices necessary to enhance their capacities for innovative and efficient human endeavour. Thus, poverty alleviation which serves as ruse for pushing all manner of manufactures into African economies in pursuit of global neo-liberal trade, must give way to education in awareness of the enslaving tentacles of poverty and penury and the liberating exhilaration of working out one's way to freedom from want.

A religious mystic of the Sufi order of Islam summarized this truth about the psychology of change in these words: -"increase your needs and you will know God", the quintessence of the dynamics of change and progress being consciousness of need or lack, and awareness of a further need or necessity to satisfy the need or filling the lack, coupled with search for knowledge which brings the know-how for satisfying the need, filling in the lack. To the Sufi, acknowledgement of God as the Supreme, Universal and Eternal Intelligence is the ultimate source of the wisdom and knowledge that brings the change which resolves needs. Without this consciousness of need and the will to strive for qualitative enduring change, it is futile for a society's policy-makers to fill the bank accounts and pockets of people with money to expand their businesses and cottage occupations while they continue in the same inefficient subsistence- minded ways.

Is it a gimmick or ignorance when in country after country in Africa the World Bank's acclaimed economic trouble-shooters device policies described as micro-financing by which the Bank lends money to African states to relend, for purposes of well-touted poverty alleviation programs, to fishermen, fish mongers and market-women who, not being able to read and write, cannot keep any books of accounts? Where people's goals are set only on improved subsistence and they have hardly any literacy, numeracy and book-keeping skills, economic development requires, through well-thought out appropriately designed education, a whole antecedent orientation of mind and attitude. For where expectations in life of vast sections of our societies consist of no more than guarantee of a comfortable day-to-day subsistence, slight incremental changes in the status quo easily lead to complacency. National policy-makers and international well-wishers should be held accountable when loans and grants injected into national and local economies to promote businesses are squandered by the recipients on child-naming ceremonies, funeral parties and on electronic goods.

In many a traditional society, even among formally educated urban dwellers, slight improvements in a person's finances easily translate, not as opportunity for savings and productive investment, but as opportunity to indulge in ostentatious consumption which one was not previously able to indulge in. In the actual conditions of our underdevelopment, it is a mistake to assume that formal Western education, within the prevailing cultural environment, to inculcate professional skills, is enough to make one a vehicle for effecting change and modernization. So a lawyer who became a government minister in the Greater Accra Region of Ghana with a budget of millions of dollars to spend on road works in his district, never saw a need to repair in his town the only road passing in front of his house, which linked many villages, including his own, to the market of the town where he lived his educated life. And yet he spent much money, apparently misappropriated from public sources, to celebrate his acquisition of a new name by which he was initiated and integrated into a clan which he considered to be superior to his maternal clan, his paternal clan having been in doubt as no-one claimed paternity for his mother's pregnancy. He went on to build himself a lavish mansion surrounded by the filth and squalor in which he grew up.

Indeed, Accra remains a sprawling agglomeration of affluent ghettoes. Like the government minister, formally educated head-knowledge urban planners and city managers, unacculturated into the planning, utilitarian, managerial skills, visionary imagination and aesthetics of a Baron Haussmann, preside over haphazard expansion of Accra with no artistically conceptual holistic apprehension of a city in its organic, structural, and functional dimensions and relationships to make it worth living in by persons mindful of sanitation and public hygiene, public utilities and conveniences, transportation, cultural, environmental and recreational facilities which breathe life into cities. In all this, it is the mindset that is at work. Overcoming consequential challenges is the gravamen of chapters that follow.

When formally educated African policy-makers undergo transformation of mind which puts on the centre-stage of national planning the core and cardinal but elementary principles of development, namely, that modernisation and development come, not from natural resources in the soil, but first and foremost from cultivated resourcefulness of the mind to work the soil for its contents, which knowledge-driven creativity converts into value, Africans will cease to be the world's hewers of wood. Much of contemporary brain-drain from Africa is largely the response of individuals who have undergone transformation of consciousness to awareness that their society's policy-makers, planners and administrators, not infused with the enlightenment that comes with the transformed consciousness and its implications, continue to manage their societies in accordance with policies which reinforce the culture of perpetual soil-tilling for rudimentary existence and its attendant poverty, penury and frustration.

The import of all this the book emphasizes as the need for the elite who move, in order to make qualitative changes in their societies, to understand that the transformation of mind and consciousness that sets authentic development in motion goes beyond formal education for undoubtedly requisite head-knowledge, though that is its starting point. We identify some major political and cultural factors which inhibit the mind's transformation. We propose a constitutional theory that seeks to underpin the establishment of public institutions that should facilitate the transformation as a complete and continuing social abreactive process to release for their upliftment the energies of people hitherto held in repetitive straitjacket by imitative application of a kind of knowledge whose constricting social effects have been aided and compounded by formally democratic but essentially repressive and unimaginative systems of governance. This, we argue, implies aided selectivity in knowledge and its understanding. This requires a second Philip to come to the aid of our modern Ethiopian Eunuchs, as narrated in the Acts of the Apostles of the Christian Bible.

It is argued that the quality of education inculcated into us as individuals, groups and communities, continues to determine our inner or internalized formation; that this formation we project on to the external world as our outlook and world-view in accordance with which we make our judgments about the world and about how we respond to situations and events; and that our internalized formation has delayed the reintegration into the main-current of world history, as equal players, of vast sections of Africans who, until very recently in terms of archeological time, have been the leaders and makers of world history and culture. How can African factory workers or peasant farmers be reintegrated into the mainstream of the contemporary current of world history as active participants when even their elite erudite professors of the humanities are often more concerned with studies about Roman Africa than about Ancient Egyptian Africa whose centre of civilization and culture was located in Sudan, the heart of Africa?

When we are able to think through and accomplish the internalization of our new qualitative formation and express and manifest it attitudinally in our ways of doing things and in setting our goals and objectives, then the internal formation received through various forms of new education, may be said to have transformed us into a new consciousness and being. Transformation of consciousness and being makes us become our thoughts. Without quality transformation of consciousness the internal formation that we acquire through all forms of education and life experiences remains as knowledge in the head while we carry on with life in old untransformed ways.

The new- thinking transformation alienates us positively from the untransformed, therefore, undesirable, status quo. It makes people question the status quo and knowledge itself, and motivates people to change the complacent status quo or opt out of it even if by emigration.

Because the transformation produces a new consciousness and being out of the old person, care must be exercised about the quality of transformation that is sought. Genuine development and modernization need true knowledge. But at the same time, development planning must avoid a trap inherent in the very novelty of true knowledge into which cultures emerging from the darkness of ignorance may easily fall. Seeking to make ourselves and our lives into what we formally know may easily make us imitative, leading us to a darkness of a higher order which, by virtue of its undoubted sophistication and complexity, may make us think we are developing and making progress.

Thus, we slowly kill ourselves where, pursuant to new knowledge, we seek to eradicate malaria-carrying mosquitoes by so applying aerosol insecticides that we end up inhaling and ingesting D.D.T, or we prolong the shelf-life of farm harvest by treating them with toxic cancer-causing chemicals and liquids. On the other hand, seeking to make ourselves into new and tested conclusions which we draw from our study, understanding, thinking and the sober reflection upon what we know to the point of objectively identifying all implications, makes us innovative. On the latter lie the dynamo and motive force of genuine development and progress. On the former we become sponges absorbing every flotsam and jetsam of knowledge; in the latter we become ecclectic contributors to the growth of knowledge. The conclusions we draw from knowledge that education gives us makes us undergo a dynamic process of new-thinking transformation.

The new-thinking transformation, in an environment of healthy skepticism, sets genuine development in motion on a chartered course to an envisioned destination. With the exception of few providential men like Mahatma Gandhi and Kwame Nkrumah who acquired it under adverse circumstances and conditions without the help of public institutions which promote it, the new- thinking transformation, for most mortal men and women, requires sound institutions and value systems for its acquisition, development, dissemination and expansion. Transformed Kwame Nkrumah insisted on and attained immediate sovereignty for Ghana in the teeth of opposition from his fellow elite compatriots who, lacking Nkrumah's transformation of mind, were only content to petition the British government to grant Ghana the status of sovereignty within the shortest possible time on British terms and vision for the evolution of the British Empire. Kwame Nkrumah defined Ghana's development agenda and set it in motion in collaboration with a few equally transformed Africans from the diasporas, such as W.E.B. Du Bois, George Padmore, C.L.R. James, Arthur Lewis, and Sam George Ikoku of Nigeria.

The national reconstruction and development agenda for Ghana of the transformed minds collapsed after the 1966 coup d'état largely because Ghanaian society and in particular most of its elite, formally educated to the highest Western standards though they were, dutifully absorbed the formal head-knowledge education which they had received. But they did not critically reflect on it and digest it to draw their own conclusions. They thus disabled themselves from actualizing and reconstructing into innovative paradigms their experiences and the inner formation they received from their formal education.

In the event their minds failed to attain to Nkrumah's creative, innovative and visionary level and quality of new thinking transformation. They acquired formation without transformation. In other words, the high education and head-knowledge which Nkrumah's colleagues in the United Gold Coast Convention (U.G.C.C.) had, only reinforced their culturally traditional, colonial subservience.

Their education made them more efficient servants. Hence most of the elite rather actualized their head-knowledge formation in the acquisition and enjoyment of the leisure and privileges of the colonial system and its legacy. Their formation made them imitative, not imaginative and innovative.

They kept and jealously guarded their education and knowledge like heirloom without making any effort of their own to objectively reexamine that knowledge for them to draw their own conclusions like Nkrumah and his aides did.

This explains why contemporary twenty-first century proposals for and attempts at, West African and broad African defence and security, political and economic union invariably contain nothing new that Nkrumah and his aides had not already reflected upon, elaborated and recommended to African heads of states and governments in the early 1960s. Development projects such as hydroelectric dams, universities, steel mills, defense projects and international football competitions, agricultural production and expansion, industrial processing and manufacturing, which Nkrumah considered as necessary infrastructure for any underdeveloped country seriously committed to development, were denounced by his elite opponents because they lacked his visionary transformation. It was in the colonial status quo that they would best enjoy their new status as spokesmen of the Whiteman. Even in the 1980's the writers of the 1984 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica denounced Nkrumah's projects as "prestige projects". Nkrumah's African opponents did not apply their minds to examine the motives for which Nkrumah's opponents in Europe and America were criticizing him; they failed to do their own original thinking to see if it was a matter of prestige and extravagance for Nkrumah to spend his country's savings to build hospitals, roads, schools and universities for his citizens and Africans who entered Ghana without restriction.

These same projects in this twenty-first century continue to serve as essential infrastructure which continues to underpin the economy of Ghana. Nkrumah's critics probably did not know that in undertaking those manufacturing projects for Ghana, and in his economic policy agenda for Ghana, Nkrumah was trying to do for Ghana what the economist Maynard Keynes was able to achieve for the U.S. during the Great Depression and for Europe after the ravages of the Second World War. By his novel theory of the business cycle Keynes got the I.M.F and the World Bank established. It is tragic irony that Ghana's formally educated men, passing off their ignorance as wisdom, denounced the true wisdom and foresight of Kwame Nkrumah for seeking to apply the theory of Maynard Keynes to give to Ghana and Ghanaians the same full-and-well rounded business cycle that Maynard Keynes gave to the U.S to overcome the Great Depression, to Europe in the Marshall plan to reconstruct their shattered economy after the Second World War, and the entire world in the Bretton Woods. Agreements by which the I.M.F, the World Bank and much later the W.T.O, were established. And the West applauded our Ghanaian educated learned but ignorant men for rejecting and denouncing the very economic process that they were grateful to have obtained from Maynard Keynes. Nkrumah's is an extant vision of post-colonial development from a transformed mind that will be discussed at length subsequently.

The I.M.F and the World Bank, contrary to the denunciations that they heaped on Nkrumah between 1966 and 1969 to justify his overthrow, now declare without acknowledgment to Nkrumah the wisdom of his developmental policy vehicles. Examples were Ghana Education Trust, state-regulated but privately owned land banks for socio-economic investment, community and state-funded health care schemes, publicly funded state enterprises and joint ventures with private partners, and investment funds to assist economically disadvantaged groups. The I.M.F and the World Bank have now been encouraging the resumption of those public measures by some of the very persons, who, lacking Nkrumah's transformed visionary mind and consciousness, opposed, plotted and aided his overthrow. When they were overthrown in 1966, Nkrumah's government were, through the Industrial Development Corporation and its investment banking affiliate, the National Investment Bank, working with foreign partners through the medium of the state investment administration machinery, the Capital Investments Board, towards the solar manufacture of domestic and industrial salt along the coastal belt of Ghana, especially at the Ada Songor Lagoon, the Sakumono Lagoon of West Accra at Welja, and at Elmina. Initially abandoned, the Ada project was later on transferred to individuals and capitalized with state funds to provide the financial base of the untransformed elite who precipitated Nkrumah's fall. After more than forty years of dithering the value of Nkrumah's salt projects had been acknowledged to hold prospects for being a very profitable foreign exchange earner for Ghana, more than cocoa.

Vision does not descend arbitrarily on people. Vision is cultivated by men and women who apply their inner formation derived from education to transform themselves into new-thinking, new-seeing men and women. They project the illumination of their new-thinking faculties, consciousness, intuition and empathic sensibilities and imagination on to prevailing conditions and circumstances of their people and form mental images and vistas of what they would want for their people. They strive selflessly to work and motivate their people to strive equally to work and uplift themselves to attain those vistas and goals which, from the perspectives of the moment, may appear dreamy, wishful and unattainable.

The goals become their vision. As men of vision they strive to attain the goals which are the vision, the images of which they have imagined and seen with the eyes of their minds. Attaining the vision becomes their mission on earth.

The new-thinking transformation enables like-minded individuals and groups to come together to identify and set for themselves, either directly or indirectly through their representatives, goals and objectives for uplifting themselves and their communities and societies in programmes of action. The programmes of action are elaborated by means of group or communitarian direct or vicarious thinking out of a process which is commonly denominated as public policy formulation. Many innovative public policies fail in Africa either because of lack of that transformation of mind necessary to motivate individuals and groups to strive to attain goals set in the policies, or because the policies have not been properly reflected upon. Not clearly thought out, the policies fail to take account of any dysfunctional tensions and cleavages that may arise from contradictory transformed and untransformed minds and visions, failure to recognize which inevitably prejudices success. It may be fatal for the success of transformed visionary leaders where they fail to realize that failure to properly educate and inspire untransformed people to understand, appreciate and identify with their visions and motivate and further inspire them to strive towards the realization of goals set by the transformed minds may cause ruinous dysfunction in society.

The historically unprecedented real life situation in which post- colonial people find themselves responding in the same society to different drum- beats, some stone-age and static, some nationalistic, and some dynamic globalised digital information technology, calls for careful social engineering of public institutions which promote tolerance and cooperative public debate and deliberation of choice of ends and means. The book, therefore, attempts to identify values and structures which may promote the requisite transformation of mind, consciousness and flexible adaptable attitudes. This should take place in us individually and collectively as communities and societies in a rapidly transformational global world community.

As such, sovereign equality has moved away from the meaning it had throughout the last two centuries as non-interference, to a meaning in which sovereign equality now translates, thanks to the emergence of higher transformed ethical consciousness, as the unity and inviolability of the human dignity of the persons who, together, establish states and always have sovereignty in themselves. Dictators can no more plead state sovereignty to tyrannize their citizens in whom sovereignty now resides. States are no more sovereign; they are creatures out of the sovereign people. They, therefore, only exercise the people's sovereignty.

Beyond formal education, educating the mind for transformed understanding for wisdom, work and vocation which underpin our model of genuine development requires the simultaneous cultivation of a congenial environment for work satisfaction and fulfilment. But the one form of education which our definition and its model of development should avoid is that education policy of expending scarce resources to give to aging men and women of Africa education in basic literacy and numeracy unaccompanied by education in modern values, personal hygiene and vocational skills. Meanwhile their grandchildren with much longer productive lives ahead, have no schools to attend and no training for work.

Education for genuine development must be teleologically thought through and must be diligently monitored in its implementation. In default of vigilance, the desire for education may easily lead to dumping of indiscriminate and fake education programmes and fraudulent institutions more directed at the fees that are collected than in the impartation of knowledge and skills. This may result from the credulity and sometimes complicity of politicians and policy-makers.

The burden of the argument we develop in the following chapters is that a policy of education for true development as earlier on defined may be helpful to revamp the economies of creditor industrialized countries when they lend to developing countries to import educational goods and services. But the borrowers may not derive expected benefits from the imported educational goods and services unless the policies are clearly thought through and efficiently implemented and monitored. The monitoring process itself, to be meaningful, must be the subject of constant evaluation with reference to stated goals which are regularly revised to reflect the transformation which should be the logic of any genuine transition from backwardness and inefficiency to modernity and efficiency. The term efficiency is used here as a compendium of what development is about.

The concept of authentic or genuine development as contained in our first definition is used throughout the book. It implies that the proper starting- point for any developing society embarking upon lifting its people from backwardness and inefficiency to modernity and efficiency must be the thinking through and structuring of a creative, viable and enduring system of governance. The system of governance must be endowed with human resource capacities not only for conceptualizing and articulating clearly thought-out policies, but also working out systems which demonstrate the value of, and strive for, educating all citizens. The system of education must also endow them with an intellectual market-place or a stock-car race-course of competing ideas which challenge the mind and make society flourish with novel thoughts and ways of doing things more efficiently at least cost.

Such a system of governance cannot but be an open, socially accountable and publicly responsive, tolerant democratic government under the rule of just and equitable laws. This, it is argued, provides society with a fundamental, conducive environment for the flowering of the mind, consciousness and cultures which actualize and manifest in physical and moral terms as a society's collective level of development.

In their contributions towards promoting the democratic framework for public debate and developmental decision-making as are discussed in the following pages, lawyers are like architects and engineers. They are engaged in the conceptualization and design of viable, functionally efficient, ethically sound and human-need oriented utilitarian but at the same time aesthetically and morally attractive structures. As such their efforts need to be informed by insight into the motivations of men who solicit to serve the public as Presidents but not as garbage collectors, by what men actually do covertly with power and what they profess openly to be doing. This places on the lawyer a duty to ensure that his task of constitution-making benefits from a good understanding of a wide range of individual and group processes and activities within which states function.

Also like administrators, a lawyer's work usually consists of interpreting and applying normative rules to factual situations. But unlike administrators whose work is usually prospective, the lawyer's task is often retrospective, being the application of general rules to specific post-facto situations. The lawyer's emphasis is on the elaboration of general rules and generic factual situations, more than on the application of rules to make policy choices or to determine a course of action or to arrive at a discretionary decision, which are the tasks of the administrator.

In constitution-making, the lawyer's task too is prospective. In adjudication the judge also makes policy choices, though not as openly as the administrator does. While the administrator's work is enriched by an understanding of law and how it is interpreted, the lawyer too benefits from an understanding of various conditions that bring about and influence the situations in respect of which he is called upon to apply the law and how subjective human factors are deployed to turn value-loaded situations and facts into objective questions of law dispassionately debated. Post-colonial development, therefore, requires a healthy convergence of the lawyer and the administrator in their respective fields of work to enhance efficiency of governance for the benefit of the citizens and society.

The book in part Three explores requisites for the convergence in our elaboration of the theory of substantive constitutionalism.

Applied to the constitutional domain, the lawyer's rewarding understanding of social facts translates as sociological comprehension of political and economic processes of individuals and groups which impact upon society, state and laws. Sociological comprehension of political and economic phenomena by a lawyer broadens and deepens his thinking about law and enlarges his conceptual vision about the quality and model of state and society which he may deploy his professional tools of legal expertise and judicial adjudication to design for his people as his contribution towards shaping an efficacious societal instrument for tackling the manifold problems inherent in genuine modernisation and development.

Consumption in our societies of goods of material development risks producing a complacency of the mind while global neo-liberalism and its accompanying international free trade spread a culture of consumerism. This is imperceptibly becoming an opium dulling the minds of the people with ready availability of easily disposable goods at precisely the epoch in their lives when what they truly need is a sharpening of their consciousness to their needs to push them to greater efforts. The task of the lawyer in the face of these developments becomes more urgent than ever. In what ways can the lawyer apply his legal expertise and sociological insights to support laws which will subject consumer globalization to national regulation and priorities and advance the interests of his fellow-citizens without violating legitimate norms of genuine international interdependence?

For, equitably applied, fair norms of international cooperation and interdependence, when properly synchronized with national priorities, constitute veritable catalytic facilitators of national development and modernization which promote harmonious integration of backward societies into the mainstream of world history. This makes post-colonial societies participants in the advancement of global knowledge, science and technology, as they willingly discard aspects of their cultures which they see as pulling them back and unhelpful. The need for lawyers and development planners and policy makers to manage through law the effects of globalization in their societies is a necessity. Failure to do that risks making post- colonial states and societies for ever continue to be the drawers of water and hewers of wood within the global economy.

The risk increases especially as supranational regulatory institutions like the I.M.F, the World Bank and the W.T.O, and multinational enterprises, often more powerful than many post-colonial states combined, coopt sections of local ruling elite to become more the privileged spokesmen of the global system and multinational interests within their national economies than representatives and spokespersons of their people who elect them to be rulers.

Closely related to the necessity for growth in consciousness of need, must be the acknowledgement that if law is to be applied to play its full developmental role as an instrument and motive force for qualitative social change unobstructed by internal sectarian interests and external interests packaged as globalization and international cooperation, then lawyers have to avoid studying law and its seemingly technical rules in a social vacuum. In other words law as a social institution and tool must be studied, analysed and understood in its comprehensive societal context and in social terms. One way of doing this is by way of social research by social scientists.

Another method is to ascertain the social and economic environment in which laws are made and applied in order to identify what the laws are actually doing or are being applied to achieve in society, and relate the empirical findings of the law's concrete works, achievements and consequences to the law's stated goals, ascribed aspirations and objectives. In other words, it falls within the province of sociological jurisprudence to ascertain the extent to which the actual workings and results of law measure up to noble aspirations of intentions ascribed, and used, to justify the laws.

Written by a lawyer, the book adopts the second method. Divided into three parts, the book takes us on a journey which starts in Part One with a re-examination of French decolonization arrangements in West Africa and examines how, after more than half a century, those arrangements continue to influence the exercise of power in those societies. We enquire into how long-forgotten causes still condition citizens' attitudes and responses, and determine the form, contents and scope of ostensibly autonomous political and economic decisions.

We examine persisting effects of abandoned colonial education upon the mindset, thought processes, interpretation and understanding of contemporary domestic problems and solutions brought to them, and upon the world-view of the post-colonial elite and their children who did not live under colonial rule. This is done because it is the elite who largely determine the directions in which their societies move. We examine the ends which various elite ruling groups who come to exercise state-power use law to attain. We try to provide some insights into the contemporary essence of post-colonial states, into the system of thought of the ruling groups, their motivations and the perceptions they have of their societies, states and law, and into relationships which the laws produce in the societies.

This is done in Part Two. On the basis of the evidence we try to answer the question whether what we find is what the laws promise and what the people of post-colonial societies implicitly want for themselves, taking into account the policies and pronouncements on which basis the people give their support to their rulers. This enables us in Part Three to suggest normative, structural and procedural solutions towards bridging the gap between rhetoric, euphoric optimism, expectation and reality. Suggestions are made for institutions and processes to hold the rulers to account for gaps between what they promise and what they deliver, away from the oft self-serving congratulatory waxing upon what would have happened disastrously but for the below-average little that was delivered, well below the promised performance and raised expectations.

The book is not a law text-book. It does not seek to explain or interpret laws, or clarify any branch of law by means of normative and structural analysis of black-letter laws and judicial pronouncement of judges. It assumes that persons who may read it as lawyers already have a good understanding of legal rules, theories and concepts of law which animate the discussion. The book's contribution to law may lie in the realm of jurisprudence and legal thought in the ways in which it seeks to draw readers into new channels of thinking about law and its mission in developing societies. Its thesis in this regard is that the perception which many post-colonial lawyers often have of law as a distinct, autonomous bread-and-butter institution for enlightened food foraging in an elitist condescending isolation from the very people and society whose affairs it seeks to manage, regulate, mediate and control--a perception which is a fundamental misconception of law, which court-room traditions of English Common Law and certain aspects of conventional legal education in Africa tend to reinforce.

In positive terms, the thrust of the book's argument is that when laws, their concepts, norms, structures and procedures are situated spatio-temporarily within the entire historical, cultural, political, social and economic processes of post-colonial societies beyond the court-room dicta of precedent- bound judges and are analysed and studied within the context of time and space, ethics and mores of a people, then the full meaning of law and legal concepts are clearly expressed and understood more fully, just like any societal phenomenon which reflects the beliefs, the lives and times, the history, aspirations and the social and economic geography of a people. So for example, certain laws made ostensibly as part of the modernization process of Africa, may be fully understood and appreciated only when they are examined within the context of the vision and ambitions which the power-holders had for their communities and societies or within the context of the historical evolution of African political economies in which agitation for economic rights through organized labour unions preceded agitation for political rights. Contextual understanding of laws informs, enlightens, and defines the scope and limits of any attempts to borrow or transfer law and legal institutions from one culture to another, or from one generation to another. Thus explaining why liberal democracy and liberal rights laws preceded social democracy and economic and social rights in Europe can only be understood in terms of the political and social history of Europe, without any implication that the sequence has to be the same on other continents in different historical circumstances. Such that in Africa, Asia and the Pacific, in countries like Ghana, Kenya, Pakistan and Papua New Guinea, street-cleaners, school teachers, news vendors, town criers and grave-diggers, on their leaders' coming into political power through the liberal democratic process of the ballot box,apply their political power to legislate and execute economic and investment laws that turn them into instant overnight dollar-millionaires.

They thus achieve Kwame Nkrumah's exhortation to his "veranda-boys", rough-sleeping followers in his Convention Peoples Party 'seek ye first the political kingdom and all things shall be added unto you" in aphoristic imitation of Jesus Christ's encouragement to the faithful. When a self-effacing, hardworking Minister in President Kenyatta's government of Kenya, a veteran of the Mau Mau liberation struggle that won political freedom for Kenya, was reportedly not enriching himself, the senior Oginga Odinga, also a veteran, reported that President Kenyatta asked Bildad Kaggia, the Minister, "Kaggia, what are you doing for yourself? Bildad, I say, what are you doing for yourself?''

Ignoring the historical and cultural milieu of laws complicates the manifold problems of Africa's development. Thus in his zeal to assist an ostensible reform of mining laws of Ghana, a law professor unwittingly wreaked on Ghana's land tenure system within three years, from 1983 to 1986 when he undertook the reform, more havoc than colonialism took a century to wreak on Ghana. Thanks to Lord Luggard's colonial policy of indirect colonial rule through the medium of pliant chiefs coopted into the colonial system, Ghana's pre-colonial land tenure system endured under colonialism and survived intact into post-colonial times. Native lawyers, educated and trained in England, did not allow their assimilation into the Common Law tradition to lead them into imposing English land law and tenurial system on Ghana. In fact they successfully resisted it. But the professor, backed by the military power of a murderous regime under which hundreds of opponents vanished like in Argentina and Chile under Pinochet, uncritically imposed on Ghana without any public debate, a Minerals and Mining law, P.N.D.C. Law 153 At a stroke of the dictator's signature, that law reduced land-owning sovereign Ghanaians to a status comparable to that of displaced native Americans and Australian Aborigines: every Ghanaian became a squatter in his own home as the decree empowered any mining company, invariably a multinational company, holding a mining licence from the state, to enter any land and destroy any structures on it, if necessary, in order to explore for minerals in and under the soil. Inasmuch as sand is silicon, an element or mineral, the soil containing sand on which every house in Ghana was constructed became vested in the state.

A mineral licence holder can, therefore, enter a man's house and dig the foundation with impunity because he is exploring for a mineral, may be, silica or silicon. Unlike native Americans and Aborigines, Ghanaians were not given even the privilege of being deported into reserves and settlements; the application of the decree left them destitute like the rats and reptiles in the wild. That decree undermined and betrayed all the work of the Aborigines Rights Protection Society which, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, fought for and saved the land rights of native Ghanaians from expropriation by the British colonial rulers. The then Ghanaian or Gold Coast, elite sent delegations to London and successfully convinced Queen Victoria to declare that she wanted the hearts of her colonial subjects, not their land, contrary to the expropriations which she presided over in East Africa. In its essential aspects, that military decree, called a law, surreptitiously transferred to Ghana in an intellectually dishonest manner, an Australian law which the British settlers in Australia enacted to dispossess native Australians of their ancestral lands and forcibly deported them to remote inhospitable settlements.

Ghana's decree empowered rogue investors, adventurers and multinational mining companies holding government licences to enter any land in Ghana and dispossess the native allodial owners of their rights in violation of well-established land laws of Ghana with impunity.

Compared to P.N.D.C Law 153, a 1904 colonial ordinance by which the British government expropriated the minerals of natives was more humane and more respectful of native rights than what the P.N.D.C power-wielders and the professor did to the sovereign citizens of republican Ghana. No one doubts legitimate capacity of the government of Ghana to vest mineral and strategic resources in the state on behalf of the people as a whole. But within the context of a sovereign people, i.e citizens, not subjects, whose property rights antedate the state and must be respected because it is they who are sovereign and not the state, the constitutional question, even under military rule, is whether when it is necessary to abridge property-rights in the public interest, a state that is the instrument of the sovereign people can do that on terms that amount to confiscation, distinct from compulsory acquisition with adequate compensation. The disdain shown to the sovereign landowners is a painful reminder of the colonialists of East Africa. This is the face of post-colonial development on which we throw light in this inquiry.

A latter-day socialist convert to capitalism, the law professor directed his energies to becoming the intellectual surrogate of local ambitious and foreign adventurous land-grabbers in search of precious metals. He deployed his knowledge of Stalinism to champion a mining law that reduced Ghanaian allodial land owners into virtual African Kulaks. They could be deported from their ancestral land at a stroke of the pen of a minister of mines or a bureaucrat of a government which professed commitment to private enterprise and the free market, but sought to apply communist Stalinist measures to forcibly expropriate property without compensation. It was use of crude state power expressed as law to create a privileged economic oligarchic class out of impoverished formally educated groups who had seized political power.

The fact that the law was inspired from Australia was used to project its Western democratic origin. That ruse was used as a cover for that law's essentially racist character. Ghanaians, terrified into docility and silence by the regime's brutal search-and-destroy paramilitary commands, were in no position to point out salient differences between the history and politics of colonialism in Australia and Ghana, which made the law untenable and inappropriate in Ghana. Ghanaians were more petrified when the commander of the entire armed forces unceremoniously resigned his command and sought asylum at the British High Commission, because Ghanaians learnt that the General was regularly ignored by his army commander, in league with corporals who communicated directly with their airforce captain, Rawlings. Libyan armaments were imported without reference to the Armed Forces Commander who saw signs that search-and- destroy men such as Corporal Adomogri, now in self-imposed exile in Norway, were after his life.

It was possible to impose the minerals decree because although Ghanaians are the republican repositories of sovereign powers of rulership, Ghana was at the time a territory virtually captured and overran by marauding adventurers led by mutineers, convicted felons and criminal fugitives.

The chickens came home to roost in Ghana when, contrary to his promises to repeal the Mineral Law 153, and another expropriation P.N.D.C. Law 287, President Kufuor, once elected democratically into office the moment Ghanaians had the opportunity to tell Rawlings their mind, saw the immense opportunities in Law 153 and Law 287, for effortlessly rewarding party supporters who had been ousted from power for years since January 1972, when Busia was overthrown.

To get more arbitrary elbow-room, President Kufuor sought to stampede through parliament a Legislative Instrument No. 1716, the effect of which was to reinforce the minerals law to a worse degree than when Rawlings was the unelected dictator. Terrified by the massive presence in the parliament gallery of Ada allodial landowners who felt their land rights were threatened by L.I 1716, Parliament rejected the Instrument and got Kufuor's Minister for Lands to withdraw the subsidiary legislation. The futility of seeking, in a constitutional democracy, to treat sovereign Ghanaians like colonial subjects, persecuted Australian Aborigines and Russian Kulaks, was brought home to President Kufuor when Ada native landowners among whom counted university professors, retired diplomats, lawyers, doctors and Kufuor's own retired school-teachers at Prempeh College, and their chiefs and priestly rulers, marched on Parliament. They prevailed on the law-makers to get the President to withdraw the law. Under pressure from a delegation of Ga-Dangme Council of Elders that confronted him on November 29, 2002, a day after the withdrawal of the L.I.1716, the Minister for Mines admitted, later to be repeated on December 13,2002, at a meeting of a committee of the Council of State, which the writer attended, that it was his President who used him to persist in his intransigent defence of Law 287 and L.I 1716.

The minister confessed that his President encouraged him to use the legal basis of the Minerals Law 153 and Minerals Commission Act, 1993, Act 450, to push through the Parliament L.I. 1716, to serve the purposes of Law 287. Legislative Instrument 1716, had it been approved by Parliament, would have reinforced Law 287. The aim was to dispossess the Ada people of their salt lakes, lagoons and adjoining lands in favor of faceless rogue-investors, bureaucrats, politicians and hangers-on who would speculate in the lands for effortless capital gains. Local compradors would be rewarded and honored with foreign titles and decorations for selling portions of their motherland and what did not belong to them to foreign interests. These are masks of post-colonial development behind which the holders of political power use their position to acquire economic power in spite of sovereign people and genuine foreign investors.

At a broader social and economic level the Songor-Lagoon saga marked a stage in the making of the Ghanaian working class in their transition from being non-feudal, independent land-owning individuals, groups and clans into landless wage-workers. Pre-capitalist communal landowning clans were being expropriated of their invaluable capital assets by force of laws of doubtful validity. In the book itself we shall delve deeper into how successive executive arms of government have sought, since 1993, to stifle and frustrate aggrieved landowners in such situations by bribing individual members of the legislature and the Judiciary with vast tracks of expropriated lands in Accra and in the rural areas and with soft loans to establish themselves as lady-and gentlemen- absentee farmers and agro-industrialists and collectors of rent from shopping malls and luxury apartments.

Also discussed is the support which multinational companies and agencies of the industrialized states bring to weld rival elite groups into a homogeneous collaborative ruling class divided into mutually supportive and competing groups and parties more than competitors, in order to provide conducive political and constitutional framework and environment to dispossess the much less educated majorities without disturbing the formal apparent democratic order. The few elite hands into which the lands and other economically strategic national assets would be concentrated would then turn round and employ once affluent clans as wage-labourers on what used to be their own property. It marks a stage in the making of a post-colonial working class that colonialism did not make.

Concurrently with the Ada Songor lagoon saga, a similar scenario started unfolding in the Western Region of Ghana with the discovery of crude-oil and gas off-shore and in the Tono River basin. Suddenly politicians, speculators and surrogates began swooping on the coastal belt of the region with money and consumer and quickly depreciating goods like cars, cross-country four-wheel drive air-conditioned vehicles and television and D.V.D players, in exchange for land from subsistence-farming landowning persons and groups many of whom had never owned a bicycle, but now suddenly had become the proud possessors of cell-phones that brought the world to their villages.

The Songor Lagoon case brought to the fore the criterion of the mind as the essential determining factor in post-colonial development. This time, however, it was a perverse manipulation of the mind of unsuspecting simple folk. In plain factual terms, the Songor Lagoon problem epitomized a singular issue which runs through all chapters: it is the use of state political power processed and formally dressed up as law to make decisions which seek to make private ownership displace group communal ownership.

This was the challenge which was often created for landowning communities in precapitalist post-colonial societies by property acquisitive ruling groups bent on using the power of the state and the force behind the laws to establish their economic power base in immovable capital property assets. To condition the minds of unsuspecting Ghanaians to accept President Kufuor's programme of establishing the economic power-base of his supporters, the President and his intellectual apologists sought to focus the minds of Ghanaians on the virtues of nineteenth-century free market liberalism as the right model for establishing a twenty-first century, African free-market system of organizing capital for optimum efficiency in production, distribution and profit maximization.

Ostensibly to achieve economy of scale, small landowning peasant farmers and salt producers of Ada and other coastal villages were persuaded to believe that the only way by which they could improve their economic future in Ghana's emerging liberal economy was to cede their small clan land-holdings to a few, politically powerful and influential elite groups who would apply modern techniques of production to produce efficiently at least cost to maximize profits. The question: to maximize profits for whom, was glossed over. In the distribution of profits and rewards we see the lord and the serf in modern-day Ghana.

With the minds of the people and their expectations fired by the government's slogan of creating property-owning democracy, the subtle expropriation of the clans, through state acquisition and subsequent releasing to favourites for peppercorn rents, was legitimated to gain moral justification and acceptance by the very victims of the expropriations. While property-owning democracy was touted in Southern Ghana by loyal appointees of the government, the small, landowning cocoa farmers elsewhere in Ghana were not equally exhorted to cede their small holdings to large-scale plantation magnates. It was as if economy of scale was applicable to only the food-farming and salt-producing areas of the South, but not applicable to cocoa farmers.

By the efforts to condition the minds of the Ada people, especially the subsistence-level producers, to visualize the exhilarating prospects of future participation in the promised property- owning democracy, it was sought to persuade the pre-capitalist landowning kinship groups to voluntarily transfer their lands, their only productive economic assets, to an emerging elite political group whose only capital was their capacity to do politics and manipulate words. Many of them were supporters of the dictatorial regime of Rawlings when the only cheap means to make easy money was through blackmail, influence peddling, or outright extortion through the use of naked power of A.K.47s

What the rulers, in their acquisitive impatience and haste to become landowners, failed to realize or wilfully ignored, was that they were using constitutional rule of law under a sort of flawed electoral democracy to sow seeds of social discord. Conflict in society would become inevitable when erstwhile landowning kinship groups become conscious of their new status as wage-working landless citizens in a free- market economy. They would wake up to find that the property-owning democracy which they had been promised in return for surrendering their communitarian, collective land tenure systems, had resulted rather in the loss of their economic power, independence, self-reliance and pride.

Within the political economy of multiethnic societies, tensions, conflicts and acts of open hostility aggravate as indigenous investors are seen to come increasingly from ethnic groups with whom the dispossessed groups have a history of hostility and conflict. This becomes worse if ancestors of the new landowning groups had ever waged war on ancestors of dispossessed groups for the same property. This means that economic policies should not be made in a historical and social vacuum.

Social implications and social costs of economic policies and decisions must be critically studied and subjected to dispassionate objective analysis to spare post-colonial societies some of the more avoidable consequences of ostensibly public but self-serving decisions which the ruling elite enact as laws. This can be effectively done when, of all natural resources, we first develop our minds in all their intellectual and material productive capacities and dimensions. Without developing the minds of a community as their first natural resource, developing their other natural resources amounts to throwing carrion to vultures. Institutional obstacles to developing post-colonial minds and ways of overcoming them are explored in chapters that follow.

By a letter dated May 8,2002, the minister of mines informed the chiefs and people of Ada that "Cabinet has approved the proposal submitted by the Ministry of Mines for the formation of Ada Songor Salt Development Authority which shall among other responsibilities exercise: (a) Oversight and control of the Songor Lagoon and all adjoining lands,...''The people of Ada immediately smelt a rat; they suspected a presidential secret agenda to exclude them from the property-owning democracy which the President had touted on his assumption of office. For, they argued, how could a President who had announced a comprehensive programme to privatize state manufacturing industries, state-owned insurance and banking services, transport, water and electricity utilities, road and harbours infrastructure, contemplate setting up a state-owned authority to manage and control transactions in land, brine and salt production? The Ada people started wondering aloud whether the property-owning democracy which was already being inaugurated in some areas of Ghana, was going to be turned into a property-losing democracy in minority areas of Ghana to please tribal chieftains with a long history of waging war to acquire those very salt lakes of the Ga- Dangme people of the coast. Surely, they argued, the President had no intention of alienating sections of the society over whom he presided? But that was precisely the consequence of that ill-thought out recommendation he had accepted from a minister who administered a major national portfolio with the small- minded mentality of a provincial backwoodsman. The result was an unnecessary tension and conflict which arose in consequence of that minister's attempt to get his President to impose a parochial tribal land tenure system built around feudal chieftains on areas of Ghana where land tenure system is built on the rights of kinship groups, families and clans in egalitarian traditional political systems which could be described as communitarian or communal republicanism.

The nature of African politics, being ethnically influenced as it is, and where it now has reached in its modernization leaps and falls, with political pluralism practised by visionless opportunists as ethnic parochialism, it may be salutary for every open-minded President wishing to reduce errors, to consider setting up an intellectual round-table where proposed policies may be examined in all their dimensions and implications. By applying thought and intellect to project the societies into the future and situate them within projected results of their decisions, think-tank aides may assist the rulers to become authentic leaders leading their societies on routes they have surveyed and traversed with their minds before the first actual steps are taken. Details of this intellectual journey are explored in the book after we have examined some of the tragic consequences of our national failure to look before leaping.

The Ada Songor affair and President Kufuor's self-inflicted political wounds, and debacle marked a step in the progressive differentiation in Ghana of a hitherto predominantly egalitarian communitarian society, along economic class lines demarcated by political power. By using political power enacted as law to convert group ownership of a vital and limited capital asset into private, individual ownership in which the justness of one's title was based not so much on any legitimate claim of right as on the force of the dictates of gun-backed positive laws, Ghana's soi-disant liberal democrats sought to wreak on sections of their fellow-citizens the forcible dispossession which colonizers inflicted on Black Africans in South Africa under apartheid and on Aboriginal Australians.

Using law to shift capital from one social group to another is not new in world history. But to seek to do it within a constitutional frame-work of legal equality of all citizens on parochial ethnic considerations in a multi-ethnic society already charged with history of mutual suspicions, is to sow seeds of conflict which demonstrates the rulers' lack of wisdom, the cultivation of which forms part of the thrust of the book in Part Three.

Genuine development, therefore, requires laying sound political, economic and social foundations in well thought out broadminded policies in which human resource development and physical infrastructural planning, execution and maintenance are linked to demonstrable economic growth and expansion. This has to be done and coordinated with such efficiency that the policies and the laws, in their enforcement, leave no doubt that human quality of life and well-being in freedom constitute the only valid and legitimate tests of good governance. Proper cultivation of the mind as the most important natural resource comes again into play.

Acquisition of head-knowledge of economic principles must be accompanied with a transformation that leaves no doubt that economic recovery, structural adjustment, economic growth and expansion and similar processes which the experts measure in terms of gross domestic product, are never ends in themselves, as our rulers and their economic gurus would want ordinary mortals to accept. These evaluations which we are made to accept as conclusive indicators of performance are only means to the real end of achieving higher quality of life, and higher standards of living for the society whose economy is in question. Indeed it must be accepted that economics, economies and all social policies can only be validly measured in human quality-of-life terms because economics and economies are about human lives. How traditional cultures and mores impact on these criteria is explored.

If gross domestic product continues to grow at impressive rates by whatever yardstick that are used, but only a fraction of that growth remains in a society's economy to manifestly transform the lives of the people while the bulk of that growth exits the economy, and yet the rulers and elite educated leaders congratulate themselves, then something must be wrong with that society's thought-process, if not with the entire thought-system. These questions, and especially the correlation or otherwise between I.M.F and World Bank policies and human welfare in Africa, are addressed throughout Part Two of the book.

In our conclusions we make suggestions towards addressing urgent national and continental African human resource weaknesses and failures. When we re-examine (i) the quality of national decision-making, and (2) the structure and functioning of our centers of analyzing policies, of our institutes of social and economic research, and of our erudite think-tanks and we find that development policies and strategies endorsed by our think-tanks, centers and institutions are not, when implemented, producing the expected improved changes in quality of life of majorities of the populations even though the statistics, returns and the expert findings of the policy-makers, researchers and objective observers point to increases in gross domestic product, to macro-economic stability, low inflation and to those other abstractions and indicators which conclusively prove on paper and in theoretical analysis that economic development is taking place, then a question akin to that of the emperor and his new clothes arises for society to answer. Do we, like innocent children, unconditioned by considerations of privilege and ideological indoctrination, decide innocently on the basis of the objective facts before us in the actual economic, social and living conditions of vast majorities of the population, or we join in the wisdom of the wise and the powerful in chorusing that contrary to what is obvious, all is going well; in which case we shall not have to defend our stand? And, surely, we shall always be in the good books of our betters?

This means that public debate must extend beyond the limited province of politically connected, often foreign-patronised and subsidized egg-heads, into the wider domain of the entire society as collective stakeholders in public policy. This may be done effectively with objectivity within a constitutional environment of credible transparent governance in which freedom of information and its exercise as a democratic right of all is legally enforceable against governments, public institutions and agencies to lift the veil of secrecy which impedes informed debate.

Naturally modernization and upliftment of quality of life of hitherto backward societies such as Africa's demands a disciplined and judicious use of scarce resources through transparent decision-making processes in order to achieve set goals and targets. Equally elaborated in transparent anteriorly formulated far-sighted and sometimes hard-headed policies, the goals and targets will depend on their intrinsic and manifest merits for acceptance by the people who may have to bear the brunt of sacrifices for achievement. Acceptance is facilitated when people know why they are called upon to make sacrifices and the policies are rooted in the sociological realities of the people, even if the policies aim at transforming those realities ultimately. Such policies evoke popular animation and make the people willing to make necessary sacrifices when the leaders are seen to lead by example, in contrast to leadership by exhortation which many African leaders are good at doing. Moreover it is much easier for policy failures to be accepted by the ruled when the policies are the outcome of consensual processes which all identify with, their execution are open and transparent and the leaders readily take responsibility for failures as they lead the people by example, not by the characteristic rhetoric.

Policies which lead to dispossession and displacement of the many in favour of powerful and favoured few constitute a disingenuous abuse of power. They will be opposed by marginalized populations as they become more enlightened, informed and aware of the strength which their numbers give them, unless democracy is perverted. These points are made here as an invitation to readers to start pondering over them. They are issues which are constantly raised throughout the book in various forms. They cumulatively constitute a theme in various forms that are addressed in several chapters in order to prevent past decisions from distorting future reforms especially where lack of collective insight and institutional memory leads to repackaging of old failures to appear as prospective success formulae. Raised here as they are, they spare readers the tedium of repeating them as they reverberate throughout the book.

Throughout the book we examine instances of perverse application of the mind in conflicts of interests situations purposively contrived in self-serving policies packaged and presented as public interest. We examine the policies in order to ascertain some articulate roles of the state and law in the post-colonial socio-economic reconstruction process. A question which we must constantly turn over in our minds is as follows:- if in form the style, procedures and mode of governance and respect for liberal democratic rights under constitutional democracy replace the violence and arbitrary fiats of coup-makers, how essentially do the socio-economic relationships which result from the rule of African democrats differ from those of the military rulers?

In the face of the reluctance of democratically elected rulers to repeal dictatorial decrees of the military rulers and continue to execute self-serving policies decreed as law by the dictators, are we to conclude that the transition from military dictatorship to constitutional democracy is therefore essentially nothing more than a choice between the forcible brutality of the armed robber and the smooth and suave persuasion of the confidence trickster? In the conclusions we offer suggestions as to how we could save our societies and states from such depressing cynicism.

In the implementation of the Minerals and Mining Law 153 and P.N.D.C Law 287, and the aftermath of ill-fated L.I 1716, one could see the convergence of the ambitious economic constituencies of Rawlings, the P.N.D.C. dictator and Kufuor, the democratic President and their hangers-on. Setback which African development suffers when self-seeking politicians and coup-makers in search of legitimacy make promises they renege on, and dangers which professing and professed democrats pose to democratic governance in the disparity and contradictions between their rhetoric and performance, are explored in the book. In the conclusions and epilogue we make recommendations for preventive institutional measures.

Essentially an inquiry into the political economy of law, the book situates post-colonial states and societies within the global economy and examines the extent to which their developmental and modernization decisions are impacted upon by decisions of the dominant actors, within the global economy. These global actors are (1) the industrialized economies and their multinational enterprises; (2) the International Monetary Fund (I.M.F), an organization which, controlled as it is by the quantum of quotas or shares which a member holds, exerts control on national economies to regulate the global economy in terms of international liquidity, international division of labour, exchange rate and currency convertibility and movement; (3) the World Bank, which, established with the I.M.F as complementary institutions, relies on loans it gives to borrowing countries to promote global privatization and global free enterprise and free trade; (4) the World Trade Organisation which, established in the 1990's after its initial formation in 1948 was aborted by Cold War politics, promotes global free-trade in domestic economies through its supervision of the observance by member states of international trade rules and protocols which it assists member-states to negotiate and sign; (5) and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (O.E.C.D) which protects the interests of the industrial economies of North America, Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. Theoretical underpinnings and practical effects of the principle of international division of labour built on the theory of comparative advantage and on which principle the neo-liberal global economy operates, are identified and discussed in their application to, and impact upon, African developing economies. The economic, social and political effects of the international division of labour and decisions of the I.M.F, the World Bank, the W.T.O and multinational economies upon ostensibly autonomous decisions of states and the human rights of post- colonial people are examined with some prognostication and recommendations.

This leads to the formulation in the final chapter of a theory of substantive constitutionalism. It is a theory which, by its political arrangements, is designed to assist, at the conceptual level, in providing post-colonial people with an added theoretically and empirically based model for organizing what may be described as human-need-oriented, human-friendly holistic states, designed and structured to serve as efficacious community instruments for enlarging and protecting the rights of citizens, and for assisting them to elevate their minds and the quality of their lives to manifestly more fulfilling heights by means of the quality of the decisions they make and apply in managing their affairs.

At the end of the book, we present a picture of a model of self-reliant development in which Africa's modernization and growth policies cease either to consist of stop-gap measures in reaction to changing external circumstances in the face of which we deterministically resign ourselves, or to only mitigate the effects of external conditions and configurations with plans which depend on the goodwill of external well-wishers for success. The conclusions of the book give us a model of development which starts with honest hard-headed and frank acknowledgement of our internal weaknesses that we seek to redress by re- educating ourselves to progressively achieve enduring changes primarily in ourselves, ie in our mindset, creativity and innovativeness in our attitudes and perceptions of ourselves and the external world.

We present a development process which starts by equipping us all, from garbage collector to laser surgeon, with a platform of common mental characteristics, attitudes and responses as persons living in a broadly homogeneous society or community, with work ethics and informed insight into our respective individual vocations and professions as mutually supportive services we render to each other. The performance of each individual's calling on platform of common identity, common basic beliefs and common goals, may hopefully enable each individual acting in pursuit of his own legitimate interests directed at serving or producing goods which serve the community, will enable us collectively to manage our circumstances and harness them to serve our group policies and human needs.

A departure which the book makes from conventional starting-point of the development process in African post-colonial states is crucial: in technologically less developed societies such us ours, to design the development process in terms of plans which require, for success, that developed states change their policies and make available to us products and services on the basis of our undoubtedly manifest needs, is to make us forever objects of global charity. This ultimately makes us the victims of tangential change. It leads us under new forms of domination. On the other hand we need to conceive and change the African development paradigm to one of first transforming our minds as our most important natural resource, all other natural resources being only secondary.

We then proceed to aquire capacities which enable us effectively to act on our other natural resources as we deem fit and can manage. This makes us true masters of the change which we desire and set ourselves to achieve. In this self-reliant model of development which we propose, we reject post-colonial twenty-first century models like the New Partnership for Africa's Developed (nepad) which implicitly emanates from a perception of Africans by the developed industrial societies as putty which they can work on with their financial and technological capital resources to mould in accordance with their perceptions of our welfare, status and the future they envisage for us in the world to levels which they deem compatible with their needs and wants and continued superiority and domination.

African votaries of nepad and Africa's tangential development from Presidents Abdul Wade of Senegal and Kufuor of Ghana through Obasanjo of Nigeria to Thabo Mbeki of South Africa and to our Africa legendary icon, Nelson (Madiba) Mandela and their successors, are humbly and with due respect admonished that the vision which animated and sustained the African liberation movement and the anti-apartheid struggle, must not be blurred by the intoxication of seeing Black faces in apparent formal political control of an Africa which, only formally restored to Africans on the basis of formal legal equality, is devoid of economic and social justice. Such a blurred vision can only delay but never abort the inevitability of the eternal laws of human evolution and civilization in which we Africans are participants, active players not bench-warmers.

The African transformation which forms the essence of the book's conclusions envisages a re-education directed away from reinforcing in ourselves the conditioned involuntary and spontaneous projection of Eurocentric and other meretricious values and perceptions cultivated and inculcated under our Black skins through assimilation of ill-understood exogenous cultures, values and elitist social advancement policies. It is re-education that should be directed at producing a transformation of our minds, culture, perception and attitudes across the entire spectrum and rungs of the social order. This should endow us with capacities to correctly indentify our problems and challenges and generate imaginative and creative ideas to resolve them.

In the process we learn from our errors and strive to attain to more satisfactory qualities of life. The re-education paradigm should assist us to cease to be the pitied objects and recipients of goods, services and all manner of charity faultlessly planned and paternalistically packaged for us by external well-wishers and benevolent, condescending patronisers. We present a conceptual model of transformation and development process which starts with seeking to equip policy-makers and development planners with a mental attitude which puts the well-being of their people at the top of the development agenda, instead of treating them as foot-notes, or marginalizing them, or even treating them like the reptiles, rats, pests and noisome vermin to be eradicated from mining and industrial sites by forcible deportation, destruction of their subsistence farms and deprivation or pollution of their natural sources of potable water. The proposed model stops the relocation of communities away from their homes declared as sites for mining, industrial and development projects that only enhance efficiency and multinational corporate profits.

The conclusions suggest ways of making elite formations of society, from which the rulers emerge, more responsive and accountable to the ruled. This, it is hoped, will stop the sacrifice of the ruled for physical structures and profits, luxury and leisure of a few, and restore economic growth and development to its proper role, not of being an end in itself, measured and evaluated in terms of statistical figures, but as the means to the true end. We identify the true end as the human welfare dimension of the progress and advancement of the ruled to whom sovereign powers of rulership properly belong in every truly democratic polity in which the legitimate exercise of free will of individuals under law and their well-being underpin the legitimacy of the state, its power and authority.

We answer questions such as: what is the purpose of a well-designed education system, established and funded with billions of World Bank dollar loans, with well-spelt out curricula in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, psychology and medicine, but graduates pass out and the economy offers hardly any opportunities for their employment? Solutions offered by rulers to such consequences of poor developmental policy-making could be described as comic parody but for their tragic implications. Thus to stop brain-drain of doctors and nurses out of Ghana, the ruler, Jerry Rawlings, proposed that education standards be lowered for nurses and doctors to make them unemployable outside Ghana.

Understanding the implications for our societies, our ways of doing things, and for our very ways of life, of concepts of management like planning change, organization, delegation, technology and productivity, does not come by itself. It is inculcated at all levels of society through purposive effort instructed by practice whose efficiency is assessed by its output and stated targets. Applying these concepts as developmental tools to attain maximum results to accelerate our human upliftment and sustained competitiveness on the ruthless and often dissembling arena of global underhand free-for-all market of veiled national interests which the powerful convert into international rules and regulations which the weak must obey at the risk of sanctions and blackmail, requires a strong and congenial national, and eventually, a continental African, political framework of solid constitutional foundations. It also requires an enabling social environment for private initiative and for states to perform their functions of planning, regulation, facilitation and supervision through the transparent exercise of allocatory powers, rule under law and accountable governance.

Suggestions for laying the legal foundations for the state to encourage, facilitate and expand opportunities for the exercise of private initiative of citizens are made in the last two chapters and the conclusions. Suggestions are also made for laying the constitutional basis in law for demanding and enforcing individual and corporate responsibility and accountability from and against persons who make public decisions or undertake private management of public resources and assets and public services by virtue of their expertise.

On the face of it, the book may appear to tell the depressing story of benighted pauper-colonial opiate people on a cheery bus-man's holiday- ride to nowhere; but behind the undeniable gloom and pain of self-inflicted wounds shine clear pointers and encouraging and comforting indicators to crucial work which the post-colonial person must do on his mindset, thought-processes, on his world outlook, and on the reorganisation of his society, state and its governance before he could hope to be a winner in a global competition ill-matched against him. It is a call to our rulers to stop trudging the global arena with development blue-prints and banners which point to rosy development of everywhere in our environment, but develop nowhere. It ends with a call to take difficult and self- denying steps of self-reliance necessary to make us winners, not in a globally restricted zero-sum game, but in an open competitive world in which there is room for everyone, every nation, with the requisite mastery of the rules, to be a winner.