Fifty years on, how independent African economies are?
This is one of the more sensitive parts of the evaluation of African independence. Intra-African trade represents a dismal 9 per cent of the overall trade of Africa with the international community. And Africa’s trade represents only 3 per cent of global trade. We have not made progress in that area. Africa has even lost ground because the values of Africa’s commodities have dropped since independence. The prices of commodities are not fixed by Africans themselves. They are fixed elsewhere. The financial system has not been developed in a way that allows the integration of Africa into the international financial mechanisms. Africa’s financial transactions represent a dismal 0.87 per cent of global financial transactions, which is nothing. This lack of economic progress has its social implications. In the [UN Development Programme’s annual] Human Development Report, you will see that among the 20 countries which have performed the least in terms of human development, most are African co
