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Micropolitical Dimensions of Development and National Integration in Rural Africa: Concepts and an Application
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 May 2014
Extract
Independent tropical African regimes face essentially the same dilemma that increasingly occupied the European colonial governments during their last years: to achieve rapid and widespread techno-economic development by using as a principal instrument the subsistence farmer. African elites, to a far greater extent than their colonial predecessors, are also subject to the immediate demands of political legitimacy. The occupational survival of bureaucrats, technocrats, and politicians depends significantly upon their ability to produce expanding social and economic benefits for the mass of their clienteles at costs in human effort and other deprivations which the majority of local minorities does not consider prohibitive. An eloquent expression is given to this dual challenge by the Tanzanian statesman and intellectual, Amir Jamal (1965, p. 5):
The relationship between the leaders and the
masses requires to be recast fundamentally so
that the dialogue between them becomes continuous
as well as politically and economically
productive. Once the sanctions.… in support
of colonial rule are withdrawn, a government
can only govern…if it…undertakes immediately
the critical task, of building up an almost
monolithic dialogue with the masses. This is
a task of a real magnitude, demanding as it
does a two-way communication between the technological,
social and administrative sophistication
of the executive at the centre on the one
hand and the realities of the amorphous or
tribally conditioned eager and aspiring masses
in the country still contending with age-old
environment and equipment, on the other hand.…
This…in effect means the bridging of the gap
on a day-to-day basis, not between technology
and subsistence economy but between those
leaders who become compulsively aware of
their total dependence on technology which
would take some generations' efforts to
become home-based and the masses who inevitably
simplify brutally by asking in
constant refrain--why can't we have the
hospitals, the schools, and roads and the tractors today!
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- Copyright © African Studies Association 1972
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