Dependency Theory and Africa’s Underdevelopment: a Paradigm Shift from Pseudo-Intellectualism: the Nigerian Perspective

Abstract

Over the years, African political and development scholars, writers and commentators have blamed the Europeans for the underdevelopment of African. This has necessitated the evocation of Dependency theory in explaining Africa’s cum Nigeria’s underdevelopment situation, hence Africa’s underdevelopment has been linked to two categories of factors: internal and external. The internal factors, Nnadozie said, fan the ember of the external factors and therefore require and deserve more attention hence the connivance of African elites with the Europeans elites to impoverish the continent. Recently, there has been a clarion to a paradigm shift from the Pseudo-Intellectualism of the dependency theorist made manifest in the Walter Rodney’s ‘How Europe underdeveloped African’ to Igwe’ and Ghanaian Chronicle’s ‘How Africa underdeveloped Africa’ and finally, Ope-Agbe‘s ‘How Nigeria underdeveloped Nigeria’. This paradigm shift is the thrust of this paper.

Keywords:   Development, Underdevelopment, Dependency, Bad Leadership and Governance.