European Engagement with Africa : Problems, Potentials and the Way Forward

Sammanfattning: This research seeks to evaluate European engagement with Africa looking at the problems, pontentials and way forward. The continent’s treasure chest of varied natural resource endowments, have made it the source of historic, economic and political competition from especially western interests, a trend that has combined dangerously with the region’s poor leadership and democratic profile in impoverishing its masses, escalating lethal conflicts, while upsetting hard earned developments gains, that have been made. About 50 years since the sun of colonial hegemonies set in Africa, the continent’s development prospects continue to stagnate. Even the World Bank moved to describing Africa’s poor as the poorest of the poor in its 2001 development report. One question that continues to beg for answers is why a region so richly endowed with natural and human resources continues to bear the brunt of misery in such dispiriting fashion? The research is built on an exploration of the backward and forward historical continuums of patronizations that have stifled the continent (backward: counting the true cost of the legacies of slavery and colonial exploitation, forward: measuring the real cost of the iniquitous integration of Africa within the global economy and the continent’s role as bread basket for the rest of the world). The research explores the economic rationale for Europe’s engagement with the continent in the political, economic and cultural spheres, casting from a plethora of academic sources drawn from both leftist and right wing publications on the question of European engagement with Africa. In the end, the research has dwelled on some possible policy recommendations which could help this relationship. These recommendations  includes the African debt cancellation, using the Chinese Cushion Effectively for Africa’s development and the last but not the least, the reconstitution of African poltical and economic power which if considered, could precipitate a reversal in the trend of most African countries.