Beyond Mere Narrating "African Renaissance": Expediency of Local Autonomy to Entrenching Sustainable Developmental Renaissance in Africa

This paper engages the issue of "African renaissance," which remains an intense discursive theme that lacks consensus on African developmental strides. It particularly considers the place of local autonomy to promote developmental renaissance. Although a robust citation of political economy works of literature on objectifying African renaissance exists, there is a paucity of rigorous researches that associate the issue with the incapacitation of local autonomy in the policy-programme matrix of African countries. The paper contends that the thorny problem of cementing the African renaissance lay in the non-appreciation of the local autonomy-sustainable development nexus. It argues that the theoretical postulations meant to uphold the African renaissance for actualization of optimum development tend to give little consideration to how subordination of local autonomy in intergovernmental relation processes undermines the continent's developmental reawakening. Africa's development-building may not be realizable if the following dimensions persist: (i) absence of constructive local governments' input in development plan policymaking, implementation/administration and feedback evaluation; (ii) emphasis on top-down development schemes rather than a bottom-up approach, and (iii) disregard for optimal grassroots development. Therefore, deriving from the abovementioned dimensions, the consensus that African policymakers in the higher tiers fail to appreciate local autonomy's structure-agency potential for the sustainable developmental rebirth of the continent is somewhat accurate. Hence, this paper proposes a model constructed from the Nigerian context that can galvanize cum instigate realpolitik that will accentuate Africa's developmental renaissance from the bottom-up, including attenuating factors that hamper the development of African grassroots.