African voices: African visions

Like many other Africans, we tend to talk about the ills of Africa. We are sure many people will understand the usual "armchair discussion and analysis" of what went wrong that we Africans usually start once a few of us get together. During one of these armchair discussions, we decided to do something about the ills of Africa. As you can guess, our decision was not to start a revolution, join a guerilla movement or quit our jobs and become volunteers. The simple idea, which was the origin of this book, was how could we get young Africans to begin a dialogue, to reflect together and generate ideas on the way forward for Africa. This was in December 1995 and since then we have been engaged in the exciting, challenging, demanding and rewarding activity of trying to organize a global dialogue among Africans on the future of Africa. Part of the outcome of that dialogue is this book.This idea, we believe, is timely for the simple reason that for more than 15 years now since African countries began to implement Structural Adjustment Programs ( popularly known as SAPs), African intellectual capital has been mostly invested in debating their pros and cons. Despite the fact that the majority of African countries are implementing some form of adjustment, the debate rages on. While the world was making new discoveries in science and technology, the majority of the African intellectual elite were engaged in a debate that is best characterized as a dialogue between the deaf and the dumb.In fact, SAPs became an industry. Lectures, seminars and conferences were organized all over the world. Mind you, this is still going on! This is not to say it is not important to talk about SAPs, examine their implementations and see how they can be improved or replaced. The problem was that while we ere reacting to the international financial institutions no one was really busy trying to map out a future for the continent or design alternative strategies to transform Africa.In fact, many will argue that since independence, African states have had neither a clear vision of the future nor effective strategies to transform their societies. We disagree because there were efforts such as the 1979 Monrovia Report on Africa in the year 2000 prepared by African scholars