Modernization and the Crisis of Development in Africa: The Nigerian experience.

This book revisits what in the two decades preceding the end of the Cold War was popularly known as ‘the African development crisis’. Nigeria, one of Africa’s largest economies, is used as case study. The core aim of the book is ‘to interrogate the central role of modernization in Africa’s development trajectory’ (p. 5). Based on a searching critique of the modernization literature, the author assembles a plethora of theoretical and empirical evidence to prove that, as opposed to enhancing development, the modernization paradigm is responsible for Africa’s development crisis and has reinforced the peripheral role of African countries in the global capitalist system. This argument is not entirely novel. It is indeed a core argument of many dependency-school and Marxist political economy scholars that dominated the discourse of African development crisis throughout the 1980s and 1990s. The collapse of the communist bloc and the end of the Cold War has not only had a significant effect on the African left – once the champion of the anti-modernization debate in the continent – but has also seen many stalwarts gravitate to the ‘centre ground’ and ‘right’ of the ideological spectrum. Dibua adopts ‘a radical political economy approach’ in his analysis (p. 6). The author makes a spirited argument in Chapter 2 that the dominant neoliberal solutions to Africa’s development crisis promoted by the Internati