The Lingering Challenges of Underdevelopment in Africa’s and Nigeria: The Root Causes, Impacts and Panacea

Abstract

The underdevelopment of Africa’s and Nigeria is neither natural nor solely caused by internal contradictions, such as corruption, bad leadership, embezzlement of public funds as argued by some political science scholars even though the aforementioned internal factors plays a very devastating roles on the issue of underdevelopment in Africa. However, Andre G. Frank argued that the Europe and Africa’s were developing at a different pace, until the Europe came and distorted the development of Africa, the idea which Frank called development of underdevelopment in Africa. Nevertheless, it is germane to expose the fact that the underdevelopment of Africa’s and Nigeria was caused or could be traced to internal and external factors such as bad leadership, corruption and highhandedness etc. as the internal factors on one hand, and slavery, colonialism and imperialism, deceptive politics of exploitation of Africa’s surplus values as the external factors on the other hand. However, this paper examined the external causes of underdevelopment in Africa’s and Nigeria, and examined the pattern or process through which the Europe underdeveloped Africa’s and Nigeria. This paper adopted the relative deprivation theory as a model to explaining how Africa’s and Nigeria were deprived of her development, and how her resources were exploited by the Europe, hence, underdevelopment of Africa’s and Nigeria. This paper also adopted the secondary methods of data gathering, as valuable data were retrieved from articles, textbooks, newspapers and internets materials, as those data collected are used to validate the arguments of this study. This paper finally proffers sustainable solutions on how to fall out of the devastating challenges of underdevelopment ravaging Africa’s and Nigeria.