Many West African countries have disparities between their northern and southern regions that conventional economic literature can neither explain nor solve. Across West Africa, there is a growing case for thinking about these shared disparities from a regional lens.
Editor’s note: This essay is available in our print issue, Godfathers: An Introduction. Buy the issue here.
West African scholars and politicians had high hopes for their region at independence. Even before this, in 1927 Ladipo Solanke had published United West Africa or Africa at the Bar of the Family of Nations, in which he argued that:
It took the white race a thousand years to arrive at their present level of advance: it took the Japanese, a Mongol race, 50 years to catch up with the white race, there is no reason why we West Africans, a Negro race, should not catch up with the Aryans and the Mongols in one quarter of a century.
Sadly, this prediction woefully failed. Instead, West Africa has gone over 60 years without the development Solanke envisioned, and Nigeria, the ‘giant of Africa’, ranks high on state fragility and features one of the highest poverty rates in the world.
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