A critique of Metz’s conception of development through dependency and Pan-Africanist thought

Metz diagnoses excessive individualism, excessive technocratic orientation, and excessive anthropocentrism as the main factors that undermine development globally. In this work, I seek to show that the application of Metz’s diagnosis in Africa exposes limitations associated with the silence on the condition of powerlessness of African countries in a world that is bifurcated into the dominant and exploiting capitalist, the Global North, on one hand, and, on the other, the weak, dominated, and exploited Africa, the Global South. Africa suffers from underdevelopment due to a lack of power to defend itself against capitalist imperialist exploitation of labour and natural resources. I show that a Pan-Africanist remedy, specifically the construction of a single African state, is crucial for addressing the powerlessness hindering development in African countries. This work contributes new knowledge from deploying Walter Rodney’s dependency theory to expose the weaknesses of Metz’s diagnosis of factors that limit development

Silence · Technocracy · Underdevelopment · Critical Realism in Sociology · Political Economy and Marxism · World Systems and Global Transformations