Editor, Reference is made to Joe B. Jakes’ article, Africa on the rise: A myth or reality?, (The New Times, October 8). As an industrial designer, I must complement and clarify further the economist’s message. He’s right; Africa should now put industrial and technology policies at the forefront of all development programmes. Indeed, besides the “statistical illusions” widely spread in demagogical expressions such as GDP, per capita income, and all other pseudo-economic formulae, there is a blatant reality of more and more Africans living borrowed lifestyles. We don’t manufacture any of the items we use and consume in our daily life, almost everything is imported, and all at a high cost. Why then don’t we start making the things we need for our own living, and eventually trade any surplus with both neighbours and foreigners? Making things we need for living means; first, that we should know our real needs: needs for sheer physical and psychological survival as well as other kinds of needs being fulfilled. Second, all those first and secondary needs will be fulfilled through use, in the large sense of the term, of all sorts of artifacts. Africa, therefore, needs first and foremost, experts in artifacts use, who will specify what financiers and industrialists should invest in, following a certain order of priority reflecting the specified and ordered needs. In clearer and concrete terms, this is what “industrial and technology policies” mean; that needs to be formulated first, and then their implementation supervised by the same type of experts mentioned above. A true “development programme” cannot be anything else than that! François-Xavier Nziyonsenga
