Situating Africa's development plights in “confidence” and “inferiority complex” are increasingly gaining currency continent-wide. Nowhere is “confidence” and “inferiority complex” discussed openly than in Ghana, which pride itself as the “Black Star of Africa,” and home to all that you can think about of Pan Africanism, such as the “African Personality” discourse, which had been more or less an international anti-imperialism political rhetoric than translation into confidence growth and the extrication of Africans from inferiority complex in their progress.

Still, for the past 51 years the “Black Star of Africa” has not projected any brilliant African development philosophy driven by the idiosyncrasies of African cultural values as the Southeast Asians have done. The Southeast Asians minted the “Asian Way” by blending their cultural peculiarities with the global prosperity and that has helped developed the Asians' remarkable confidence and disentangle any inferiority complex in their development process.

Recently politicians such as Nana Akufo-Addo, presidential candidate of Ghana's ruling National Patriotic Party for the December 2008 general elections, have spoken seriously about the confidence dilemma within Ghana's progress. Traditional rulers such as the Asantehene (King of the Asante ethnic group) Osei Tutu 11, too, are coming to terms with the confidence and the inferiority complex concerns. Osabarimba Kwesi Atta II, Omanhene of Ghana's Oguaa Traditional Area, argues worryingly that “the inferiority complex syndrome” is a serious matter caused by centuries of the “slave
trade.”

Such views, as Africa's progress unbolts, Africans are acknowledging that their progress journey lacks deep-rooted confidence, which should flow from
within their core cultural values first, and is mired in disturbing inferiority complex in relation to global prosperity. This has prompted Kenya's James Shikwati, director of the Nairobi-based Inter Region Economic Network, yell that “Africa urgently needs its own Age of Enlightenment.” Shikwati makes the case, citing Gregory Clark, author of A Farewell to Alms, that "The majority of Africans today are poorer than those who lived in the Stone Age Era," and this means today's “Africans ought to drive their own age of enlightenment by asking such basic questions as to why a continent rich in minerals is perceived to be poorer than the rest of the world.”

In this circumstance, either in Nana Akuffo-Addo, Osabarimba Kwesi Atta II or Shikwati, the main view is that African elites have not being thinking deeply enough in relation to their cultural peculiarities and progress, an idea that partially echoes the late Senegalese President Leopold Senghor's
view that Africans find it difficult to think but are good at expressing their emotions. This may be debatable today in the face of boom in intelligence and knowledge across borders, but such view may explain Y.K. Amoakoh, former chair of the UN Economic Commission for Africa, analysis that Africa is the only region in the world where its development process is dominated by foreign development paradigms to the detriment of its rich cultural values. That tells African elites' degree of thinking, in relation to the continent's development process. But the daunting developmental challenges facing Africa demands remarkable thinking, from within Africa's cultural values up to the global level - it shouldn't be the other way round.

How well African elites, as directors of progress, think and project confidence and untie the inferiority complex in their progress, as Nana Akuffo-Addo is demonstrating in Ghana, is answered by Osabarimba Kwesi Atta II, who offers that “this could be done by ensuring that all African children are educated to believe in themselves, and to have confidence in African values, in order to dispel the notion that anything African was inferior.” For Shikwati, who uses the primitively dark period of Europe to buttress his African Enlightenment case, “European history is dotted with tribalism, ethnicity, superstition, extreme religious beliefs, repressive kingdoms and wars, but that ought not to be an excuse for Africans to celebrate. The lesson Europe offers, however, is that the exploitation of an inquiring mind, a mind that was willing to be rebellious and give reason the power to shape people's lives is what gave birth to Europe as we know it today.”

The key element in tackling Africa's confidence and inferiority complex dilemma is with the African elites' minds – it's the African's mind, nothing but the African elites' minds, as directors of advancement. It is from the African mind, which have being shaped, sociologically and psychologically, by the African
culture from birth but which culture have not being considered in thinking about Africa's progress (that has created the long-running crisis of confidence and inferiority complex), that need to be transformed, as Nana Akuffo-Addo has intimated to Ghanaians, for progress.

As expected of African elites, whether in Europe or Asia, they had transformative elites who were able to think deeply from within theircultural values by transforming their cultural ideals to the global prosperity level for progress. Psychologically, their continuing confidence grew from this. In Southeast Asia, bold thinking in the face of dare developmental challenges transformed into their progress came to be called the “Asian Way.” Whether in Malaysia's Mahathir Mohamad, Japan's Akio Morita, South Korea's Gen. Park Chung Hee, Taiwan's Gen. Chiang Kai-shek, Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew or China's Deng Xiaoping, Southeast Asian transformative elites had outstanding grasp of their cultural principles and were able to weave them into the global prosperity ideals. Expectedly, though there were some rifts between the Southeast Asian indigenous tradition and the dominant Western neo-liberal capitalism in Asia's march to prosperity, since 1949, as Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw argue in The Commanding Height, “the Asian miracle is now sometimes called “Confucian capitalism,” a reminder of their elites' ability to blend their cultural values and the neo-liberal development paradigms.

The outcome, as Robert Kagan indicates in his new The Return of History And The End of Dreams, is an “Asian arc of freedom and prosperity” stretching
from Japan to Indonesia to India. Africa's confidence crisis in its development process and its ensuing inferiority complex have come about because African elites have not being able to think deeply through their culture, that informs their historical and psychological origin, for the continent's progress. As Kwaku Atuahene-Gima, of the Beijing-based China Europe International Business School, argues, Africa's cultural idiosyncrasies, through its historical and psychological context, should be considered as a way of injecting confidence in the continent's progress and unscrambling Africa's inferiority complex.

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