Abstract:
This work argues that Africa’s condition of poverty lingers because the continent
fails to view poverty in its holistic sense in her attempts at tackling her economic
challenges. Other types of poverty exist, such as mental poverty, moral poverty, emotional
poverty, spiritual poverty, political poverty and social poverty, which pose
great problems for the continent. Obviously, her failure to give worthwhile attention
to solving these problems largely contribute to why she has not really benefited from
her vast wealth of human and material resources. Also, this lack of holistic approach
to perceiving poverty often allows Africa to be swayed by global forces of change
such as socio-cultural factors, political factors, wars and terrorist activities, technological
forces as information technology and electronic media, and so on. Consequently,
majority of Africans seem to be blinded to the reality of possibility of redemption
from the continents precarious economic condition. Thus, neglecting their
nations, they emigrate abroad, under the guise of seeking enabling environment for
productivity and survival. At the same time, those at the helms of affairs perpetuate
the economic poverty status-quo by greedily enriching themselves. Thus, the continent
becomes an unfortunate victim of parochial perspectives as other continents
become undeserving beneficiaries of her endowments and heritages. Using philosophy’s
critical and argumentative methods of empirical, conceptual and historical
analysis, this paper debates that a holistic perspective to poverty can help control
global forces of change in ways that will favour Africa’s total development and enhance
her profiting in the globalisation era.
