When Americans and Europeans think of policy, they usually associate it with a measure to solve a particular problem within the limits of what public resources permit. Making policy involves a careful calculation of how means relate to desired ends. It is about such principles as feasibility, sustainability, and efficiency – all in one. Policy analysis, as conventional textbooks confirm, is the application of economic principles to the political process. But, as the African experience suggests, policy making does not have to be based on an economic rationale. As the previous five chapters have shown, where politics is supreme and power not effectively reined in, policy making is more typically made on purely political grounds. Policy objectives become ends in themselves as the calculation of costs to achieve them are ignored.

There are three factors in the international environment that help explain why policy making in Africa has tended to be void of economic thinking. One is that African countries originally saw themselves as being caught in the process of catching up with the developed societies. In such circumstances, thinking economically meant going slower than was deemed desirable. The second reason is that African governments have often viewed the rest of the world, and especially the former colonial powers, as having a moral responsibility to pay for African development because of all the suffering that colonialism caused.