The Economic Commission for Africa, (ECA) is out with its own formal tribute to one of Africa’s sharpest voice in development matters: the late Prof Thandika Mkandawire who passed on March 27th, 2020. The Volume 7, Number 1 issue of the Journal of African Transformation is dedicated to the deceased thinker.
Taking a hefty package of over 150 pages, different writers took a different angle to Prof Thandika in the journal which just made its way out. The topics treated range from the development discourse in Africa to the democracy – development nexus on the continent to the good governance problematique to African politics in the age of party pluralism. Others are neoliberalism and healthcare delivery, developmental statism, Africa’s transformation in the context of developmentalism, the views of Thandika and that of Samir Amin, another leading thinker on the continent who is also dead on socioeconomic development in the continent and, lastly, a profile chapter.
Prof Thandika Mkandawire has been the subject of numerous tributes since his death, among them Prof Eghosa Osaghae’s Thandika Mkandawire: A Tribute; Why There is Outpouring of Tributes for Thandika Mkandawire by Prof Paul Zeleza; Dr. Yusuf Bangura’s Development Oriented, Iconoclastic, Witty and Informal: Thinking About Thandika Mkandawire, (1940 – 2020); Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Malaysian Development Economist, Celebrates Late Prof. Thandika Mkandawire by Dr. Jomo Kwame Sundaram and CODESRIA Devotes Bulletin to Late Thandika Mkandawire.
At this rate, there is no knowing if more tributes might not be on their way. But, is it not possible to assemble all the tributes in one text which the practitioners of popular struggle can re-articulate/politicise towards the kind of democratic cum developmental order invoked in the tributes? The tributes could be discursively powerful but would not transform into action on account of that in the current configuration of power at the global and continental levels.
