There were at least two strong indicators of the paralysis of the 11^th World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference in Buenos Aires. One was the Argentine government's revocation of the accreditation of 64 representatives from 19 civil society organisations. And the second is that there was no Ministerial Declaration coming out of Geneva.

Many African regimes today simply avoid the demands of good governance, ignore the rule of law and commit gross violations of human rights in the belief that Western aid will always bail them out of their chronic budget deficits. Stated simply, Western taxpayer dollars provide the fail-safe insurance policy for the survival and persistence of failed regimes in Africa. That is exactly Nana’s point.

Africa’s share of global trade remains insignificant because it faces numerous challenges: customs procedures, a lack of infrastructure and information as well as poor market integration. While there are expectations that the EU trade policy and the WTO negotiations could improve Africa’s trade, there is an increasing need for African countries to consider other alternatives for trade performance.

Deloitte says it wants to fight tax evasion, and yet they give advice on how to divert money. The audit firm has been trying to woo investors to use its services, with the promise of multiple tax advantages for their projects in Africa, thus each year depriving the poorest states of the world of hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue.

Business-oriented analysis of the middle class in Africa is superficial, preoccupied purely with number crunching in terms of income and expenditure. In contrast, new scholarly interest in the African middle class offers a deeper analysis of cultural factors and identities, consciousness, social positioning and relations to other groups as well as institutions and the state.