The term development has been an object of controversy especially amongst the early socio-economic researchers. In fact, it was at a time mistaken for growth until 1970s when social change was said to be the characteristic hallmark of development. Growth was then markedly differentiated from development as an economy may experience growth and not necessarily develop. As long as growth does not translate to or trigger observable social change, development is still at large!
How then can we comprehensively define the subject of development? In economics, economic development is defined as a sustained or long-term increase in per capita income of all goods and services produced in a country associated with desirable social and institutional changes as well as reduction in poverty, inequality and unemployment.
In a broader sense according to Walter Rodney, development in human society is a many-sided process. At the level of the individual, it implies increased skill and capacity, greater freedom, creativity, self-discipline, responsibility and material well-being. Some of these are virtually moral categories and are difficult to evaluate – depending as they do on the age in which one lives, one’s class origins, and one’s personal code of what is right and what is wrong. However, what is indisputable is that the achievement of any of those aspects of personal development is very much tied in with the state of the society as a whole. From earliest times, man found it convenient and necessary to come together in groups to hunt and for the sake of survival. The relations which develop within any given social group are crucial to an understanding of the society as a whole. Freedom, responsibility, skill, etc have real meaning only in terms of the relations of men in society.
Of course, each social group comes into contact with others. The relations between individuals in any two societies are regulated by the form of the two societies. Their respective political structures are important because the ruling elements within each group are the ones that begin to dialogue, trade or fight, as the case may be. At the level of social groups, therefore, development implies an increasing capacity to regulate both internal and external relationships. Much of human history has been a fight for survival against natural hazards and against real and imagined human enemies. Development in the past has always meant the increase in the ability to guard the independence of the social group and indeed to infringe upon the freedom of others – something that often came about irrespective of the will of the persons within the societies involved.
Men are not the only beings which operate in groups, but the human species embarked upon a unique line of development because man had the capacity to make and use tools. The very act of making tool was a stimulus to increasing rationality rather than the consequence of a fully matured intellect. In historical terms, man the worker was every bit as important as man the thinker, because the work with tools liberated men from sheer physical necessity, so that he could impose himself upon other more powerful species and upon nature itself. The tools with which men work and the manner in which they organize their labour are both important indices of social development.
More often than not, the term ‘development’ is used in an exclusive economic sense – the justification being that the type of economy is itself an index of other social features. What then is economic development? A society develops economically as its members increase jointly their capacity for dealing with the environment. This capacity for dealing with the environment is dependent on the extent to which they understand the laws of nature (science), on the extent to which they put that understanding into practice by devising tools (technology), and on the manner in which work is organized. Taking a long-term view, it can be said that there has been constant economic development within human society since the origins of man, because man has multiplied enormously his capacity to win a living from nature. The magnitude of man’s achievement is best understood by reflecting on the early history of human society and noting the following: firstly, the progress from crude stone tools to the use of metals; secondly, the changeover from hunting and gathering wild fruit to the domestication of animals and the growing of food crops; and thirdly, the improvement in organization of work from being an individualistic activity towards being an activity which assumes a social character through the participation of many.
From the foregoing, it is important to note that man from inception, was able to deal substantially with the environment not by acting in isolation but in groups. Small clusters of human beings came together and collectively devise various means of winning a leaving from nature. The synergy thus built helped man to quickly surmount the challenge of survival and moved to address sustainability. This is a profound lesson. If the different fragments of development experienced by man from history were a function of collective participation of all members of the society, then any development programme fabricated to fix any socio-economic issues must also welcome inputs from all and sundry if it must see the light of the day! We have all, thus far, been represented by our governments, delegates, committees, etc as touching development issues and that’s probably why most of the initiatives are yet to record ground breaking successes. Truth be told, development and nation building should be the primary concern of everybody! Everyone should have a stake in it. If we can successfully share the development burden of United Nations across united minds, we will definitely hit the mark in no distant future. That is the essence of creating this forum. The united minds are herewith referred to as loafbaskets and it is a platform on which people can get more responsibly serious about their lives and their immediate society. Check around your vicinity and report all development issues you could observe. If you witness something worthy of emulation within the confine of development, you’ll do well to pass it across to millions of people in this forum who would take a cue from it. There are appropriate buttons and tools on this platform designed to receive such thoughtful inputs from the public. The ball is now in your court. The development baton is passed to you. Ensure you equally pass it around until it permeates the entire aspects of the society.
