(a) How the many institutions put in place by the ruling elites, and the alien and alienating policies and programs they have repeatedly promoted, have driven populations living in poverty and squalor to destroy the environments where they live, that surround them, and depend on for their livelihood.
(b) How the failure by African and non-African academics, international and development agencies and policymakers to listen (and hear with respect) and accordingly respond to the priorities and needs of the poorer segments of society has intensified the on-going systematic breakdown of Africa's institutions of socialization and destruction of crucial life support systems.
Although in a very different context, Mark Taylor, quoting Derrida, offers a glimpse of what I systematically investigate in this article. That is, as he notes, how "every structure -- literary, psychological, social, economic, political, religious, etc. -- that organizes human experience is constituted and maintained through acts of exclusion. In the process of creating something, something else is inevitably left out. These exclusive structures [in turn] can become repressive -- but that repression comes with consequences... What is repressed does not disappear; it always returns to unsettle every construction."