•  
  •  
 
African Social Science Review

Abstract

While my extensive search yielded about 20,500 mentions, seven scholarly citations, and three scholarly book reviews of John Mukum Mbaku’s Corruption in Africa: Causes, Consequences and Cleanups (2007), no systematic analysis has been done on the text, even though such potential exists. This is a serious gap in the literature on Africa’s international affairs and development studies because the book is one of the major works, if not the most comprehensive work, on a topic that has significant implications for the continent’s international relations and development. This paper is an attempt to fill this gap. Specifically, I employ the mathematical concept of Fractal Dimension and Complexity Theory to explore the idea of the spectrum progressing from more orderly to less orderly or to pure disorder which reflect the major postulates on corruption in Africa. This called for the utilization of the Pluridisciplinary approach that helped me to mix linguistics and mathematical approaches—more precisely, Linguistic Presupposition and Fractal Methodology. The results generated after the MATLAB computer runs suggest that the combination of negative and positive feedback loops, which form the basis of several African knowledge systems, also form a key mechanism of general self-organizing systems in Corruption in Africa: Causes, Consequences and Cleanups.

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.