Latest fibs from world financiers http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/73149

Patrick Bond makes a stinging critique of the recent report of the African Development Bank that claims that ‘one in three Africans is middle class’ and as a result, Africa is ready for ‘take off’.Apparently, ‘one in three Africans is middle class’ and as a result, Africa is ready for ‘take off’, according to African Development Bank chief economist Mthuli Ncube last week at the World Economic Forum–Africa summit in Cape Town. ‘Hey you know what, the world please wake up, this is a phenomenon in Africa that we've not spent a lot of time thinking about.’Obviously not: Ncube defines middle class as those who spend between $2 to 20 a day,

a group that includes a vast number of people considered extremely poor by any reasonable definition, given the higher prices of most consumer durables in African cities. Those spending between just $2 and $4 a day constitute a fifth of all sub-Saharan Africans, even Ncube admits, while the range from $4 to $20 a day amounts to 13 per cent, with 5 per cent spending more than $20 a day. Below the $2 a day level, 61 per cent of Africans are mired in deep poverty, a stunning reflection of ongoing underdevelopment due to imperialism, the resource curse and nefarious African elites. 

It’s just as Walter Rodney explained in his book ‘How Europe Underdeveloped Africa’ nearly four decades ago: ‘the operation of the imperialist system bears major responsibility for African economic retardation by draining African wealth and by making it impossible to develop more rapidly the resources of the continent. Secondly, one has to deal with those who manipulate the system and those who are either agents or unwitting accomplices of the said system.’Playing both roles, the likes of Ncube have not changed their neoliberal tunes, they simply hold up a small sliver of (desperately entrepreneurial) Africans engaged in petty commodity exchange as the hope for the future.