The diverse contributions of Professor Adebayo Adedeji as a scholar, practitioner and international civil servant to African development are the subject of this book, with contributions from mostly African scholars, policy-makers, and former and current senior officials of the United Nations. Two common threads emerge from the diverse authors: the distilling of Adedeji's contributions during his distinguished career of four decades; and the critical diagnosis of Africa's past challenges, present trends and future prospects.

The book, with nine chapters, is divided into four thematic parts and draws from leading documents prepared under Adedeji, especially the Lagos Plan of Action and the African Alternative Framework to Structural Adjustment Programmes for Socio-Economic Recovery and Transformation, which are as relevant today as they were three decades ago when they were first developed. For those familiar with the development debate of the 1980s and 1990s between the World Bank and United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), much of the materials in this book draw from various publications of the two institutions. There are also a lot of repetitive materials across chapters in the book. However, I found refreshing insights and interpretations in four core chapters, which the other chapters revolve around.

Part 1 presents reflections on Africa's development policies and strategies since 1976. Richard Jolly, a former Deputy Executive Secretary of UNICEF, draws on his personal experiences and interactions with Adedeji as Executive Secretary of UNECA, when he recalls in chapter 1 how Adedeji was aware of the ‘battles for the African mind’ (p. 22). In challenging the perspectives of the Washington Consensus, ‘Adedeji was at his best and his most loyal to Africa’ (p. 20). In spite of political battering and attacks from the Breton Wood Institutions, ‘Adedeji stood up for Africa and presented an authentic African vision of independent economic advancement’ (p. 18). The main theme of Ali Abdel Gadir Ali's contribution in chapter 2 is that although Adedeji did not initially succeed in many of these battles, over time some of the priorities for which he articulates have now been mainstreamed, especially into the 2015 Millennium Development Goals.

Part 2 focuses on Adedeji's efforts to use regional integration to overcome the challenges of fragmented African economies. In chapter 4, Adekeye Adebajo provides a biographical sketch of Adedeji as an erudite scholar, a foremost development planner and practitioner, and the father of African integration. Adedeji's vision for African integration was initially outlined in an article on ‘Prospects for Regional Economic Integration in West Africa’, published in 1970 in the Journal of Modern African Studies. Based on this scholarly insight, and as Nigeria's Minister of Economic Development, he was instrumental in the creation in 1975 of the Economic Community of West African States. At UNECA, he facilitated the creation of the forerunner of the Common Market of Eastern and Southern Africa in 1981 and Economic Community of Central African States in 1983. His far-sighted vision and skilful efforts to transform the UNECA as a platform to promote African economic integration is comparable to Jean Monnet, Europe's political visionary who was very instrumental as a French technocrat in the establishment of the European Community.

Part 3 is dedicated to examining the institutional deficits that continued to plague Africa's development. Part 4 presents in-depth analysis of conflicts and development in Africa. In this context, Chapter 6 by Otobo builds on Adedeji's work in the area of scenario analysis for the continent and highlights the structural constraints impeding Africa's long-term development prospects as stability deficit, manifested in coups, conflicts and crimes; the organisational deficits reflecting institutional weaknesses and capacity deficiencies; and the scientific and technological deficit preventing real transformation into industrial and knowledge-based economies.

As a scholar, Adedeji espouses development of Africans for Africans and by Africans. As a practitioner, his record as a Minister between 1971 and 1975 would be viewed as a golden era for Nigeria's economic management and planning, which witnessed orderly crafting of development plans and execution of infrastructure development across the country. As an international civil servant, he believes in developing the capacity of Africans to master development process and used his pivotal position as head of UNECA to build a distinctive African Voice on the Continent's developmental issues at a time when the Washington Consensus was the dominant paradigm for development.

Most readers of this book will agree with the following statement in the Foreword by President Joaquim Alberto Chissano, former President of Mozambique: