p In order to attain real national independence all developing countries, including African, must first surmount their economic backwardness, promote their culture, radically modify their economic structure, carry through industrialisation and modernise agriculture. The experience of the first years of independence has left no doubt in the minds of many leaders of the newly free African states that so long as they continue to be dependent on the capitalist market spontaneous economic development merely preserves relations of inequality and exploitation. Hence the importance of the organising and regulating role of the state, its ability to mobilise all material and manpower resources in the interests of national development and to curb the malign influence of foreign monopoly capital. This process has become particularly extensive and profound in the socialist-oriented countries where the state sector controls the key branches of the national economy.

p The period of independent development bared the acute contradiction between the requirements of accelerated economic progress, on the one hand, and the low level of development of the productive forces and the scantiness of internal accumulations, on the other. The newly free countries managed to increase the share of accumulations in their GNP. But its low absolute volume (annual per capita average on the continent is about $35) cannot provide the economy with all the resources it needs. The need to develop the productive forces is running into increasing contradiction with the backward, multi-structured economy, the predominance of smallcommodity and semi-natural economy and archaic relations of production in most countries, especially in Tropical Africa. A considerable number of rural inhabitants annually migrate to towns, aggravating the already acute problem of employment there. Africa’s underdeveloped urban economy, with not more than 2 per cent of the labour force 150 employed, cannot provide jobs for all. By 1980, the labour force in Africa increased by more than 33 million of whom, however, only some 18 million could find employment.

p At the same time there is an acute shortage of skilled workers, technicians and engineers in the independent African states. Modern technology and the budding industry need more and more qualified workers. The training of national technical and administrative personnel, therefore, is one of the most important conditions for liquidating the dependence of African countries on the industrialised capitalist states.

The need to cope with the urgent tasks of economic development in order to alter their unequal status in the international capitalist division of labour, makes the independent African countries objectively interested in expanding allround economic links with the world socialist community, the Soviet Union in the first place. This interest is sustained by the socialist countries whose relations with the developing countries are based on the principles of genuine equality, mutual benefit, and non-exploitation. They sincerely want to help the developing countries to surmount their economic backwardness inherited from the colonial period and to strengthen their independence, and support their struggle against imperialism in every way. Manifold and active cooperation with’the socialist countries is turning into an important material condition for solving a host of vital problems of social and economic development facing the African countries. Moreover, being a model of basically new relations between industrialised and developing countries, it seriously influences the entire range of external links of the young African states with the capitalist world and thus contributes to their liberation struggle.