Basil Davidson has argued that the concept of the nation-sate was a poor choice for governing structure in Africa and was indeed doomed from the beginning. Davidson writes about the problems of post-colonial Africa that "the jubilant crowds celebrating independence were not inspired by a 'national consciousness' any more than were the Romanian peasants and their coevals in the nation states crystallized some decades earlier from Europe's old internal empires. They were inspired by the hope of more and better food and shelter" (Davidson 185). When the satisfaction of these immediate needs did not materialize, the people oriented themselves other foci for social allegiance. Eriksen writes,
For the great Pan Africanists, the nation state may have been too small; for very many Africans, it was way too big, unless they happened to live in a ministate such as Lesotho or Mauritius, or if they had the kind of Western education and middle class experiences which gave sense to the African nation state as an imagined community- or, again, if the state had something substantial to offer by way of education, employment, security, etc. For the vast majority of Africans, a community of this scale did not tally with their personal experiences, which were strictly local (Eriksen).
National development includes both economic and political development in a complementary manner, and development in beginning states is marked first by increasing economic productivity, which may be spurred by increasing geographic and social mobility and by increasing political efficiency in mobilizing the human and arterial resources of a region and enlisting them in meeting national goals (or societal goals). Organski makes a distinction between economic and political development and defines political development as increasing governmental efficiency in utilizing the human and material resources of the nation for national goals: "The primary function of natio...