It is now mandatory to offer a critique of the structural adjustment programme, SAP. Such a critique, I believe, is not incompatible with the highest of patriotic duties. Indeed, such a critique can be astutely deployed by a well-meaning but misguided government towards the clarification of its economic goals.
It is part of the intellectual tragedy of SAP that African governments which pursue this programme are driven by the very logic of SAP to listen to the sound of their own voice as well as the voice of the sycophants and professional cheer-leaders who surround these governments. Consequently, all one hears are shouts that there is no alternative.
Those who know their contemporary history very well must remember that this was also the war-cry of Margaret Thatcher in the early eighties. It was a cry that earned the Iron Lady the unflattering appellation of TINA, (There Is No Alternative) from a hostile section of the British press. If only to avoid the pitfalls of Thatcherite “Revolution” in an underdeveloped economy, a critique of SAP can no longer be postponed.
One major reason for this critique is the fact that it is necessary, before the cries of the alleluiah boys drown the anguished cries of millions, to offset the solid virtues of SAP against its horrendous social devastations. Second, it is necessary to demonstrate that contrary to official claims, the dismay of many intellectuals with SAP is not predicated on the withdrawal of social privileges purchased by an overvalued currency. Finally, it is imperative to debunk the myth that SAP is original or homegrown.
Three recent international developments have spurred on this critique. First, the publication in the Sunday Times magazine of the names of the leading two hundred rich families in Britain. The findings are startling. They show that after ten years of structural adjustment, after heroic attempts to create yuppies and yobos with Porsches, Britain is still dominated by old money.
The leading rich families are still the royalty, the feudal landowners and the retailers. England remains very much a nation of lords and shopkeepers. In this major respect, Margaret Thatcher’s revolution is very much a sound-and-fury affair.
The second development is the publication to coincide with Thatcher’s ten years in office of a very perceptive political biography of the Iron Lady by Hugo Young, a political columnist with the Guardian newspaper. Titled: One of Us, it is an absorbing chronicle of how Thatcher, by a combination of feminist guile and sheer ruthlessness, was able to rout the exhausted paternalist grandees who dominated the old Conservative Party and who gave it its human face.
The third development is Thatcher’s recent whirlwind tour of Africa during which several African leaders could be seen falling over themselves to be in the good books of the Dowager of Structural Adjustment and obviously the World Bank.
The structural adjustment programme has its solid merits. It is designed to encourage thrift and self-reliance. The greed for the consumption of foreign goods is discouraged. Waste in the public sector is curtailed. Social albatrosses are hacked down. Export drive is stimulated via incentives and a sober assessment of the strength of the national currency. The goal is a healthy balance of payments.
No self-respecting nation can ask for more. Thatcher’s achievement in transforming Britain’s economy from the utter stagnation of the Heath and Callaghan years is extraordinary. Even the socialist economies with their nationalized inefficiency and bureaucratic sloth are discovering that there may be something to learn from this.
As it were, the monetarist policy on which structural adjustment is based takes its inspiration from the ruins of Keynesian economics and social engineering. Lord Keynes, at the risk of vulgar brevity, was an advocate of huge government spending, of massive job creation, of the regulation of prices and of compassion for the poor.
Structural adjustment programme, on the other hand, deregulates, privatizes and encourages rich and powerful individuals to hold the society to ransom. Thatcher herself has given this its classic formulation when she remarked that “there is no society, only individuals”.
The hidden agenda of SAP, then, is to make inequality respectable, to liquidate the pathologically poor, to encourage a cult of the individual and to treat intellectual workers with philistine contempt. The success of the policy can be seen on the faces of the new beggars of London, the army of destitute, the million homeless in the underground and the mass exodus of intellectuals from Britain.
As a result of the huge social tension and unease engendered by SAP, a startling paradox comes into focus. Government must invade every facet of society to enforce social cohesion; everybody must be whipped into line. It is obvious that the leap to the Hobbesian jungle of economic deregulation leads to harsh political regulation.
No developing country nation can afford the huge social dislocation, the destruction of local enterprises and the massive flight of intellectual capital engendered by SAP. One can, of course, understand a developed capitalist economy adjusting its economic parameters, but an underdeveloped economy which is not even fully capitalist? This is the fundamental fallacy of SAP in Africa. There is as yet no structure to adjust.
The solution, of course, is a retreat from SAP. We must first build a structure through a national development plan which returns priority to local entrepreneurial initiatives, which resists the foreign imperative to artificially undervalue the national currency, which respects worthy intellectual pursuits and not philistine self-seeking and which, while combating official corruption and profligacy, also respects the obligation of all decent governments to the weak, the poor, and the needy.
- First published in Newswatch, June 26, 1989