It was a dramatic encounter. The forum was one of those Organization of African Unity (OAU) Heads of State summits during the regime of Nigeria’s military President, General Ibrahim Babangida, in the 1980s. Exactly which one it was I cannot recollect now. That was a time when the hegemonic International Financial Institutions (IFIs) were imposing stringent Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAP) as a cure all for all ailing African economies as a precondition for foreign aid and loans. In attendance, as a member of the Nigerian government delegation was the eminent journalist, media administrator and lawyer, Chief Tony Momoh, who was Nigeria’s Minister of Information. Also a frontline participant at the event was the respected development economist, public administrator, international civil servant, academic and researcher, Professor Adebayo Adedeji, in his capacity as Under-Secretary General of the United Nations and Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA).
The Babangida regime had enthusiastically embraced the Structural Adjustment policies, which included massive currency devaluation, deregulation of the economy, reduction of the public sector workforce, comprehensive privatization of public enterprises, and removal of subsidies on critical social services among others. The regime’s officials, particularly the brilliant rationalist and Secretary to the Federal Government, Chief Olu Falae, articulately advocated the IMF and World Bank positions that there was no alternative to SAP as the only path out of Africa’s protracted crisis of underdevelopment. Professor Adedeji had at several fora vigorously canvassed an opposing view to the obvious discomfiture of his home government. He was of the firm belief that not only was most of the policy components of SAP inappropriate, but there were indeed viable alternatives to them. Chief Tony Momoh, spokesman of a pro-SAP government unconventionally put on his toga as a journalist at that event, got a tape recorder and sought an interview with the Professor, which the latter readily gave. The interesting exchange between the two men was later published in the Daily Times if my memory serves me right.
It would appear to me as a layman that the defining essence of the life of Professor Adebayo Adedeji who passed on to eternity on 25th April, 2018, was the intellectual struggle to extricate African Development Strategy and Policy from the hegemonic stranglehold of external forces, particularly IFIs that may not necessarily mean well for the continent. For those of us who do not have the requisite grounding and expertise in economic as well as development theory and analysis to appreciate and apprehend his technical disquisitions, there are luckily a number of easily accessible publications on the life, times and works of Professor Adedeji. One of these, for instance, is a collection of essays in his honour when he clocked 65 titled ‘Issues in African Development’ and edited by Bade Onimode and Richard Synge. Published by Heinemann Educational Books (Nigeria) Plc in association with the African Centre for Development and Strategic Studies in 1995, the book is divided into four sections comprising 16 chapters and runs into 323 pages.
The book’s contributors are some of the most illustrious scholars from diverse disciplines including economics, history, politics, public administration, development as well as experts in diverse spheres of international development administration. In the preface to the book by Stephen Lewis, we have a glimpse of what Professor Adedeji meant to those who worked with him at the ECA. In his words, “Collaborating with Adebayo Adedeji was an extraordinary experience. His whole persona comes alive when he speaks, feelingly, of Africa; it stimulates everyone around him; conviction and animation are unleashed in equal measure, and just when you feel the tensions perilously rising, his voluble laugh bursts forth in a catharsis of reconciliation. Adedeji’s great strength lies in his unswerving determination to resolve the African crisis. Nothing distracts him. As a result, his contribution to Africa gives meaning to internationalism”.
The same impression is conveyed in a statement by the former Secretary General of the United Nations, Perez de Cuellar, to the 27th Assembly of the Heads of Government of the OAU, held in Abuja on 3rd June, 1991 in a fulsome tribute to Adedeji thus: “Professor Adedeji has been at the helm of ECA for more than half of its existence and has left an indelible mark on the work and objectives of the Commission. He has made significant contributions to successive initiatives to address and to improve Africa’s economic and social situation. I am pleased to have this opportunity to congratulate him, in his native land, for a job well done, and to wish him success in his future undertakings”.
My favourite chapter in this book is titled ‘Africa’s Development Crisis in Historical Perspective’ by the late Professor J.F Ade-Ajayi; a chapter in which a scholar I had assumed to be essentially of a conservative cast traces the developmental travails of the continent to the legacy of foreign conquests such as the Arab and Atlantic slave trade, colonialism and neocolonialism. That chapter reminds one of the immortal Walter Rodney in his ‘How Europe Underdeveloped Africa’. Writing about the legacy of colonialism, for instance, Ajayi perspicaciously observes that “The interest of the European powers in Africa was to disrupt existing lines of intra-African trade, and channel all effort into the production of primary crops required for export, and encourage importation of European goods even if it meant destroying local manufactures, crafts and industries. Thus, it has been said, Africa learnt to produce what it did not consume and to consume what it did not produce”.
Professor Ajayi points out that our inability to genuinely decolonize after independence meant a failure to confront the past and make genuine amends. Consequently this implies “a carry-over of the disabilities from the slave trade era to the colonial period, and from the colonial period into the period after independence. This often involved a loss of self-esteem, an undue willingness to substitute dependence on charity for self-confidence and self-reliance, an attitude sometimes referred to as evidence of “colonial mentality”.
And when he turned 70, another collection of essays was published in Adedeji’s honour titled ‘African Development and Governance Strategies in the 21st Century’ again edited by Professor Bade Onimode. This 256 page book is made up of 16 seminal essays and an epilogue also written by some of the continent’s best and brightest minds. Tracing the impasse of development in Africa forty years after independence in this book’s preface, Professor Segun Odunuga , makes the point that “Adedeji’s advocacy of holistic human development is based on the concept that society can only develop with the mobilization of the people; hence his statement that Africa would need to set in motion a process that puts the individual at the very centre of a development effort that is both human and humane…” Is this not a foretaste of the lesson Bill Gates came to teach our leaders 14 years after this book was written? But the definitive book on this great African is undoubtedly ‘African Development: Adebayo Adedeji’s Strategies’ written by Professor S. K. B. Asante and published in 1991, which we will examine in the second part of this piece.
