As we noted in the first instalment of this piece, Dr Sylvester OdionAkhaine , in his book, ‘Patrons of Poverty: IMF/World Bank and Africa’s Problems’, traces the root causes of contemporary disorientation, disarticulation, disillusion and mal-development in Africa to the historical forces of slavery, colonialism and now neo-colonial imperialism. He cites the concrete examples of Senegal and British-Gambia to demonstrate that his thesis is no mere ‘leisure of the theory class’. Those two countries were forced by the colonial administration to engage in overproduction of groundnuts for export to the detriment of the production of rice, which was their staple food crop. The consequence was that they became heavily dependent on rice importation from French Indo-China and India respectively.
All across Africa, the emphasis of colonial economic policy was on production of cash crops for export leading to the persistent food crisis due to overdependence on food imports. As Dr Akhaine puts it, “Rodney saw in it what he called ‘irrational contradictions’ due to non-industrialization. Africans grew cotton and imported finished cotton goods, grew cocoa but imported chocolate beverages in a process of product round tripping…colonial production never allowed Africans to produce what they consumed and consequently became outward oriented economically”.
Perhaps the two most important chapters in the book are the fourth and fifth, which interrogate the Western and African solutions, respectively, to the continent’s crisis of dependency and underdevelopment. The western policies propounded for Africa through the IFIs and mostly adopted by intellectually slavish and timid African policy elite include modernisation theory, Import Substitution Industrialisation, Washington Consensus/Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAP) and Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative. None of these policy initiatives helped to ameliorate the plight of African countries – indeed they only sank deeper into the morass of underdevelopment.
Modernisation theory, for instance, Dr Akhaineexplicates, posited that African countries were backward and traditional societies that had to tread the trajectory of highly industrialised western countries to achieve modernisation and development. The rich industrialised countries of Europe and North America were put up as the developmental role models that African countries must seek to replicate. They did not realize, or perhaps did not bother, that this kind of development model by imitation engendered a feeling of inferiority and psychological inadequacy on the part of Africans that only made it more difficult for the latter to find a way out of the dark labyrinths of poverty, misery and despair.
This dilemma was perhaps best captured by Professor Claude Ake, who lamented that “The colonisers convinced themselves and tried to convince us that our level of civilisation was sub-human…Now, two decades after political independence, the cult of inferiority continues to be nurtured by the ideology of development which Europe has foisted on us; this ideology represents Western society as the ideal state of being and African society as thoroughly bad and needing drastic change. It is no wonder that we the African elite suffer from an inferiority complex”.
Modernisation theorists who drew up the immediate post-independence development plans for many African countries such as Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda among others emphasised external capital inflow in the form of loans and grants as well as increased agricultural production for exports to the detriment of domestic food sufficiency. The rich bauxite deposits of Ghana, Akhaine notes, could easily have supported a viable aluminium industry for the country. But there was a snag. Western experts deemed Ghana’s bauxite inferior and needing further enrichment from the West to enhance its suitability for industrial purposes.
Thus, Akhaine describes these policy options as being “in the main, mechanisms for reproducing the unequal economic relations of the colonial epoch in a post-colonial setting, which many have referred to asneo-colonialism, the continuation of colonialism by means of economic dependence”. The author agrees with Professor OkwudibaNnoli that what was achieved was at best the ‘acquisition of artifacts’ such as bridges, trunk roads, stadia, ports etc which were not products of the indigenous productive or technological capacities of African countries.
In a similar vein, the Import Substitution Industrialization strategies suggested to African countries by the IFIs only increased further import dependency, encouraged massive foreign exchange (capital) outflow and high budget deficits. This is because the strategy was based on large scale importation of equipment, machinery and high level technical skills to produce locally consumer and intermediate goods that were once imported.
And despite the emphasis on Agriculture, rural development and employment, particularly by the United Nations (UN) development agencies, the 1980s was regarded as a lost decade for Africa with severe food shortages across the continent, drought in some areas, increased malnutrition, marked slump in manufacturing, manipulation of commodity prices by Western multinationals to the detriment of African countries and monstrous corruption by African countries all combining to drive the continent deeper into debt.
As from the mid- 1980s, the IFIs began to urge the adoption of stringent Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAP) by desperate, fiscally distressed African countries as a condition for external financial support. The same set of policies –exchange rate devaluation, market liberalisation, deregulation of controls, privatisation of public enterprises, removal of subsidies to the most vulnerable, downsizing of the public sector etc – were forced on practically all African countries irrespective of their peculiarities. At the end of the day, the SAPs practically wiped out the middle class in most African countries, destroyed social services, increased both poverty and inequality, compounded the debt problem and generally worsened the plight of these countries.
The Western solutions to Africa’s crisis of development are juxtaposed by Dr Akhaine in chapter five with proposed home grown African solutions. Two major solutions to Africa’s problems originating from Africa are examined by the author. The first is the far reaching organisation of African Unity (OAU) 1980 Lagos Plan of Action (LPA), which, unlike the Western solutions focussed on concrete problems confronting the continent with the objective of achieving collective self-reliance for accelerated, non-dependent development. Areas covered by the LPA include food and resources, human resources development and utilization, science and technology, transport and communication, trade and finance, economic and technical cooperation, environment and development, energy, women and development, as well as development planning, statistics and population.
The second major home grown development agenda by Africans for Africans is the African Alternative Framework to Structural Adjustment Programmes (AAA-SAPs) articulated by the UN Economic Commission for Africa. Summarising the thrust of AAA-SAP, Dr Akhaine writes that “Whereas SAP compels adjustments to the crisis in the global financial architecture in its domestic and external dimension, the alternative framework proffers for African economies structural transformation from its ‘structural disarticulation’, diversification and increased productivity in order to improve the lot of the African people and bridge the gap in the standard of living between them and the rest of the world”.
It is a measure of the stranglehold that the IFIs have on the policy process in Africa and a confirmation of Dr Akhaine’s central thesis that these alternative home grown solutions were shot down by the IFIs and African leaders abandoned them for the IMF/World Bank-inspired African Priority Programme for Economic Recovery (APPER) – 1986-1990. The economies of African countries have unfortunately degenerated even further since then. Poverty has risen astronomically, the debt burden worsened and meaningful development more of a mirage than ever.
To launch Africa on the path of true development, Dr Akhaine stresses the need for the requisite political will on the part of African leaders as well as the replacement of the current rent-seeking, neo-colonial African elite with new patriotic afro-centric elite. But then one wonders how this can be achieved without a far reaching revolution, which seems a remote prospect given the constellation of class forces in today’s world.
However, it is difficult to fault the author’s endorsement of the position of the Tony Blair-inspired Commission of Africa that “Africa’s development must be shaped by Africans. History has shown us that development cannot and does not work if policies are shaped and forced by outsiders. It is Africa’s actions and leadership that will be the most progressive in generating resurgence in Africa, advancing living standards and taking forward the fight against poverty”.
