Imperial, Neo-Liberal Africa?

Review of African Political Economy No. 113: 417-422 © ROAPE Publications Ltd., 2007 ISSN 0305-6244 Imperial, Neo-Liberal Africa? Alfred B. Zack-Williams & Giles Mohan Now that the fanfare and euphoria surrounding what has been called Tony Blair’s passionate denunciation of impoverishment in Africa as ‘a scar on the conscience of the world’ (Lone, 2007), the ‘development buzz’ (Collier, 2007) generated by rock stars and the ‘make poverty history campaign’ has all died down, it seems quite a good time to reflect on the ‘achievements’ to date. These campaigns were preceded by the UN millennium development goals on poverty alleviation, which in turn were followed by the Report of the Commission for Africa. More than a third of the way towards the 2015 goal, it is clear as Salim Lone suggests, that the developed world is falling behind on its commitments to African countries and the plight of many Africans is getting worse. According to Lone, no sub-Saharan African country has met the criteria on poverty alleviation and it would have been unthinkable that Western Governments, which gleefully presided over the creation of new classes of super- super rich, would use their considerable influence to push African leaders to pursue policies which would shift resources away from the rapacious national elites towards the poor … Nor was it likely the west would permit Africa to stray from the neo-liberal orthodoxies prescribed for the continent by the World Bank and the IMF. Readers of this journal would be familiar with the challenge and critical engagement, which the Editorial Working Group has posed to the new orthodoxies of ‘neo-liberalism’ and, in particular, the World Bank and IMF-sponsored structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) in Africa. ROAPE, as a collective, has been in the forefront in challenging the assumptions and the ideological underpinnings of SAPs by pointing to the devastating effects it has had on the life of ordinary Africans, their economies and societies in general. These policies that have generated wealth for the elites and created economic growth in a few countries, have brought misery to a billion people for two decades. Furthermore, we have pointed to the fact that neo- liberalism does not constitute a single coherent ideology, but a hotchpotch of economic and political diktats which in turn have weakened the state in Africa as more and more of its functions are outsourced to NGOs, creating ‘less order, less peace and less security’ for the mass of the African people (Ferguson: 2006:39). ‘Democracy’ was dangled as a carrot to the African masses only to be negated as their votes became worthless as the powerful nations supported comprador elements within the political classes regardless of how power was achieved – as is the case in the recent elections in Nigeria. The journal has also drawn attention of the real struggle of the African people against structural adjustment programmes and the attempts by the comprador classes to intensify their oppression through the conditionality embedded in SAPs. ROAPE has published articles on African people’s attempt to create autonomous political and economic spaces (such as the parallel or informal markets) – free not only from a kleptocratic state, but also from ISSN 0305-6244 Print/1740-1720 Online/07/030417-06 DOI: 1080/03056240701672478 418 Review of African Political Economy the worse excesses of SAPs which has rendered the state a ‘political monument’. This journal has also catalogued examples of the anti-SAPs struggles waged by various groups and communities, such as anti-SAP revolts and ‘IMF riots’. Other features of these struggles include: smuggling of commodities across national borders; constructing a system of multiple modes of livelihood; and direct challenges to the state through support for social movements challenging state hegemony. The triumphal arrival of neo-liberals, steeped in anti-dirigisme and the privileging of the market, accompanied the very manifestation of SAPs as the prognosis of African economic ailments in the ‘lost decade’ of the 1980s. Neo-liberal market driven ideology was based on a one-dimensional prognosis to what is a complex problem facing African leaders, but reduced simply to ‘market failure’. The mantra of ‘whatever your economic ailment, deflate’ demonstrates confidence in the market at the expense of public institutions (Stiglitz, 2002). The latter point is particularly true of political institutions which had to bear the brunt of challenges from Paul Collier’s ‘Bottom Billion’ (Collier, 2007; Lawrence, 2007:169-176) in their quest to survive SAPs. Writing about the Fund, Stiglitz (2002) has argued that it has moved away from its original purpose, which was: to put international pressure on countries to have more expansionary policies than they would choose of their own accord. Today, the Fund has reversed course, putting pressure on countries, particularly developing ones, to implement more contractionary policies than these countries would choose of their own accord. Furthermore, Stiglitz observed that the absence of a coherent and reasonably complete theory has led to policies, which exacerbate the very problems that the Fund was set up to resolve. These policies (anti-dirigisme and deflations) do not endear African states to the Fund or Bank as ‘shoots of development’ and early post- independence innovative social care systems (as was the case with Mozambique) were destroyed at the altar of neo-liberal dogma. Neo-liberals demanded the rolling back of the state, which was demonised as a ‘lame leviathan’, a ‘vampire’, whilst as Bjorn Beckman has been at pains to warn in the pages of this journal: ‘the neo-liberal project seeks to de-legitimise the state as the locus of nationalist aspirations and resistance’ (Beckman, 1993:20), by drawing on theories of ‘rent-seeking’, ‘patrimonialism’ and state autonomy, whilst obscuring the massive role of state power in the economic domination of imperialism of transnational corporations. The African state was crudely contrasted with the developmental states of Asia as being too interventionist, thereby producing a soporific civil society, whilst in fact the problem is not the depth of the intervention, but the quality. Given this perceived pathology of the African state, the idea of a ‘developmental state’ was treated with disdain. What was required as far as the IFIs were concerned was a surrogate state, which was manifest in a number of ways. The first potential route was by strengthening the grip of NGOs (Non-Governmental Organisations) (originating from within the imperialist centres) on African societies, which would increasingly appropriate the role and functions of the dysfunctional state. Second, the state could be captured by direct intervention by external powers, as was the case in Somalia by the US in 1993 with disastrous consequences, or more positively by Britain in war-torn Sierra Leone in May 2000. A point which this journal has continued to stress is that imperialist designs are always dynamic and ever Editorial: Imperial, Neo-Liberal Africa? 419 changing, with the sole objective of making the world safe for capital. Thus, in his contribution in this issue, Nikola Kojucharov takes a critical look at the World Bank supervised Chad-Cameroon pipeline project, pointing to the way the World Bank tried to appropriate a major function of the Chadian state, namely the ability to levy taxation, what Kojucharov calls, ‘foreign interference in the economic sovereignty of a nation’. Clearly, the ability of the state to levy taxation is crucial for its survival: not only to deliver social citizenship and the social contract, but also to placate retainers and others who are in the service of the state. Indeed, much of the conflict in contemporary Africa stems from the inability of the state to provide social citizenship and to finance the patron client network or ‘shadow state’. To deny the state access to taxation directly is to put obstacles to socio-political reproduction and to threaten stability and the very existence of the system. Whilst interrogating the concept of ‘resource curse’, that is, the tendency for resource wealth to impair the economic and political development of a resource endowed country, Kojucharov shows that oil has not improved the standard of living of the Chadian people, with the majority continuing to live on less than $1 a day. In order to discipline the state, the Bank stripped the Chadian state of its sovereignty, which became a major source of conflict between the political class and the officials from the Bank. Kojucharov argues that underlying the unsuccessful conversion of oil revenues into poverty reduction was not simply the World Bank’s policy choice (as most critics have suggested), but that the project was hindered more by the external nature of the World Bank’s policy intervention than by any particular design flaws. In his view, for the project to achieve its goal of poverty reduction, a policy rethink is called for to do away with the complex regulatory frameworks, which hinder the strengthening of institutional capacity. The case of the Chad-Cameroon pipeline points to the transmogrification of imperialism: not only was the policy designed (like SAPs) to hem Africa even more closely onto the accumulation needs of global capitalism as producers of raw materials and markets for manufactured goods from the imperialist centres, but the agreement was specifically set up to ensure that oil continues to flow to reduce Western dependence on supplies from the conflictual Arabian Gulf and to ensure capital flow to the multinationals, like Esso, that invest in Chad’s oil industry. In the era of the ‘war on terrorism’, Africa and her natural resources have now assumed major importance, not least because the imperialist centres now have to find an alternative to the perilous Arabian peninsular. Furthermore, the arrival of new players and new markets for African raw materials – namely the Chinese and Indian markets – have helped to valorise African raw materials in the eyes of the imperialist nations.

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