Review of African Political Economy No.73:307-310 © ROAPE Publications Ltd., 1997 ISSN 0305-6244; RIX #7301 Commentary Ray Bush & Morris Szeftel This issue continues the critical evaluation of aspects of Africa's economic and political crisis offered in previous editions of the ROAPE Review of Books in the hope of an effective alternative to prevailing notions. In the present conjuncture, the dominant forces of global capitalism restrict the policy agenda with regard to arresting economic decline, ethnic conflict and state disintegration. Structural adjustment (imposing externally-regulated liberalisation) and liberal democratic political reform (largely confined to electoral competition among a small elite and the sponsorship of civil society) have been the only games in town. The evidence is everywhere that this narrow agenda is inadequate for the task. Its apologists defend it, not by pointing to their successes or their intellectual coherence and elegance, but by reiterating that there are no alternatives. Hence the need to encourage the widest range of critical contributions in that hope that, from them, alternatives will begin to emerge. The need for a new agenda is manifest. Economic restructuring, after 25 years of failure and despite the continuing brutality of its social impact, draws only muted criticism. Despite these failures, and notwithstanding occasional hand-wringing by the World Bank (as it accepts that mistakes have been made and launches a new slogan), Africa continues to be 'adjusted' to fit it for its station on the margins of world capitalist markets. The disappointments of democratisation are more recent and thus less fully explored. But the limitations of political pluralism as a means of promoting democratisation and overcoming the instability, ineffectiveness and corruption of post-colonial states, are already clear. While it is too soon to be categorical, multi- party competition appears to have done little to check centralised power and a great deal to discredit the electoral process itself. In Zambia (the liberal democratic flagship in Africa) the 1996 presidential and general elections produced widespread allegations of unfairness rather than providing the MMD government with the unambiguous mandate it had sought (Baylies & Szeftel, 1997). They have been followed by increasing political tension culminating, in August 1997, with reports of police dispersing a political rally and, in the process, shooting former President Kaunda and seriously wounding Rodger Chongwe, leader of the Liberal Democratic Party and a prominent human rights activist. It is a telling irony that Dr Chongwe had been the minister in the first MMD government (after it replaced Kaunda's regime) most closely associated with democratic and constitutional reform. In Kenya, impending elections in 1997 have produced widespread violence with security forces killing protesters. Democratization, in the form it has taken, does not appear to have made free and fair elections any more possible than they were without it. Even those of its critics who hoped for nothing much more than a little democratic space in which ideas and interests could be articulated have been largely disappointed. 308 Review of African Political Economy The likely limits of multi-partyism as a vehicle for democratisation were explored in this journal from the outset of the process (Allen et al., 1992). More recently (ROAPE 65,1995) Allen sought to locate the origins of instability and authoritarianism in the combination of underdevelopment with a rapid transfer of power to an indigenous petty bourgeoisie through plebiscitarian politics. The consequence was, he argued, the development of an unstable clientelism and regionalism with high levels of corruption. At best it produced the centralisation of bureaucratic power; at its worst, the post-colonial state degenerated into a spoils system, brutal repression and even state collapse. Allen suggested that liberal democratic reform might offer a partial way out of this slide but a more fundamental process of change, using very different agencies from those in charge of the present process, was, however, necessary: ... there will have to be a second and more radical wave of innovation, this time ... towards stable, decentralised and democratic systems at regional, national and subnational levels. Western agencies and African leaders, who have been so thoroughly implicated in past failures, can provide neither guidance nor initiative in this process. Those are far more likely to come from within civil society, which already has experience of coping with the breakdown of centralised-bureaucratic systems, and of the far more difficult task of the reconstruction of civil and political life in the aftermath of terminal spoils politics (Allen, 1995:319). In this issue, Allen turns his attention to a fuller examination of the question of civil society, considering its popularity in recent analyses of the social base of political change in Africa and in the thinking of external support for liberal democratic reform. He argues that it is conceptually imprecise and analytically vacuous; its popularity owes much to its ideological value - as a force in opposition to the state - to the liberal policy agenda of external donors and agencies. Allen suggests, correctly in our opinion, that a return to concrete concepts such as class and gender is more useful than this vague shell. This critique of the 'democratic credentials' of civil society adds to two important recent contributions elsewhere: Glaser's (1997) questioning of the simplistic opposition of civil society against the state in recent South African writings on the left; and Mamdani's path-breaking study (1997) of the pernicious legacy of decolonisation in Africa and the limitations of civil society as an instrument for any kind of inclusive democratic transition. Two other articles in this issue take up questions related to Allen's analysis of repression and breakdown in the terminal phase of spoils systems. Outram's study of warlordism and factional warfare in Liberia shows how civil war over the division of the spoils reduced the country to a state of long-term dependency on foreign aid (aid over which the factions continued to fight without any thought for the citizenry). And Zack-Williams' analysis of the return of military rule in Sierra Leone assesses the May coup in the context of the spoils system as manifest in what Reno has called 'the Shadow State'. In more general terms, John Saul also takes issue with the liberal democratic project, contrasting two approaches to democracy and democratisation. He shows how what he terms 'the political science of democratisation' (exemplified by Diamond and Huntington, among others) proposes that reform must be consistent with the interests of international capitalism and the neo-liberalism of the IFIs if it is to avoid, in Diamond's words, 'provoking a crisis that might destroy democracy'. Saul argues that this narrow, pessimistic approach is devoid of any real concern with socio- economic outcomes and has a tendency to blame the victims, rather than their Commentary 309 oppressors, for transitions that fail. As an alternative, Saul offers what he calls 'the political economy of democratisation' rooted in the processes of imperialism, class struggle and state-social relations. This approach offers the possibility of examining issues of democratisation in terms of the real interests that move them. It offers a methodology that permits analysis of institutional forms and constitutional change in terms of the interests and historic conjunctures they represent rather than in terms of their own ideological justifications. The debate about democratisation has taken place in the context of processes that destabilise and erode the African state. This, in part, is the problem for and with liberal democratic theory, rooted as it is in changing institutional arrangements rather than the socio-political relations on which they rest. This issue includes a number of contributions which look at very different aspects of such destabilising forces. Baylies and Bujra report on key issues raised at an international conference in Senegal on social research in AIDS, an instance of useful international co-operation. With their report, we append a newspaper article (published from the Observer with the kind permission of the authors) which indicates a more problematic example of international co-operation in which international pharmaceutical companies test drugs in Africa but then withdraw treatment when tests have been completed. Using a very different approach to the other articles in this issue, and concerned with a different subject, Mohan opens out some related questions and problems. Rejecting the tendency of most on the left to reject post-modernism out of hand (as a reactionary form of intellectual self-indulgence divorced from reality) he juxtaposes post- structural ideas with marxism and explores the way the former challenge the latter. This is done by exploring the various meanings of 'difference' in relation to contemporary development theories and policies. Mohan argues that this analysis of 'development' theories as a form of discourse reveals the power relations inherent in them, including their eurocentric character. Asking how the 'insights of post- structuralism' can be incorporated into 'a still radical political economy', Mohan suggests a number of issues for a future theoretical agenda: the subordination of markets to social