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The Discourse on National Autonomous Development

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The Discourse on National Autonomous Development Revisiting the Debate on National Autonomous Development* Issa G. Shivji Professor of Law Faculty of Law University of Dar es Salaam Tanzania [email protected] Introduction In this so-called era of globalization and global village, it is anachronistic to talk about nationalism, autonomy, and development. Pundits have declared end of history. Development is passé, and autonomy is outdated. We are living in a global village where there is interdependence, where planners and politicians talk about win-win situations, not winners and losers, or worse, exploiters and exploited. The world is interdependent. Nationalism is cultural relativism, at best, or fundamentalism, at worst, while autonomy is a pipe dream. But all fads have their days. Globalization, or neo-liberalism as we recognise it in Africa, is being questioned, not only ideologically and theoretically but also, politically. In many ways, what happens in Latin America is very often the dress rehearsal for Africa. And Latin America is revolting against neo-liberalism. Nonetheless, the last 25 years of adjustment in Africa have caused havoc. Not only our people continue to wallow in the legendry poverty but also even the self-respect and dignity of the nationalist period have been ridiculed and the gains of the independence period, however modest, have been reversed. But, as I said, there is a backlash. African scholars, at least to the north of Limpopo – I am not sure about this part of Africa since “you people” take your cue from more temperate climes! – are beginning to revisit the nationalist period; are becoming bolder by the day to call globalization by * Issa Shivji is visiting South Africa as a guest of the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s Unit for Rural Schooling and Development at the University of Fort Hare. He has also spoken at the Education Policy Unit at the University of Witwatersrand and the Institute for Economic Rsearch on Innovation at the Tshwane University of Technology. 2 its name, imperialism. Even a kind of “primary resistance” on the ground is surfacing in ways, which no one could have predicted even five years ago – witness the so-called armed rebellion in the oil states of Nigeria. It is in this context then that I wish to revisit the discourse on national autonomous development (NAD) and converse with you on how we can develop and deepen this discourse as we enter – hopefully – the period of post-neo-liberalism. First, let me, in broad strokes, recapitulate the development discourse from nationalism to neo-liberalism. From nationalism to neo-liberalism* The struggle for independence in Africa was primarily an assertion of the humanness of the African people after five centuries of domination and humiliation of the slave trade and colonialism. Amilcar Cabral described it as the process of ‘re-Africanisation of minds’ or ‘rebecoming Africans’. National development became the passion of politicians and the ‘great expectation’ of the people. In the vision of the more articulate nationalist leaders like Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, the independent state had a double task, that of building the nation and developing the economy. The state in Africa, Nyerere argued, preceded the nation, rather than the other way round. Thus, the national project was from the start, top-down, and statist. The colonial economy and society were anything but national. In the scramble for Africa, the colonial powers had divided the continent into mini-countries where boundaries cut through cultural, ethnic, and economic affinities. This was made worse by the policy of divide and rule, leaving behind uneven development in an extreme form. Some regions were more developed than others were. Some ethnic groups were labelled martial, providing a recruiting ground for soldiers; others were turned into labour reservoirs; some ethnic groups were characterized as “intelligent” and moderately entrepreneurial as opposed to the rest who were inherently indolent and lazy. All were of course uncivilized, uncultured, undisciplined pagans whose souls needed to be saved and whose skins needed to be thrashed. * This section is based on my public lecture to Cornell University, September, 2005, titled ‘The Changing Discourse on Development in Africa’. 3 The colonial economy was typically disarticulated, almost tailor-made, for exploitation by colonial capital, linked to the metropolitan trade and capital circuits. Extractive industries like mining predominated. Plantation agriculture existed side by side with subsistence peasant cultivation, all concentrating on one or a couple of crops for export according to the needs of the metropolitan economy. In settler colonies, large-scale alienation of fertile land left the indigenous to eke out a living from scraps of land and still pay taxes to the colonial state while providing labour to the settler farmer. Entrepreneurship and skilled labour was deliberately discouraged, if not suppressed, by legal edicts and administrative fiat. Instead, where needed to distribute metropolitan goods, build railways and ports, or service the state and the settler town, skills were imported from the Indian subcontinent. Different colonial powers left behind different forms and traditions of public administration, culture, cuisine, dance and education, elementary as it was, all concentrated in towns. The urban and the rural were literally two countries within one; one alien, modern, a metropolitan transplant barred to the native – while the other stagnating and frozen in the so-called tradition or custom. Neither the modern nor the traditional were organically so. Both were colonial constructs. No other continent suffered as much destruction of its social fabric through foreign imperial domination as did Africa. These initial conditions on the eve of independence show that the nationalist project faced a formidable task on the morrow of independence. What is more, the state, which was supposed to carry out the twin tasks of nation-building and economic development, was itself a colonial heritage. The colonial state was a despotic state, a metropolitan police and military outpost, in which powers were concentrated and centralized, and where law was an unmediated instrument of force and where administrative fiat was more a rule, than the rule of law. The nationalist vision thus called for a revolutionary transformation not only of the economy and society but also the state. A few nationalist visionaries attempted, but none 4 succeeded. The post-independence international context was no more propitious than the colonial was. Independence found Africa in the midst of Cold War and the rising imperial power, the United States, for whom any assertion of national self-determination was “communism”, to be hounded and destroyed, by force if necessary, by manipulation and deception, if possible. The early story of the gruesome assassination of Patrice Lumumba and the overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah; the continuing story of military coups, assassinations, and resistance to national liberation wars; and the civil strife in Africa, in most of which imperialism had a hand, bear testimony to what the former colonial powers and the rising imperial power could do to retain their collective global hegemony. It is in the context of these conditions, that African nationalists had to realise their dream of nation-building and economic development and to answer their people’s ‘great expectations’. Invariably, the agency of change was the state since there was virtually no social class that could shoulder the task of national development. Fanon’s characterization of the African middle class, which inherited power at independence as an underdeveloped middle class with the mentality of a businessperson rather than that of a captain of industry, captured the essence of the post-independence ruling class (Fanon 1963). Nor was foreign capital obliging in spite of various protective laws and incentive schemes put in place by the African governments. Invariably, nationalist politicians turned to the state. African governments of all ideological hues – from capitalist Kenyans through socialist Tanzanians to Marxists of various inclinations– all resorted to the state for their economic programmes. The erstwhile World Bank designed the post- independence economic programmes, contrary to the current propaganda from the West. In effect, it involved intensification of the monoculture agriculture for export; some enclaves of import-substitution industrialization and throwing open of the extractive and resource based industries to transnational corporations. The public sector expanded rapidly financed, almost exclusively, by draining surpluses from the peasantry. State-run and managed marketing boards became the mechanism of 5 siphoning off surpluses out of the agriculture sector. Much of the surplus found its way to metropolitan economies. The rest supported the state bureaucracy. The state had to be manned. The colonial bureaucracy was almost exclusively White at the top and immigrant in the middle. The education and health infrastructure had to be expanded, both for pragmatic as well as political reasons. Africanisation of the civil service could not be resisted nor could the basic welfare demands of the population. Provision of basic services by the state also served to legitimise the otherwise authoritarian rule of the political elite. The state bureaucracy grew rapidly. Nationalism thus resolved itself into various ideologies of developmentalism. ‘We should run while others walk’, politicians declared.
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