Volume 24 1997 Issue 73
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.
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