EXTRACT | ‘Can Africans Do Economics?’

About the book
Can Africans Do Economics? examines the intersection of economic development and freedom across the Africa.
Drawing on the powerful ideas of former African leaders such as Thomas Sankara and Julius Nyerere, this book explores their belief in the inseparable link between political independence and economic progress.
Informed by the scholarship of leading economists Grieve Chelwa, Marion Ouma, Redge Nkosi, Cleopas Sambo and Ndongo Samba Sylla, Can Africans Do Economics? redefines development as a process of emancipation, not simply economic growth.
Combining historical context with forward-thinking policy proposals this book presents an urgent case for transformative policies grounded in African realities, and rejecting foreign-led interventions on the continent.
EXTRACT
Africa is Rich, not Poor
Vijay Prashad
Although most Africans are poor, our continent is potentially extremely rich. Our mineral resources, which are being exploited with foreign capital only to enrich foreign investors, range from gold and diamonds to uranium and petroleum. Our forests contain some of the finest woods to be grown anywhere. Our cash crops include cocoa, coffee, rubber, tobacco and cotton. As for power, which is an important factor in any economic development, Africa contains over 40% of the potential water power of the world, as compared with about 10% in Europe and 13% in North America. Yet so far, less than 1% has been developed. This is one of the reasons why we have in Africa the paradox of poverty in the midst of plenty, and scarcity in the midst of abundance. Kwame Nkrumah, I Speak of Freedom.
Africa is a continent of at least 54 countries where over 3,000 languages are spoken. Nigeria, with a population of 220 million, accounts for over 500 languages alone. Although English is the official language of the country, a legacy of British colonialism, around ten per cent of the population speaks it as their first language (for half of Nigeria, Hausa and Yoruba, are their first language). The extraordinary diversity of the 1.4 billion people who live on the continent needs to be registered in the very first instance.
The experience of Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972) as the leader of Ghana formed the basis for his insight in 1961 which, decades later, remains intact in our time. Africa is indeed a rich continent with largely poor population. Estimates of Africa’s natural resource wealth suggest that it is worth $6.5 trillion, at a minimum, but its total external debt is a fraction of that at $1.1 trillion. Because of debt, rooted in the neocolonial structure of the world system, half of the people on the African continent live in poverty. The existence of immense resources has not created wealth but instability and war, drummed up by colonialism and then the strong arm of multinational corporations (MNCs). An emblem of this paradox is that Africa contains 65% of the world’s uncultivated arable land but is also reliant upon basic food imports. This enigma of concurrent wealth and poverty defines Africa’s reality. Words such as corruption, inefficiency, and overregulation are frequently deployed to explain the situation, but they are only epiphenomenon.
Can Africans Do Economics? reflects on this fundamental problem of immense wealth and unpayable debt, of potential sovereignty and effective subordination. The title of the book is playful but real, echoing the actual confusion set in place by the assumptions made by mainstream economics and political science. Here are two of them: Africa’s problems are endogenous, rooted in cultural factors and national liberation projects, and not exogenous, framed by the history of colonialism and the reality of the neocolonial world system. To claim that poverty is inherent in Africa is to exculpate colonialism and neocolonialism, which allow the continuation of this structure. There are of course several internal problems within African countries, as there are in any country, but these do not define the nature of the crises they face.
HOW AFRICA IS SEEN
In 2003, Thandika Mkandawire and Charles C. Soludo published an edited volume on the International Monetary Fund’s Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) imposed on Africa. Imposed is a strong word, but it adequately describes the zeitgeist of the 1980s and 1990s, and the essays by Marion Ouma and Cleopas Gabriel Sambo in this book make that very clear. In their introduction, Mkandawire and Soludo pointed out that the lack of belief Africans’ capacity to build their own development agendas resulted in a deluge of over 100,000 foreign technical experts, costing over $4 billion annually to maintain have literally taken over the process of policy and project design and sometimes implementation. In what has ensued, Africa has turned into a pawn in the chessboard of experimentation for all manner of ill-digested development theories and pet hypotheses.
The ‘ill-digested development theories’ emerge in two classic World Bank reports – Sub-Saharan Africa: From Crisis to Sustainable Growth (1989) and Adjustment in Africa (1994). By the late 1980s and into the early 1990s, the post-colonial national liberation frameworks that focused on undoing imperialism were set aside and multilateral agencies began to focus their attention on problems such as corruption, regulation, and a collapse of the rule of law. The overall framework of governance defined the problem narrowly and set aside the external problems of centuries of exploitation carried out by international powers.
The aftermath of the famine in Ethiopia (1983–1985) evoked an entire ensemble of stereotypes about Africa: poverty, hunger, corruption, disorder, and inefficiency. Out of disgust for this descriptive catalepsy Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina wrote his satirical 2005 essay, ‘How to Write About Africa’, which bitterly shows why the animals in The Lion King film have a more complex humanity than the humans in Karen Blixen’s book Out of Africa. It is commonly insinuated that if Africa’s elites can be portrayed as rapacious, and its masses helpless, and if the continent can be reduced to the humiliations of poverty, then it makes sense that the West should re-colonise Africa through the multilateral institutions and their neoliberal reforms.
WHAT AFRICA MUST CONFRONT
Africa is weighed down by a buried history of colonialism, including the Atlantic Slave Trade, which stole wealth from the continent and used it to enrich Europe and the Americas. I express this history as buried because although it is widely acknowledged, this acknowledgement does not shape political responses to current crises. The wealth that could have been invested to solve basic problems was used instead to finance the industrial revolution in Europe and North America. This elementary point is not only an argument for better historiography but the importance of naming all impediments to development. African countries effectively must borrow money from the former colonial powers that stole African money. In turn, the money is borrowed at usurious interest rates and comes with onerous conditions which simply deepen debt rather than produce development.
Due to the insufficient decolonisation of the world economy, MNCs and former colonial powers use financial practices to enable the extraction of wealth from African states. While the figures for this plunder have not been properly calculated, they would probably be in the hundreds of trillions from the 15th century to the 1960s alone. If one looks simply at illicit financial flows between 1980 and 2009,between $1.2 trillion to $1.4 trillion left the continent, equivalent to Africa’s entire GDP of the continent, and far greater than the Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) that reaches its shores.
African intellectuals and politicians confront two simultaneous problems. First, structural pressures of significant debt burdens and the swindle of FDI and development aid. SAPs forced countries to cut their subsidies for human development and their public wage bill, which meant a deterioration of public services (especially health and education) and the forced deregulation of the economy by the lack of state oversight. This, combined with the legal plunder authorised by MNC-controlled debates around accountancy and financial flows, opens the floodgates for the outflow of resource wealth.
Second, theoretical pressures stem from an absolute denial of colonial theft and of the existence of an unjust world system. The scholars who have catalogued the deep impact of colonialism on Africa range from Walter Rodney, a Marxist who taught at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, to Kenneth Onwuka Dike, a liberal who was the first vice-chancellor of the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. Despite their important work, the denial of colonialisation’s impact shapes economic approaches to African countries. This denial means that the most important constraint for development is not permitted within the discourse on African economies and African development. The theoretical pressure was deepened about five decades ago through two parallel developments. First, the almost deliberate disregard for the theories of national liberation that had emerged during the decolonisation movement. The work of these thinkers– from Nkrumah to Amílcar Cabral to Thomas Sankara – has been neglected, their books allowed to go out of print and their work not given the due regard for study. Without the lineage that runs from Nkrumah to Sankara, the theoretical armour needed to confront the imperialist logic of development simply cannot flourish.
That living tradition, which animates this book is directly elevated by several of the authors notably Ndongo Samba Sylla on Sankara and Grieve Chelwa on Nkrumah. The spirit of that tradition needs to be generated by a proper publishing programme (as has been conducted by Inkani Books) and must be returned to the centre of academic thought (there need to be more serious dissertations drawing from this lineage). For this reason, Redge Nkosi’s essay searches for a monetary policy fit for the reality of diverse African situations rather than importing a policy framework from colonising states. It is against that theoretical pressure that scholars such as Nkosi, and thousands of others in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, work to build policies against both the arrogance of IMF clichés, and the withdrawal into forms of nativism that cannot serve the needs of a modern economy.
Second, the disregard of serious pan-African thought came alongside the attrition of the public universities on the African continent which had incubated Pan-Africanism. From the 1990s, public universities faced serious funding cuts, which forced them to rely upon finance from elsewhere for research. These entities included European, North American, and South African private foundations, funds from multilateral agencies (including those newly set up on the African continent, which received their own funding largely from European and US foundations), and money from EU coffers and USAID’s largess. These funds were accompanied by their own constraints, which included fealty to the overall neoliberal research agenda.
Extract provided by Inkani Books
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