World Bank President Robert Zoellick recently wrote in Uganda's main independent newspaper:
The financial crisis has wounded Africa. But Africans' vision for the future has remained resilient: They seek energy, infrastructure, agricultural development, regional integration linked to global trade and markets, and a dynamic private sector. … For states coming out of conflicts, the challenge is ‘securing development’ – through a reinforcing mix of peace and order, governance, economy, and legitimacy. (http://allafrica.com/stories/200909010510.html )
But how and why can such a vacuous neoliberal universalism persist and remain ascendant? Related to this, what does it tell us about debates in African political economy that the slender counter-hegemonies that do exist are externally derived: developmental states, the Chinese model, new Latin American social democracies.
These questions are more important for ROAPE than for other journals, as ROAPE aims to encourage and disseminate oppositions and alternatives: often deriving from African intellectual circles, based in narratives of struggle and resistance that specific countries or regions might generate. Next year, ROAPE will be publishing a special issue titled ‘Africa struggles’ which will focus on resistance-as-practice: protest, organisation, every-day, ideational and collective.
As Casse and Jensen show in their examination of the politics and representation of poverty reduction in this issue, studies of African political agency are very far removed from the neoliberal abstractions which are either asserted or derived from quantitative analysis. But, this does not mean that simply relaying qualitative research from ‘on the ground’ excuses us from engaging with broader intellectual issues. Indeed, Casse and Jensen do precisely this, first, by raising questions about both the reliability of widely deployed theoretical and conceptual assumptions in poverty reduction research and intervention, and the argument for a correspondence between economic growth and poverty reduction; and, second, by calling attention to the possible replacement of poverty reduction strategies by Poverty Reduction Growth Facility programmes, which are reminiscent of structural adjustment loans.
So, what lessons can we draw from an age in which a neoliberal ideology doggedly persists, even as its practices, logic and morality are called into question. Substitutes are either neoliberal alternatives or, where they profess to be alternatives to neoliberalism, are models which are sketchy and derived largely from social transitions that have taken place outside Africa? This question is worth a little exploration.
Answering questions
Ostensibly ranged in opposition to neoliberalism are critical approaches to African development. But what does ‘critical’, which has become the lodestone for any unorthodox social science, mean? It signifies a cynicism of political power, but little else. It represents only the broadest of oppositions and is normatively attractive: who wishes to label themselves as ‘uncritical’? The question therefore becomes: critical in what sense?
For students of political economy, critical approaches must surely be based in an understanding of the dynamics of global capitalism and the ways in which social relations in African countries have (re)produced forms of poverty, political marginality, injustice and, frankly, mass mortality. The political economy of capitalism is not a master narrative of necessity or economic determination; it is a more open political economy of accumulation, contested labour and trading relations; the political assertion of property rights; and a wealth of cultural-political endeavours to defend, undermine, critique, and reconfigure public spaces of authority. It recognises that capitalism has at its core a ‘tragic’ historical motor, of offering at least the potential of material progress, but always with a tendency to impose social disruption, high levels of exploitation, alienation, and modern forms of impoverishment and marginality. Both the potential and the tragedy are played out in multiple settings through variegated social and political institutions, both formal and informal, and very often in integrated fashion. This is, in broad brush strokes, the multidimensional Africa that a critical political economy provides. Such a political economy is evidently twinned to political norms such as popular participation/agency, gender equality, social justice; it also evokes – or prefigures – notions of liberation and socialism. Both Patrick Bond and Peter Jacobs' briefings challenge major neoliberal and disciplining structures by highlighting the anti-democratic and social deleterious nature of the APRM and the ‘pro-poor’ responses to economic crisis in South Africa.
Questioning answers
It might well be that most readers of ROAPE are happy to agree a broad analytical frame based in a critical approach to capitalism in Africa which cleaves to norms of social progress. Yet, this does not allow us to agree a ‘constitution’ for researching and evaluating contemporary events. All it does is provide the basis for asking meaningful questions.
ROAPE's own intellectual history demonstrates this very well. Throughout its pages, one can see arguments about the value of ‘Marxist-Leninist’ nationalist projects, the role of the national bourgeoisie, the historic agency of peasant societies, the presence and potential of civil society organisations or new social movements. It is striking that there is no sense in which a consensus can be reached about the definitive place that any of these forms of political change suggest a single Model for Africa. It would be tragic indeed if critical scholars replaced the vulgar teleologies of neoliberal ideology with new teleologies that set out necessary, correct, or irrefutable prospectives for Africa. In this sense, answers to the pressing questions regarding social justice, struggle, and development must always be provisional and subject to as much questioning as that reserved for a new World Bank lending programme or a large oil investment on the Bight of Benin.
This issue of ROAPE carries a diversity of articles, but each of them works against one-dimensional views of Africa. Peter Kragelund provides an contribution to debates concerning the role of Chinese foreign direct investment (FDI) in Africa. He starts from a paradox: that Western conditionalities of economic liberalisation have enabled the entry of certain types of Chinese investment into Africa. Concentrating on the case of Zambia, he shows how this has happened and how important it is to consider the sector and scale of FDI in order to come to judgements about its broader social effects. If Kragleund can be read as a case for nuanced and complex global articulations, the article by Ebenezer Obadare and Wale Adebanwi reinforces this point in its reflections on the politics of remittances. Obadare and Adebanwi argue that the ‘developmental’ focus of research into remittances is based in the question: what impact do remittances have on recipient economies? The authors argue that a broader set of research question also needs addressing: how do remittances affect the role of African states and the nature of the national citizenry? The diasporic, spatially unbounded, and opaque nature of many ‘national communities’ suggests profound shifts in the nature of state authority and civic action.
Of course, much of the research on African states (or for some the African state) is reconciled to the ways in which state authority is limited, negotiated, evaded and manifest in ‘shadow politics to use Bill Reno's felicitous phrase. This is part of the story of the transnational effects of remittances and it is also central to the ways in which states have reformed their local presence. J. Tyler Dickovick provides a fascinating comparative study of three of Africa's most prominent attempts to reconstruct local state power (Uganda, Burkina Faso and Ghana), revealing how three categorical interactions between the ‘central’ and the ‘local’ have emerged. Burkina Faso exemplifies confrontation, Ghana cooption and Uganda construction. Dickovick argues that these strategies –and indeed their efficacy – are strongly related to the nature of prevailing localised forms of authority, commonly expressed through modern structures of chieftaincy.
Thorkil Casse and Stig Jensen analyse contemporary Burkina Faso and Madagascar in light of the poverty reduction strategy framework which currently orients a great deal of Western aid policy. Indeed, as Casse and Jensen argue, it is the connection of the poverty reduction agenda with the Millennium Development Goals that underpins the type of relentless optimism with which Zoellick commences this editorial. But, in these two case studies, the linkages between poverty reduction (if it is taking place and even then only by the slender standards of the World Bank) are tendentious and opaque. There is no good reason why one should assume that a well-implemented poverty reduction strategy will lead to a process of poverty reduction; this is assumed by so many who then go on to analyse the extent of implementation or the level of aid/credit that underpins a Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper.
Ibaba S. Ibaba and Jeremiah O. Arowosegbe both deal with the politics of violence in the Niger Delta. Both of them identify the corrosive effects of violence. The injustices of oil exploration which underpin the emergence of rebellions, insurgencies, and more complex and novel forms of violence, have obvious impacts on the peoples of the Delta who are thrown into a permanent state of emergency. But furthermore, broader political projects of development or conflict resolution seem increasingly remote in contexts of insurgency/counter-insurgency.