Introduction
Recent research on global inequality neglects shocking forms of stratification in Africa. Yet, the large body of research on existing explanations of inequality in Africa is hardly satisfactory. Overly focused on labour and capital struggles, this body of work neither systematically addresses the problem of spatial separatism (Gore 1984/2012) nor transcends the trap of ‘capitalocentricm’ (Gibson-Graham 1996/2006). These explanations also neglect how stratification is created, aggravated and maintained by particular institutions of landed property and their production of rent. Marxists are interested in land rent, of course, but they suggest, with their disproportionate focus on capital, that its relevance as explanation declines over time. The recent interest in land grab also missed the opportunity to engage with the political economics of land, focusing instead on the politics of rural land struggles.
In this brief debate piece, based on my new book (Obeng-Odoom 2020a), I contest the ‘state of affairs’ in explaining stratification in Africa. I try to develop a relatively new explanation of stratification in Africa drawing on, among others, stratification economics, a new approach to political economy developed by black economists and other economists of colour.1 Stratification economics has been given significant attention in the Review of Black Political Economy (see e.g. vol. 42, no.1), but the Review of African Political Economy has paid limited attention to it. This dualism in stratification political economy brings to the fore the historical disconnect between ‘African political economy’ and ‘black political economy’. While the former has been primarily influential among transdisciplinary groups of Africanists in Europe who draw on Marxist class analysis, the former has flourished largely in the Americas within the circles of the National Economic Association. In this latter group, class but also wider institutional economic analysis of race, imperialism and economic development are of primary concern to its practitioners, who are mostly economists. Like two streams with a similar purpose that hardly converge, these two types of political economy run side by side, but neither their political economy nor their leaders converge. My book brings together these two traditions. Not only does it learn from them separately, it also distils insights from their combined concerns and other schools of thought.
It is on this basis that my book develops its argument. Instead of regenerative and inclusive development, the existing political economic system of institutions and property in Africa transfers rents from the class of producers to an absentee class of landlords. The intensification of this process is either disputed, caricatured so that it can be explained away (e.g. Maseland 2018), or widely recommended in various guises by economists, other social scientists wedded to the modernist logic of neopatrimonialism (for a review, see Mkandawire 2015), possessive individualism and new institutionalism (Bromley 2019). Other advocates of this orthodoxy are international organisations such as the OECD (Schmelzer 2016), and the champions of liberalism, including The Economist (Zevin 2019). However, maintaining this system is likely to accentuate existing social stratification in insidious, but destructive ways. The spread of gated housing is one such mechanism. The transnational control of municipal services is another. Rising labour aristocracy among oil workers is a third. This aggravation of stratification includes, but transcends, capitalist contradictions and the impediment of attempts to address it. Even more concerning, this current system hides institutional processes of stratification in plain sight.
Gated housing estates in Nigeria and elsewhere can be seen by everyone, but their underpinning contradictions in enclosing land – a free gift of nature – for private benefit often get lost. The monopolistic control of municipal services including water in Côte d’Ivoire and elsewhere by transnational corporations and global property conglomerates is another. A third is the efflorescence of labour aristocracy in the oil industry even among frontier oil economies such as Ghana. In all these examples, the social costs arising from the private appropriation of socially created land value underpins social problems of inequality and uncertainty. In my book I demonstrate even more specific cases with carefully analysed evidence relating to property economics, land reform, human capital, international trade and economic growth in Africa. I show that radical alternatives of socialisms and Africanisms are also contradictory, and often contributory to social stratification. Such is evidently the case in Zimbabwe, with its growing problem of absentee landownership, and South Africa with its racial and class contradictions.
While political economists have typically focused on capital to explain inequalities, they overlook the penetrating insights that the land under their feet offers through the triple mechanism of property, institutions, and social stratification in Africa. To demonstrate this argument, in the remainder of the article I first describe the problem that has generated centuries of debate. Next, I show why it is crucial to go beyond standard explanations of inequality in Africa. Then, I describe and defend a new Africanist political economic approach centred on stratification economics.
The problem
Widespread and growing inequalities in Africa are well known, but scholars have given relatively little attention to the problem. Compared to poverty, social stratification gets much less research attention in African political economy. According to the International Social Science Council, since 1992 the volume of publications on inequality has increased fivefold, but most of these focus on the top 1% of households located in the global North (International Social Science Council 2016). This emphasis on the global North is much like Thomas Piketty’s blockbuster, Capital in the twenty-first century (Piketty 2014), or more recent accounts (Kwon 2016; The Economist 2019). The award of the 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel to Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer for their experimental approach to poverty analysis further cements the focus on African poverty.
Yet, perhaps, inequality in Africa needs even more urgent attention. Cities in Africa are growing, physically and economically, but so is their inequality. Indeed, as noted in the famous State of the world’s cities report, ‘African cities appear to be the most unequal in the world’ (UN-HABITAT 2008, xiii). More recently, The human development report 2019 has asked, ‘How unequal is Africa?’ (United Nations Development Programme [UNDP] 2019, Ch. 3), but its analysis neglects cities. Yet, the spread of gated housing estates as concentrations of wealth is one physical manifestation of this growing spatial inequality (Ehwi, Morrison, and Tyler 2019). Social inequality is also on the rise. Cyril Ramaphosa’s (2018) essay, published in the Financial Times, shows growing inter-group inequality in South Africa, while the work of Dorrit Posel, Daniela Casale and Erofili Grapsa shows that intra-group inequality in Africa is also on the rise (Posel, Casale, and Grapsa forthcoming).
These types and levels of stratification are not only internal, but also international, intergenerational and inter-continental. Per capita monthly GDP in sub-Saharan Africa is 10 to 20 times less than what pertains in Western Europe, North America and Japan (Piketty 2014, 64). Indeed, even when Africa was said to be ‘rising’, its contribution to world GDP was stagnant at 2% and has remained so since 2005 (United Nations Office of the Special Advisor on Africa (OSAA) and the NEPAD-OECD Africa Investment Initiative 2016). A focus on stratification in Africa is important for these reasons. More fundamentally, because, analytically, this rethinking of social problems in Africa could help to develop a more global account because focusing on inequality leads analysts to ask ‘unequal in relation to whom, where, how and why?’
Posited causes of inequality
Yet, there is much to dispute about the posited causes of inequality. In development economics, the tendency is to explain persistent inequality and poverty in Africa as a function of the scarcity of physical and human capital, natural capital problems and a culture of poverty. Indeed, ever since Jan Tinbergen, the first Nobel Laureate in Economics, revealed to economists that inequality is caused by a race between education, which increases the supply of skilled workers, and technological change, which determines their demand, economists have usually stuck to this framework (Atkinson 2016, 29).
Theoretically, the ‘culture of poverty’ idea – first developed by the anthropologist Oscar Lewis (Wilson 1992) – can be explained in two ways. The more conservative view is that Africans are born with certain cultures that keep them impoverished (Banfield 1976). A more liberal interpretation is that ‘cultures of poverty’ arise from poverty itself or from colonialism. So, poverty is either the result of nature, or nurture, but it is always the product of culture. The natural capital problem has become a widely discussed issue in the study of Africa, drawing, in development studies at least, on Richard Auty’s (1993) book, The resource curse thesis.
Critics do not only dispute these theories, they also posit a range of alternatives, from Marxist political economy through dependency to world system theories. Some of these alternative explanations point to capitalism as creating ‘development of underdevelopment’. Others are more specific in focusing on neoliberalism, including how the extension or creation of markets, in particular, has been responsible for the problems of inequality and related social discord of fraud (Wiegratz 2016). Globalisation and postcolonial critiques tend to highlight the place of colonialism in generating and maintaining structures of inequality (Njoh 2003/2017), while analyses of industrialisation, and import-substitution industrialisation, point to the removal of import protection and policies of market-based industrialisation as drivers of inequality on the continent (United Nations Conference for Trade and Development 2006; Nwoke forthcoming).
Beyond orthodoxies and heterodoxies
That these critiques too are fraught with major problems is well documented (Hill 1986; Jerven 2015). What is often debated is why such limitation is so common. Usually, critics point to economics itself or economists as the problem. Uskali Mäki (2018) points to economists rather than economics as the source of the problem, while Steve Keen (2011) locates the limitations in ‘the madness in their method’. Only rarely do critics contend that the limitation to conventional analysis stems from a combination of the identity of economics and its methods (Hill 1986; Jerven 2015). Polly Hill’s principal challenge to development economics is both conceptual and pragmatic. She sought ‘to expose what I see as the old-fashioned, stereotyped, Western-biased, overgeneralized crudity and conceptual falsity of so many conventional economic premises, as well as economists’ complacent attitude to bad official statistics’ (Hill 1986, xi). Hill took aim at the unit of analysis in both neoclassical and Marxist economics, the principal polarised positions in development economics.
For the neoclassicals, Hill takes aim at the economics of households. Its central assumptions – that households are homogeneous, that they are headed by the African man, who is also an economic man and that wives’ activities can always be inferred from their husbands – are the focus of significant criticism. According to Hill, there is much heterogeneity and information asymmetry. Wives could have dependent, independent or interdependent economic strategies, and this African man is not necessarily an economic man. Therefore, the idea of perfect information, a core basis of the notion of perfect competition, is questionable.
Marxist economics is similarly problematic. For Hill (1986), the concept of ‘peasant’ is particularly obtuse. If the image of a peasant is someone financially struggling, then according to Hill the idea does not apply to most of the people called peasants because so-called peasants have much income from non-agrarian sources, which they combine with incomes from agrarian activities. Likewise, if peasants mean some people with a shared revolutionary motive, then, again the designation is a misnomer because so-called peasants are often so different that a shared objection to a common enemy is not often apparent.
Neither neoclassicals nor Marxists, according to Hill, systematically deal with the problem of wealth transmission. To address these problems, Hill sought a hybridised blend of economics and social anthropology, called ‘indigenous (African) economics’. Hill’s criticisms and reconstruction deserve the attention I have given them. They show the historical and continuing conceptual and epistemological limitations of development economics. However, Hill’s approach is limiting too. She neglects questions of rent and space, how they are problematically treated in development economics of various shades and types, and the various ways in which such analytical problems obfuscate our understanding of stratification in Africa. So, I caution against Hill’s (1966) preference for an ‘indigenous economics’. As noted by Obeng-Odoom (2017) in this journal, similar problems characterise Morten Jerven’s (2015) book Africa: why economists get it wrong. Alternatives are needed.
Toward a new beginning
The problem of the existing work on stratification in Africa is not that it fails in its exposition, but that it succeeds in obfuscating reality. The body of research conveniently overlooks what R. T. Ely (2011) called ‘ground under our feet’. It strenuously claims that we now live in an era when fundamental questions about land, rent and space no longer matter; such an emphasis, we are told, is ‘too narrow’. In short, existing research on stratification in Africa obfuscates the crime of stratification.
Like other crimes, deflecting attention is a defensive strategy of the crime of stratification. The appeal to culture is to mask shocking forms of rentierism, the view of Africa rising serves to legitimise the status quo, while the stubborn insistence on only capital as explanation serves as a convenient stratagem by both the left and the right, progressive and mainstream writers to hide their complicity as beneficiaries of the historical and ongoing system of land, property and rent extraction. In such circumstances, it is wrong to call for a change. What is needed is not just change; but a just change.
I propose stratification economics as one path towards that change. Pioneered by black economists and other economists of colour, this sub-field is characterised by at least three features (Darity and Hamilton 2015). First, a focus on stratification as the central problem. Second, the questioning of existing explanations and, third, the pursuit of new alternative explanations. My book, Property, institutions and social stratification in Africa (Obeng-Odoom 2020a), develops this approach. While monopoly capital has been the central focus of much of the existing alternative attempts at explanation, in this book I take monopoly rent, indeed rent generally, more seriously.
It follows that I reinterpret existing concepts such as class. Previous uses of this important political-economic concept have centred largely on workers’ relationship to the means of production within particular modes of economic organisation (May 1992). In this dominant interpretation, which has become a defining feature of African political economy, exploitation of workers is often the most important referent and, hence, class-based revolution the only alternative to the social problems of capitalism. My approach extends this domain of analysis to the realms of power and control. In contrast to old African political economy characterised largely by a unitary focus on Marxist economics, institutional economics (Zouache 2018) has a much wider, open-ended orientation.
A strength of this original institutionalism (Galbraith 1956, 1979; May 1992) is that this approach to class analysis is linked to a special cross-cutting spatial interest in explaining stratification. Whether the concern is about technology, international trade, or debt, questions of space are crucial. Yet, international trade debates have typically centred on the national scale with little or no interest in cities and the experiences of the subnational state and the transnational control of municipal services. This spatial analysis reveals significant insights about spatial segregation and the spatial concentration of wealth which the emphasis of African political economy on class alone tends to neglect or has a tendency to treat lightly.
The most developed social science tradition that can handle these relatively neglected aspects of political economy is the Georgist tradition. Its method of analysis was first developed in 1898 in the book The science of political economy (George 1898). Put simply, the Georgist approach entails the systematic reconstruction of political economy currently largely centred on capital and profit. It recentres analysis on land and rent in their relationship to capital and labour. Modern Georgist theorists, however, have been quite ahistorical, quite sectoral, quite nationalist and quite neglectful of stratification in Africa. To address these problems, the method of the book is to seek a hybridised blend of analytical Georgism with stratification economics by drawing on the original work of Henry George and the ideas of black economists and philosophers. The ideas and theories of William Darity and Hilary Beckles are of particular relevance.
This integrative method is a better foundation than the alternative fragmentary tradition. One strength is that the approach directs attention to fruitful avenues of data. Primary data that I have collected myself, a reinterpretation of existing data collected by others or produced by institutions such as the courts, and the systematisation of fragmentary data are examples. Key concepts such as ‘land’, ‘rent’ and ‘space’ also take particular meanings. Their reconceptualisation in Georgist/Africanist/stratification terms (see e.g. Asante 1975; Okoth-Ogendo 2003) make them quite distinct. Unlike in neoclassical development economics, geographical economics and new institutional economics where land is seen as substitutable, for example, by capital, and rent is assumed to be the outcome of the free interplay of demand and supply, while space is conceptualised as physical, I argue that land is unique, rent arises mainly from monopoly and space is both relational and political-economic.
Conclusion
It is on this basis that the book develops its argument. Instead of regenerative and inclusive alternative development, the existing political economic system in Africa transfers rents from producers to absentee landlords. Therefore, it is parasitic development; not regenerative and inclusive alternative transformation. This process has become insidious and is likely to accentuate existing stratification. Not only are these inequalities in the form of income, but also in terms of wealth and power.
Although seemingly ordinary, systematically demonstrating this argument is important. Indeed, if upheld, it should follow that Africa’s development cannot simply be about shifting gears from meeting one goal or another. Indeed, addressing stratification in Africa cannot even be about changing leaders, as in Egypt, or calling for a new development paradigm, including promoting New Partnership for Africa’s Development or institutionalising the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) which, although more compelling than changing goals, is still idealist. (On AfCFTA, see also recent research elsewhere: Obeng-Odoom 2020b.) Of course, ideas are important, especially if developed by the ‘right’ racial groups. However, perhaps even more crucial are vested interests, prevailing circumstances, the economic landscape and how these forces interlock (Galbraith 1977, 11). Rather, like Walter Rodney’s conception of development (Rodney 1972/2011), this argument implies that development must be seen as a reorganisation of how production, distribution and their rewards are shared both internally and internationally. But, unlike Rodney, that reorganisation can give a much stronger place to land – a prelude to a global land reform centred not so much on the physical redistribution of land, but of its rents which can, in turn, be put to social purposes. The non-enclosure of existing national commons, public land, and global commons can complement this alternative. Along with the payment of reparations, declaration of existing debt as odious and the radical reorganisation of work that evolutionarily ends or pipes down wage labour, I show how this alternative social transformation can be developed through dialectical analysis.
The trouble with this attempt to reconcile seemingly incommensurable lines of analyses is that it can take time to be developed systematically. However, when successfully done, it can also sanitise existing contradictions and demonstrate a clearly new approach. Property, institutions and social stratification in Africa (Obeng-Odoom 2020a) carefully develops this alternative. In bringing together parallel traditions of class analysis, race and stratification economics, my book also transcends these approaches. By engaging concrete examples in Africa, my book shows how stratification economics can become another path for black, African and, indeed, a wider global political economy of inequality.