This journal started out as the work of academic activists dedicated to supporting the struggle for liberation and independent development of the African continent from the ‘belly of the beast’. John Loxley, who passed away on 28 July 2020, was an outstanding example of such a committed activist who devoted his life to teaching and research directed to changing lives for the better wherever he was. John was from the beginning a member of the ROAPE editorial ‘family’, first as a contributing editor and then as a member of the International Advisory Board, and contributed to the journal both as author and editor.1 However, this was but a very small part of his extraordinary life and achievements, and this tribute will try to cover as much as we can here of its depth and breadth.
John was born into a working-class family in the middle of the Second World War. He was the seventh of 12 children, and the first in his family to go to university. His father worked in Sheffield's famed steel industry, dying at a relatively young age from an industrial disease. His mother was a seamstress and before having children had worked in Sheffield's other famous industry, cutlery manufacture, lining the cutlery boxes (canteens) with cloth. John's class background shaped his politics. He was very proud of Sheffield and the way its Labour administration, together with the post-war Labour government, had secured the guarantee of healthcare and social housing to working-class communities. He was one of the few council estate schoolchildren who got into a grammar school and even fewer who got to university. From King Edward VII School in Sheffield, he went to the University of Leeds, graduating in Economics and then, under the guidance of Walter Newlyn, an economist of money and banking, who spent some time at Makerere University in Uganda and who clearly saw John’s promise, completed a PhD in 1966 on the development of the East African monetary and banking system, while also lecturing at Makerere. Meanwhile, in neighbouring Tanzania, Julius Nyerere’s avowedly socialist government had nationalised the private banks and needed an economist who could advise the newly appointed general manager of the state-owned commercial bank, Amon Nsekela, to run it in accordance with Tanzania’s ujamaa principles. John was recommended as the only one who knew anything about the banking system in East Africa but who also sympathised with what Nyerere’s government was trying to do. He moved to Tanzania in 1967.
From the National Bank of Commerce, John moved two years later to the University’s economics department, then under the headship of Tamás Szentes, a Hungarian Marxist who along with other academics such as Justinian Rweyemamu, Kighoma Malima, Giovanni Arrighi , Lionel Cliffe (also Sheffield born and educated at the same school, and a lifelong friend) and John Saul, had a significant influence on John’s thinking. He was clearly committed to Tanzania’s avowed socialist objectives but also well aware of the contradictions between the objectives and the obstacles to effective socialist planning for achieving those objectives. He was also acutely aware of the small number of highly qualified people available to implement socialist policies in government administration and parastatal management. So he enthusiastically took up the post of director of the newly established Institute of Finance Management, which had the specific objective of training public servants in the theory and practice of financial planning for socialism, involving the study of the monetary system, accounting, banking and insurance. He always wanted a Tanzanian to take over his post as soon as feasible, and achieved this two years later.
By then, John had spent almost 10 years in East Africa and, during his time in Tanzania, accumulated a vast amount of experience in policy-making as a member of the board of directors of Tanzanian parastatals, and other national policy-making bodies involved with price controls and the marketing of Tanzania’s major export crop, sisal. He was involved in setting up the Tanzanian Investment Bank and chaired a task force on the organisation of the savings and international banking businesses in the country. He had become the go-to person for anything connected with financial and banking policy in Tanzania.
As he began to think about the next stage of his life, John was offered the post of Secretary (Deputy Minister), Resource and Economic Development Sub-Committee of Cabinet of the Manitoba provincial government in Winnipeg, Canada. The then provincial administration was in the hands of the relatively left-wing New Democratic Party (NDP), and John clearly saw it as an opportunity to return to active policy-making and be of practical use to the people of the province. Two years later he joined the Economics Department of the University of Manitoba, where he found a few like-minded economists with views diametrically opposed to the rising tide of neoliberalism. It was not long before he was promoted to full Professor and then later became head of the department for 13 years.
However, his involvement with African countries continued. In 1982 Tanzania was being pressured by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to impose severe economic adjustments on its people, in order to receive a loan from the IMF. John spent a year in Tanzania preparing an alternative structural adjustment programme that would be less traumatic for vulnerable citizens. Over the next two decades he then worked with several other governments (Uganda, Mozambique, Ghana, Zambia, Seychelles, St Lucia, St Kitts and Nevis, and Guyana) to identify alternatives to IMF austerity measures. His work helped several countries in their negotiations with the international financial institutions (IFIs). He advised the Mozambique government on housing finance policy, the Canadian and Swedish development agencies and the International Labour Organization on structural adjustment and gender and adjustment policies in various African countries. He recognised that there is always a political element to any budget and to economic adjustment, and recognised how the poorest would be affected by them. In the early 1980s his work was some of the earliest being done on alternative structural adjustment policies. It resulted in three books, one with his fellow ROAPE Contributing Editor Bonnie Campbell.2
His abiding concern with the need for more African expertise in dealing with development issues and negotiating with the IFIs was exemplified by his membership of the Executive Board of the African Capacity Building Foundation. The respect accorded to him by African economists was reflected in his being asked more than once to assess the effectiveness of the African Economic Research Consortium, the pan-African capacity-building body for training economists largely funded by international donors.
He advised the Tanzanian Banking Commission on reforming the financial system, the Madagascar Central Bank on stabilisation policy, and chaired a study team on economic policy for the post-war Ugandan government. He worked with the African National Congress and Congress of South African Trade Unions on post-apartheid economic policy and was part of the Macroeconomic Research Group working on an alternative macroeconomic policy in South Africa to that of the IFI orthodoxy. When taken, his advice was effective. For example, the World Bank economists negotiating a structural adjustment programme were taken aback by the preparedness and expertise of the Tanzanian negotiators, which resulted from John’s forementioned work with the government prior to the negotiations. In the Ugandan case, John reported how the new president did not want to devalue the currency after the civil war despite its evident overvaluation. Museveni saw devaluation as a neoliberal and imperialist measure, whereas for John it was a practical way of increasing income to agricultural export crop producers who were the mainstay of the economy as well as rationing imports, while still allowing the government to prioritise imports of essential goods. Uganda did eventually allow its currency to depreciate, and the agricultural export sector did recover.
John’s work for the government of Manitoba brought him into contact with development policy concerning the neglected First Nation peoples, and over time he became increasingly involved with First Nation authorities and in influencing government policies affecting their peoples. He chaired government committees investigating development plans, advised committees of Manitoba chiefs on budgeting, finance and development programmes, served as Economic Advisor to Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples and as Economic Advisor to Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs (AMC). He represented the AMC on a joint committee with the Canadian Bankers Association on the phasing in of financial independence for First Nations. He was a consultant to the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society, an agency concerned with the funding of child welfare in Canada, and helped the Society to win a landmark decision by Canada's Human Rights Tribunal that First Nation children had been discriminated against in welfare provision. He led or was a member of major research projects concerned with community development, especially of inner city and First Nation communities, but also concerned with child and youth prostitution and violence against women. His advice and expertise were called upon by Manitoba’s Department of Health, both as a budget advisor and as a one of a three-person commission to investigate the effectiveness of chiropractic, and he served as advisor to the province’s Minister of Finance for nine years.
John’s long tenure at the University of Manitoba anchored his life and work as an academic activist. He was a highly respected colleague, teacher, doctoral supervisor and researcher.3 He wrote and presented with immense clarity and without jargon. His range and dynamism to shape debates was exemplary whether it was on alternative budgeting and finance, a critique of structural adjustment and the IFIs, the contradictions of public–private partnerships or the development of alternative economic policies. Regarding the last, John was an active member of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) (https://www.policyalternatives.ca/), serving on the board of directors of both its Manitoban and Canada boards and coordinating its Alternative Federal Budget exercise for five years. The CCPA was influenced by Cho!ces, a group John started in Winnipeg which first developed the Alternative Budgeting process which eventually came to reside in CCPA as the Alternative Federal Budget. John was active in the University of Manitoba Faculty Association, representing it in negotiations on salary issues with the University, but his involvement with unions extended to representing for nine years the Canadian Association of Industrial, Mechanical and Allied Workers on boards of arbitration. He practised his commitment to community cooperation by organising a group that saved a long-standing local hardware store from closing by redeveloping it as a cooperative, chairing its board for 10 years. He also chaired a local community micro-lending institution.
John received several awards for his work in Canada. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and awarded the Galbraith Prize in Economics and Social Justice, the Canadian Association of University Teachers Distinguished Academic and Distinguished Service Awards, and on several occasions recognised for his contribution to the Faculty of Arts at the University of Manitoba. He was invited to deliver the Second Julius K. Nyerere Memorial Lecture, ‘Building solutions for development in Africa’, University of Manitoba in October 2002, and the Phyllis Clarke Memorial Lecture at Ryerson University in March 2011, ‘Global crisis, fiscal restraint and public–private partnerships’. These were a fitting recognition of the importance and extent of his work and activism. But he would have much preferred to see the end of capitalism and the dawn of an equitable and humane socialist world which after so many failed ‘socialist experiments’ seems to be further away than ever, although it did not stop John from getting on with supporting the struggle for such a world.
Any account of John’s life cannot leave out his dedication to football as a player (especially for the university staff team at the University of Dar es Salaam and the Winnipeg community team he established, the Crescentwood Saturday Soccer Club), as a coach to the teams in which his children played, and as stalwart fan of his hometown club, Sheffield Wednesday. Nor can be left out his devotion to his family, in Winnipeg, in Sheffield, and now in Brisbane, Geneva and Toronto; his loyalty and support to his friends and comrades around the world; his positivity in the face of the setbacks to progressive movements; and his wicked sense of humour. As one of his sisters, Verna, observed, the world was a better place with him in it.