Grand concepts like neoliberalism are both necessary and dangerous. Necessary because they help to identify the ways in which the global political economy is organised, how power works, and what ideas and ideologies are ascendant. Dangerous because these grand concepts enable generalisations, finesse specificities and tempt people to reckless degrees of certainty in their observations. Evocative of Nietzsche's understanding of truth, the study of African political economy has been replete with a mobile army of metaphors that have worked between this necessity and danger: developmentalism, authoritarianism, clientelism and neoliberalism. These broad concepts have allowed us to articulate a sense of the structural and generic out of Africa's multiplex dynamics. This study has also allowed us to develop a historical narrative – largely expressed through a set of sequences – in which one period is replaced by another. Without the language of grand concepts such as these, it is difficult to imagine how African Studies or political economy would exist.
It is often during periods in which researchers sense epochal change that these broad concepts need especially intense examination. We are currently within one of those periods, marked by global economic recession and financial instability. The global recession has led some to consider that neoliberalism is on its way out. The crisis's origins in loose lending and a highly financialised American political economy at least suggests that there might emerge a new or more powerful political effort to regulate capital mobility. This possibility, it seems, is being quashed quickly by business, the international financial institutions (IFIs), and by Western politicians and economists who have successfully connected responses to the crisis to packages of very light public regulation, private self-regulation, and ‘rescue packages’. So-called nationalisation is in practice a long-term public subsidy for large banks, with negligible effect on banking practices – including the obscene rewards for chief executives and directors.
If (unsurprisingly) post-neoliberal institutions are not emerging from the apexes of power in the West, one might consider the efflorescence of unorthodoxies in Latin America: not just in well-known cases such as Venezuela but also in large economies, notably Brazil and Argentina. Argentina's escape from the austere clutches of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 2002 into a situation in which it is no longer reliant on the usual IMF/World Bank support services is remarkable. And, of course, China's economic growth and industrialisation represent an insistent message that capitalist development within nation-states rarely – if ever – follows a neoliberal template. One of the paradoxes of neoliberalism – purported epitome of global capitalism – is how poorly it has served as a means to promote capitalist development.
This is nowhere more evident than in sub-Saharan Africa, where neoliberalism has become not only a grand concept for researchers but also the orienting template for social and economic management for nearly 30 years. And, during those 30 years the evident trend was that economic growth has been weak and halting; and the social transformations that underpin economic growth have relied upon plunder, resource exhaustion, theft, and fraud rather than the idealised images of energised entrepreneurship supplied by the World Bank or advocates of microfinance. Indeed, in a counter-intuitive way, examples of free market competitive entrepreneurialism have more often than not emerged outside the economic plans of the age, in opposition to government policy and resisted by elites. Where spontaneous, popular efforts to promote social democratic development have emerged they have often been resisted by IFIs in coalition with anti-democratic elites.
Because of this, and in the context of the generic difficulty of building developmental states in the context of extreme extractive economies and unequal exchange relations, notions of a post-neoliberal Africa have been non-existent. That world-region in which neoliberalism has been most aggressively advocated by external agencies and most disruptive in its implementation remains – even if by default – attached to mutating forms of neoliberal social engineering. There are currently 34 countries involved in the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) process, from interim PRSPs to second- or third-generation PRSPs. And, even in countries where the entry of Chinese investment and aid is striking, many remain attached to the routines of World Bank and IMF lending: Zambia, for example.
Does this mean that Africa is locked into a neoliberal permanent revolution? As the rest of the world is rocked by financial crisis and the emergence of unorthodoxies in Asia and Latin America, perhaps Africa remains in the thrall of the World Bank and IMF's benchmarks, tranches of credit, and policy advice? The answer to this rather broad question is a rather broad affirmative, but with no assertions as to the prospects for neoliberalism nor the extent to which this big picture captures a good representation of what is happening between one country and the next. It is also a generalisation which tends to underplay the importance of the ‘informal’ or spontaneous economy which remains beyond the fiscal reach of the government and state.
And herein we see the danger that accompanies the necessity of thinking in orienting terms like neoliberalism. Neoliberalism's general characteristics may be well known, but their instantiation within diverse African political economies is not. Furthermore, the practices of neoliberal reform are not simply the creation of African governments in the image of the dreams of World Bank technocrats. What seems to be the case is that the instability and low rates of growth that characterise the current period have opened up the possibility (no more) of increasingly ‘distorted’ or unorthodox neoliberalisms. African governments have become increasingly disposed to push aspects of policy against prevailing neoliberal common sense. In 2008 the Tanzanian government rescinded a lease to a private consortium to operate Dar es Salaam's water and sewerage infrastructure, successfully defending itself at an international arbitration board and receiving damages from Biwater Gauff in the process. In the wake of a drought, the government of Malawi successfully integrated a fertiliser subsidy and a publicly supported storage and supply scheme as part of its agricultural policy within its PRSP. These headline-grabbing examples might be accompanied by myriad smaller examples in which specific loans are not taken on, leasing and privatisation contracts are revisited, and governments consider Chinese and other sources of investment, lending, and aid. In a related way, the EU Economic Partnership Agreements that were inaugurated in 2008 have not enjoyed strong take-up by African states. Meanwhile, the indigenous movement for social and economic justice and its apex in the African social forum continue to strengthen.
None of this announces a great change in the regimes within which African states operate. It does suggest, however, that neoliberalism is both less stable and homogenous than it was. It suggests that we should understand neoliberalism in Africa less as an a priori template for all aspects of policy-making and more as a core neoclassical macroeconomic doctrine (still largely underpinned by the IMF) around which practices of governance might vary. Its continued strength is also, in part, due to the continued weakness of alternative economic policy and templates, whose development is continually undermined by the persistent hegemonic belief in the tenet that ‘there is no alternative’ to the dependent and policed existence of institutions of higher learning and advocacy to the donor bloc, and the consequent lack of financial support for independent policy-making and alternative ideas. This historic opportunity to lead change, when neoliberalism is weak, requires a continued concerted effort by heroic independent thinkers across the continent and beyond, to maintain and defend their institutional positions and right to publication, often in the absence of support or recognition, and/or while being undermined by their peers and senior management.
Recognising this mosaic of fractured neoliberalism, but also the coeval weakness of alternatives, allows us also to move beyond an unhelpful dichotomy that often emerges in studies of neopatrimonialism. The commonly used metaphor of the air-conditioned room and the veranda has generated a great deal of research in which African politics is either formalised and liberal, or informal and patrimonial, with the implication that the latter is in some sense more African and the former is more Western. In fact, neopatrimonialism (and its synonyms, such as clientelism, the politics of the belly, and many understandings of corruption) has also served as a grand orienting concept for African politics, is subjected to the same dangers of overgeneralisation, and has been used in broad ways that are at least as loose and generalised as studies of neoliberalism. It is also not a discourse that conclusively establishes the central assumption that this is an essentially African phenomenon, despite that being widely assumed, rather than just a characterisation of the anti-democratic paternalism present in all democratic struggle. Because of this weakness, the discourse of neopatrimonialism and its sibling, corruption, acts to pathologise African politics, with little intellectual gain to understanding either the specificities or generic aspects of African political processes.
If we recognise some malleability within the neoliberal template – especially concerning its political practices – we can begin to think outside of the constraining dichotomy of neoliberalism versus neopatrimonialism. In the process, we can move away from the pernicious assumption that ‘African’ politics is entirely performed within the smoke-filled room and the neoliberal agenda is a Washington-imposed straitjacket. Even if neoliberalism is not on its way out, our conceptualisations of it need constant reflection, adaptation, and attention in the light of the diversity of African governance practice.
The issue
This issue carries a diversity of articles. Sara Pantuliano's article provides an empirically rich account of the dynamics of livelihoods (or, if you prefer, social reproduction) amongst the Misseriyya in Sudan. Occupying a boundary zone in Sudan's geopolitics and involving patterns of migration subjected to various kinds of stress, Pantuliano highlights two key themes: first, the adaptive strengths of Misseriyya communities both before and after the Peace Accord; second, the diverse political possibilities that emerge out of changing livelihood strategies. Indeed, the compelling picture that Sara portrays is that livelihoods studies need to remain open to the ways in which survival, asset management, and income generation open up different political actions. Livelihoods are moral economies, and involve collective endeavours and the politics of dispossession, appropriation, and exploitation – all of which are detailed in the article.
Peter Alexander and Aleksandra Gadzala both deal with aspects of Africa's informal political economy. Alexander's article is also empirically rich, mapping a terrain of local protest against the quality and pricing of service delivery charges. Local protests of the kind accounted for in Peter Alexander's article are a leitmotif of South Africa's democratic denouement: the socially progressive aspects of liberation have tended to be quashed by the imperatives of accumulation that have been asserted by South Africa's capitalist class and a panoply of international advisers and creditors. But, beyond this historical context, Peter investigates the rhythm of protest and its local dynamics. As a result, we see how South Africa's urban spaces (especially Gauteng) are constantly pierced by messy outbreaks of protest by the informally employed, underemployed, and destitute. These protests are themselves also profoundly political – part of a difficult dialogue between local ANC party structures and its ‘popular base’, partly an outcome of new masculinities and youth identities, and of course partly anger and a sense of injustice and disillusion at the pallid social redistribution that has taken place in South Africa, leaving massive amounts of inequality and unemployment.
More populist analyses of urban poverty – both from the left and some neoliberal writers – argue that the informal sector is not a ‘reserve army’ of underemployed or a cantonment of those existing in a state of ‘bare life’; rather it is the seedbed for new entrepreneurship and economic renovation. Aleksandra Gadzala's article on the informal sector in Zambia shows how problematic this approach can be. Informality is not necessarily vibrant renovation; it can also be a site of last resort for those expelled from the formal sector during crisis, and it can be extremely unstable and aggressively competitive. It is this context that Aleksandra describes in order to highlight the repercussions of Chinese business entry into the informal manufacturing sector. Chinese diaspora business methods have effectively undercut some Zambian small businesses, leading to an emerging ‘Sinophobia’ and a ‘migrating out’ of production to China for re-import – a structure of production that is likely to reduce Zambia's role in the production chain even in the informal and mass markets for basic goods.
John Saul's article takes a step back from Alexander's specific depiction of protest and collective local voices to question the ways in which we speak of liberation. Focusing specifically on South Africa, Saul argues that liberation should be seen as a way of thinking beyond the immediate constraints of the state and prevailing property relations to something more transformative. This transformative thinking might run along several different – and interrelating – pathways: race, class, gender, and voice. The latter, less categorical than the others, alludes to an agenda of deepening democracy, something more akin to a social democracy in which practices like participation and agenda-setting are in some ways more substantively connected with broader calls for social justice and equality.
In a related sense and more broadly, Kevin Cox and Rohit Negi consider the ways in which states are understood as potential agents of progressive social change. Rather than fetishising the state as an ‘artefact’ which fails, is developmental, patrimonial and so on, Cox and Negi argue that states are constituent parts of the spatial fixings of the political economy of capital. That is, states – and the strengths and weaknesses – are part of the ways in which capitalism has worked to expand through space and time. Historically, those states that have been instrumental, even crucial, in ushering in extended processes of accumulation which have led to mass social improvement (what is generally understood as ‘development’) have done so within fully fledged capitalist social relations. In much of Africa, and not only in Africa, capitalism exists in complex and dynamic interaction with peasant societies. As such, Cox and Negi suggest, the beginnings of a discussion about the prospects for developmental states must be with the nature of prevailing property relations. ROAPE has carried a great deal of writing on this general issue over the years; in the context of global recession, questions of ‘deproletarianisation’, changing multiple modes of livelihood, and dispossession – and the political forces that they generate – remain as central as ever to a proper understanding of state power.