The Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) has become the main way in which development policy is articulated in much of Africa.1 The PRSP connects a number of agencies together: national governments, some civil society organisations, creditors, donors, and consultants and auditors. The PRSP effectively mainstreams poverty reduction into development-policy practice.
It is no coincidence that the PRSP has become the lingua franca of orthodox international development politics especially in regards to Africa. More than any other world region, Africa has become the signifier of poverty. The connection between Africa and poverty is often close to homology or elision: Africa/poverty. Other aspects of the international architecture of development practice affirm this connection: the way the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are discussed, and the new poverty vocabulary of chronic poverty, voices of the poor, and so on.
It is a material fact that Africa is an impoverished continent: outside of South Asia and China, there is no other space in which so many people suffer such a paucity of livelihoods. For all of the justifiable cynicism about international economic indices and the rankings they create, Africa is at the bottom of a certain hierarchy: 24 of the world's 26 poorest countries are in Africa if one takes gross national income (GNI) per capita as a very rough but roughly indicative measure.2
Poverty is political. This is so in myriad ways: not only in its measurement and its integration into policy initiatives, but also in the naming, ‘seeing’ (cf. Scott 1999) or categorisation of the poor. Like the term ‘development’, we can see how in part poverty is a categorisation that enables intervention by a range of agencies, as one can readily identify in the emergence of an international poverty agenda since the Monterrey Consensus in 2001, the ‘Development’ G8 meeting in 2005 accompanied by Make Poverty History, or the endlessly stalled World Trade Organization (WTO) Doha ‘Development’ Round.
Furthermore, the poor might exist statistically, but not socially. Measures of income per person, nutrition, infant mortality and so on create aggregations of people which are in a sense entirely abstract. Unlike a class, ethnic, age or gender identity, ‘the poor’ is a thin social categorisation. Where poor people live and work, their poverty is couched in ‘thicker’ social references: ethnic marginalisation, social injustice, senses of powerlessness, predatory state practices and so on.
In detailed studies where the signifier ‘poor’ is used, we can readily see how poverty is embedded in a moral economy or social relations. In South Africa, Ashwin Desai (2002) shows how the social identity of ‘the poors’ is constructed out of a sense of social injustice during the post-apartheid period which endeavours to negate the ethnic and racial signifiers the country is still struggling to negotiate. David Anderson and Vigdis Broch-Due's edited book The poor are not us (2000) explores the ways in which pastoralists in East Africa have been categorised as poor in ways that do violence to the social realities of their livelihoods.
Poverty is political; and poverty is relational. Poverty is not an innocent or original condition; it is the outcome of a history of deleterious social encounters with others. Where poverty exists, it is not a result of some being ‘left out’ of something progressive, it is the outcome of marginalisations, dispossessions, assertions of control, acts of deception, and a range of contingent and accidental interactions (including misfortune).
The relational aspects of poverty are extremely important. Scaling up to the international level, one could be forgiven for associating Africa's poverty image with an ideological representation of globalisation as a neoliberal universalising force in which poverty is a residuum rather than an integral component. Africa's poverty seems to be a result of Africa's failure to integrate; poverty is Africa's fault; neoliberal globalisation does not in itself produce poverty. Consider the following text specifically addressed to the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) ‘Challenges of Globalisation for Africa’: ‘countries that fail to participate in this trend toward integration run the risk of being left behind’ (Ouattara 1997, no page).
Africa has been pathologised as much as it has been exploited. Indeed the two go together in what might be called an ideological act in which Africa is impoverished twice: in the first place through the damaging effects of a global capitalist system and secondly through the impoverished images produced of Africa, represented as a place of little else than poverty and violence at the margins of a supposedly beneficent globalising mainstream.
Thus, we need both to recognise a real mass poverty in Africa (not simply a postmodern ‘poverty’ signifier) whilst treating poverty as nothing more than an indication towards specific social relations embodied in peoples, institutions and spaces. PRSPs themselves are poorly equipped to make much of an impact on poverty, although that is not to deny them some palliative effects that might emerge through some recovered spending on social provision. Levels of poverty are so high in many African countries that it is only a slight exaggeration to claim that everyone (outside of a nexus of politicians and businesspeople) is engaged in attempts at poverty reduction, from middle-ranking civil servants down to the land- or labour-scarce rural household, the struggle for a basic standard of living constitutes much of social and productive life. When carrying out fieldwork in a small market town in Tanzania, I was discussing the ownership of the small number of all-terrain cars in the town. One belonged to the director of a small Tanzanian non-govermental organisation (NGO) that had enjoyed international NGO support for a time. Laconically, my research colleague commented that the director ‘was reducing his own poverty’. Using the donor leitmotif of poverty reduction ironically, the point was that poverty reduction was a national pursuit. The NGO director was not wealthy, although he was clearly richer and more secure than the majority of people in the district. But, the international NGO support his organisation had received had ended and the NGO was now all but defunct. He was engaged in a range of activities to secure money elsewhere. His position was neither affluent nor secure.
Also in Tanzania, the Economic and Social Research Foundation publishes Quarterly economic reports, one of which contains a pie chart of income distribution (April–June 2009). Along with the chronically poor, there is a segment titled chronically rich. This segment is defined as those who have remained rich for ten years, but one might take from the literature on chronic poverty that chronic wealth is that which is difficult to ‘escape’ from and that is symptomatic of a broader social dysfunction. A kind of wealth that is anti-social.
If poverty of the kind found in much of Africa – as well as other parts of the world – is both morally and politically unacceptable, and if poverty is relational rather than an ‘innocent’ or ‘original’ situation, then we might think about poverty reduction and wealth reduction as interlinked. What is wrong with a Wealth Reduction Strategy Paper (WRSP)?
The richest 10% of the world's population hold one-half of the world's income (Held and Kaya 2007, p. 1). The poorest 800 million people continue to suffer from malnutrition; there are 946 billionaires with assets worth over US$3.5 trillion (Dauvergne 2008, p. 110). Clearly, any WRSP would need to be focused on a global social group whose addresses might be found in a Forbes wealth index or a recipient list of the US government's Troubled Assets Relief Programme (TARP) rather that the offices of a poor African state. Might it constitute a more equitable form of contract between institutions such as the World Bank or IMF and African states if the latter requested that adherence to PRSPs and their related donor/creditor programmes be accompanied by WRSPs implemented within and amongst those states where the concentrations of wealth – for all the equalising talk of globalisation – still resides?
A couple of thought experiments might bring this into clearer relief. The net asset worth of the world's Forbes3 listed dollar billionaires in 2010 was US$3.5274 trillion. Redistributing these assets to the world's poorest billion (generally seen as those below the global poverty line of a dollar per day) would provide them with a cash/asset extra wealth of about US$3,500. If this were distributed over a ten-year period at US$350 per year, it would be likely to put into motion broader processes of poverty reduction which might actually move the world into something like a ‘world free of poverty’.
The US government TARP is a Treasury fund to buy ‘troubled’ assets of large banking complexes. With an initial budget of US$700 bn, it constitutes a staggering redistribution of wealth from the poor (low-income, indebted taxpayers, many of whom were hit very badly by the sub-prime loans collapse and many of whom are African-American) to the chronically rich chief executive officers (CEOs), fund managers and shareholders of private financial institutions. The money has been paid out on the basis of misleading information about the sustainability of recipient banks and operationalised through private agencies, which again has generated a sense of secretive mass-asset redistribution. TARP is a striking exemplar of the profoundly anti-social nature of chronic wealth: the ‘great predators’ (Bracking 2009) who rely on state support, evasive, speculative and vulture-like asset mobility, and the occasional philanthropic gesture.
If course, stating a case for a WRSP leads directly to the question of utopian thinking: it might be nice to imagine such a thing, but it is completely irrelevant to the conditions of the present day. This critique is both too obvious to be very interesting, and also misleading because of the way in which it denigrates the purpose of utopian thinking. Any radical thinking requires a tension between the optimism of the will and the pessimism of the intellect, as Gramsci put it. But, also, the purpose of a utopian idea such as a WRSP is to serve as a ‘missile concept’ (cf. Fournier 2008, p. 531) – a way of challenging what orthodoxies would call the ‘real world’, a speech act that defends as well as describes current conditions. In other words, without some utopian thinking, how can we exercise any flexibility concerning historic possibilities which are not simply slight extrapolations of the present day?
Additionally, what kind of utopia is this? In an important sense, it is a very moderate one. A WRSP would not involve revolution; it would involve mass dispossession; it would not undermine the existing structural dispositions of power embodied in capitalism and the state system. Imagine a redistribution of wealth (which might involve any combination of income, property, savings, assets) of the richest few thousand families calculated to leave this tiny minority with good jobs, remuneration and a basket of assets. It is about the chronically rich being made to suffer no more than the indignities of comfort. It is a sobering diagnostic of our times that a WRSP would be decried as ludicrous and utopian when compared with the real dystopia of mass chronic poverty in African countries and elsewhere.
The modalities of a WRSP are difficult to specify – not only because the wealthiest people are – by definition – also extremely powerful. Downstream of any act of progressive redistribution there are many questions about how the money might be used. For the last 20 years there has been a great deal of energy expended regarding how aid might be put to best use: the relative efficiencies of NGOs as service providers; aid, governance and ‘political will’; techniques of expenditure tracking, direct budgetary support; demand–response mechanisms such as those employed by the Global Fund and some privately supported foundations. There is likely to be considerable merit in thinking again about this considerable body of evidence and practice in light of a possible substantial infusion of extra resource.
Joseph Hanlon, Armando Barrientos and David Hume (2010) moot the possibility of direct cash provision to the poor, on the grounds both of efficiency as ‘value for money’, and also on the premise that it is most likely that the most poor will know best how to reduce their own poverty. Over time (consider the thought experiment above of US$350 per year for a decade for the poorest billion) this would lead to socio-structural change in which global poverty changes significantly. This argument is again both radical when seen in the context of contemporary structures of power and political possibility but, set against existing social conditions, perfectly feasible and humane. And, it would also allow possibilities of escaping the cloying intellectual imperialism of Western aid frameworks which cannot but project their own utopias onto societies struggling to define and assert their sovereignties.
Poverty and wealth are mutually defining; they are also relational. Although it would be a crude simplification to argue that ‘the West’ is rich because ‘the South’ is poor, nor can we deny that, however complex the commodity chains, the unlevel playing fields, the imperialist power projects, and the historical legacies, there is a substantive justice case for a WRSP based in the notion that Western affluence and African poverty are connected and that this evokes duties upon Western states. Thomas Pogge (2007) argues that anyone with a belief in human rights can move straightforwardly towards a case for global redistribution not in the name of charity but in the name of justice. For all of its utopianism, a WRSP would serve as a moderate, just, and potential highly effective way of moving beyond the PRSP.
Dereje Feyissa's article provides a fascinating account of a kind of ‘resource curse’ which is removed from the largely rational choice analyses of oil in West Africa. Looking at the Afar region in Ethiopia, Dereje's work delineates the political economy of claims to salt production, claims that evoke arguments about this region's relations to Addis Ababa, as well as efforts to generate capitalist coalitions that might gain access rights to salt. As is so often the case with subterranean resources located in marginalised areas, the revenues from salt are not going to the general population of the area that Dereje studies in some detail (Afdera).
Bernd Mueller argues that the agrarian question – as developed in no small part within the pages of this journal – provides a vital way to understand social change in many parts of rural Africa. The key issue here is how the expansion and intensification of capitalist social relations reproduces and transforms the ways that households work – both on the field and elsewhere. Using a survey from Lushoto district in Tanzania, Mueller shows how complex the interpolations of capital can be: between the genders, within segmented wage labour markets (and especially the highly exploitative kibarua labour market), and between farming/wage labour households. Mueller also adds his critical voice to those who have identified the inconsistencies in the ways that Western agencies such as the World Bank have represented rural development, largely because of their inability to face squarely the differentiating and dispossessing aspects of agrarian change.
If Mueller argues that simplistic ideas about agricultural development miss the complexity of the impact of capitalism, Franklin Obeng-Odoom reinforces this insight in his study of water provision, waste management, and privatisation in Accra. Once again, donors, governments, and much of the research looks at provision through headline figures (number of standpipes, flow volume of water and so on), but the process of privatisation runs deeper than the legal mechanisms of a public–private partnership. Obeng-Odoom shows how market hierarchies have emerged in which the wealthy gain enhanced access to water and might also then sell water on to the poorest, making a profit in the process. Privatisations are not simply rolling back the state; they are creating new or intensified privations of societies. Furthermore, Obeng-Odoom shows how headline statistics obscure serious performance failures by private agencies in terms of reliability and maintenance – something that seems to be pretty much the rule across Africa's privatised social provision.
Luke Sinwell's article analyses social movements in South Africa and moots the extent to which they might be understood as a sign of independent revolutionary politics. Radical tactics might emerge in pursuit of relatively restrained objectives, focused on eliciting more or less discretionary social provision from the state. Underpinning this analysis is a key feature of South African politics more generally: the increasing dominance of the African National Congress (ANC) party-state. This leads to social movements maintaining substantial loyalty to the ANC even if protest might resemble something more independent and radical. Of course, keeping in mind the extreme social deprivation and social inequality that characterises South Africa's political economy, thinking innovatively about both the potential and restraints of current social movements is vital.
Relatedly, this issue carries a series of essays which review the legacy of radical nationalist struggle in southern Africa. This set of essays (by Patrick Bond, Henning Melber, John Saul, Richard Saunders and David Sogge), initially brought together by John Saul for the e-zine AfricaFiles (http://www.africafiles.org/), considers the problematic and generally disheartening dénouement of the political projects of the region that were based on ideals of revolution, socialism and national self-determination.