This anniversary issue of the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) revisits the prospects for development in Africa. The theme is as prominent today as it was in 1974. However one discusses the statistics or offers stories of woe and hope, the plain fact is that African countries have not industrialised. They have not qualitatively shifted the patterns in the commodities that they export or generated mass wage employment, or appropriated upgraded production technologies: in short, the living conditions of most Africans in 2014 are worse than they were in the early 1970s.
While some kind of capitalist transition may have taken place in a number of ‘later developers’, from the NICS to the BRICS, it is also evident that African political economies have not been static, although many have been stagnant. If anything, a fair characterisation of post-colonial economic change would be that many African countries have suffered excessive change: instability and radical shifts in prices, rates of exchange and so on. As a result of a high dependence on the export of primary goods with volatile prices, political instability, and a whole range of damaging policies implemented under structural adjustment and poverty reduction strategy papers, a great deal of accumulation in Africa is bifurcated. It is separated between the short-term, low profit margin, and often desperate activity of what is commonly called the informal sector, and the politically insulated and foreign-dominated large-scale investments in minerals, energy, commercial farming, and so on. Indeed, a great many African countries have been through periods of rapid growth, but these have been ephemeral, hamstrung by the uneven and dependent nature of that growth, contributing as a result to the sense that growth is in itself part of the broader political economy of instability that many African states endure. If it is unstable, highly concentrated, and extraverted, developmentally speaking, growth is not good.
If this is our context for discussion of development, one might ask why the notion of ‘new African development’ and its synonyms have emerged recently. It is interesting to note that a similar kind of question drove a great deal of the research and debates in ROAPE’s early issues. From a Marxist perspective, a central focus was given to the prospects that emerging African bourgeoisies would forge ahead with processes of accumulation that would underpin broader projects of national transformation. Heavily influenced by Latin American theories of dependency, the premise was that incipient capitalist classes might have the wherewithal (at least potentially) to generate ‘autonomous’ or ‘delinked’ development in which investment would generate expanding wage labour, the growing workforce would demand more of the commodities that peasants produce, peasants would attain higher incomes from crops and invest in agriculture, facilitating improved supplies of materials for new industries and so on. In the present day, the prospects for development are framed in a very different way: here attention is given primarily to rates of economic growth, increases in foreign direct investment (FDI), and a growing African ‘middle class’.
Setting aside the historical context for a moment, it is clear that these two framings of development's prospects are based in very different perspectives. The present-day optimism is based in a mainstream economics and business school approach, replete with vapid anecdotes of entrepreneurialism, and cleaving to the faith that indices of growth are in themselves evidence of development. Thus ‘the experience of the last decade suggests strongly that Africa is likely to make the twenty-first century its own’ (ECA, 2013: 1). And the World Bank 14 years ago noted that Africa could ‘claim’ the [21st] century (World Bank, 2000). Immense opportunities for investment have been repeatedly highlighted. As Kofi Annan, Chair of the Africa Progress Panel (www.africaprogresspanel.org) has noted, ‘Africa is on its way to becoming a preferred investment destination, a potential pole of global growth, and a place of immense innovation and creativity’ (APP, 2012: 7). The 2014 Africa Progress Panel talks about ‘agropreneurs’ as a vehicle to improve food security, and there is again return to the trope that the continent is about to ‘unleash’ its potential. We are repeatedly informed that GDP on the continent grew by an average of 5.6% between 2002 and 2008, making it the second fastest growing continent in the world behind Asia. And that growth outside or beyond extractives is evident. Yet we also know, and as the APP recognises, 400 million Africans live in countries that will take more than 25 years to double their incomes; 16 countries have negative per capita GDP or if there is any growth at all its less than 1%. Kenya and Senegal will take over 60 years to double their average incomes on the current 10-year trend (APP 2014, 27).
In Marxist terms, the narrative that focuses on growth per se is circulationist. The concern with consumption, prices, and levels of trade does not often look at the way production is organised or changing. It does not ask questions about the social relations of accumulation. Nor does it give serious attention to the political economy of class and in particular the relations between those who control the state and those who control large capital. There is something of the cargo cult in the new growth approach where there is a fetishising of gross national income (GNI) growth, urban redevelopment (without a working class), and mega-projects, rather than development of assets for locally produced and retained value.
Looking back, one can identify how the Marxist political economy explored in ROAPE had its limitations, yet it also offers some distinct advantages in searching for analytical approaches to evaluate present-day high growth rates in some African countries. There may have been an excessive focus on theoretical correctness that drew attention away from empirical trends, although this was hardly universal. There was also a relative lack of attention to the ways accumulation and ethnicity interacted, although again a fair retrospective would highlight how ROAPE led the way in bringing concerns with ‘graft’ into the analysis of African politics without reifying ethnicity as the prism through which to explore politics in Africa. The value of the debates was that they focused on the social relations of accumulation, the nature and extent to which accumulation was underpinned by certain kinds of state authority, and the ways in which national economies were shaped and reshaped by patterns of uneven incorporation into global capitalism. Within this perspective, a high growth rate could only be an indication or suggestion (what would in the 1970s likely be called an epiphenomenon) that some form of political–economic change was taking place but its form and substance could only be understood through empirical research within a political economy framework – one that recognises that the business of capitalist accumulation is disruptive and destructive. Capital accumulation generates new forms of inequality and exploitation and – if the risky, changeable, and contingent processes of dispossession, accumulation, investment, and redistribution allow it – development. But just what kind of development, with what kind of consequences and generalisability and sustainability in a continent that is already impacted by climate change, labour migration, persistent food crises and persistent poverty?
In plain language: the critical political economy pioneered by ROAPE offers the raw materials for a far more rich and nuanced understanding of new African growth. And, within this tradition, two important points immediately suggest themselves that attenuate the extent to which we can join in with the general optimism expressed in the economic journalism of airport books. First, growth is not economic transformation. Economic transformation is about changes in class structures, investment in new technologies of production, deep and pervasive social change. There is a long list of countries that experience bursts of high growth as a result of short-term changes that do not represent a broader economic transformation; in all of these cases growth slows and, developmentally, little changes. In this light, there are already good reasons to be very cautious about the import of higher growth rates.
Second, development as a process of economic transformation based in new forms of accumulation – which in themselves are generated by ambitious political action and investment – is both uncertain and in some degree socially detrimental. Until the pervasive global social resistance to actually existing capitalism becomes something like a counter-hegemonic socialist alternative, we have to accept that capitalist development is effectively the means and end of development. Of course, capitalism has proven to be a tenacious and exploitative way of generating wealth, but it has in many national spaces been successful in creating drastically improved general social well-being. That it does this in ways inextricably interlinked with impoverishment and extreme hardship in the workplace is exactly the essence of the meaning of uneven and combined development and more ‘tragedarian’ interpretations of Marx. This leaves our analyses of growth in Africa in a somewhat agonistic position. Unless one cleaves to the ahistorical liberal faith in positive-sum and market-based growth leading to development, one is faced with the fact that development is an unpleasant or perturbing lived experience for many people for a lot of the time. This in turn has two repercussions.
First, that ‘Africa rising’ tropes are politically and analytically infantile, categorising out of the picture the core problematic of capitalist growth and all that this entails. And, in terms of research, crunching the numbers and peppering with anecdotes remarking on the growing number of corrugated roofs in a capital city, and suchlike, borders on dereliction of intellectual duty. Second, that within the intellectual and political traditions of ROAPE there remains a challenge to make realistic, unromantic and non-ideological assessments of growth and (early?) transformation, while also insisting on bringing to the fore the experiences and agencies of the poor, exploited, and politically marginalised, categories that commonly actually fall upon the same people. This must be a priority because, without a focus on these classes of labour, these social identities, in whose name do we legitimise the whole development project?
This anniversary issue can be read as a strong argument for a critical political economy approach to growth and development in Africa. The articles do not assume renaissance or global convergence; they frame empirical and theoretical questions to test this assumption. They pay close attention to the ‘dirty’ political economy of capitalist development: the coercion in its DNA, the pivotal question of state form, the uncertainty and risk involved in managing processes of accumulation and change.
In a broad-ranging and forensic analysis of current data, Ndongo Sylla makes some striking observations. Most importantly: Africa's economic growth has largely benefited international capital and the globalised elites of Africa and other regions. Distinguishing between GDP and GNI, Sylla shows how increases in levels of production within national economies have been substantially allocated outside of the economy, reducing the possibilities for capture within people's social wage or within the state's fiscal politics. He goes on to show how, in historical context, ‘new growth’ seems far less significant than one might imagine. The broader point here, an exacting but realistic one, is that capitalist development requires a great deal more than a ‘purple patch’ in GNI growth, especially when that growth period comes on the back of the devastation of structural adjustment. Sylla's conclusion – meticulously constructed – is that ‘the reality is that Africa remains one of the world's most open, dependent and exploited regions’ as a result of its net negative payments vis-à-vis the rest of the global economy.
Carlos Castel-Branco's article on Mozambique follows Sylla's global–historic framing. Again, starting with an empirically rich political economy, Castel-Branco develops the insightful metaphor of porosity to identify what is effectively a ‘development-less growth’ in Mozambique. This is a result of an unholy ‘triple alliance’ of international capital, (sections of) domestic capital, and the Mozambican state which together create practices of surplus capture, removing the possibility that the revenues generated by new investments might be integrated into a more progressive discussion of the mass population's well-being. The dynamics of this alliance are based in a politically constructed (and empirically dubious) notion that FDI is ‘footloose’ and therefore flees at the sights of corporation tax; that there are strong medium-term benefits from what are effectively often ‘enclave’ investments; and that the market will in some fashion generate equitable growth for all. These are effectively faith statements, the dogma upon which mainstream discussions of ‘new growth’ are premised throughout the continent, and well beyond.
A real strength of Castel-Branco's article is the detailed national situating of the analysis of what is effectively an extraverted political economy of accumulation. Equally contextualised articles can be found in the Rwandan and Ethiopian case studies. In both of these articles, we find critical reflections on the prospects for developmental governance in two of Africa's most interesting examples of growth and transformation. Niamh Gaynor characterises Rwanda as ‘a nation in a hurry’. She shows how, in spite of the strong evidence of economic growth, the political focus on maintaining the impetus of growth and transformation generates strong authoritarian tendencies within the Rwandan state. The impatience of the government and its top-down approach to the implementation of often radical development policy generates social resistance, especially in circumstances where the poorest or most vulnerable are expected to bear exiguous costs of adjusting their livelihoods to fit with state plans.
One of the drivers of Rwanda's developmental urgency is the government's central concern with security and its association of securitisation with strong development performance. It is as if fast and effective development will solve the considerable challenges of governance in a traumatised and vulnerable state. Fana Gebresenbet borrows from the critical International Relations of the Copenhagen School to elaborate on the interactions between security and development in the Ethiopian case. There are two key axes to this – both of which have resonances for many other African countries. One is the perception of social instability within or just over national borders, a phenomenon that is present in varying degrees in many of the countries that endured civil war during the late 1990s and early 2000s. The second is the commandeering of militaristic metaphors to present government action. In this second sense, development is articulated – and to some degree practised – as a series of military manoeuvres: battles to be won, strategies to be implemented, wars against social ills, a demand for patriotic conformity and sacrifice.
What Gaynor's and Gebresenbet's articles do is identify the importance of the social origins of governments and the ways in which the underlying motivation for ambitious projects of social transformation are constructed. This goes well beyond idealised liberal wrist-wringing about ‘political will’ and ‘reform champions’ once again to identify how ‘dirty’ development practice can be. It is in the midst of these country cases, with their slender possibilities for capitalist transformation and their high-order concerns with statehood, order, and security, that difficult and realistic analysis and judgement of capitalist development can usefully be explored.
Mark Duffield raises worrying concerns about the changing nature of doing field work in the global South, and he does this by exploring how the South is viewed as an object of knowledge. He sets this in the context of his recent return, after almost 40 years, to a small Sudanese town near Sennar. He notes how such journeys to Africa have become much more difficult and not encouraged by the UK higher education concerns with research audits and other bureaucratic measurements of academic output. He goes beyond the idea that universities have just become risk averse to establish how restrictions on research provide complicity with obstructive African state practices. He highlights the growing remoteness in academic and policy organisations, linking it to the shift away from a historical politics of solidarity and Western engagement with Africa to the ‘neoliberal marketisation of the sub-prime tele-economic conditions encountered in the global South’. His work raises questions that go to the heart of Western intervention in Africa as he recognises ways in which ‘remoteness’ is practised across the continent with telling consequences.
Henry Bernstein revisits John Saul's article ‘African peasants and revolution’. This appeared in the first issue of ROAPE in 1974 as national liberation struggles and the rural dimensions to them were reaching fever pitch especially in ex-Portuguese colonies, but also in Namibia and Zimbabwe. Bernstein re-examines what was then a wave of optimism regarding the possible role for sustained peasant involvement in progressive transformation. He argues that, in fact, most rural dwellers are not peasants but rather constitute ‘classes of labour’ with a rural base. These live very insecure lives and under conditions of immense hardship. Under these circumstances and where there has been generalised commodification, with a high level of historical fragmentation of rural labour, it is now not self-evident, if ever it was, from where progressive forces for social transformation and resolution of agrarian questions will emerge.
This issue also includes a far-reaching interview with Samir Amin. He has been described as ‘one of the world's greatest radical thinkers’, ‘A titan of radical thought’ and a creative Marxist. He has advised many socialist African leaders, is an important contributor to the World Social Forum and is the Director of Third World Forum, Dakar. Samir Amin published, in the first issue of this journal, an article ‘Accumulation and development: a theoretical model’. As one of the founders of dependency theory, he has been at the forefront of critiquing mainstream views that Africa's problem is that it just isn't yet fully part of globalisation. Instead, he has argued forcefully and with great analytical heft, as he does in his interview in this issue, that Africa's problems stem from, among other things, the way in which the continent has been incorporated into the world system. His interview offers insight into the critique of Africa's development experiences and glimpses at the alternatives to the global system.