Alternative Futures For Africa

Timothy M. Shaw

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429716126
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This comprehensive, critical examination of Africa's future–written by a diverse group of Africans and Africanists–raises many questions and challenges concerning the development and unity of the African continent. Eclectic in range and method, but cohesive in concern, the book identifies and analyzes alternative probabilities in the political, economic, and social spheres and on the national, regional, and international levels. Many of the contributors point toward an unpromising future for Africa unless its development strategy is changed and its inheritance of dependence on the world system overcome.

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Introduction: The Political Economy of Africa’s Futures

Timothy M. Shaw

[ECA projections] show abundantly clearly how poor Africa’s performance has been in the last decade and a half, and how dim the prospects are for the rest of the century, assuming the persistence of the present mix of public policies in most African countries and assuming also the continuation of the present international economic system. Even if Third World countries succeed in bringing about a fundamental restructuring in the world economic order, unless there is a corresponding restructuring of the economic order at the national and regional levels in Africa, the region as a whole will benefit only marginally, if at all, from changes in the world order.

[Africa needs] Three New Orders … a new national economic order, a new regional economic order and a new international economic order. A new international economic order which is not based on the achievement of an increasing measure of national, as well as collective, self-reliance and self-sustained growth and development in Africa will not provide African countries with maximum benefits. Conversely, the restructuring of the international economy is a critical factor in the realization of national and collective self-reliance in Africa.

—Adebayo Adedeji ¹

Projections about the future political economy of Africa based on established trends point to a troubled future for the continent. Yet, out of weakness comes forth strength. And as Professor Adedeji noted in the opening citation, the very gloominess of Africa’s predicted future should generate a predisposition to engage in a fundamental reexamination and redirection.² However, the ability of African leaders and organizations to respond determinedly to such threatening scenarios is itself severely constrained by the continent’s history and inheritance of dependence and underdevelopment. Therefore, any avoidance of an unpromising future requires the transcending not only of unfavorable indicators for the decades immediately ahead but also of unhelpful inheritances from past centuries.

The Future of the Future

The collection of material in this volume attempts to survey the current state of knowledge about the continent’s future and, based on informed explanations of present predicaments, to offer some prescriptions about how to avoid any ominous predictions. Obviously this is an ambitious and elusive undertaking, and the projections and recommendations should be treated with great caution and considerable skepticism. Nevertheless, the chapters do represent a novel attempt to introduce and advance futures studies in Africa. The preparation of this material has been motivated in part by sheer curiosity and in part by an awareness that planning is related to power—power both in terms of resources and in terms of influence.

That futures studies are relatively undeveloped in Africa is symptomatic of the continent’s place in the world system as a part of the periphery because it cannot yet determine its present rate or direction of development, let alone its future progress or path. Meanwhile, the central powers in the system continue to control not only the rate of capital accumulation and technological change but also the production of futures studies. In general, then, the conception, generation, distribution, and utilization of futures studies are concentrated in the metropoles of the advanced industrialized states, a further reflection of global inequalities.

The current concern about trends and scenarios arises largely from a growing sense of crisis in the North³ about recession and inflation, resource depletion, and industrial pollution,⁴ and these northern preoccupations have since been joined by some southern issues. Yet, together they have not led to a fundamental reevaluation of investigation and orientation but instead have been incorporated into merely a shift of focus—toward international interdependence and the prospects for sustained growth in the North as well as accelerated development in the South resulting from redistribution and restructuring.⁵

The future in most futures studies is still essentially conceived of in terms of a world system dominated by northern institutions and interests. Notions of disengagement and self-reliance in either intellectual or policy terms have not received sufficient attention in futures studies to date. Africa needs its own school of futurists, with their own set of scenarios, if it is to break away from the new orthodoxy of world models and systems entropy based on northern definitions and preoccupations. Studies of the future, as well as the future itself, need to be decolonized on the African continent.

The Political Economy of Planning in Africa: Basic Human Needs and Power

Futures studies have yet to have a major impact on social analysis, personal perception, or policy formulation in Africa or the rest of the Third World, despite the tradition of planning for development in most of the peripheral states. Indeed, the only African institution to begin to take such projections seriously is the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) under Adebayo Adedeji, although the Institut pour le Développement Economique et la Planification (IDEP) and the Council for the Development of Economic and Social Research in Africa (CODESRIA) in Dakar have held workshops on the future. Awareness of the warnings and implications of the Club of Rome’s scenarios has been limited largely to the advanced industrialized states, although each of the major models of global trends and each of the major studies of sectoral trends do contain forecasts for the African continent that need to be recognized and responded to on both national and continental levels.⁶

Indeed, unless the global and regional projections now available are taken seriously, Africa will be confronted with a set of growing problems, and the exponential nature of those problems will render them increasingly intractable. Available projections point to the exacerbation of inequalities affecting Africa in the mid-term future—inequalities within African states, inequalities among African states, and inequalities between African states and the rest of the international system (both the Third World and the industrialized countries). It was fear of such interrelated and intensifying inequalities that led Dr. Adedeji to advocate a new, more self-reliant order on each of the three levels—national, continental, and global. Unless such radical remedial action is undertaken immediately, the sociopolitical problems generated by socioeconomic changes will indeed produce the political instability, social under-development and personal poverty that are predicted in various world models as well as in several of the chapters contained in this volume. For reasons of national development, continental cohesion, and global order, Africa’s future needs to be known, debated, and planned. The April 1980 Lagos economic summit and declaration represent an initial step in this direction.

Planning is essential if two prerequisites of national development and order are to be achieved; namely, the satisfaction of basic human needs (BHN) and the realization of effective national power. Until most peoples on the African continent have sufficient food, water, housing, and educational and health facilities⁷ and until African regimes have sufficient financial, industrial, educational, and strategic resources and reserves, sovereignty will remain a chimera. But neither of those goals, BHN or power, can be achieved easily because they involve difficult choices for, and considerable resistance from, both internal and external forces.

The ambiguities of Africa’s position are revealed with particular clarity in the case of food, a sector in which the continent used to be self-sufficient but now is increasingly dependent upon external supplies. But dependence on foreign food is not simply a function of population growth or environmental deterioration. Rather, it is one aspect of the continent’s incorporation into the world system. Africa’s involvement in the international division of labor means that it produces primary products for export—coffee, tea, cotton, groundnuts, etc.—and imports basic commodities—wheat, rice, meat, fish—that it can no longer provide for itself. As Karl Lavrencic indicated: “The apparent inability of the African continent to feed itself is paradoxical since one of the region’s chief assets is its huge agricultural potential. Africa has all the conditions for becoming one of the world’s major food baskets.”⁸

Yet despite Africa’s potential, agriculture makes up a declining proportion of the continent’s gross domestic product (GDP)—down from 41 percent in 1960 to 34 percent in 1976—and the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) estimates that agricultural production would have to rise by 3.5 percent annually if the estimated 720 million population of the year 2000 is to be fed. In 1976 only six African states achieved that level of growth in agriculture; the average increase was 1.6 percent. Meanwhile, food imports continue to rise by 5 percent each year, and Africa would need more than a $27,000-million investment to satisfy BHN by 1990.⁹ Ironically, therefore, Africa may have to rely on foreign inputs—technology, seeds, technicians, fertilizer, oil—to feed itself. But any lasting effort to satisfy BHN requires sociopolitical as well as agro-economic changes; it requires a fundamental reassessment of agriculture and self-reliance.¹⁰ The elusiveness of BHN and agricultural transformation is characteristic of the difficulties of disengagement and reorientation.

Given the problems of political leadership, class formation, social instability, and external dependence, both aspects of underdevelopment have to be attacked simultaneously—external and internal, superstructural and substructural. To do this successfully requires either political agility and/or authority. As Claude Ake has noted, there is a third possibility open to African regimes between dependent capitalism on the one hand and self-reliance on the other; one that is directly related to unpromising projections and trends.

The third historic possibility which lies before Africa is a march to fascism. This could come about in a situation where there was protracted economic stagnation, but not yet revolution… one thing that would surely be needed in ever increasing quantities in this situation would be repression.… It would appear that the choice for Africa is not between capitalism and socialism after all, but between socialism and barbarism. Which will it be?¹¹

Some regimes have attempted to avoid barbarism and fascism by practicing a form of enlightened authoritarianism to provide BHN and augment national power. But this mode of leadership has been in short supply since independence, and only a few states have begun to either realize BHN or reinforce their power capability, let alone both. And each state in that minority has achieved such progress by merely modifying its association with the world system rather than by radically redefining the system itself. Such an option is not open to the majority of countries; for them, self-reliance, of either an enlightened or a despotic variety, may be inevitable.

Philippe Lemaitre pointed to the achievements of the minority of “semi-industrial” centers that has grown through association rather than by disengagement

where a fairly self-confident middle class seeks self-consciously to mark out its boundaries and decide its course. In some of these countries, mixed private-public companies might enter into quasi-monopolistic arrangements with particular multinational corporations, assuring a flow of technology, military equipment, and advanced machinery into the state in exchange for certain key products. The corporations and the major extra-African countries in which they were based would gain assured markets, profits from the sale of invisibles, and the flow of needed raw materials. In return, the middle classes of semi-industrializing countries would be in a position to obtain advanced equipment, enhance the military security of the state, and carve out a local sector of the world market for intermediate industry.¹²

However, that option is not available to many African states, either because of internal opposition (the national or comprador bourgeoisie is very small) or external disinterest (national markets and resources are inadequate). In particular, resistance from excluded workers, peasants, and unemployed people, as well as from alternative fractions of the ruling class, make a sustained semi-industrial strategy problematic. To avoid such opposition and instability, there is recourse to populism and rhetoric. Lemaitre suggested:

If any of the successful semi-industrializing states follow a “China model” they may become very ideological; in all probability they will be “Marxist-Leninist.” Those which follow a “Brazil model” may eschew ideological language entirely; or they may invent various original ideologies, largely nationalist and a bit xenophobic in content. The doctrine of “authenticity” now preached in Zaire may be a foretaste of such ideologies.¹³

But semi-industrialization is not an option for most African states and peoples. And as the processes of dependency and underdevelopment intensify, the structural and temporal crises of the majority as well as of the minority will be exacerbated. For those states, the choice is not sovereignty but survival. As Thomas Kanza argued, “There are only two choices for Africa: survival or suicide.”¹⁴

Incorporation, Intervention, or Isolation

The majority of African states and peoples have not benefited significantly, if at all, from d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• The Contributors
• Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction: The Political Economy of Africa’s Futures
• 2. Toward the Invention of an African Future
• 3. Africa’s Futures: A Comparison of Forecasts
• 4. Alternative Scenarios for Africa
• 5. Toward Continental Integration: Supranationalism and the Future of Africa
• 6. The Future of Economic Cooperation Schemes in Africa, with Special Reference to ECOWAS
• 7. The Future of Development in Nigeria and the Sahel: Projections from the World Integrated Model (WIM)
• 8. A Basic Needs Strategy and the Physical Quality of Life Index (PQLI): Africa’s Development Prospects
• 9. The Computer Culture and Nuclear Power: Political Implications for Africa
• 10. The Future of Europe and Africa: Decolonization or Dependency?
• 11. Development and Economic Growth in Africa to the Year 2000: Alternative Projections and Policies
• Appendixes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index