Is there an African Political Economy? As a field of study, African Political Economy has not been developed conceptually, theoretically, or analytically. It suffers from the same fate as some other disciplines and fields of study in Africa in which knowledge production has been essentially anchored in theories and concepts from elsewhere. At the global level, the political economy lost its place in the pantheon of intellectual discourses and as a focus of study in the post-Keynesian era. As Robinson (2010: 5) argues, âdiverse Fordist-Keynesian models of national corporate capitalism spread throughout the twentieth century from the cores of the world capitalist system to the former colonial domains in Latin America, Africa, and Asiaâ. These models were geared toward redistribution, welfarism, and the general empowerment of workers, with strong labor unions to the fore. In Africa in particular, developmentalism placed high on the agenda of early post-colonial leaders: first as a means of securing their legitimacy, then as a means of justifying their struggle for independence from the colonialists and building mass support base through reproduction of popular classes (Mkandawire 1998; Robinson 2010).
Following the Keynesian principle of boosting aggregate demand and increased state involvement in ensuring full employment, the postwar global economic structure of accumulation brought about prosperity and welfare for manyâat both the core and periphery of global capitalism. However, this âgolden eraâ of capitalism did not last, in part, because of several contradictions within the national and global economic arrangementsânot least the power of labor unions to negotiate higher wages, state regulation of capital, and the shock from the expected rise in interest rate by the Federal Reserve of the United States of America (Gilpin 2001; Bracking and Harrison 2003). Robinson (2010: 5â6) provides a deeper narrative of the forces that led to the onslaught in the Post-Fordist regime of accumulation and its redistributive tendencies. He notes that:
This alliance brought about the ascendancy and hegemony of market ideals under the rubric of neoliberalism (Harvey 2007).The expansion of collective rights, the institutionalization of Keynesian-Fordist class compromise, and the prevailing norms of a âmoral economyâ that assumed capital and state reciprocities with labour and citizens and an ethical obligation to minimal social reproductionâall this burdened capital with social rigidities that had to be reversed for a new phase of capitalist growth. Capital and its political representatives and organic intellectuals in the core countries organized a broad offensiveâeconomic, political, ideological, militaryâthat was symbolically spearheaded by the Reagan-Thatcher alliance.
At the intellectual level, development study was radically transformed from its interdisciplinary nature to one focused on firm-level analysis with quantification and mathematical precision brought to the fore. Fine (2009) provides an historical overview of how Economics became disentangled from other disciplines and isolated from other social sciences in ways that ensured that both its theory and resultant policies have continued to advance profit maximization at the firm and individual levels with scant regard for the society. Despite warnings from Polanyi (1957) that the idea of a perfect market is, at best, a utopia, neoliberal economic theorists continue to justify inequality as an essential part of the modern economy (Hayek 1960). As we explain later in the chapter, the international financial institutions (IFIs), especially the World Bank, became the knowledge bank: a place where the ideals of market fundamentalism are propagated and exported to developing countries of the world. These ideals have had devastating consequences on the socio-economic conditions of these countries: a fact that the Bank and the Fund have recently acknowledged (World Bank 2018).
The contradictions of global capitalism have ensured that crises are inevitable (Harvey 2016; Oloruntoba 2016; Stiglitz 2010). The late-1970s global commodity crisis, the Asian financial crisis of 1988, and the global financial crisis of 2008â2009 are just a few recent crises (Soros 1998; Oloruntoba 2016). Strident critiques of Economics from the Left and Right have ensured a return to Global Political Economy or International Political Economy as a sub-discipline in Political Science and International Relations. Increasingly, the need for economics to be rooted in society has become more nuanced. Given the peripheral position of Africa in the global capitalist system and the prevalence of economistic thinking in universities, think tanks, and policy circles, an African Political Economy as a field of study is both necessary and compelling for a proper understanding of the historical and contemporary forces and forms of interaction and production that shaped and continue to shape the development trajectory in Africa.
The question of whether there is an African Political Economy set in the context of integrating Africa into the global circuit of capital, which began with the transatlantic slave trade over five centuries ago. Although parts of Africa had related with other regions of the world, such as Asia, Europe, and the Middle East through trade, it was the transatlantic slave trade that marked the turning point in the relations between the continent and other parts of the world in its current subordinated form (Rodney 1981). Other forms of relations, such as imperialism and colonialism, successfully subordinated the continent to other regions in a global capitalist system defined by an asymmetry of power and an unequal international division of labor (Hoogvelt 2005, 2001). The Political Economy of Africa manifests various characteristics that link the past with the present in a continuum that has affected its diversification, development, sophistication, domestication, and inclusiveness. Located and ensconced within its pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial structures, African Political Economy has continued to operate informally and formally. Unlike other regions of the world where the intersection of politics and economy has been informed by indigenous approaches and practices, the formal aspects of African Political Economy have, to a very significant extent, been defined by exogenous knowledge base that underpins theoretical frameworks and policies (Ake 1979).
Scholars have provided both historical and analytical accounts of how the triple heritage of the slave trade, colonialism, and post-colonialism have shaped the structure, nature, and contour of the political economy of Africa (Taiwo 2010; Rodney 1981; Ake 1981). In relation to the overarching influence of transatlantic slave trade on Africa, for instance, Walter Rodney poignantly argues that in the 400 years that the trade lasted, nearly 12 million Africans were carted as commodities to the New World. The massive dislocation of such large numbers of people robbed Africa of its able-bodied men and women. As Olufemi Taiwo (2017) argues in his TED Talk, many of the Africans forcefully carted away from their land of birth included inventors, artists, agronomists, and other professionals. In addition to the violence that undergirded both trans-Saharan and transatlantic slave trade turned communities against one another, created distrust, and undermined the peaceful environment and collective efforts needed to innovate, plan, and achieve development.
Ake (1981) locates the Political Economy of Africa within the extractive and disruptive logic that underpinned colonialism. In their bid to build the war-destroyed metropolitan economies through the creation of access to raw materials, the colonialists changed the mode of production as well as social relations of production in Africa through the introduction of wage economy and cash crop farming. In this process, Africans were forced to move from rural areas to urban areas in search of wage labor. To achieve their extractive objectives, infrastructures such as railroads were designed and constructed to link only the sources of raw materials to ports of exports. Bracking and Harrison (2003: 5) put the colonial state and its mechanism of accumulation in Africa more sharply:
Colonial states established the political conduits through which African societies engaged with the global political economy. In many ways, the construction can be seen as a project of simplification: reducing complex social forms to basic national templates: the âzoningâ of agricultural production, the reduction of varied cultures of ownership and norms of trade to âchieftaincyâ and the regulation of marketing boards; and the construction of local and long-distance trade networks to the road and rail links from region to ports, capital city, and customs office. ...[T]he colonial project might not have completed its immanent desires to produce self-contained national economies malleable to the designs of international capital, but it did mark a profound historical transition, which defined the historical possibilities of independence.
Decolonial thinkers have argued that despite the end of colonialism at the political level, a global matrix of power has ensured the continuity of the colonial patterns of exploitation and extraction in Africa (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018, 2013; Grosfoguel 2007). These scholars argue that the globalization processes ensconced in neoliberal market ideas, promoted under the superintendent roles of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization, have ensured further subordination of African economies to the logic of global capital. In this regard, the IMF and the World Bank have dutifully assumed the role of high priests of development discourses and policies over most parts of Africa. Perhaps with few exceptions, these institutions have offices in the Presidencies or Ministries of Finance of African countries, where they offer policy advice and instruction to bureaucrats on the best way to administer the economies. As Stiglitz (2002) argues, the consultations that the Bank and the Fund staff carry out in developing countries are usually bereft of the local realities and experiences of the poor people. Rather, such consultations usually take place in five-star hotels where officials of the Ministry of Finance or Central Banks meet with the representatives of the Bretton Woods institutions. He further notes that the Fund changed its founding mandate of compelling developing countries to pursue expansionary policies, which can boost aggregate demand in postwar Europe, to adopting contractionary policies in a bid to operate along market fundamentalist principles (Zach-Williams and Mohan 2007).
Various theoretical approaches have been advanced to examine the political economy of Africa. These can be categorized into liberal and critical theories (Nasongâo 2018). Classical and neoclassical theories interpret African economic conditions in terms of the inability of the state in Africa to mobilize capital at the national level. Thus, they argue that foreign direct investment (FDI) and official aid are required to help these countries finance infrastructure. In relation to trade, neoclassical theories also argue that given the abundance of raw materials in Africa, the principle of comparative advantage in which countries specialize on exports that have comparative cost advantage is the right one to apply in Africa. This is because exports of r...