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15 January 2000

Political economy issues are centrally important in development debates in Africa. Key to this global inquiry about Africa’s evolution is the fundamental premise regarding States’ responsibility on social and economic dynamics. Is the state responsible for allocating resources and determining which and whose wishes will be satisfied? Will African societies be better off if the mobilization and allocation of resources is left to foreign private firms primarily motivated by wealth accumulation or to international financial and trade institutions or to bilateral development agencies? What is the potential of political intervention in promoting or impeding social welfare or striking a balance between public outcomes and foreign private interests?

Africa’s destiny during this second millennium has been a long saga of astonishing achievements and failures. At the dawn of the first millennium, Africa’s oldest civilization, ancient Black Pharaonic Egypt had already left to the world an enduring legacy of technological, social, religious and cultural revolutions that are still guiding humankind’s adventurous spirit. Mathematics, astronomy, poetry, architecture, geography, navigation, writing, agricultural irrigation, etc, had long been invented and used for at least three millennia before ancient Greece and Mesopotamia. In the past two millennia, the balance of world power shifted from Romans to Greeks to Arabs to Chinese and Japanese, to Europeans and lastly to North Americans. We all know that each of these civilizations made significant contributions to world history through the same human thread of bravery, genius and at times the most barbaric cruelty. Africa was caught in a gigantic and cruel trap through slavery and colonization. We should never be tired of reminding ourselves, as well as the rest of the world, of this important historical fact.

Extraverted economic policies and international financial and political dictatorships are among the major factors that paralyze Africa. For the past decades, economic choices have been made based on the needs and precedence of Paris, London, Washington and their likes. Imperatives for getting cheap export mining and agricultural inputs were the driving motive behind colonialism and more recently the Lome Convention. The threat of an unprecedented financial crisis due to excess Eurodollars in Western banks prompted Western powers to promote dramatic lending policies that are responsible in great part for Africa’s debt burden.

The HIPC Initiative (Highly Indebted Poor Countries Debt Relief Initiative)--with its corollary, the Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility, which conditionally ties debt relief with the requirement for regular debt servicing from countries--will certainly not eliminate this debt burden. Skyrocketing international commodity prices created unequal terms of trade at the expense of Africa.The dominance of neo-liberal ideology set in motion adjustment policies, promoting export-led growth, in order to generate foreign exchange and sustain foreign debt service payment. The need for outside markets, cheap labor costs, and easy circulation of trade and investment across borders is responsible for intensified privatization measures. Indeed, both the World Trade Organization and the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act, with formal rules and enforcement mechanisms, aggressively promote these policies to support the hegemony of transnational corporations.

Privatization essentially supports mergers and acquisitions. Privatization initiatives in Africa are mostly direct transfers from State monopoly back to the monopolies of former colonizers, boosting corruption in the process, usually through the enticement of government officials. For example, privatization of utilities services like water, electricity, education, health or transport are a disaster. The rationale behind privatization includes promoting efficient management. In fact, African consumers experience a worsening of service delivery, more distortions, shortages and price increases. In addition, workers are unhappy because jobs and social security are shattered while expatriates with huge salaries are being hired.

Further, the centerpiece of Africa’s struggle for equality, human development and peace lies in one of the most profound imbalances: the lack of equality between women and men. There is inequality in terms of the lack of recognition accorded the womens’ contributions in building society’s welfare, their participation in economic and political decision-making, their access to and control over wealth and the surplus asset generated. Economic policies from colonial times to the adjustment era have progressively developed mechanisms aggravating gender inequality. Their impact is in many cases more alienating for women than informal constraints of preexisting institutions.

Gender equality is yet to move from backstage to center stage. The momentum successfully created in Beijing is very slow to take place. What can make delinquent African governments change the way they do business with women? Are the world community and African governments serious about gender equality? Why is the application of formal rules for engendering resource allocations and power sharing mechanisms so slow to happen? Some of the answers lie in the fact that conservative men with ideologies of the past lead African governments and international institutions. They surely deserve a failing grade for the gender biased policies they have been carrying out all over Africa. Women need and deserve more than literature and rhetoric in this new century. They want to see concrete, systematic and measurable change to reverse their situation for the better. Now is the time for them to set the agenda, not a systemic one but an institutional agenda.

African people hear often that information technology will make the continent develop and catch up with other regions. Well, the reality is that Africa enters the 21st century having the least developed telecommunication services and infrastructure in the world, with 26% of the world population sharing 2% of world telephone lines, and no control whatsoever on the content or nature of information being sold to its people via the internet. Neither trade nor aid in and by itself will bring social welfare to Africa. Therefore, there is a need to reverse the newer trends we are witnessing in world trade and financial affairs. Despite its obvious failure in Seattle in November 1999, the World Trade Organization remains a supranational power with a level of political and economic might that clearly dwarfs the ability of dominated states and people outside the circle of the small group of the most powerful industrialized countries. Its rules and enforcement mechanisms protect corporations and defend the interests of powerful countries.

Can African countries compete against European and American corporations and pharmaceutical companies who have the knowledge and power to patent seeds or medical products and prevent others from using them for developmental objectives? For instance, it was recently reported that South Africa has plans to manufacture medicine for HIV AIDS patients in order to drastically reduce the costs for African AIDS patients. The pharmaceutical companies are using all kinds of intimidations against South Africa project, including lobbying the US authorities to support them. This hurts every one in Africa, in particular women who suffer most from AIDS. If the international community is serious about its concern for Africa’s security, it would reconsider the heavy burden put on the continent to implement by all means export led growth policies at the expense of resources badly needed to care for women and children victim of the AIS pandemic. Similarly, the industrialized countries deserve some ethics lessons. They silently watch, or actively support, their arms and mining industries fuel war to sustain their market in Africa.

The developed world is asking the wrong questions on Africa while keeping tyrants and zealots of all sorts in business. This brings chaos, hatred and political instability in Africa. The most powerful nations in the world must be prepared to change their double standards policies, anti-governance positions and share global goods and prosperity with the South. Excessive spending on the millennium celebrations when the industrialized nations consumed 320 millions bottles of champagne during one holiday weekend is a curse on the face of a world filled with poverty and powerlessness. Poverty and powerlessness fuel war and lead to staggering numbers of refugees or acute food shortages. The difficult situations, that are the result of wrong policies, fatally lead to a highly visible role played by Northern NGOs acting like firefighters. In addition, humanitarian actions have become a highly coveted territory for access to bilateral and multilateral funding as well as to Nobel prizes while African NGOs are further isolated. It would be instructive to undertake a cost benefit analysis of emergency relief operations to determine who pays and who benefits? How many of our African doctors roaming around unemployed could have done the same work if equally supported? The story of development assistance in Africa is yet to be assessed. Taking the case of France or the United States, it would be very informative to differentiate the amount of money claimed as bilateral aid from the real amount of money that stays in any given African country.

The ideological choices of the Bretton Woods institutions determine the political economy of adjustment policies. The body of knowledge, economic models and socio-economic paradigms created outside African empirical realities is unilaterally presented as the ideal solution or “best practice” for all countries. Neoclassical economic theory guides the underlying assumptions of African economic policy formulation and development programs. It suggests that market relations through individual property rights and pursuance of self-interest to maximize desires are the most important of all social relations. Therefore, human genius and efforts must be concentrated in facilitating market transactions because unregulated markets bring prosperity while economic intervention brings chaos.

Many observers say that Africans only have themselves to blame and should search for the solution of the continent’s problems in corrupted circles. African and Northern governments are equally corrupt each in their own way. In the past forty years, Northern governments have been protecting dictatorial regimes plundering public finances and keeping illegal money in the Northern banks. Most recently, they have raised concerns about “good governance”, “good practice”, and all sorts of “goodies” because the international and financial system they have set in motion is in trouble.

It is often said that criticizing the IMF and World Bank is no panacea and that Africans should check the dealings of their own governments. In a context where these institutions lead and control the development process of country assistance strategies and policy framework papers, they should be held accountable as much as governments are. Huge World Bank projects, for example, for building river dams or agro-business enterprises not only had disastrous environmental impact and devastating livelihood disturbances, but they were breeding sites for corrupt policy implementers.

The World Bank is not only an economic agency. It is also a political institution despite the fact that it denies that. The Bank wants to go beyond its policing role on Government and to control NGOs as well. Lately, many civil society organizations have raised serious concerns about the Bank’s project to draft a “Handbook on Good Practices for Laws Relating to Non-Governmental Organizations”. In addition to the fact that this initiative is threatening NGOs because it can give Governments an opportunity to control, silence or undermine NGOs, it should not be coming from the World Bank. Instead of worrying about NGOs, the Bank must draw a handbook of laws to make her and her partners, like the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, more transparent and accountable to African women and men.

As we are in the era of showing good practices, NGOs and other independent stakeholders must evaluate the World Bank and the IMF and start watching the UNDP more closely. No matter how ideological suitable it may be for him, the UNDP administrator should not plan over the head of millions of African people and others from the developing world to move the agency’s whole poverty program into the World Bank. Good governance should start with consulting and respecting people’s will. Bank rhetoric and claims for setting “poverty alleviation” as a priority is not enough. The results speak for themselves, poverty is growing at an unprecedented speed and the Bank and Fund must be held accountable for their failing policies and false promises. They must first correct the devastating consequences of adjustment policies on women and children.

Can we count on the goodwill of governments to change the ugly face of poverty and powerlessness that are plaguing our communities? Can we entirely trust bilateral and multilateral channels to achieve this major challenge of our times? My answer to these two questions is no. Any power when left unchecked loses accountability. However, it is within the power of governments and NGOs to abide by clear and simple rules, equity and governance. Transparent negotiations and agreements may determine the content of such rules. We must understand the necessary and important contributions NGOs can make to keeping governments, development agencies and financial institutions under permanent check.

Despite their contradictions, NGOs have demonstrated their critical role in sustaining the growth of democratic values and shaping an alternative vision of a world different from what powerful market forces are trying to impose upon people—i.e., a vision of economic, political and social rights. In recent times, they have become synonymous with balance of powers whether nationally or internationally in spheres as diverse as human rights, economic and international trade policies, environmental health, gender equality, peace and knowledge sharing. The concrete results of NGOs are illustrated through their organized determination and success in making the recent WTO Ministerial Conference a failure, the banning of landmines, and the freezing of the OECD’s Multilateral Agreement on Investment project aimed at empowering corporations to the detriment of developing countries and endogenous people. Local NGOs should not hesitate to challenge the World Bank’s major policy choices and assumptions while working with independent African academics and researchers to revisit issues from a gender perspective and without being overly concerned with donor priorities. The exclusive reliance on foreign consulting firms and expertise is wrong. It should not be preferred over the invaluable contribution of NGOs to development homegrown ideas and solutions. Development and human rights NGOs must not compete with each other but work together to bring meaningful contributions in policy design, moving from the periphery of domestic and world affairs to the mainstream of economic decision taking mechanisms. Public accountability and transparency depends largely on the capacity of local NGOs to monitor the way budget items are rank ordered, ministerial disbursements made or priority settings determined. States and their national and international institutions must be prepared to accommodate better informed NGOs and more demanding constituencies. These constituencies include youth, women, peasants, educators, environmentalists, students, etc, who are willing, able and ready to be embarked in the management of and access to resources, services and opportunities.

Yassine Fall is an economist and researcher from Senegal and presently Executive Secretary of the Association of African Women for Research and Development (AAWORD). She also works as trainer in economic literacy and policy advocacy. She has conducted numerous consultancies for bilateral and multilateral organizations in a number of countries in West, Central and East Africa. She has carried out studies and field research on macroeconomic and international trade policies, food security and environmental health, emergency relief operations in situations of conflict and child labor issues. She is an advocate for policy approaches and alternatives that set gender equality and poverty eradication as primary policy outcomes. Her most recent publications include: Macroeconomic Reforms in Africa: What Position from the Women's Movement in Policy Advocacy? and Economic policy choices: promoting or endangering sustainable human development rights for women in Africa. She is the editor of the AAWORD book Africa: Gender, Globalization and Resistance (1999).

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