The African Condition: From Crisis to Conjuncture

Abstract

The structural adjustment project of the Bank and Fund has transformedthe actualities if not yet the analyses of Africa’s political economy. And this transformation — from devaluations and privatisations to deregulation and user-pay — has taken place not only at the level of policies but also in terms of politics and economics. Initial post-independence assumptions about the centrality of the state and the inevitability of development have been superseded by the erosion of the state and concentration only on growth, which nevertheless remains problematic. As reflected in most contemporary analysis, the mood has changed from one of cautious optimism to continuous pessimism: how to recapture the idealism and dynamism of the early independence period?

The gravest development problems are in Sub-Saharan Africa. Unfavourable external conditions (including a prolonged fall in the terms of trade of primary goods exporters) and inadequate domestic policies have caused economic, social, and environmental decline. After reasonable growth in the 1960s and early 1970s, the region’s economic performance deteriorated…. Saving and investment rates fell sharply in the early 1980s.

IBRD, World Development Report 1989: 12

‘the debt problem’ (in Africa) is to a considerable extent a symptom of a balance of payments weakened by adverse world economic forces and domestic policy shortcomings, as well as of reduced access to new capital inflows.

SCF/ODI, Prospects for Africa: 64

Despite the widespread adoption of adjustment programmes, African countries paid back more — a total of $1.5 billion — to the IMF from 1986 to 1989 than they gained in new borrowing.

Ravenhill, 1990: 714