(Africa’s Long Road Since Independence by Keith Somerville)
The book by Keith Somerville Africa’s Long Road Since Independence has a subtitle “The Many Histories of a Continent”. This subtitle reflects the author’s approach to dealing with Africa’s post-colonial history. In his view, it is not one history, but many – histories that have intertwined, converged and diverged. Whereas the chronology provides the general framework, the author highlights several important histories within that framework: decolonization and state-building, conflict and peacebuilding, economic development and associated problems, the role of external actors, etc. This new account of those histories looks in particular at the relationship between territorial, economic, political and societal structures and human agency in the complex, and as the author recognizes, sometimes confusing development of an independent Africa.
Whereas the problems of economic development are not the main focus of the book, this issue (or history, to use the author’s expression) is considered, one way or another, in almost each chapter. There is even a separate chapter on structural adjustment programs and their consequences and a section discussing the resource curse in Nigeria, Angola and DRC.
One interesting theme that is not directly formulated but emerges from the book nevertheless is the theme of alternative development models based on alternative economic systems, particularly in the early post-colonial period. A number of African countries, particularly in the beginning, had a strong socialist leaning and tried alternative development paths, often based on customary structures of mutual support and communalism (not coincidentally having the same root as “communism”). The two best known attempts are probably Julius Nyerere’s Ujamaa in Tanzania and Kwame Nkrumah’s socialism in Ghana. But there have been many other, less well-known attempts, for example, in Guinea, Mali and Uganda. All these attempts have failed, and these countries have ended up as neoliberal economies. Was this outcome inevitable? This question is especially relevant in light of the continued critique of the prevailing capitalist model (which very serious economists, such as Joseph Stiglitz and Thomas Piketty, believe to be inefficient, unjust and even dangerous for humanity’s survival) and recent discussions about its alternatives and post-capitalist future (for example, Paul Mason and Yanis Varoufakis, to name a few). Of course, the rise of China with its alternative model adds another layer of complexity. There is little reason to doubt that China’s economy is capitalist (as Branko Milanovic convincingly argues) but it has a number of specific features distinguishing it from the Western model (I strongly recommend Yen Yen Ang’s How China Escaped the Poverty Trap). Moreover, according to the official Chinese doctrine, the current phase of development is just a prelude to a communist society, which remains the final objective of the Chinese Communist Party.
But back to Somerville’s book. Although he does not analyze the specific features of what became known as African socialism in the 1960s, it’s useful to recall that this concept was rather different from the Soviet-style orthodox centralized socialism (of course, different versions of socialism existed in Europe too and Aleksandr Gevorkyan provides a good analysis of different models in his book Transition Economies). But the essential characteristics of African socialism included: (1) strong links to the African communal tradition and emphasis on peaceful national and international unity, hence (2) rejection of the Marxist doctrine of the economic class struggle and the inevitability of revolution; (3) strong role of the public sector in economy (including nationalization of key industries); (4) state-driven social and economic development based on large government projects in energy, processing and industrialization; (5) non-exploitative social relations; (6) availability of state-provided social safety nets.
As Somerville documents, young African countries focused their development efforts on government projects in industrialization with the objective to end their dependency on raw materials and agriculture and promote import substitution. This was true for both “socialist” and non-socialist countries, which accepted the Prebisch–Singer hypothesis, which argues that the price of primary commodities declines relative to the price of manufactured goods over the long term, which causes the terms of trade of primary-product-based economies to deteriorate. This idea, developed in the 1940s, has served as a major pillar of dependency theory and policies such as import substitution industrialization. (Sommerville also subscribes to this thesis, saying in several places that continued dependence on primary commodities is the major reason for Africa’s underdevelopment.)
Specifically, the early development efforts in Ghana revolved around the Volta River hydroelectric power project, bauxite mining and processing, and industrialization. The generation of electricity and the processing of bauxite well proclaimed as the basis of a new Ghanian economy and as the end of dependence on cocoa. The share of government expenditure in GDP grew from 7 percent to 18 percent over the decade, and the share of extraordinary and development expenditure grew from 27 percent to 36 percent over the decade following independence.
Unfortunately, these efforts coincided with a precipitous fall in international cocoa prices, which reduced government’s foreign exchange earnings and made debt service difficult. Had the West been genuine about Ghana’s development, it could have extended a helping hand by rescheduling the country’s debt and offering additional financial assistance. However, Nkrumah’s socialist rhetoric and the development of relations with the Soviet Union and China led to American opposition, which in turn limited financial assistance from Western donors and blocked assistance from the IMF and World Bank. My friend Ghanian economist Nii Moi Thompson argued cogently that there was an American policy of denying funding that would have enabled the government to ride out the fall in cocoa prices in the 1960s, while waiting for investments and development projects to bear fruit. Nkrumah’s failure to deliver on his promises, partly engineered by the West, led to his overthrow in 1966 followed by a cycle of military coups.
But, as Somerville reports, in the 1980s Ghana ironically became the star pupil of the IMF and World Bank by implementing structural adjustment programs (SAP). Ghana introduced sweeping reforms to liberalize the economy and meet the demands of the financial institutions for changes to exchange rates, trade and more besides in return for an SAP facility and financing. The new approach included price incentives, assistance with the supply of fertilizer and pesticides, and encouraging farmers to plant more coca. Rise in cocoa prices gave the impression that SAP had turned the economy around, but there have been no major structural changes and debts increased $3.087 million, with debt servicing rising into 48.9 percent of export earnings. This came at a high social cost, with growing poverty and poor welfare, health and education provision as public spending slashed. Ultimately, as we all know, the IMF and World Bank rejected the SAP approach, but a lot of damage (and human suffering) had been done by that time in Africa and in the developing world in general.
Unlike Nkrumah’s version of socialism, which stressed centralization of power and modernization through economic development, purportedly to serve the interests of all Ghanaians, Nyerere’s socialism was based on a re-imagining of pre-colonial African communalism. Within months of achieving independence in December 1961, Tanzania was set on a path Nyerere called self-reliant socialism. Based on his ideas on version of family-based communalism of pre-colonial society, he offered the concept of Ujamaa as the basis of African socialism. This rejected capitalism and Marxist class-based socialism as models for Tanzania’s development and condemned the “antisocial effects all of the accumulation of personal wealth” arguing instead for a society where individuals work for each other, and they are looked after by society. It was based on a vision of traditional African society in which no one starved because they lacked personal wealth, socialism in which “those who sow reap a fair share of what they sow.”
The farm in metaphor was carefully chosen: Nyerere set out a rural-based concept of socialism founded on the idea that in African society resources were commonly held: individuals did not own land but had the right to use it, and there was no exploitation of tenants by landlords. Nyerere located his ideas in the context of an application of communalism that embodied what he wanted to achieve rather than in the context of an identifiable, functional tradition of communalism. In Somerville’s opinion, this was to prove to be an exaggeration of traditional communal values and an unworkable extension of the functioning of extended families to a wider community not bound by kinship.
The Ujamaa policy, set out in the Arusha declaration of 5 February 1967, established a program of self-reliance with an economy based on rural agriculture, with nationalized banks, land and other principal means of production. The state was in control of economic activity. Nyerere stressed that this was to establish an equitable and non-exploitative economy. The plan was to expand agricultural production through communal farming to produce a surplus that could fund national economic development, raise living standards, provide services, and achieve independence from foreign control.
Again, similar to what happened in Ghana, foreign banks like Barclays, Grindlays and Standard all withdrew stuff and refused to cooperate with the government after nationalization. Tanzania still received development support from Canada, the Scandinavian countries and NGOs such as Britain’s Oxfam, but this was not sufficient to provide a sound financial base for reform. They were also serious problems in the parastatal sectors, which still relied on foreign expertise. Tanzania lacked experienced economic planners, agricultural economists, financial administrators and management personnel.
Even in the absence of international support Umajaa has been a success. By 1980, Tanzania had one of the highest literacy rates in Africa, despite being one of its poor countries. Better social welfare was provided, and famine and serious hunger was avoided. Tanzania had become a more equal society, narrowing the gap between high and low wage earners and between rural and urban incomes.
But Tanzania was still at the mercy of the global economy. The government could not maintain the cooperative policy or resist international pressure to make punishment structural adjustments, not only because it had failed to increase productivity and because the parastatals had run up huge debts, but also because the early 1970s saw both a fall in world prices for agricultural commodities and a rise in the price of oil and manufactured imports. The mechanization of agriculture required imports of fuel, fertilizers and capital goods that rose in price even as the exports they were used to produce sold for less.
Somerville concludes that it could be argued that a more longer-term, gradual transformation program based on the active participation of rural people and with greater resources available might have succeeded. However, similar to the Ghana case, this would still have required the support of major foreign dollars and financial institutions, which did not come.
A few words about Uganda in the end. Uganda became another poster boy of the international financial institutions in the 1980s through SAP implementation. But this was the result of an evolution when the original socialist ideals were replaced with neoliberal values (I wrote about it in my chapter of Uganda’s public sector development in Public Administration in Conflict Affected Countries, https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-74966-8_8#DOI). As I note in that chapter, ”there is hardly a leaf from the IMF cookbook that Uganda has not tried: liberalization, privatization, deregulation, etc.” But this was not how it started.
From the outset, the Ugandan government development strategy prioritized industrialization and aimed at a greatly reduced role for export crops. By the mid-1960s, the country’s first Prime Minister (and later President) Obote had begun a decisive shift to the left, in the belief that only a statist approach to the economy could bring about “Africanisation” and enable the country to realize its full material potential. The belief in the power of state intervention, central planning and industrial socialism was common across in numerous newly independent nations across the continent. This was the rationale behind the nationalization program across the financial and commercial sectors. It also led to the greater interest in rural development, and to the sponsoring of research on the part the Ministry of Agriculture into peasant farm and technologies and use of labor. It was an economic program which in many ways culminated in the putatively radical “Common Man’s Charter” in 1969. Much derided consequently, it nevertheless represented an attempt to constitutionally enshrine a batch of entitlements and protections for the “ordinary citizen”. Strongly egalitarian, the Charter argued for a redistribution of income which puts more purchasing power in the hands of the Common Man, reduction in an excessive dependence on agriculture as a source of income, diversification of the economy to make it less dependent of foreign trade, and promotion of the participation of citizens in all sectors of the economy.
Th practical implementation of the Charter was derailed by further developments, not least Idi Amin’s coup and overthrowing of Obote. The Chapter certainly did not find much understanding from international financial institutions, which were taken aback by this Charter, ushering “a new political culture and a new way of life, both anti-feudalism and anti-capitalism”. But they had their revenge after the installment of the National Resistance Movement (NRM) regime. As Somerville points out, the NRM was initially committed to a socialist approach, but it proved to be empty rhetoric; the movement quickly dropped any socialist leanings in the face of the massive need for financial and development aid. This forced the new government to become another poster boy for the neoliberal, capitalist, free market reforms being demanded by the IMF, World Bank and donors in return for aid. Sommerville argues that Museveni opted for this change in direction purely because he deemed it expedient and somewhat contrary to his beliefs (Museveni graduated from Dar es Salaam University, which at the time was a hotbed of radical pan-African and Marxist political thought).
From today’s perspective when state regulation, price controls, income redistribution, social welfare measures and much more is part of a standard policy package in developed countries, the experimentation efforts of the African leaders in the 1950s and 1960s look really innocent. It was an unfortunate time for experimentation, though. Any deviation from the orthodox capitalist playbook was considered as a defection to the socialist camp and betrayal of the true democratic values. As a result, the African countries that wanted to practice their unique and independent development model became subject to political, economic and financial pressure by the same international institutions that were supposed to facilitate their development. The book is full of examples how foreign aid (or its withdrawal) was unceremoniously used as a Cold War tool across Africa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (former Zaire), Gabon, Somalia, Ghana, Malawi, Mozambique, Uganda and other countries. (A recent book by Sara Lorenzini Global Development: A Cold War History provides a comprehensive analysis of the various applications of international aid during the Cold War.)
As Sommerville’s account shows, alternative models were not originally doomed. But they were actively discouraged and deliberately sabotaged. African countries failed not because of lack of their imagination or willingness to adapt alternative development models. Their failure and the subsequent neoliberal transition are the result of intentional policies of Western capitalism and its international institutions. Plainly, African countries were not given a fair chance to follow their independent course. We don’t know what might have happened otherwise. Unfortunately, history knows no subjunctive mood.