Neoliberal Africa About the author Graham Harrison teaches politics at the University of Sheffield. He has written on democratisation, corruption, governance and the World Bank, with a particular interest in Africa and especially eastern Africa. He is an editor of New Political Economy and is coordinating editor of Review of African Political Economy. Neoliberal Africa The impact of global social engineering graham harrison Zed Books london & new york Neoliberal Africa: The Impact of Global Social Engineering was first published in 2010 by Zed Books Ltd, 7 Cynthia Street, London n1 9jf, uk and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, ny 10010, usa www.zedbooks.co.uk Copyright © Graham Harrison 2010 The right of Graham Harrison to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 Typeset in Monotype Bulmer by illuminati, Grosmont Index by John Barker Cover designed by Safehouse Creative Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cert no. SGS-COC-2953 CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne Distributed in the USA exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St Martin’s Press, llc, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, ny 10010, usa All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of Zed Books Ltd. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data available isbn 978 1 84813 319 8 Hb isbn 978 1 84813 320 4 Pb isbn 978 1 84813 321 1 Eb Contents 1 Neoliberalism in Africa, neoliberalism and Africa 1 2 Neoliberalism in Africa: a failed ideology 36 3 Practices of neoliberalism: repertoires, habits and conduct 61 4 Global neoliberal practice: institutions and regulation 77 5 Neoliberal practice in Africa 97 6 Neoliberalism’s final frontier? 118 7 Conclusion: neoliberalism’s prospects 143 References 149 Index 171 i Neoliberalism in Africa, neoliberalism and Africa Africa at the forefront [Africa] has been thrust into modern world history in incon- trovertibly powerful and long-lasting ways. The slave and tropical commodity trades changed the world, industrial and non-industrial alike. The recalcitrance of European theory in the face of Africa is a construct of the same history, a co-production of Africa and Europe over centuries of economic and political engagement. (Guyer 2004: 14) Lagos is not catching up with us. Rather, we may be catching up with Lagos. (Koolhaas et al. in Ferguson 2007: 75) It is commonplace to find passing references to Africa (in this book meaning south of the Sahara) as a ‘switched off’ place in the global political economy. Indeed, some major and excellent volumes on global neoliberalism simply ignore Africa (Campbell and Pedersen 2001; Soederberg et al. 2005). It is for this reason that David Moore rightly states that ‘studies of globalisation often ignore, or provide only passing coverage of, Africa’ (2001: 909; see also Brown 2006). This ignorance is not just an expression of the alignment of international studies with the structuring of economic and state power and Western predominance (Hobson 2 neoliberal africa and Seabrook 2007; Engel and Rye Olsen 2005); it is also a product of the arguments and reflections of many scholars who are par- ticularly interested in Africa (for an illustrative set of examples, see Sender 1999: 89–90; for the orthodox view, see Nissanke and Thorbecke 2008: 1). In the West more generally, Africa is repre- sented in the media and mainstream culture as remote, exceptional and characterised as lacking to some degree or other the proper properties held by the ‘international community’ or ‘globalisation’ (Elbadawi and Sambanis 2000: 245; Werbner and Ranger 1996). In broad sweep, and not without a little licence for flair of expression, Achille Mbembe makes a striking summary: Africa … is portrayed as a vast dark cave where every benchmark and distinction come together in total confusion, and the rifts of tragic and unhappy human history stand revealed; a mixture of the half- created and the incomplete, strange signs, compulsive movements, in short a bottomless abyss where everything is noise, yawning gaps and primordial chaos. (2001: 3) There is a lot to take in and unpack here, but it is difficult to disagree with the import of this overview: public and popular cultures in the West tend to represent Africa in terms of absences, delinquencies or alienness – each of which serves to reinforce a sense of Africa’s marginality from any sense of global convergence and/or progress. The robustness of this general trope is all the more striking for the fact that it has persisted throughout a period in which another discourse, that of globalisation, has worked to represent the world as increasingly interconnected and converging (Rupert 2000; Hay and Marsh 1999). Discursively, talk of globalisation can be understood as a recent and virulent incarnation of an expansive liberalism (Hovden and Keene 2001) which aims to encapsulate national, cultural and economic differences as ephemeral: either as differences that don’t make a difference, as ‘historically contingent’ (Tsakalotos 2005: 894) or as ‘rigidities and vestiges’ (Bourdieu 1998) that temporarily encumber liberal realisations. Within this view, neoliberalism in africa 3 Homo economicus is seen as the originary state of the human being. In other words, socio-economic diversity does not undermine the notion – or faith (Weis 2004: 462; Geschiere and Nyamnjoh 2000: 444; Marangos 2008: 238, and especially Comaroff and Comaroff 2000) – that there is a deeper global logic of convergence towards a particular form of sociability. That form of sociability is based in two lodestones: the free market and the rational individual (Williams 1999; Vlachou and Christou 1999: 2; Tsakalotos 2004: 10ff.). It is worth noting that neoliberal ideas frame rationality in a specific fashion – individualised, utilitarian and egoistic – which by no means exhausts ontologies of rationality (Manor 1991: 311). It is this sociability – and the premiss that this is a founda- tional or essential human sociability – that allows globalisation discourse to imagine a converging humanity without articulating any significant aspects of coercion or severe disruption but rather as a positive-sum, consensual and stable process. The ‘challenges’, ‘issues’ and ‘problems’ with globalisation in this liberal view are second-order, concerning reform scheduling and design (Sachs 2005; Stiglitz 2007), the pace and nature of market-led moderni- sation (Easterly 2007; de Soto 2001), or the means to deal with ‘externalities’ such as environmental damage. In sum, a powerful discourse of globalisation has emerged in the last twenty years which projects a global process of integration and harmonisation – convergence – which is in all societies’ interests. These two discourses – of African exceptionalism and liberal integrative globalisation – produce a dissonance: an awkwardly conjoined sense of the universal and the particular in which Africa’s place in any narrative of globalisation is significantly underspecified compared with other world regions. Nevertheless, some account of Africa must be made in order for those who advocate the liberal globalising canon to claim a universal world- view. This account creates a global cognitive landscape in which ‘globalisation is passing Africa by’, Africa is not fully globalised, and analogous phrases. This is often the metaphor evoked in IMF
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