Imperialism and the Democratization Process in Africa

The main damage caused by this uncritical acceptance and adoption of orthodox monetarist prescriptions clearly evidenced in the inability of “African politicians … to articulate any original or critical view on economic policy…contributes to a sense that there is little to choose between rival parties, other than the moral characters and competence of the people who lead them. It follows that political parties tend to compete for the same social constituencies as their rivals and find it hard to identify and represent any social or economic interest group which has been previously under-represented, unless, of course, such a group is ethnically defined,” (Ellis 1993: 139). In many of these nations therefore, there is an extreme ethnicization and personalization of politics- the struggle is reduced to removing Abacha, Moi, Kaunda, Mobutu, Eyadema and so on. The pro-democracy groups do not make any new arguments. They have no new constituencies, and rather than create a holistic agenda linked to the historical struggles for empowerment and democratization, they engage in name-calling, political opportunism, grand-standing, defensive radicalism, and the politics of limited objectives. The policies of the West, the Fund and the Bank are accepted hook, line and sinker as the MMD did in Zambia. Though the Bank belatedly recognized the political dimensions of the African crisis in its 1989 report, a point made by Africans a long time ago, its agenda for the new politics is to use it to implement adjustment to facilitate debt-repayment, and the penetration of African markets by western capital. As Adedeji (1993: 51) has noted, “all the SAP policy instruments exacerbate the openness and external dependence of the African economies.”