Imperialism and the Democratization Process in Africa

At the same time the state in the capitalist economies continued to expand. In America the state funds universities, public transportation, research and development, and subsidizes health care. It provides food stamps and several entitlement projects. It provides thousands of scholarships to its citizens. It regulates the economy and through frequent intervention, tries to control inflation and prices. It subsidizes agriculture and even pays farmers not to grow crops. It uses the military to provide jobs and bails out ailing banks and big corporations that have been looted by corrupt businessmen or poorly managed. The list is endless. The state in the advanced capitalist society is actually more interventionist than the state in Africa. Yet, it is this attack against the state, in an environment where the bourgeoisie is weak and dependent that is often overlooked or underplayed in prescribing the monetarist policies which have not been directed at the greatest debtor-nation in the world, America.
The state has always been part of the processes of change, accumulation, domination, exploitation, and progress. The new Western agenda does not differentiate between the state as an institution and the state type. As well, the state is not conceived in its totality or in its social context, in this context it is easy to reduce it to government and blame it for all the ills of the continent: “African economies were dominated by large, inefficient public enterprises. Private sector activity was heavily regulated…Excessive controls and regulations encouraged corruption. Economic activity became distorted. The biggest profits were earned not from production, but from gaining access to favours from the bureaucracy….Many of the activities undertaken by African governments are still harmful to economic growth” (Chalker 1993: 24). This sort of position is impressionistic. First, how come foreign companies operating in and employing Africans manage to reap huge profits annually? Second, I am not aware of any major parastatal in Africa without a major foreign partner which supplies the high level skills, information, technology, management, and at times capital. How come only Africans take the blame when these foreign operated or foreign managed parastatals go bankrupt and fail to make profits? Third, the explanation of corruption by Lynda Chalker does not explain how come there is so much corruption in Western economies in spite of the efficiency and so on. After all, the savings and loans scandal in America makes the likes of Mobutu, Babangida, Nguema, and Moi look at amateurs when it comes to corruption. Finally, fourth, Chalker does not explain why a real bourgeoisie should rely on the state or bureaucracy for accumulation, why it should be inherently committed to accumulation through unproductive (though lucrative) alliances with imperialism. On the one hand the African bourgeoisie is blamed for being corrupt and unproductive, and on the other he or she is encouraged to maintain the unequal and exploitative relations with foreign capital which makes it easy to penetrate, dominate and exploit African economies. Let us briefly turn to a few elements in this new western agenda for Africa.