Survival in contemporary Africa

There is a growing consensus that despite the emerging sites of hope on the African political landscape, the region still faces daunting obstacles to growth, development and peace.  Contemporary discourses on Africa, even where optimistic, reveal a certain doubt as to the continent’s future. Statistical indicators of progress are hardly reflective of the conditions of living and the challenges from structural distortions and contradictions remain formidable. The end of the cold war and the increasing integration of the continent into the global economy have generated new dynamics, pressures, expectations and fears.
The triumph of the market and the demise of communism has not only increased the power and influence of donors, lenders and the multilaterals, but also posed severe challenges and opportunities for the African continent. On one hand, there is the opportunity to fully integrate into the emerging global capitalist order to exploit the developments in science and technology, the new information revolution, and the expansion of the global market. Such integration, it is argued, will open up extensive opportunities for trade, investment, foreign aid and support for other developmental objectives. On the other, the changes in the global market hold out the risks of further marginalization and the redirection of investments and aid to other parts of the world.
The complaints about aid and compassion fatigue by the donors are evidence of increasing frustration with the intractable and complex problems and contradictions of the continent. It is contended by those who see the deepening crisis of the region as an inhibition to full and effective participation in the so called new global order that the legacies of colonial and neo-colonial exploitation and mismanagement, the crisis of the state and society, and conditions of poverty, foreign domination, instability, institutional and infrastructural decay and dislocation make effective participation in the global order almost impossible. Even the World Bank is of the view that Africa’s future, in the increasingly complex and competitive global order is at best bleak and uncertain, that it is ‘falling further behind the rest of the world,’ and that current projections point at a ‘depressed per capita income level’ for the future.
This sort of projection raises several questions, not just about the future of Africa but also about its post-cold war relations with other regions of the world. What sort of internal transformations are needed to empower the region to take advantage of current and future changes in the global order? Is the global system structured in such a way as to make it possible for a debt-ridden, crisis ridden and poverty stricken region to effectively and profitably participate in the emerging global dispensation?
How will ongoing implementation of orthodox structural adjustment packages as well as difficult political liberalization programmes in the context of deepening crisis and global marginalization facilitate or mediate Africa’s participation in the new globalization? Are current political balances sufficient to guarantee an effective and maybe productive interaction and participation in the global order? How has globalization affected the ongoing processes and politics of transition in Africa?
Is the global system really changing? What exactly do we mean by change? These questions might appear simplistic, even mundane. But they are important to a holistic appreciation of the depth and implications of current movements in the global system. Until the recent explosion of the Asian myth evidenced in the near total economic breakdown of the so called ‘Asian Tigers’ as well as the crisis in Latin America, Japan and parts of Europe, it was almost considered a sin to be critical of the new globalization, given its numerous promised benefits. The Asian crisis brought the world to a new reality and encouraged a re-examination of not just the role of the multilaterals but also the value of orthodox economic theory, especially in a developing country context.
Without doubt, the global system is entering a new era. The end of the 20th century has ushered in unprecedented and largely unanticipated changes, especially in the context of the rapidity and decisiveness with which these changes have occurred: the reunification of Germany with the collapse of the Berlin Wall; the peace talks between Israel and Palestine; the formal end of apartheid in South Africa; the collapse of the Soviet Union as a super power and nation; the widespread adoption of market reform programmes as dictated and supervised by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF); and the emergence of the United States as the hegemonic military and economic power in the world.
As well, we can add a renewed role for the United Nations especially in the areas of humanitarian relief, peacekeeping and peacemaking; the preponderance of micronationalism; and efforts by the United States to sell the ‘American way of life’ as the only credible alternative left for the entire world in the face of the assumed victory of the bourgeoisie over communism and totalitarianism.7 To this already impressive list of novel developments, we can also add the deluge of struggles for multipartyism which have altered the political landscape of many nations, especially in Africa.
These changes have precipitated a near redundancy of non-alignment as a political/ideological posture in global power relations; the drastic alteration of cold war based foreign policy platforms, and promoted the emergence of new economic alignments or trade blocs. Of course, we are also beginning to witness new immigration restrictions which ‘display more racist tendencies toward minorities, particularly of African descent. Interestingly, the end of the cold war and the triumph of the market and the United States have received intellectual support and rationalization from scholars like Francis Fukuyama in his ‘End of History’ thesis, and Samuel P. Huntington in his ‘Clash of Civilizations’ postulations.
The changes outlined above have, in several regards, altered the content and direction of global social, economic and political relations. As the World Bank jubilantly declared in its World Development Report 1995: ‘These are revolutionary times in the global economy. The embrace of market based development by many developing and former centrally planned economies, the opening of international markets, and great advances in the ease with which goods, capital and ideas flow around the world are bringing new opportunities, as well as risks, to billions of people. One can hardly disagree with this new euphoria: communications are faster, cheaper and more open; the activities of governments are increasingly more open to external scrutiny; and there are more discussions of economic cooperation and integration beyond ideological and political lines.
Even Cuba and communist China are doing more business with capitalist economies and carrying out internal reforms along market lines, even if they refuse to admit to such ideological somersaults. A crisis ridden continent like Africa, with most of the least developed nations of the world, is increasingly caught in the unpredictable and highly sophisticated and competitive vortex of this emerging global order. Unfortunately, at the economic level, Africa was not quite ready for these changes and so was caught unawares. Politically, however, the dynamics and demands of globalization have contributed to the political liberalization processes in Africa.
One can ask the question: Was Africa prepared for this new ‘revolution’? Are there institutions and structures on ground to receive, mediate, resist, reject, or recompose the products of ongoing changes? What are the ideological platforms on which Africa will be participating in the new globalization and engaging the powerful forces of monopoly capitalism? Finally, how will the plethora of contradictions, conflicts and suspicions all over the region, within and between nations, condition Africa’s location and role in the emerging order?
One would be really stretching the limits of generosity to claim that Africa was ready for the numerous developments within the continent, much less in other parts of the world. Africa was not even prepared for the dramatic changes that took place in South Africa that culminated in the election of Mandela as the country’s first post-apartheid president and the vigorous and aggressive expansion of South African businesses into other African economies. Beyond these, however, the new globalization is marked by other critical features that further demonstrate the weakness and vulnerability of the African economy.
One major feature of the new globalization is the increasing powerlessness of the state, at least, as far as regulating the movement of information, ideas, capital, even skills is concerned. As the World Bank admits, ‘Governments are increasingly seeking to improve the international competitiveness of their economies rather than shield them behind protective walls. The implication is that governments are taking steps to give more autonomy to private initiatives and to cede some political ground to powerful corporations. Rapid changes in information technology have greatly impacted on the autonomy, capabilities and spheres of action open to the nation state. Boutros Boutros-Ghali has observed that ‘(t)he time of absolute and exclusive sovereignty has passed’ and states must ‘find a balance between the needs of good internal governance and the requirements of an ever more interdependent world.
As is evident in Africa, the state is increasingly under pressure and attack, and quite a handful have become stagnant, exhausted or have collapsed outright. With the radical restructuring and weakening of the African state, the multilaterals have come to command unprecedented influence and power over national governments. They not only influence and determine the nature of economic policy but also political developments and contestations. Developed nations no longer hide behind diplomatic language and culture to express their political interests in their relations with developing states. Their control over information, foreign aid, loans, investment, and military hardware is now easily mobilized to support political agendas for poverty stricken and debt ridden states.
At times, this influence is conducted through overt support for particular non-governmental organizations or individuals with potential for taking over the reigns of power. At no time in the post-Westphalian history of the contemporary state system have non-state actors wielded more influence and power than at the moment. The breakdown of ideological orthodoxies and the search for new patterns of socio-economic and power relations have further reduced the relevance of the state in favour of less formal and private structures and institutions. The singular influence and power of election monitors in the current global order attest to the ever growing significance of non-state actors as newly elected or re-elected governments often require their stamp of approval for international acceptability and legitimacy.
On balance, it would appear that scientific, economic and social factors, rather than political developments, have contributed more significantly to the erosion of state sovereignty and in shaping the character of the new globalization in recent times. As the nations of the world came to depend more on each other, as transportation narrowed distances, as communications made it possible for people to interact and exchange information and ideas, and as nations became readily permeable to the power of new communications systems, the ability of the state to lay claim to some higher level of authority gradually weakened.
Of course since the 1980s, with the crisis in the former Soviet Union, and more so since the emergence of the independent republics, the triumph of the market has not only narrowed ideological positions but has also drawn nations together in the struggle to permeate markets, attract foreign aid and investments, and attract new technologies. What is instructive, however, is that in most of the ongoing discussions about the new globalization, Africa is hardly considered or taken seriously. This is despite the ‘encouraging progress made in transforming sub-Saharan Africa,’ and the far-reaching socio-economic and political reforms that governments have been forced to adopt to please lenders, donors and international pressure groups.
These reform packages, often imposed from abroad and supervised by the multilateral agencies and credit clubs, have served in no small measure to erode the autonomy and sovereignty of African states. The combination of externally designed, imposed, and supervised political and economic conditionalities – structural adjustment and political pluralism – is part of the conditions determining Africa’s integration into the emerging global order: as a dependent, vulnerable, weak, dominated, and almost helpless, peripheral actor in the new divisions of labour and power.
There is no doubting the fact that in a world relatively liberated from hard ideological constraints, ‘new technology is rewriting old concepts of sovereignty and over time will also change national objectives. Recent struggles for democracy in developing countries have benefited significantly from the cellular phone and fax machines which despotic and repressive governments could not control: ‘Ideas transmitted by satellite broadcasts, fax machines and internet ports are prying open even authoritarian regimes.
Most of these major technological contraptions are not produced or even assembled in Africa, save perhaps South Africa. Yet, this is a world that is increasingly being run and conditioned by technology, in particular, information technology. In Africa, except for a handful of countries like South Africa, business is still performed mostly manually, relying on outdated information, completely oblivious of new possibilities opened up by new technology. From banking to insurance, through import-export activities to information collection, processing and dissemination, Africa is still decades behind parts of Asia and Latin America, not to mention Europe and North America.
What has been referred to as the ‘digital age’ with ‘powerful data networks’ is drawing developing nations ‘into the borderless information economy. Nations of the world really have no choice about joining or opting out of the new information age. To opt out is to be isolated and cut off from the massive flow of ideas and information badly needed to move into the next century. On the other hand, participating in the information age requires a high degree of political openness, administrative flexibility, rapid changes in science and technology, even a revolutionary transformation of the educational system of the country.
Internet connections are expanding by 16% every month, fiber optics are transmitting 40 billion bits of data per second, and the US army claims that soon there will be as many computers as persons in the world. Governments have practically lost the capacity to keep pace with the generation, processing, manipulation and dissemination of information around the world. The World Bank further supports these claims when it notes that in line with the new global emphasis on the market as the prime mover of growth and development, ‘technological changes have made the world easier to navigate – goods, capital, people, and ideas travel faster and cheaper today than ever before. Underlying these changes have been huge reductions in transport and communications costs.
So far, African states are not poised to move in the direction of exploiting these new developments. Yet, as African nations wallow in confusion, poverty, superstition, the recycling of outdated information and ideas, and continue to rely on old and already discarded technology, around the world, medical practices, experiments in science and technology, banking services, academic research and so on are being undertaken in cooperation by persons separated by hundreds of thousands of miles. It is embarrassing to note that over three quarters of the faculty at African institutions lack computers and have no access to internet facilities.
All over the world, even in the most developed market economies, governments are rapidly losing control over the flow of money. As the IMF itself has admitted: ‘This integration of financial markets is not only irreversible, but it can only broaden and intensify in the future. Let us not make the mistake of believing that the answer to financial crises lies in reviewing this globalization through exchange controls and less open markets. The most efficient central bank cannot boast of having full knowledge of or control over domestic financial transactions. The computer has put within the reach of average citizens the power to execute complex banking transactions within the confines of their homes. Geographical location or currency denominations now mean almost nothing to the new financial marketplace.
Where does Africa stand in this new globalization of the financial marketplace? The answer is ‘nowhere’: the currencies are either worthless (Zaire, Somalia), excessively devalued (Ghana and Zambia) or generally inconvertible. Most of the countries are so poor that their central banks simply exist in name. Others can no longer control inflation, while several countries only do business in the weekly auctioning of foreign exchange in the name of rationalizing the financial market as part of a usually poorly implemented adjustment package. Businesses are not going into Africa because the near worthlessness of the currencies is depressing the market and there are practically no buyers for non-essential commodities and services. Banks are yet to be computerized, and transactions still take forever.
The most powerful actors in the new globalization are transnational corporations. They are rapidly streamlining technology, labour training, utilization and exploitation as well as production processes. This also includes a strategy to, as much as possible, streamline and rationalize consumption around the world to facilitate the production and marketing of goods and services without frequent retooling, investments in fixed capital or skill development. The end of the cold war is strengthening the power and influence of the corporations and encouraging them to move into untested waters.
The end of apartheid encouraged McDonalds into South Africa and encouraged South African corporations to move rapidly into neighbouring countries. While western business interests have not been deterred by the uncertainties in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, ‘the foreign direct investment response has been, at best, hesitant and weak in Africa. As Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has noted, though most African states have developed ‘new investment codes; the number of sectors previously reserved for nationals has been sharply reduced; screening procedures have been simplified and one-stop investment centres have been established; the relative equity share that foreigners are allowed to hold in enterprises has been raised; and tax holidays of up to ten years or more are now common …the annual average flow of foreign direct investment to Africa over the 1985-89 period was $2.6 billion.
In the same period, Latin America and the Caribbean received $6.0 billion, the East, South and South-East Asia received $13.6 billion, North America received $55.8 billion, and Western Europe received $60.8 billion. In fact, of the 23 Sub-Saharan African countries with more than two million people, ten had no foreign direct investment inflows and only six had inflows of more than two dollars per capita. It is clear, therefore, that the new globalization is not redirecting resources towards Africa in any credible or substantial sense. Rather, unlike other developing regions, and despite the rapidly expanding global financial market, Africa has not expanded its ‘exports of manufactures’; it remains a producer of ‘primary commodities and terms of trade have continued to fall. Increasingly lacking the capacity to generate foreign exchange, and without an appreciable inflow of investments, even to those countries which have clearly decided for open markets and liberal democracy like Zambia, Africa cannot be an effective actor in the new globalization.
Africa entered the 20th century as a dependent, foreign dominated, technologically backward, politically unstable, vulnerable, and marginal actor in the global system. Decades of foreign aid, albeit informed by cold war considerations and calculations, political support for ideological client states, and investments, even if in enclave sectors, produced no appreciable change in the region’s unprecedented deterioration, dislocation and decay. The reasons for this unenviable situation are not lost to observers and scholars of Africa.
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