Africa and the New World Order (review)

Ihonvbere offers an interesting account of Africa's marginalization in the new world order. The first chapter is refreshing in the clarity of issues it discusses, and the author deserves credit for casting his net wide enough to include several major factors that not only explain African predicaments but also structure the remaining six chapters of the book: the experience of slavery, the colonial legacy, the repressive postcolonial and rent-seeking kleptocratic state, an exploitative international economy, the global division of labor, and denigration of local cultures and values.

Chapters Two and Three discuss the debt crisis and structural adjustment policies. Ihonvbere evaluates the negative impact of the international division of labor and the exploitative international economy on Africa. He maintains that Africa's underdevelopment is primarily the result of shortsighted policies of the World Bank and IMF. These policies emphasize cash production at the expense of food production, making Africa more dependent on food imports. Ihonvbere's solution to the negative effect of the debt crisis and structural adjustments is economic regionalism, which he develops in Chapter Five. This process should equip Africa with an internal dynamism capable of sustaining inward development that was broken during the slave trade and the colonial system.

Chapters Four and Six offer a balanced discussion of abuses of human rights and failed democratic transitions. Ihonvbere's argument that democratization cannot take root in Africa unless there is sustained economic growth and a vibrant civil society corresponds with mainstream analyses of democratization and economic development. The last chapter browses the future of Africa within the new world order, which is delegitimizing many states unless they adapt. Taken together, the seven chapters allow one to discern one major explanation of poverty and economic failure in Africa: the failed state as a reproduction of the colonial state.

Despite the insights and wealth of information in the book, several substantial and methodological pitfalls should be underlined. First, the debt crisis is mostly internal although some external factors have accelerated it. The crisis, which started in the mid-1970s, evolved concomitantly with the accumulation of enormous windfalls from the rise of prices of primary commodities in the world markets. African leaders neither invested their export earnings in productive endeavors nor postponed their consumption by paying off some of their debts. They became victims of the "Dutch disease." As African countries were accumulating revenues from exports in the 1970s and early 1980s, their food production was declining while food imports were increasing. Huge export windfalls lined the pockets of corrupt political elites who spent the money ruinously. Pathological patrimonialism has grown considerably, reinforcing administrative ineptitude as export earnings channel millions of dollars into capital cities. The ruling coalitions appropriate these resources, and complaints are viewed as a threat to state security, which often result in crackdowns, disappearances, and extrajudicial killings (Emizet 1998). Blaming the World Bank and the IMF overlooks the survival strategy of these coalitions. Generally, they control state resources by excluding the preferences of potential rivals and the people from the policy-making process. Domestic policies have thus hampered development.

Second, in order to evaluate adjustment programs one must picture African economies without them. Operationally, the objective of adjustment programs--the Washington Consensus--consists of bridging the gap between aggregate demand and aggregate supply as well as creating favorable conditions for market operations. The usual measures are market-oriented policies, wage freezes, monetary and fiscal restriction policies, financial reforms, and devaluation. These policies serve as restraining measures to control the patronage and lavish behavior of African leaders, because they have dismantled all indigenous agencies of restraint, such as the Central Bank and the Ministry of Finances, by placing them under their control. An agency of restraint is "an institution whose goal is to protect public assets from depletion, prevent inflationary money printing, prevent corruption, protect socially productive groups from exploitation, and enforce contracts" (Collier 1991, 155). In the absence...