Accumulation in an African Periphery: A Theoretical Framework

AFTERWORD

84 AFTERWORD As this manuscript was going to the press, the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced at the end of the G20 summit held in London at the beginning of April 2009 that the Washington consensus was over. The old Washington consensus is over. Today we have reached a new consensus that we take global action together to deal with the problems we face, that we will do what is necessary to restore growth and jobs, that we will take essential action to rebuild confidence and trust in our financial system and to prevent a crisis such as this ever happening again.28 One would have thought that Gordon Brown would have gone further and apologised on behalf of the G20’s predecessor, the G7, for the social and economic havoc that the “Washington consensus” caused to millions of people, particularly in the South. One does not expect imperialist masters to apologise. The purpose of the G20 meeting was to revamp the capitalistimperialist system in light of the crisis and changing balance of global power. One columnist characterised the G20 statement as essentially “an effort to rewrite the rules of capitalism”, while Paul Taylor of Reuters opined that it was recognition of the shift in global power. The London G20 summit shows just how far power has ebbed from the United States, and from the West in general. Until late 2008, the Group of Eight mostly Western industrialized nations — the United States, Canada, Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Russia and Japan — was the key forum for economic governance. 85 The new, unwieldy top table has emerged faster than anyone dared predict because a humbled America and a chastened Europe need the money and cooperation of rising powers such as China, India, Russia, Brazil and Saudi Arabia to fix the world economy.29 The top table is “unwieldy” because the former ghettoised countries from the global South - China, India, Brazil, and Saudi Arabia – are sharing it. Africa still has no place even at the “unwieldy” table. Instead, at the meeting of African finance ministers hosted by the IMF chief and President Kikwete of Tanzania in Dar es Salaam just weeks before the G20 summit, the IMF presented itself as the champion and spokesperson for Africa. In a public lecture at the University of Dar es Salaam, Dominique Strauss-Kahn said with a straight face that “The one policy suits all approach is wrong since countries have different needs. In one country privatization can be the solution while in another, the solution can be nationalisation.”30 All this was said with a straight face and without apology, when the IMF/World Bank-dictated privitisations have caused social upheavals and destructionofjobsandlivelihoodsinAfrica.Virtuallyeverymajor privitisation in Tanzania, for instance, from telecommunications to railways, banks and mines, has been a tragic tale of financial scandal and social upheaval. This author subtitled his 2006 book Let the People Speak (Shivji 2006), “Tanzania down the road to neo-liberalism”. We are now approaching the end of that road. It is time for the people to speak and for intellectuals to rethink, reassess, and chart out a new, alternative path for African development, a path that will never again marginalise African masses under the spurious rule of elites in collusion with imperialism. 86 Together with the approaching end of neo-liberalism, the development discourse will also need to change. ‘Poverty reduction or alleviation’ strategies, which dismissed the masses as the poor, while elevating the so-called private sector (meaning private capital) as the ‘engine of growth’, need to be subjected to close scrutiny. The scrutiny has begun. As Gordon Brown was burying the “Washington consensus” in London, Thandika Mkandawire, a respected African scholar, was addressing REPOA researchers in Dar es Salaam on “the role of the state for marketled development in a developing economy”. While reaffirming the role of a developmental state in Africa, Mkandawire pointedly questioned the meaning of “market-led development”. Markets do not lead; it is social actors who lead, he asserted. The central question, therefore, is which social actors and what type of state would lead development in Africa. In other words, we need to discover – concretely – the agency of development. The questions raised in the last section of this monograph are therefore very pertinent. We need to go back to the basics of political economy. The national, social, and agrarian questions need to be addressed, analysed, and understood...