Transforming Mozambique: The Politics of Privatization, 1975-2000 (review)

As a self-described Afro-Marxist state, Mozambique became one of the most heavily statist economies in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet between its official abandonment of socialism in 1990 and 2001, the country had privatized more than 80 percent of some one thousand state-owned enterprises. Thus it appears that Mozambique has fully embraced the neoliberal prescriptions calling for privatization and market liberalization. This transformation was guided by Frelimo, the same party that once ardently championed state socialism, providing some indication of the complex and sometimes contradictory dimensions of political economy in contemporary Mozambique.

Of course, the discontinuities of this history are obvious. Indeed, rapid and aggressive privatization by a pluralist (if not wholly democratic) state would seem to signal a significant break with past economic dirigisme and one-partyism. Yet M. Anne Pitcher argues that this twenty-five-year period of "transformation" was also marked by significant continuities, despite the apparent triumph of the neoliberal privatization agenda. In what she calls "interrupted continuities" (237), many colonial-era firms and capitalists have reasserted themselves by reclaiming former holdings or investing anew in Mozambique. The predominance of multinational, local non-African (Portuguese and Indian), and South African capital has also squeezed out most blacks, along with vestiges of the "revolution." Nonetheless, important aspects of the Marxist era also persist. Notably, the state maintains a significant shareholding, and, contrary to facile arguments about the inexorable march of neoliberal globalization that sees all influences as external, the state (and Frelimo party elites) has in many ways shaped the process of liberalization and privatization.

The book is divided into seven chapters, with the greatest attention devoted to the historical and analytical frameworks and to the manufacturing and agricultural sectors. Pitcher draws chiefly on Peter Evans's work on the role of the state to derive her analytical framework; however, she prudently eschews some of the contradictory aspects of Evans's "embedded autonomy" approach, which are hard to disentangle and increasingly appear grounded in the East Asian experience. Instead, she sticks to his more replicable and generalizable framework, which sees the state in a variety of development(al) roles vis-à-vis the private sector, acting alternatively as demiurge or midwife, engaging in husbandry of business, and so on. In postcolonial Mozambique the state played the demiurge, directly involving itself in the production process in order to transform the economy. This explicit hostility to the private sector has today been replaced by elite opportunism and pragmatism. But since both eras saw the enrichment of an elite few and the exploitation of small farmers, laborers and others, Pitcher characterizes the contemporary phenomenon as one of "transformative preservation" (6 and passim).

The final chapter, "The End of Marx and the Beginning of the Market?", provides a particularly intriguing treatment, through examination of a series of commercial advertisements, of how various companies, some still state owned, have adapted to competition. To this reader, this section appears to step out of the traditional confines of political economy by blending approaches more often seen in anthropology, psychology, and marketing. Analyzing the content of these ads, Pitcher reveals their double entendres and their efforts to appeal to different audiences—local, regional, and international—sometimes successfully, other times less so. Some may argue that the bulk of this chapter is somewhat tangential to the discussions about the history, mechanisms, and impact of privatization that make up the rest of the book. Possibly, but this is at best a minor quibble. I found the chapter a fascinating review and a creative way of illustrating (literally) the ways state and private sector have endeavored to reposition themselves as market actors and occasionally competitors.

The shortcomings of the book are few. Pitcher discusses a large number of transactions involving state acquisitions and divestitures over a quarter century. It is at times difficult to keep track of the major privatizations discussed: large versus small, the overall costs involved in various sales, the...