Modernization and the Crisis of Development in Africa: the Nigerian experience (review)

This book revisits what in the two decades preceding the end of the Cold War was popularly known as ‘the African development crisis’. Nigeria, one of Africa’s largest economies, is used as case study. The core aim of the book is ‘to interrogate the central role of modernization in Africa’s development trajectory’ (p. 5). Based on a searching critique of the modernization literature, the author assembles a plethora of theoretical and empirical evidence to prove that, as opposed to enhancing development, the modernization paradigm is responsible for Africa’s development crisis and has reinforced the peripheral role of African countries in the global capitalist system. This argument is not entirely novel. It is indeed a core argument of many dependency-school and Marxist political economy scholars that dominated the discourse of African development crisis throughout the 1980s and 1990s. The collapse of the communist bloc and the end of the Cold War has not only had a significant effect on the African left – once the champion of the anti-modernization debate in the continent – but has also seen many stalwarts gravitate to the ‘centre ground’ and ‘right’ of the ideological spectrum. Dibua adopts ‘a radical political economy approach’ in his analysis (p. 6).

The author makes a spirited argument in Chapter 2 that the dominant neoliberal solutions to Africa’s development crisis promoted by the International Financial Institutions (IFIs) are an ideological extension of the discredited modernization school that hitherto dominated the African development discourse. Like the neo-Keynesian state-led modernization approach to development, partly blamed for the developmental failures of the pre-1970s, Dibua argues that the contemporary IFI-inspired approach to development in Africa is flawed, not least because it promotes Western-centric forms of globalization as models of development in Africa and the global South.

The most important contribution of this book is its analysis of the Nigerian experience. In seven of his ten chapters, Dibua presents a systematic anatomy of development planning in both colonial and post-colonial Nigeria. He demonstrates how, through their self-appointed ‘modernizing mission’, the colonialists laid the foundation of the modernization paradigm and entrenched the necessary coercive institutions for its perpetuation in Nigeria’s development process (Chapter 3). In chapters 4–9, he critically analyses a barrage of post-colonial policies, including the ‘democratic experiments’ of the various civilian republics; indigenization of foreign enterprises; short- and mediumterm national development planning; industrialization by import substitution and technology transfer; land/agrarian reforms; public infrastructure and low-cost housing development; the structural adjustment programme; and women ‘empowerment’ programmes. These diverse programmes, according to Dibua, reinforce modernization values as they tend to foist and foster the structures of capitalist accumulation.

There are a few conceptual difficulties associated with Dibua’s dismissal of what he describes as ‘modernization-inspired’ scholarship on Africa. For instance, though Dibua berates neo-liberal theories because of ‘their preoccupation with grand models’ (p. 9), his so-called ‘radical political economy approach’ is no less guilty of grand theorizing and grandstanding. Needless to say, in both its episteme and origin, the Marxist political economy approach is ‘Western’ – a fact acknowledged by the author (p. 23), albeit without showing what makes the paradigm more suitable to the African situation.

Paradoxically, Dibua castigates Western Africanists who draw comparisons between post-colonial African development patterns and particular episodes/stages in the history of Europe; however, in many pages of the book he makes references to contemporary political events in Europe and the USA (for example, high-profile scandals involving lobbying, money laundering and inflation of contracts) to show that some of the malpractices in Africa also obtain in the West. On what basis, therefore, would Dibua justify his emphasis on context-specificity? Finally, Dibua criticizes protagonists of the neo-liberal paradigm – in my view quite rightly – for their IFI-related emphasis on ‘rolling back the state’ and ‘by-passing the state’ in the development process...