Neoliberal Africa: the impact of global social engineering

186 Pages·2010·1.75 MB·English

by  Graham Harrison

Neoliberal Africa
About the author
Graham Harrison teaches politics at the University of Sheffield.
He has written on democratisation, corruption, governance and
the World Bank, with a particular interest in Africa and especially
eastern Africa. He is an editor of New Political Economy and is
coordinating editor of Review of African Political Economy.
Neoliberal Africa
The impact of global social engineering
graham harrison

Zed Books
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Neoliberal Africa: The Impact of Global Social Engineering was first published
in 2010 by Zed Books Ltd, 7 Cynthia Street, London n1 9jf, uk
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Copyright © Graham Harrison 2010
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isbn 978 1 84813 320 4 Pb
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Contents
1 Neoliberalism in Africa, neoliberalism and Africa 1
2 Neoliberalism in Africa: a failed ideology 36
3 Practices of neoliberalism: repertoires, habits
and conduct 61
4 Global neoliberal practice: institutions
and regulation 77

5 Neoliberal practice in Africa 97
6 Neoliberalism’s final frontier? 118
7 Conclusion: neoliberalism’s prospects 143
References 149
Index 171

i
Neoliberalism in Africa,
neoliberalism and Africa
Africa at the forefront
[Africa] has been thrust into modern world history in incon-
trovertibly powerful and long-lasting ways. The slave and
tropical commodity trades changed the world, industrial and
non-industrial alike. The recalcitrance of European theory in the
face of Africa is a construct of the same history, a co-production
of Africa and Europe over centuries of economic and political
engagement. (Guyer 2004: 14)
Lagos is not catching up with us. Rather, we may be catching up
with Lagos. (Koolhaas et al. in Ferguson 2007: 75)

It is commonplace to find passing references to Africa (in this
book meaning south of the Sahara) as a ‘switched off’ place in
the global political economy. Indeed, some major and excellent
volumes on global neoliberalism simply ignore Africa (Campbell
and Pedersen 2001; Soederberg et al. 2005). It is for this reason
that David Moore rightly states that ‘studies of globalisation often
ignore, or provide only passing coverage of, Africa’ (2001: 909;
see also Brown 2006). This ignorance is not just an expression
of the alignment of international studies with the structuring of
economic and state power and Western predominance (Hobson
2 neoliberal africa
and Seabrook 2007; Engel and Rye Olsen 2005); it is also a product
of the arguments and reflections of many scholars who are par-
ticularly interested in Africa (for an illustrative set of examples,
see Sender 1999: 89–90; for the orthodox view, see Nissanke and
Thorbecke 2008: 1). In the West more generally, Africa is repre-
sented in the media and mainstream culture as remote, exceptional
and characterised as lacking to some degree or other the proper
properties held by the ‘international community’ or ‘globalisation’
(Elbadawi and Sambanis 2000: 245; Werbner and Ranger 1996). In
broad sweep, and not without a little licence for flair of expression,
Achille Mbembe makes a striking summary:
Africa … is portrayed as a vast dark cave where every benchmark and
distinction come together in total confusion, and the rifts of tragic
and unhappy human history stand revealed; a mixture of the half-
created and the incomplete, strange signs, compulsive movements,
in short a bottomless abyss where everything is noise, yawning gaps
and primordial chaos. (2001: 3)
There is a lot to take in and unpack here, but it is difficult to
disagree with the import of this overview: public and popular
cultures in the West tend to represent Africa in terms of absences,
delinquencies or alienness – each of which serves to reinforce a
sense of Africa’s marginality from any sense of global convergence
and/or progress.

The robustness of this general trope is all the more striking
for the fact that it has persisted throughout a period in which
another discourse, that of globalisation, has worked to represent
the world as increasingly interconnected and converging (Rupert
2000; Hay and Marsh 1999). Discursively, talk of globalisation can
be understood as a recent and virulent incarnation of an expansive
liberalism (Hovden and Keene 2001) which aims to encapsulate
national, cultural and economic differences as ephemeral: either as
differences that don’t make a difference, as ‘historically contingent’
(Tsakalotos 2005: 894) or as ‘rigidities and vestiges’ (Bourdieu 1998)
that temporarily encumber liberal realisations. Within this view,
neoliberalism in africa 3
Homo economicus is seen as the originary state of the human being.
In other words, socio-economic diversity does not undermine the
notion – or faith (Weis 2004: 462; Geschiere and Nyamnjoh 2000:
444; Marangos 2008: 238, and especially Comaroff and Comaroff
2000) – that there is a deeper global logic of convergence towards
a particular form of sociability. That form of sociability is based
in two lodestones: the free market and the rational individual
(Williams 1999; Vlachou and Christou 1999: 2; Tsakalotos 2004:
10ff.). It is worth noting that neoliberal ideas frame rationality in a
specific fashion – individualised, utilitarian and egoistic – which by
no means exhausts ontologies of rationality (Manor 1991: 311).
It is this sociability – and the premiss that this is a founda-
tional or essential human sociability – that allows globalisation
discourse to imagine a converging humanity without articulating
any significant aspects of coercion or severe disruption but rather
as a positive-sum, consensual and stable process. The ‘challenges’,
‘issues’ and ‘problems’ with globalisation in this liberal view are
second-order, concerning reform scheduling and design (Sachs
2005; Stiglitz 2007), the pace and nature of market-led moderni-
sation (Easterly 2007; de Soto 2001), or the means to deal with
‘externalities’ such as environmental damage. In sum, a powerful
discourse of globalisation has emerged in the last twenty years
which projects a global process of integration and harmonisation

– convergence – which is in all societies’ interests.
These two discourses – of African exceptionalism and liberal
integrative globalisation – produce a dissonance: an awkwardly
conjoined sense of the universal and the particular in which
Africa’s place in any narrative of globalisation is significantly
underspecified compared with other world regions. Nevertheless,
some account of Africa must be made in order for those who
advocate the liberal globalising canon to claim a universal world-
view. This account creates a global cognitive landscape in which
‘globalisation is passing Africa by’, Africa is not fully globalised,
and analogous phrases. This is often the metaphor evoked in IMF