Africa’s ever-recurring armed conflicts and civil wars and the new waves of globalisation in the post-Cold War era have accentuated the marginalisation of a continent so severely that it is now at the periphery of the periphery of the world.
The failure to deconstruct and reconstruct Africa’s inherited colonial economy has exacerbated centuries-old dependence and dispossession. The optimism heralded by the era of political independence since the halcyon days of the 1960s has long since evaporated, even as one sub-Saharan country after another presently cele- brates its golden jubilee.
Africa’s most serious mistake has been the separation of politics from economics. In doing so, the discipline of economics has been severed from its origins of political philosophy and ethics and has been robbed of its human dimension. The obsessive concern with growth economics to the detriment of a holistic approach to sustainable human development has conveyed a heartless message: that people are irrelevant.
Instead, what seems to be important are fine theories and technicalities rather than the combination of the political, social, cultural, psychological and institutional factors. The emergence of the development merchant system (DMS) — with its marabouts, soothsayers and latter-day prophets — has replaced human-centred development.
It is sad to admit that the African state as invented by Europeans has neither been deconstructed nor reconstituted. The tragedy is that no serious and comprehensive attempt has been made to address inhibitive anti-development factors.
This is a far cry from the outpouring of optimism that followed news of Nelson Mandela’s release from jail after 27 years of incarceration — relayed on the eve of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa’s (ECA) seminal international conference on popular participation in development and transformation held in Arusha, Tanzania, in February 1990. Participants saw it as a good omen for the realisation of the overarching objectives of the meeting and immediately dispatched messages of congratulations in this sudden climate of expectation.
But, like the 52 other African countries that had become independent before institutional apartheid was transcended in 1994, South Africa, for a variety of reasons, settled for democratic transition rather than radical reconstruction and deconstruction of state and society. The ANC had to surrender the notion of restructuring South Africa’s socio-economic inequalities and instead embrace the neoliberal orthodoxy.
The now all but forgotten Reconstruction and Development Programme of the early 1990s was floated as the potential panacea to South Africa’s socio-economic ills. This programme was a social democratic agenda in content and orientation. It was soon, however, superseded by the growth, employment and redistribution programme (Gear), which had economic objectives and conformed with the “Washington Consensus”. Gear’s implicit message was that human-centred development and “good governance” should be subject to the dictates of liberalisation and marketisation.
There is no doubt that by opting for Gear, post-apartheid South Africa has demonstrated that it is “just another kid on the block” and, in the wake of the disillusionment with the programme, the concept of a “people’s contract” once again re-entered the South African policy lexicon on the “developmental state”.
The reassertion, by both the ECA and the UN Development Programme in 1990, of the need to return to a holistic human development paradigm is explicitly addressed by the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad), the initiative unveiled in 2001 by several African governments, led by South Africa.
It is in this context that South Africa’s paradigm of Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative (Asgisa) was developed by 2006, specifically in a bid to halve unemployment and poverty by 2014, in line with the UN Millennium Development Goals. Asgisa pins much of its hopes on partnership between business, civil society and labour, with a focus on the micro-economy. The removal of binding constraints — which Asgisa relies heavily on the Reserve Bank and national treasury to facilitate — will be a boost to the production of public goods and services, which provide employment and reduce poverty.
Despite some of the shortcomings of post-apartheid South Africa’s socio-economic development, since 1990 and, particularly, since May 1994, South Africa has left no one in doubt of its intention to remain within Africa and to play a proactive leadership role. The country has been a constructive participant in the Southern African Customs Union (SACU) as well as the Southern African Development Community (SADC), though it has not joined the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (Comesa).
Critically though, what South Africa and the rest of Africa need is not just economic growth — important as this is — but holistic human development and a culture of personal and social discipline. Only then will African states be on the road to becoming “rainbow nations of God”.
Adebayo Adedeji is executive director of the African Centre for Development and Strategic Studies, Nigeria. He was chair of South Africa’s Peer Review Process, and was executive secretary of the UN’s Economic Commission for Africa from 1975 to 1991