Harrison G. Neoliberal Africa: The Impact of Global Social Engineering (ENG)

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Neoliberal Africa

About the author

Gr aha m Har rison 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

london & new york

Neoliberal Africa: The Impact of Global Social Engineering was ﬁrst published

in 2010 by Zed Books Ltd, 7 Cynthia Street, London n1 9jf, uk

and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, ny 10010, usa

www.zedbooks.co.uk

The right of Graham Harrison to be identiﬁed as the author

of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with

the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

Typeset in Monotype Bulmer

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Index by John Barker

Cover designed by Safehouse Creative

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

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Distributed in the USA exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of

St Martin’s Press, llc, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, ny 10010, usa

reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any

form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or

otherwise, without the prior permission of Zed Books Ltd.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data available

isbn 978 1 84813 319 8 Hb

isbn 978 1 84813 320 4 Pb

isbn 978 1 84813 321 1 Eb

Cert no. SGS-COC-2 953

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

5 Neoliberal practice in Africa 97

6 Neoliberalism’s ﬁnal frontier? 118

7 Conclusion: neoliberalism’s prospects 143

References 149

Index 171

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)

t 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

n e o l i b e r a l af r i c a

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,

n e o l i b e r a l i s m in a f r i c a

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