100
n e o l i b e r a l af r i c a
sugar by 428 per cent and that of a loaf of bread by 50 per cent,
(Marshall 1990: 31). This rendered a basic subsistence way out of
reach of the average wage earner (Hermele 1988). In Tanzania,
where SAP was introduced in 1986 (after a series of ‘home grown’
attempts at adjustment), basic commodity prices followed a similar
trend: from 1985 to 1988, the per kilogram price of sugar rose by
266 per cent, soap by 396 per cent, and kangas (cloth for clothing)
by 920 per cent (Messkoub 1996). In Zimbabwe, during the first
two years of Bank-sponsored adjustment, average earnings fell by
24 per cent in real terms (Gibbon 1996: 379). In Sierra Leone in
1986, after adjustment and devaluation, the price of a bar of soap
rose fourfold from Leone 0.5 to 2, a gallon of kerosene rose from
Leone 9 to Leone 23 and a chicken quadrupled from Leone 20 to
Leone 80 (Riddell 1992: 57).
Many SAPs also included policies of retrenchment in the public
sector – the largest employer in most African countries. Con-
sequently, SAP has led to higher numbers of unemployed. In
Uganda, a World Bank-supported retrenchment programme had
cut the public employee list from 320,000 to 150,000 between 1990
and 1995 (Bigsten and Kayizzi-Mugerwa 1999: 64–5). In Ghana,
retrenchment as part of its SAP led to the cutting of 53,000 civil
servants by 1989 (Rothchild 1991: 9).
The conduct of practice was, then, largely based on implementa-
tion. Good conduct was consequential – that is, evaluated by its
ends/outcomes, not its means. The norms of implementation were
effective, quick and radical reform, or even ‘shock’. There was
often a sense that neoliberal reformers within African states were
a vanguard: equivalents of Chile’s ‘Chicago boys’ or Gaidar and
Chubalis in Russia, who had close contacts with the World Bank
and the IMF, and a ‘scientific’ value system in which ‘politics’ was
an encumbrance or a set of relations to be manipulated to realise
neoliberal ends (Milder 1996: 151).
This was the nature of neoliberal conduct throughout the 1980s:
an emaciated set of norms which did not speak to the issues of