Our Continent, Our Future: African Perspective on Structural Adjustment

by Thandika Mkandawire & Charles C. Soludo

Africa World Press, inc. P. O. Box 48, Asmara, Eritrea. 1999. 176 pages

Reviewer: Kofi Akosah-Sarpong in Ottawa, Canada.

This book adds to the debates and publications enthusing "African solution for African problems" in the context of the new continental project of "African Renaissance. " The book looks at the African perspectives on structural adjustment programmes, or somehow lack of African inputs from the scratch to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, IMF, dictated economic policies to Africa.

In the foreward to the book Ghana's K. Y. Amoako, the executive secretary of the Addis Ababa, Ethiopia-based UN's Economic Commission for Africa, acknowldges how the continent's development history is the "theories and models employed have largely come from outside the continent. No other region of the world has been so dominated by external ideas and models. " African and non-African scholars of recent times have expressed concern that unless any future development policy takes into consideration Africa's history, culture and tradition the continent's predicament will continue to worsen.

Recognising the ongoing blame and counter-blame by "externalists", who put Africa's problems on external factors, and "internalists", who put Africa's problems on internal factors, the authors walk the middle line, neither blaming external factors or internal factors, in their explorations and prescriptions of Africa's economic problems, but using both in their explorations and prescriptions of Africa's economic predicaments.

This middle-ground position, otherwise called the African reconstructionism, is the ground taken by the continental project of "African Renaissance, " which, among other things, recognises internal and external factors in Africa's march to development but attempts to fuse the rebirth of Africa's culture and tradition with the positive elements of the global culture informed by Africa's history and the general environment. The authors skillfully use this line of argument to explain and prescribe Africa's problems with the foreign-dictated structural adjustment programmes.

Looking specifically at Sub-Sahara Africa, SSA, the authors discusses many , and disparate, writings by Africans on the Structural Adjustment Programmes, SAP, which indicate common thread and perspective and shift in dialogue. The running views talk of Africans re-entering the SAP debate and leading in defining the continent's development. Despite arguing for broader policy agenda for African states and active role for African government within the market economy, the authors make it clear that their work is not a blueprint for each African state but rather policy design sensitive to each individual African state's historical and initial situations.

My take on this is that the authors did not give a large emphasis on African culture as they gave to economic and historical factors in addressing Africa's economic development via the structural adjustment programme. In the long bedrock upon which development dances on is the culture, and so any positive and negative elements in the culture invariably dictates the speed of overall development.

However, the authors did looked at the implications of Africa's physical conditions to her economic development such as the climate and the fact that Africa has the largest concentration of landlocked states in the world, and given the overall poor infrastructure and the colonial pattern of communications linkages, the geographical conditions compounds the problems of development for many an African country. My take here is that the only way to overcome these geographycal problems is greater African economic and social integration as indicated in the "African Renaissance" project.

Thandika Mkandawire and Charles C. Soludo work is divided into four chapters. Chapter 1 looks at background to Africa's economic crisis. Here there is assessment of initial conditions stifling Africa's rapid development such as human capital and physical conditions; chapter 2 deals Africa's economic crisis. Here the authors give diagnosis and prescriptions . The explanation is superb here, drawing on other disparate writings to explain the African economic crisis; chapter 3 looks at the adjustment experience through results, governance and state capacity, the nature of success and extent of reform and degree of compliance.

The last chapter, 4, explains the widening economic development gap between Africa and other countries in the world. The reason is not far-fetched: the adjustment process has failed to lay the foundation for sustainable growth and development. The reason is that policy-makers and the African states have got the basic fundamentals wrong from the scratch in their implementation of the structural adjustment programmes.

The authors offer prescriptions for broadening the economic development fundamentals. For them this means policy fundamentals must simultaneously address these issues: economic growth, economic stability, and political legitimacy. My take here is that they should have included the implications of the culture, which, like everywhere in the world, is the spiritual origin of development. As America's social scientist Francis Fukuyama explains in his The End of History and the Last Man one cannot explain the origin of Western capitalist development without the Protestant ethics as revealed by Max weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Zambia's Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo has called for same in Africa's development in the context of Africa's cosmology.