A Political Science, Sylvester Odion Akhaine has lamented the insidious role of Bretton Woods Institutions (BMIs) – World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other agents of international finance – in wracking and undermining the development of Africa over the years.
He argued that while ‘the masses in Africa desire popular democracy that is both participatory and egalitarian and guarantees their basic material needs and self-actualisation’, international finance agencies, led by the United States, desire a ‘political dispensation congenial to finance capital and its realisation’.
Delivering the 103rd inaugural lecture of the Lagos State University titled, ‘Shifting for Good: The Weson of Empiricism in the Disorder of a Third Wave of Democracy in Africa’, Akhaine contended that the economic policies reined in on African countries by these agencies of international finance have led to debt overhang which has virtually crippled their economies, wracking them to their knees thereby making them incapable of meeting their infrastructural demands to guarantee better life for their people.
According to him, ‘the World Bank and IMF engineered policies in Africa only promotes pauperisation of the people’. Although the BMIs were established after the Second World War with the aim of ‘managing the post-war global economy and promoting international economic cooperation’, Akhaine argued that they have become tools for domination of the less developed economies particularly Africa.
‘Neo-liberal economic policies from the BWIs are de-empowering for the states of the global south, and in particular, Africa. While they inflict on the state negative sovereignty, they also encourage authoritarianism that usually thrives well under the military. The problematic nature of democratic transition arises partly from long-time socialisation to the military ethos of the larger population. Therefore, demilitarisation remains a state-building problem’.
Notwithstanding the sundry macro-economic indicators and growth projections, he said that the economies of many African countries are prostrate with burgeoning debt burden put at $u1.52 trillion as of 2023 according to the African Development Bank.
‘Africa’s debt is put by some estimation at about $300 billion out of which that of sub-Saharan Africa alone is put at about $236 billion. Africa’s debt represents about 11 percent of the developing world’s debt estimated at $2.17 trillion as at 1997. In the last one and half decades an estimated $1.3 trillion in loan and debt servicing obligations went to the wealthy countries.
‘Between 1970 and 2002, Africa received about $540 billion in loans, paid back $550 billion, principal and interest, and is still saddled with a debt cargo of $295 billion. For sub-Saharan Africa,) it has received $294 billion in loans and expended $268 in debt services and is still indebted to the tune of about $210 billion’, Akhaine said, underlining the chilling statistics about Africa’s debt crisis.
Dismissing neoliberal policies which tend to favour rolling back the state in economic planning, he argued that, ‘the state needs to be brought back into the development equation. Truly, the enormity of the continent’s problems requires a capable state. I have traversed the continent to know that our problems cannot be solved by private capital and philanthropy, the state must be brought back to the table.
‘The era of the third wave has been coterminous with ravages and pillaging of capital. The concept of rolling back the state has become the rallying cry of capital underlying the Marxist conception of the state as the executive committee of the dominant class in society.
‘The polity requires a re-orientation of civic value. Equally, the lack of accountability was a major administrative deficit under military rule. Solving these issues requires a grand approach in the form of process-led constitution-making to produce a grundnorm that engrosses a corpus of democratic rights and power distribution such as fundamental human rights including freedom of the press, association, and the rule of law and separation of powers in ways that the people will become the boss of democracy.
‘This foregrounds the need to review the structure of production in Africa reified, over time, by sundry market and peripheralisation measures coming from agencies of global governance that I have dubbed elsewhere as policies of secondary uneven development, that is, post-colonial policies that reinforce extant inequalities caused by the slave trade and colonialism.
‘Colonial states linked African economies to global capitalism through commodification and export production. It oriented Africans towards the production of products with exchange-value thereby entrenching a counterproductive dependency. As Ake (1981) has noted, the inherited colonial economy logically reinforces disarticulation inherent in the production of exchange value in place of use-value.
‘The political elite, largely neo-colonial in outlook, have been unable to surmount this contradiction and achieve the goal of governance. The situation has been aggravated by the fact that the transition from colonial rule was hurriedly done ‘without any fundamental transformation in the economic, cultural and bureaucratic domains’.
‘Worse still is the fact that the process of integration into the global economy was accompanied by an intentionality that undermined the development of indigenous capital that could have aided the development of a liberal democratic order as in the metropole. So, Africa lacks the bourgeois class capable of coalescing other classes in society into a system of bourgeois representation that is liberal democracy
‘This deficit has found expression in class and ethnic cleavages in the quest for an elusive legitimacy. The consequences are protests and tensions in the society which have attracted authoritarian tactics easily exploitable by other power contenders in society. Therefore, Africa must disengage from extroversion and unleash its productive forces while fostering pan-African trade and cooperation in line with Agenda 2063’.
The inaugural lecture, which was presided over by the institution’s Vice Chancellor, Prof. Ibiyemi Olatunji-Bello, who was represented by Deputy Vice Chancellor (Administration), Prof. Adenike Boyo, had in attendance other principal officials of the university. They included the Registrar, Mr. Emmanuel Fanu; Bursar, Mr. Said Olayinka; and Librarian, Dr. Omawumi Makinde.
Other prominent guests included former Osun State Governor, Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola; former General Secretary of Yoruba socio-cultural group, Afenifere,
Chief Ayo Opadokun; former Private Secretary to Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Mr. Odia Ofeimun; and former Arts Editor of The Guardian, Mr Ben Iwala-Tomoloju.
The capacity filled lecture held at the Buba Marwa Hall at the university’s main campus in Ojo, Lagos also attracted other guests, colleagues, political elites, actors in civil society and the media.
Akhaine, a former general secretary of Campaign for Democracy, an organisation led by fiery Dr. Belo Ransome Kuti, which played a frontline role in ending military rule in the 90s, has over 100 works in prominent journals, monographs, books and other publications. He is a member of the editorial board of The Guardian and The Constitution, a journal of constitutional development, published by the Centre for Constitutionalism and Demilitarisation.
He missed death by the whiskers shortly after his prolonged detention in the 1990s when agents of the military regime of General Sani Abacha pushed him off a moving truck.
