Okello Oculi looks back at a Council for Development and Social Research in Africa (Codesria) meeting that took place in Maputo early in December under the title "Rethinking African Development: Beyond Impasse, Towards Alternatives". While the decimation of African economies through the application of so-called development policies was frequently raised during the meeting, attention also focused on the poor state of African scholarship.
The Council for Development and Social Research in Africa, CODESRIA, held its tri-ennial General Assembly in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, from 6-10 December, 2005. The theme of the event was "Rethinking African Development: Beyond Impasse, Towards Alternatives", and was attended by 400 scholars drawn from within and outside Africa. Its hosting by a Portuguese-speaking country (or rather a country where the language of government is Portuguese) was a landmark in unifying Africa's scholars across colonial language walls. The election of a female Mozambiquecan, Professor Tresa Cruz da Silva, as the new President, retained the tradition of having a woman at the top, while Professor Adebayo Olukoshi, of Nigeria, remains as Executive Secretary. Professor Zen Tedesse from Ethiopia stepped down from the presidency.
The theme of "impasse" in Africa's development clearly also applied to the dismal condition of scholarship in the continent's universities. The chairman of the "Scientific Council" of the organisation reported, for example, that out of the one thousand proposals sent by those who wished to participate in the Maputo assembly, only 155 were suitable in terms of quality of research. There was virtual poverty in philosophical issues including those in the fields of law and anthropology at a time when the continent is desperately in need of new directions and alternatives to the disaster in governance and economic decay which has marked the last three decades.
A major indicator of the impasse for Nigeria was in the low level of representation by the spread of universities which sent scholars and the ranking of those who attended. Only Ahmadu Bello University, Ibadan, Obafemi Awolowo, Nsukka, and Lagos State Universities, were represented with a grand total of less than 15. Like Kenya, Nigeria's more senior academics were either out of the business of active and creative scholarship or too tied down with earning money from consultancy work, or both. At a time when both countries are gripped by intense and often murderous struggle for power and over new directions for development, it was laughable that their weight was woefully light in Maputo as CODESRIA searched "Towards Alternatives".
In his opening speech Professor Adebayo Olukoshi condemned increasing calls by leading propagandists in Europe and North America for the "recolonisation of Africa". Professor Jomo Kwame Sunderam, a Malaysian scholar (whose father attended the 1945 Pan African Congress in Manchester and later named his son after Jomo Kenyata and Kwame Nkrumah who were at that Congress), ended his address by stating that: "Our challenge is to make History African", as against calls in newspapers like The Times (of London) and the Washington Post, as well as some think-tanks in London and Washington, for bringing an end to "problems of failed states in Africa" by establishing a new American Empire over the continent. Nigeria's academics and scholars are clearly not responding to these calls by increasingly choosing to watch football matches between Arsenal and Manchester United etc etc, instead of rising to CODESRIA's war horns.
Professor Sunderam drew attention to what he called " a counter-revolution against development economics" which since the 1980s hit Africa devastatingly with "trade liberalisation", "de-agriculturalisation", and negative "terms of trade". Opening up Africa's markets to massive imports resulted in de-industrialisation through the collapse of "whatever manufacturing capacity which had developed" in the 1960s and 1970s. The loss of jobs, in South East Asia, for example, hit jobs where women had sought liberation from tyrannies of household labour. Massive imports of food or food aid, and insistence by the World Bank and the IMF that subsidies to peasant farmers be withdrawn, resulted in undermining local food prices and capacities for food production, resulting in the collapse of food securities all across Africa.
The third blow has been in the prolonged decline in prices of primary commodities. Mwalimu Nyerere had long ago complained about the higher quantities of cotton or sisal Tanzania had to export in order to purchase one imported tractor. While prices of commodities from the tropics (like cotton) have declined severely, that of temperate commodities (like wool) have been much less. Moreover, the industrialized countries are producing chemical products out of Africa's plants, herbs and condiments and claiming intellectual copyrights over them.
In Sunderam's view, "intellectual property rights have become the biggest earners of foreign exchange for the United States of America". Finally, he focused on the sad fact that most governments in Africa now have "fewer instruments to be able to stimulate economic growth". This is due mainly to takeovers of local banks. In Kenya, for example, foreign banks have returned to the colonial practice of not lending to the local private sector, preferring to get 44 per cent of their earnings from buying government bonds; as well as charging interest rates as high as 26 per cent, thereby crippling productive investment.
In any case, only 20 per cent of foreign direct investment goes into the so-called "green fields" i.e. those that create new manufacturing capacities. The myth of foreign direct investment continues to hide the fact that African countries are net exporters of capital to North America and Europe either as debt over-repayments, payments for patents, over invoiced charges by multinational corporations, or stolen funds being hidden by corrupt officials.
One deficiency in the CODESRIA general assembly meeting in Maputo was that this analysis came from a scholar from outside Africa's universities. This is due partly to African governments keeping their own scholars away from government corridors and policy arena, with files marked "Secret" being more accessible to foreign researchers with dollars to pay as tips to their vigilant keepers. In addition to this, is the severe poverty of local scholars, which leaves the best of them vulnerable to funds to be earned from the IMF/World Bank - sponsored projects whose agenda have more to do with "palliative economics" than with "development economics". The promise by the Executive Secretary of the organisation, Professor Adebayo Olukoshi, that "fighting for academic freedom" will be a priority in the next three years, should include yanking open to African researchers creaky gates to government policy vaults.
* Okello Oculi, Ph.D, is Executive Director of Africa Vision
* Please send comments to [email protected]
