Page 24 - Msingi Afrika Magazine Issue 13

Economy

in their political manifestos, to the was the United Nations Economic Africa must fight for, as it deals with
poverty-stricken people, and make Commission for Africa (UNECA) cultural, psychological and episte-
them voter fodder for their political under the leadership of Adebayo mological aberrations. Without these
hegemony. Adedeji. processes taking place, the possi-
bility of African people exercising
A new economic knowledge These initiatives failed because they extra-structural agency remains ‘pie
paradigm for the future needs to were ‘opposed, undermined and in the sky’.
emerge, which would aim to reach jettisoned by the Bretton Woods
out to the excluded and to address institutions and Africans were thus In order to regenerate a true African
the need to deal with the root-cause impeded from exercising the basic economic renaissance, we need to
of economic development failure and fundamental right to make consider doing things differently,
in Africa. As a knowledge paradigm decisions about the future’. Adedeji making the impossible possible, and
for the future, it must be, inclusively, identified what he called ‘the oper- produce economic transformations
take on board the experiences of ation of the development merchant that would include the excluded.
the excluded. Hence there must be system (DMS) under which for- This inclusive approach should not
an understanding of the indigenous eign-crafted economic reform poli- be at a material level only but also at
knowledge systems of the excluded, cies have been turned into a kind of a spiritual level.
for that would increase the chances special goods which are largely and
of adapting international practices quickly financed by the operators An Inclusive Paradigm
to the local setting and can help im- of DMS, regardless of the negative An inclusive paradigm can fulfill
prove the impact, and sustainability, impact of such policies on the Af- people’s purpose in life if it has the
of development. rican economies and polities’. What ability to harmonise the two cultural
emerges clearly here is that what modes (i.e. the dominant econom-
The Cold War as a Context Adedeji describes as DMS carry ic paradigm and the alternative
Historically the Cold War provided coloniality which actively works to economic paradigm). This means we
Africans with two ideological op- deny agency to Africans to chart an must begin by looking at our diverse
tions: the capitalist path or socialist autonomous path of development historical and cultural epistemolo-
path within an un-decolonized mod- (Adedeji, 2002). gies, and then develop an economic
ernist-imperial world order. Africans cultural synergy.
tried to navigate this binary through The Western powers’ economic
such initiatives as the Bandung Con- grip on Africa was intensified in the What is important is to pursue
ference of 1955 that emphasized 1970s as they underwent prolonged knowledge production that can
decolonization as a central choice recession. The Washington Consen- renovate African cultural econo-
for the Global South; the Non- sus emerged as a Western initiative my, defend the African peoples
Aligned Movement; the push for a of managing the economic reces- economic dignity and civilisational
New International Economic Order; sion. Western welfarism informed achievements and contribute afresh
the Lagos Plan of Action; Africa’s by Keynesianism was replaced by to a new economic global agenda
Priority Programme for Economic neoliberal principles that privileged that can push us out of the crisis
Recovery; the African Alternative market forces in the struggle against of modernity as promoted by the
Framework to Structural Adjust- inflation. European Enlightenment. Such
ment Programme for Socio-Eco- knowledge must be relevant to the
nomic Recovery and Transforma- The Western Consensus current needs of the masses, which
tion’ the African Charter for Popular The Washington Consensus was they can use to bring about a social
Participation for Development; constituted by a set of ideas and transformation out of their present
right up to the New Partnership[ for institutional practices that began to plight.
African Development. dominate the world economy from
the 1970s onwards. The world order The first thing to be observed is that
These initiatives constituted what brought about by the Washington the epistemological field traversed
Ali Mazrui referred to as African Consensus became known as neo- by the human sciences was not laid
solutions to African problems (Pax liberalism. down in advance: no philosophy, no
Africana). The intellectual resource political or moral option, no empiri-
for these initiatives was the depen- Coloniality remains a reality. De- cal science of any kind, no observa-
dency theory and the active agent colonization remains a future that tion of the human body, no analysis

24 | we tell the true afrikan story