Published in late 2024 by South African publisher Inkani Books, Can Africans do Economics? examines the intersection of economic development and freedom across Africa. Informed by the scholarship of leading African economists Grieve Chelwa, Marion Ouma, Redge Nkosi, Cleopas Sambo and Ndongo Samba Sylla, the collected volume redefines development as a process of emancipation, not simply economic growth. Across its six chapters, the book makes the urgent case for transformative policies grounded in African realities, and for rejecting foreign-led interventions on the continent. Here, we post in full the volume’s second chapter by Grieve Chelwa, ‘Development as emancipation’, which charts the long history of Africa’s struggle for emancipatory development and freedom from its former colonisers.

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By Grieve Chelwa

‘Freedom and development are as completely linked together as are chicken and eggs! Without chickens you get no eggs; without eggs you soon have no chickens. Similarly, without freedom you get no development, and without development you very soon lose your freedom.’ – Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, ‘Uhuru na Maedeleo’ (Freedom and Development)¹

At the close of the decade in 1969, a great many of countries in Africa had attained independence, ending the long period of subjugation and exploitation that was formalised by the Berlin Conference of 1884.² At that conference, the world’s arch colonisers split up the continent among themselves with utter contempt for African people and their patterns of statehood that had existed up until that point. For this reason, the attainment of political independence, beginning with Egypt in 1922 and the inflection point that was Ghana in 1957, presented a palpable opportunity of starting anew and undoing the harm and humiliation of the past.

For many of the first generation of African independence leaders, political independence was viewed as the sine qua non of development. Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana and quite easily Africa’s most iconic statesman, captured this notion well when he proclaimed ‘seek ye first the political kingdom and all things shall be added onto it’.³ Development was also seen as the essential ingredient that would consolidate the wider meaning and achievement of political independence. Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, the first president of Tanzania, had this to say in a speech aptly titled ‘Uhuru na Maendeleo’ (‘Freedom and Development’):

It is obvious [that freedom] depend[s] on social and economic development. To the extent that our country remains poor, and its people illiterate without understanding or strength, then our national freedom can be endangered by any foreign power which is better equipped. This is not only a question of military armaments – although if these are necessary, they have to be paid out of the wealth of the community. It is a question of consciousness among all the people of the nation that they are free men who have something to defend, whether the appropriate means of defence be by force of arms or by more subtle methods.⁴

In addition to articulating the symbiotic relationship between development and political independence, the first generation of leaders grasped that development was urgently needed. Nkrumah, for example, wrote in his autobiography:

Once [political] freedom is gained, a greater task comes into view. All dependent territories are backward in education, in science, in agriculture, and in industry. The economic independence that should follow and maintain political independence demands every effort from the people, a total mobilization of brain and manpower resources. What other countries have taken three hundred years or more to achieve, a once dependent territory must try to accomplish in a generation if it is to survive. Unless it is, as it were, ‘jet-propelled,’ it will lag behind and then risk everything for which it has fought.⁵

For Mwalimu Nyerere, this fierce urgency of development required that African countries ‘ran while others walked’.⁶

The distinguished Malawian economist Thandika Mkandawire understood that the thirst for development so well-articulated by Africa’s independence leaders had motivations beyond merely increasing their people’s material wellbeing. The quest for development was an emancipatory project aimed at overcoming the shackles of humiliation formalised by the Berlin Conference.⁷ According to Mkandawire, many critiques, especially Western ones, of this developmentalist fervor on the African continent did not grasp that development and the ‘catch up’ aspirations driving it [were] not foreign impositions but part of Africa’s responses to its own historical experiences and social needs [and have] much deeper historical roots and social support than is often recognized’.⁸ To paraphrase Amartya Sen, development is freedom.⁹

What then is development? Mkandawire, for example, has argued that development means overcoming the indignities of colonialism.¹⁰ For Sen, ‘development can be seen … as a process of expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy’.¹¹ Development, for example, means the freedom from being coerced into seeking one’s meals in the rubbish pit. One sees here that Mkandawire and Sen’s ideas of development imply one another. Development as dignity is development as freedom.

The landmark 1990 report from the South Commission, that was incidentally chaired by Nyerere, defined development as ‘a process which enables human beings to realize their potential, build self-confidence, and lead lives of dignity and fulfillment. It is a process which frees people from the fear of want and exploitation. It is a movement away from political, economic, or social oppression. Through development, political independence acquires its true significance.’¹² Elsewhere the report expands on the notion of emancipation in this way: ‘development is a process of self-reliant growth, achieved through the participation of the people acting in their own interests as they seem, and under their own control.’¹³

In his classic text How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney makes explicit the link between development and emancipation. In discussing underdevelopment, Rodney writes:

…[a] more indispensable component of modern underdevelopment is that it expresses a particular relationship of exploitation: namely, the exploitation of one country by another. All of the countries named as ‘underdeveloped’ in the world are exploited by others; and the underdevelopment with which the world is now preoccupied is a product of … exploitation.¹⁴

The quest for development is, therefore, a quest for emancipation. Development gives full meaning to self-determination, the clarion call for political independence in the run-up to the modal independence decade of the 1960s. This understanding of development as an emancipatory project is useful in assessing trends in development in Africa over the last three decades or so, a matter that we turn to in the next section. Further, it is critical for assessing the many ‘development initiatives’ that have been visited upon the African continent in the recent past.

Is Africa developing?

The previous section has argued that development in the African case ought to be emancipatory. The question that then arises is what yardsticks shall we use to measure progress towards such a kind of development? The South Commission provided the following guidance: the ‘first objective of [development] must be to end poverty, provide productive employment, and satisfy the basic needs of all the people, any surplus being fairly shared.’¹⁵ Thus, even though development’s goal is the achievement of the people’s full personhood, dignity and autonomy, the practical definition provided by the Commission presents intermediate metrics that allow for the gauging of progress: Development must ‘end poverty’, ‘provide employment’, ‘satisfy basic needs’ and promote equality. These aspects can be viewed as important metrics for assessing whether a people are on the path towards the achievement of development.

On this score, is Africa developing?

To answer this question, we will rely on trends in poverty not because it is one of the most important metrics contained in the South Commission’s report, but it is the one measure with an abundance of comparable data across space and time. In addition, as I argue later, meaningful reductions in poverty are synonymous with development as is understood here.¹⁶

In 1990, the World Bank introduced their a ‘dollar a day’ measure of poverty.¹⁷ This measure was derived based on the cost of the lowest amount of calories required for sustenance, estimated at $1 per day or $370 per year. In this way, any person whose expenditure fell below ‘a dollar a day’ was considered poor. This so-called international poverty line (IPL) has subsequently been revised upwards in keeping with food price inflation and currently stands at $2.15 a day.¹⁸

There is much debate around the appropriateness of using the IPL to assess poverty. Philip Alston, who served as UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights from 2014 to 2020, issued a landmark report that was critical of the IPL.¹⁹ According to Alston, the IPL was too low to correspond to any commonsense notions of what constituted poverty. And such an arbitrarily low poverty line has allowed many, such as the World Bank, to claim dramatic reductions in global poverty whose conclusions would be overturned were a higher and more reasonable poverty line used.

Criticisms notwithstanding, a big appeal of the IPL is that consistent data across the majority of countries has been collected since 1990. Even if it is reasonable and desirable to set higher poverty lines than the IPL, there currently isn’t any such data that can support cross-country and cross-time analyses of poverty trends. Second, the incredible transformation of, for example, China’s economy over the last 40 years has coincided with reductions in poverty measured using the IPL. China’s poverty rate for 1981 was estimated at 88 per cent and by 2018 the poverty rate had reduced to 0.3 per cent, making this the fastest decline in poverty in history.²⁰

There is a lot of evidence, not least from the Chinese government and Chinese scholars, showing that these reductions in poverty are real and not illusory in the sense that the lot of the typical Chinese person has meaningfully improved over the last four decades.²¹ Many would agree with the conclusion that China’s development transformation has been nothing short of emancipatory – the country now has a level of control over its destiny in ways that were unimaginable four decades ago. Whatever the limitations of the IPL, it has to be an indictment to have a great many of a polity’s people living below such an absurdly low threshold. This makes poverty assessments important barometers in measuring progress towards development in the sense the word is used in this chapter.

In what follows, I present a series of charts that paint a picture of the story of poverty in Africa over the last three decades. The picture that emerges is not an encouraging one.

In 1990, two billion people across the world lived in poverty as defined by the IPL.²² Three decades later, the number of the world’s poor had reduced to 648 million people (see figure 1). This downward trend in the numbers of the poor was mirrored in all regions of the world except for Sub-Saharan Africa, whose trendline is visibly upward in Figure 1.²³ East Asia & the Pacific (EAP), a region that includes countries such as China, Malaysia, South Korea and Vietnam, witnessed some of the most dramatic reductions in the number of the poor. In 1990, close to a billion people in the EAP region lived in poverty and by 2019 that number had reduced to only 24 million people. South Asia, a region mostly dominated by India, also witnessed poverty reductions albeit at a slower pace than EAP. In South Asia, 600 million people lived in poverty in 1990. By 2019, the number of the poor had reduced to about 150 million people.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, the number of people living in poverty in 1990 was 270 million. After three decades, the ranks of the poor had grown by an additional 100 million bringing the population of the region’s poor to 390 million in 2019. In 1990, only 15 per cent of the world’s poor lived in Sub-Saharan Africa (see Figure 2). By 2019, Sub-Saharan Africa’s contribution to the world’s poor had grown by a factor of 4 to 60 per cent! Over the same period, East Asia and the Pacific’s share declined from 50 per cent in 1990 to only 4 per cent in 2019. In other words, at the end of 2019, world poverty had largely become an African affair whereas in 1990 it was an East and South Asian problem.

In terms of the poverty rate (the percent of a region’s population in poverty) Sub-Saharan Africa has continued to lag other regions (see Figure 3). In 1990, our poverty rate of 53 per cent was only 1.3 times bigger than the world’s poverty rate of 38 per cent. By 2019, Sub-Saharan Africa’s poverty rate of 35 per cent, even though smaller than the 1990 number, was now 4 times bigger than the world’s poverty rate of 8 per cent. Stated differently, the region’s rate of decline in poverty was far slower than the decline in world poverty. This is also reflected in the trend lines in figure 3 that show that poverty rates in all regions of the world, with the exception of Sub-Saharan Africa, have declined and converged on single digits over the last three decades.

A final figure which showcases the dismal nature of the poverty story in Sub-Saharan Africa is contained in figure 4 which shows the percentage of the region’s population living on $6.90 or less over the period 1990 to 2019. This higher poverty line is the typical poverty line in high-income countries where it is used as a criteria for the receipt of public assistance programmes. According to the figure, over the period 1990 to 2019, almost all of Sub-Saharan Africa’s population would be considered poor and qualify for public assistance if they lived in a high-income country. In other words, the much-celebrated African middle class is a figment of our own imaginations going by high-income country standards.

Why is Africa not developing?

The previous section has documented some broad trends regarding the story of poverty and, by implication, development in Africa over the last three decades. Why is this unfortunate situation our story? How have some regions successfully reduced poverty or got solidly on the path to (if they have not already attained) emancipatory development whereas Africa has failed to do so? What accounts for this and what can be done about the situation?

As many scholars have so eloquently demonstrated Africa’s underdevelopment as a structural process began with the continent’s integration into the world capitalist system around about the 15th century. Ever since this integration, the continent’s surplus value has been extracted and exported abroad to power and sustain economies elsewhere, especially in the western world. For close to 400 years until the abolishment of slavery and the slave trade in the 19th century, much of Africa’s surplus was embodied in the form people trafficked against their will to the plantation economies of the so-called New World. In the New World, enslaved Africans were worked to the death growing the kind of crops, most notably cotton, that powered the Industrial Revolution.

After the abolition of slavery in the mid-19th century, Euro-America’s extraction of Africa’s surplus relied on colonialism where the continent was carved up into colonies belonging to different European empires. Under colonialism, extracted surplus was embodied, not in the export of human beings as before, but in the export of raw materials directly from Africa that fed the industrialisation underway in Western Europe and North America.

Beginning in the early to mid-20th century, several factors combined that ultimately led to political independence in many African countries in the 1960s. First, many Africans participating and observing the Second World War came to view the Allied Forces’ (mostly Britain and the US) rallying cry for the war, which was to free Europe from illegal German occupation, as hypocritical. During that era, most of the African continent, with very few exceptions, was under illegal occupation via colonialism. Second, the formation of the United Nations at the end of the Second World War was explicit in articulating a right to self-determination that came to inspire many independence movements in Africa. Third, the economics of the colonial model came to suggest that the economic returns from direct control were smaller than those that could be obtained under a system of indirect control. Owing to one or all these reasons, many countries in Africa were granted or fought for political independence that peaked in the 1960s.

With the advent of political independence, the extraction of the continent’s surplus continued unabated and was facilitated indirectly via neocolonialism. Writing in 1965 in his magisterial text Neocolonialism, The Last Stage of Imperialism, Nkrumah described neocolonialism this way:

The essence of neocolonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus political policy is directed from outside. The methods and form of this direction can take many shapes … The neo-colonialist State may be obliged to take the manufactured products of the imperialist power to the exclusion of competing products from elsewhere. Control over government policy in the neocolonial State may be secured by payments towards the cost of running the State, by the provision of civil servants in positions where they can dictate policy, and by monetary control over foreign exchange through the imposition of a banking system controlled by the imperial power. Where neocolonialism exists the power exercising control is often the State which formerly ruled the territory in question, but this is not necessarily so. For example, in the case of South Vietnam the former imperial power was France, but neocolonial control of the State has now gone to the United States. It is possible that neocolonial control may be exercised by a consortium of financial interests which are not specifically identifiable with any particular State. The control of the Congo by great international financial concerns is a case in point. The result of neo-colonialism is that foreign capital is used for the exploitation rather than the development of the less developed parts of the world. Investments under neo-colonialism increase rather than decrease the gap between the rich and the poor countries in the world.²⁴

As theorised by Nkrumah, neocolonialism became the dominant form of extraction and impoverishment on the African continent following independence. Unlike colonialism where the presence of the coloniser was visible and palpable, neocolonialism is more subtle and harder to discern and, therefore it is difficult to rally the people against it.

As Nkrumah correctly observed, the typical feature of neocolonialism is the large inflow of foreign capital through so-called foreign direct investment (FDI) that exploits rather than develops. According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the African continent received $580 billion in official development assistance between 1960 and 2005.²⁵ Over about the same period, the continent received FDI flows of some $150 billion.²⁶ However, this huge inflow of capital, which in total amounts to almost three-quarters of a trillion dollars, has coincided with the impoverishment of the continent as attested by the statistics in the previous section. Why has this large infusion of capital stymied the continent?

Two principal reasons, working through the channel of neocolonialism, explain why this phenomenon. First, the flow of official development assistance or aid has meant that a large army of aid workers and policy advisors from the West have come to dominate policymaking in Africa. Mkandawire has shown how this policy dominance harms efforts at development on the African continent. Writing in his important 1999 book Our Continent, Our Future: African Perspectives on Structural Adjustment, co-written with the Nigerian economist Charles Soludo, Mkandawire had this to say:

One reason for policy failure in Africa is simply that too many cooks have been in the policy-making kitchen … No part of the developing world has had such a density and diversity of technical assistance as Africa. In some countries, ministries [are] literally partitioned among different donors. This [has] many implications. Not only [does] it tax the attention of the nascent African bureaucracies to the extreme, but it also [makes] the learning curve extremely costly. In the extreme cases, African policymakers [are] actually excluded from the learning process as donors [keep] the evaluations of the programs to themselves, either through exclusive distribution of the relevant documents or because of language barriers.²⁷

Mkandawire and Soludo’s observation were echoed by Adebayo Adedeji, the Nigerian economist who led the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) from 1975 to 1991. Adedeji, more direct about the sinister intentions of the ‘aid industrial complex’ than Mkandawire and Soludo declared:

In many cases, our friends and development partners have been either unwilling or reluctant to grant us the elementary right to perceive for ourselves what is good for us and to assist us in realising our perceived goals and objectives. Often, they appear more interested in foisting on us their own perceptions and goals. When it comes to Africa, the outsiders have always behaved as if they know better than Africans what is good for Africa, and the result is that without the needed co-operation and support, Africa has particularly always been derailed from pursuing relentlessly and vigorously the agenda it has set for itself.²⁸

In my own scholarship, I have documented how the problem of policy dominance is compounded by the fact that the influential research on the economics of the African continent, on which policy is based, is mostly conducted by western economists steeped in the tradition of neoliberal economics.²⁹ A striking feature of this research is the mental gymnastics that are performed in laying the blame at the foot of Africans without any mention of the very real machinations of neocolonialism.

A second channel through which neocolonialism impoverishes the continent is FDI. FDI, as distinguished from aid, constitutes private inflows of capital into Africa with the explicit intent of making an economic profit (i.e., extracting surplus). The primary reason why huge FDI flows into Africa have not had any discernable impact on the continent’s development is that the target for FDI investments are the continent’s valuable extractives or natural resources sector. According to UNCTAD, the majority of all the FDI flows into Africa between 1970 and 2005 went to the extractives sector.³⁰ Rather than aiding development, these types of investments have thwarted it in many ways.

First, the continent’s many internecine conflicts are linked to the exploitation of natural resources. The classic example is the Democratic Republic of Congo where foreign-financed war has created violent and unstable conditions to easily spirit away the central African country’s valuable minerals in addition to causing the deaths of millions of Congolese.

In other parts of the continent, foreign investors have been more subtle in causing the kinds of distractions needed to illicitly extract minerals. In countries like Nigeria, Ghana and Zambia, the approach has been to underwrite a local political elite that implements policies favourable to the foreign-owned extractives sector. Zambia, for example, has continuously granted its mining houses favourable tax treatments that rob the country hundreds of millions of dollars in potential tax revenue every year. In a puzzling policy move in 2021, the county ramped up its generous tax treatment of the mining houses while it was seeking a bailout from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).³¹

Further, foreign investors in the extractives sector prefer to invest only up to the point where they can export the commodities in their raw form with very little value-addition. This further robs the continent of considerable foreign exchange that could be earned from the exports of processed or semi-processed goods. Last, the fact that foreign investment into the extractives sector dwarfs investment in downstream activities (such as manufacturing) ties the continent’s fortunes to the dangerous vagaries of the international commodity markets where prices swing, without warning, from one extreme to the other with devastating consequences for long-term planning.

The forgotten story of development in Africa

A forgotten aspect of African economic performance is that many countries in the immediate post-independence period registered respectable economic performance that drove improvements in socio-economic development. Mkandawire and Soludo, who are one of the most careful documenters of this period, make the point that ‘postcolonial African economic history is one of fairly respectable rates of growth for nearly a decade (including some ‘miracles’ in a number of countries)’.³² They go on to write that ‘between 1965 and 1974, annual growth in gross domestic product (GDP) per capita averaged 2.6% … Changes in GDP per capita and changes in gross national product (GNP) … clearly show an increase in per capita income up to 1980 …’³³ These average statistics mask differences as in some cases African countries outperformed some of the best performing economies in the world. Writing elsewhere, Mkandawire makes this point in this way:

It should be emphasized that the performance of the top performers in Africa was close to the best of the comparable Asian countries during that period. If one takes a growth rate of 6% over more than a decade as a measure of successful development performance, in the 1967–80 periods, ten countries enjoying such growth were African. These not only included mineral- rich countries such as Gabon, Botswana, Congo and Nigeria but also such countries as Kenya and Cote d’Ivoire, who slightly outperformed both Indonesia and Malaysia during the period.³⁴

Mkandawire and Soludo note that with an increase in economic growth came an increase in ‘investments in public schools, roads, hospitals and industries.’³⁵ Further, ‘by the mid-1970s, many countries could point to significant progress in initiating processes of economic and social development. Some levels of industrialization had been initiated, levels of school enrolment had increased, new roads had been constructed, the indigenization of civil service had advanced…’.³⁶

The remarkable point to note in this brief period of post-independence economic success is that it largely came about by keeping neocolonialism at bay. First, much of the investment that came to power the impressive growth was mobilised from domestic savings.³⁷ This essentially meant that the post-independence state had to manoeuvre in deploying these investments beyond the extractives sector. Second, the fact that aid played a negligible role in capital formation meant the post-independence state entirely owned the policy process, therefore, was free to implement policies in line with its national objectives. Third, the impressive economic performance was on the back of import substitution industrialisation, showcasing the importance of industrialisation in the development process. Finally, this impressive economic performance was state-led – the direction of economic activity was not left to the market but steered by an activist state based on long-term planning.

The brief period of hopeful performance was cut short with the oil price shocks of the 1970s that sent many countries into balance of payments crises as they tried to cope with increasing import bills. Many countries unfortunately turned to the IMF for help, which was conditioned on countries committing economic suicide by implementing policies in direct opposition to the ones that had delivered dignifying economic growth and development in the immediate post-independence period. With the IMF and World Bank now fully in charge of the policy process, the stage was set for the astronomic increases in poverty that we have come to observe over the last three decades and documented earlier in figures 1 to 4.

The forgotten promise of the Lagos Plan of Action

The effect of unfulfilled promises of global development strategies has been more sharply felt in Africa than in the other continents of the world. Indeed, rather than result in an improvement in the economic situation of the continent, successive strategies have made it stagnate and become more susceptible than other regions to the economic and social crises suffered by the industrialised countries. Thus, Africa is unable to point to any significant growth rate, or satisfactory index of general well-being, in the past 20 years. Faced with this situation, and determined to undertake measures for the basic restructuring of the economic base of our continent, we resolved to adopt a far-reaching regional approach based primarily on collective self-reliance. – Preamble of the Lagos Plan of Action³⁸

In 1980, African heads of state and government gathered in Lagos, Nigeria for an extra-ordinary summit of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU). The summit had been called to take stock of the continent’s economic development situation as it stood at the time. After two decades of political independence, economic self-determination had remained elusive with many countries just as dependent on their erstwhile colonisers as at the time of independence. Several international initiatives aimed at fostering transformative development had not yielded results. The much-heralded New International Economic Order (NIEO), adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1974, which was meant to provide a framework to end neocolonialism and economic dependency in the postcolonial countries, had failed to take off, prompting UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim to issue the following words of disappointment in 1980:

I do not need to recapitulate here the course that efforts to establish a new international economic order have taken over the last several years. On a number of occasions I have been driven to voice my disappointment … the missing element is not technical knowledge or understanding. What has been lacking is the political will to make adjustments, evolve compromises and develop action-oriented strategies…³⁹

Against this background, the summit in Lagos gathered to discuss and adopt a new strategy meant to provide a blueprint for self-reliant development on the African continent in the coming decades. The strategy, which came to be fully known as the Lagos Plan for Action for the Economic Development of Africa, had been spearheaded by the UNECA under the leadership of the Nigerian economist Adebayo Adedeji. The plan’s hallmark was to restructure the economic base of the continent in support of emancipatory development.

The Lagos Plan of Action addressed many matters of importance to the economic development of the continent. However, special pride of place was reserved for agriculture, industry, natural resources and banking and finance given how crucial these aspects were in building self-reliant emancipatory development.

Building a strong agricultural base was not only important for fostering self-sufficiency in food production but would be vital for providing the raw materials required by industry. Second, surpluses from agriculture would translate into the kind of savings that could drive the development of banking and finance and in turn finance the development of industry. In a similar way, the exploitation of natural resources (such as oil, copper, gold and cocoa) would generate surpluses that would directly finance the development of industry or indirectly, through fostering a strong banking and finance sector. Like agriculture, natural resources would also be important for providing raw materials for industry.

Crucially, the plan required that the development of banking and finance be driven by domestic savings to guarantee its insulation from foreign capital. As discussed earlier, foreign-owned banks were the handmaidens of foreign control and influence in Africa. In this way, the Plan presented an integrated sectoral and country approach to Africa’s development.

It is worth noting that in the Lagos Plan of Action, the development of industry was the be-all and end-all of the plan. This was based on a correct reading of history that showed that successful attempts at emancipatory development were based on a strong industrial base. This is also the lesson of China whose unprecedented reduction in poverty and emergence as a self-determining global power has been driven by industrialisation.

Unfortunately, the Lagos Plan of Action was adopted right at the beginning of the economic crisis that came to define the African continent over the next four decades. The plan was eschewed in favor of structural adjustment plans drawn up by the IMF and World Bank whose intent and result was the removal of policy agency and sovereignty from Africa.

The fact that the Lagos Plan of Action was never implemented presents one of history’s biggest missed opportunities for the continent.

Conclusion

The foregoing paints a picture of a continent that has struggled to attain emancipatory development. This, however, has not been for a lack of trying. Many of the first generation of African leaders articulated a coherent developmentalist ideology that saw total emancipation as the goal. Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, the scourge of neocolonialism cut short this brief period of promise and today the African continent is more dependent on the rest of the world (especially the West) than it was in the immediate aftermath of political independence. However, not all is lost. The various strategies for economic emancipation developed in the immediate post-independence period such as the Lagos Plan of Action and many national development plans contain the blueprint of what needs to be done if Africa is to attain emancipatory development in the 21st century.

Endnotes

1 Julius Nyerere, Freedom and Development/Uhuru na Maendeleo: A Selection of Writings and Speeches, 1968–1973 (Dar es Salaam/London, Oxford University Press, 1973), 1–10.

2 Many studies consider Africa as referring primarily to the mass of land south of the Sahara Desert. In this chapter, I dispense with this strange practice and consider the continent in its entirety (North, South, West and East Africa).

3 As quoted in Kenneth W. Grundy, ‘Nkrumah’s Theory of Underdevelopment: An Analysis of Recurrent Themes’, World Politics 15, no. 3 (July 2011): 439. It is worth pointing out that there is some debate about when the remarks may have been said. The quote refers to a statue, some say; in his biography others say the quote was heard on independence day.

4 Nyerere, Freedom and Development/Uhuru na Maendeleo, 1.

5 As quoted in Grundy, ‘Nkrumah’s Theory of Underdevelopment’, 457.

6 Thandika Mkandawire, ‘Running while others walk: Knowledge and the Challenge of Africa’s Development, Africa Development 36, no. 2 (2011): 1–36.

7 Mkandawire, ‘Running while others walk’.

8 Mkandawire, ‘Running while others walk’.

9 Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Anchor Books, 2000).

10 Mkandawire, ‘Running while others walk’.

11 Sen, Development as Freedom, 3.

12 South Commission, The Challenge to the South: The Report of the South Commission (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 10.

13 South Commission, Challenge to the South, 13.

14 Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London: Bogle- L’Ouverture, 1972), 14.

15 South Commission, The Challenge to the South, 13.

16 Additionally, the widely lauded Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations has ‘ending poverty in all its forms everywhere’ as goal number one. See ‘Ending poverty in all its forms everywhere,’ The United Nations, accessed March 11, 2024, https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal1.

17 World Bank, World Development Report (Washington, DC, World Bank, 1990).

18 World Bank, Poverty and Shared Prosperity (Washington, DC, World Bank, 2022).

19 Philip Alston, The Parlous State of Poverty Eradication: A Report of the Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights (New York, United Nations, 2020).

20 World Bank and the Development Research Center of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China, Four Decades of Poverty Reduction in China: Drivers, Insights for the World, and the Way Ahead (Washington, DC/Beijing, World Bank, 2022).

21 See World Bank and Development Research Center, Four Decades of Poverty Reduction in China; Zhang Weiwei, The China Wave: Rise of a Civilization State (Hackensack, NJ, World Century Publishing Corporation, 2011).

22 ‘Poverty and Inequality Platform’, World Bank, accessed March 11, 2024, https://pip.worldbank.org/home.

23 The World Bank, and many other international agencies, like to separate the continent into Sub Saharan Africa and North Africa. The latter is then grouped with the Middle East.

24 Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism, The Last Stage of Imperialism (London, Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1965), ix–x .

25 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Economic Development in Africa: Doubling Aid: Making the Big Push work (Geneva/New York, United Nations, 2006).

26 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Economic Development in Africa: Rethinking the Role of Foreign Direct Investment (Geneva/New York, United Nations, 2005).

27 Thandika Mkandawire and Charles C. Soludo, Our Continent, Our Future: African Perspectives on Structural Adjustment (Trenton, NJ/Dakar, Africa World Press and CODESRIA, 1999), 35–36.

28 Mkandawire and Soludo, Our Continent, Our Future, 36.

29 See Grieve Chelwa, ‘Does Economics have an “Africa Problem”?’ Economy and Society 50, no. 1 (February 2021): 78–99.

30 UNCTAD, Economic Development in Africa.

31 ‘IMF Deal: Cry My Beloved Zambia,’ Grieve Chelwa, accessed March 11, 2024, https://gchelwa.substack.com/p/imf-deal-cry-my-beloved-zambiahtml.

32 Mkandawire and Soludo, Our Continent, Our Future, 5.

33 Mkandawire and Soludo, Our Continent, Our Future, 6.

34 Thandika Mkandawire, ‘Thinking about Developmental States in Africa,’ Cambridge Journal of Economics 25, no. 3 (May 2001): 303.

35 Mkandawire and Soludo, Our Continent, Our Future, 36.

36 Mkandawire, ‘Thinking about Developmental States in Africa’.

37 Mkandawire, ‘Thinking about Developmental States in Africa’.

38 Organisation of African Unity, Lagos Plan of Action for the Economic Development of Africa: 1980 to 2000 (Addis Ababa, OAU, 1980), 4.

39 Quoted in Rose M. D’Sa, ‘The Lagos Plan of Action – Legal Mechanisms for Co-operation between the Organisation of African Unity and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa,’ Journal of African Law 27, no. 1 (Spring, 1983): 13.

Can Africans do Economics? can be ordered through Inkani Books here.

Grieve Chelwa is Associate Professor of Political Economy and Chair of the Social Sciences Department at the Africa Institute. He is also a senior fellow at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. His current research focuses on the political economy of development in Africa. Chelwa has previously held academic and administrative positions at The New School, the University of Cape Town and Harvard University. He holds a PhD in economics from the University of Cape Town.

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