The Politics of One-Sided Adjustment in Africa

Abstract

Over the course of the past two decades, discussions of the economic liberalization sweeping have proliferated. At the center of this discussion is the impact of structural adjustment programs. Indeed, the political, economic, and social implications of adjustment have been one of the most debated topics of our times. Strongly defended by the International Financial Institutions (IFIs) and Western donor governments and criticized by those who dismiss the market superiority approach inherent in the policy, adjustment has set the terms of debate over economic development in and acquired hegemonic status. In The Politics of One-Sided Adjustment in Africa, published in the Journal of Black Studies, my senior colleague, Professor Daniel Tetteh Osabu-Kle, provided a critical and provocative analysis of adjustment in with two ambitious goals: to critique the dominant neoliberal economic prescriptions and to outline a radical transformative alternative agenda. The Politics of OneSided Adjustment in Africa is written in response to neoliberal optimism about the efficacy of their policies, challenges the optimistic interpretations and prognosis of neoliberal policies, and takes the Bretton Woods Institutions, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank to task for their emphasis on the ideology of free trade and the magic of the price mechanism. In a broad sense, Osabu-Kle's analysis challenges the prevalent Western orthodoxy of adjustment that has been articulated and reproduced to the extent that it has become, in Ernesto Laclau and Chantal

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