The Silent Revolution in Africa: Debt, Development and Democracy

Abstract

The Silent Revolution in Africa: debt, development and democracy was published in 1989, the year that shall be remembered for the momentous political revolutions of Eastern Europe characterised by a popular triumph of democratic rule and market-driven economics. Even before all this, the Soviet Union had applied for observer status at the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in Geneva, in anticipation of an increased role for itself in the western-dominated world-trading system. Poland, Hungary, China, and Yugoslavia are active members of the Bretton Woods institutions the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (I.M.F.). Having met all the loan conditionalities, Vietnam says it would love to draw on the I.M.F. for balanceof-payments support. By the extension of the logic which saturates this book, however, these countries are committing colossal economic blunders. Fantu Cheru depicts the Bretton Woods institutions as a callous duo at the pinnacle of a western-dominated international economic system, which has replaced old-fashioned colonialism, and kept African states purposefully debtridden, impoverished, and oppressed. In contrast to what the former socialist world is doing, the author argues that the sooner Africa can disengage from this system the better. This would require a retreat from export-led development, a strategy of self-reliance within African regional markets, and, above all, democratic-based development policies based on genuine peasant participation in planning and implementation, which would exclude the customary roles of African elites and donor agencies. One wonders how all this must look to the Eastern-bloc party apparatchiks of yesteryear who purveyed some variety of this doctrine for decades, and who are now forced to recant it in the face of popular outrage and massive evidence of the economic fraud and damage it led to. One needs to reflect further, how all this would go down with development policy-makers in Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia, whose economies are charging away at unprecedented growth rates based on fairly equitable export-led growth, and good rapport with the World Bank and the I.M.F. For the sad truth is that in the 1990s, the kind of analysis presented in this book can only predictably come out of Africa, not Eastern Europe, Asia, or even Latin America. Impatience with the continent's deteriorating economic conditions now

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