Intellectual change from Left and Right, 1970s∕early 1980s

The 1970s and early 1980s marked a difficult phase in the economic and political history of much of West Africa: statist policies did not bring the expected transformation, and by the late 1970s most of West Africa - Ivory Coast was a spectacular exception - was facing stagnant or negative growth.

The disappointments of ‘statist' development policies were felt on both sides of the political spectrum. On the left, ‘dependency theory' arrived on African campuses mainly in the form of Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), followed by the numerous publications of the Senegal-based Egyptian writer Samir Amin (for example Amin, 1973). Following broadly in the tradition of Andre Gunder Frank and other Latin American ‘dependentistas', Rodney and Amin argued, with particular reference to Africa, that the development of the West and the ‘underdevelopment of the Rest' were necessarily the same historical process, which con­tinued today in the form of neo-colonialism.

These ideas found a strong echo in the work of West African political economists. The work of West African neo-Marxists was deeply entrenched in a dependency reading of history: imperialism, the notion at the centre of their approach, could not be understood as an abstract category, but only in its historical evolution (Onimode, 1982). Consequently, the failure of postcolonial African states to modernise was explained by the inheritance of the ‘extractive features' characterising colonial economies, which in turn had been shaped by the expansion of capitalist production in the industrializing world (Ake, 1981, 88—9).

Furthermore, unlike the first generation of development economists, as well as African socialists like Nkrumah (up to 1966), Marxist writers of the 1970s and 1980s rejected many of the claims made about the ‘exceptionalism' of developing countries: Nigerian Bade Onimode (1944—2001), for example, claimed that ‘Class struggles have been an integral part of the pro­cess of economic development in Nigeria since the pre-capitalist era. Though the social classes are embryonic relative to the classical ones of Western Europe and North America', their development was ‘clearly visible with respect to the usual criteria of Marxist class analysis' (Onimode, 1978, 507). To think otherwise meant to introduce ‘bourgeois distortions' reflect­ing ‘the unscientific methodology of imperialist social science' (ibid.). The acknowledge­ment of the global and historical nature of African underdevelopment called in turn for a radical solution: ‘structural disengagement from the international capitalist system' (Onimode, 1982, 240).

Nearly a decade after Dependency theory, neoclassical economics emphatically reasserted itself in Africa through the ‘policy door'. In Africa the ‘counter-revolution in development theory and policy' (Toye, 1987) is usually dated to 1981, when the World Bank published Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Agenda for Action, better known as the Berg Report.

For their part, a few West African economists produced works that resonated with a free market vision. Within Ghana, the intellectual case for general economic liberalization was hardly made in public at the time that the self-described ‘revolutionary' government of J.J. Rawlings, confronted with a steadily falling GDP, reversed course by embarking on the progressive abandonment of price controls and the adoption of Structural Adjustment. The policy changes began to be implemented in 1983. A rare exception to the absence of a public argu­ment for economic liberalization in advance of the event was the appearance in the early 1980s of occasional, usually anonymous, articles criticising aspects of the price and quantity controls in a small-circulation journal, The Legon Observer. This was published within the University of Ghana, many of whose scholars at the time were more associated with the Left.

Meanwhile a Ghanaian expatriate in North America, James Ahiakpor (b. 1945), an economist who had received his education in Ghana as well as Canada, was developing a scorching critique of dependency theories (Ahiakpor, 1985, 1986). If underdevelopment was in the interests of the West, queried Ahiakpor, why had foreign investment in Ghana been shrinking as the economy declined, whereas in Ivory Coast it was the other way around (Ahiakpor, 1986)? Ahiakpor claimed that the appeal of dependency theories to politicians in developing countries was partly because it did ‘not require an understanding of neoclassical economic analysis', whose logic appeared counterintuitive, but was ultimately correct (Ahiakpor, 1985, 538).