Putting indigenous culture and institutions to work
The mere contraposition of Marxism and free market economics hides the existence of other alternatives to free market economics, and (as we saw with the Ibadan School), the emergence of local traditions in post-colonial economics.
The role of ‘traditional’ African culture in shaping economic behaviour fostered heated debates among Western social scientists in the decades following independence, but remained largely outside the work of most West African economists. In contrast with some early economic historiography which saw indigenous institutions as assisting economic development (Hill, 1963), West African economists shared with former colonial masters, nationalist leaders and Cold War partners the assumption, partly derived from modernization theory, that pre-colonial knowledge and institutions mostly represented an obstacle to economic progress.Yet the perceived failure of imported development models, whether capitalist or socialist, has occasionally led West African economists to seek an authentically ‘African’ way to diagnose and cure the continent’s economic and political malaise. Given the imposition of colonialism from Europe, it is not surprising that the source for the authentic voice of Africa had to be identified in the pre-colonial past, interpretations of which vary. Sometimes this implied a rediscovery of ethnicity: Okigbo stated that, given their distinctive values such as ‘work ethic, enterprise, innovativeness in times of adversity... a dedication to fair competition and merit’ there was ‘ample room for the Igbo to bring to bear on the solution of Nigerian economic and political problems some unique contribution’ (Okigbo, 1986/1993, 143). Far from being the ‘modernizing’ social engineers envisaged in the 1950s and 1960s, social scientists were, by virtue of their training, the best qualified to ‘identify the decline in elemental values’ (Okigbo, 1981/1987, 14) and correct it for the good of society at large.
A later contribution on the role of indigenous knowledge and institutions comes from the Ghanaian economist George Ayittey (b.
1945), who, like Ahiakpor, was trained partly at the University of Ghana and partly in Canada. Unlike many West African economists, Ayittey criticized SAPs from a free market perspective, maintaining that most SAPs amounted to ‘reorganizing a bankrupt company and placing it — together with a massive infusion of capital — in the hands of the same incompetent managers who ruined it’ (Ayittey, 1991, n.p.). Ayittey largely explains the failure of statist policies implemented from the 1960s on as the consequence of a perverse adoption of values which do not fit African indigenous tradition. In his view, in line more with the rhetoric of the Asante exiles of 1894 than with Blyden’s diasporic nostalgia, pre-colonial institutions were the highest expression of an individualistic economy, where means of production were privately owned, the ‘profit motive was present in most market trans-actions’ and ‘Free enterprise and free trade were the rule’ (Ayittey, 2005, 350). The lessons of free-market pre-colonial Africa are not only limited to economic institutions, but could be extended to the political domain. In striking contrast with the postcolonial African experience, dominated by tyrants, generals and presidents for life, in Ayittey’s account pre-colonial Africa offered examples of democratic institutions, where chiefs and elders could be ‘destooled’ by their subjects. The appeal to pre-colonial values does not conflict with support for Pan-African co-operation: an alliance of Pan-Africanism and indigenous wisdom, in contrast with Nkrumah’s centralised socialist model, for instance, would lead to the adoption of a confederal system with a higher degree of decentralization of power (Ayittey, 2010, 100).