Comments "several key ANC leaders were visited by Geoffrey Lamb, .. before escaping to East Africa and then to Sussex, England. ...migrating to Washington where during the 1980s he focused on the crafty goal of making neoliberal African economic policies appear to be ‘homegrown’:" In May 1990, when the World Bank made its first substantial appearance in South Africa in more than two decades, a war of position began that finally resulted, nearly seven years later, in a minor face-saving victory for the Bank’s Johannesburg staff. The first World Bank loan to democratic South Africa-- worth R340 million--was only granted in 1997, for the supposed purpose of making small and medium enterprises more globally competitive. The Bank had tiptoed into South Africa’s development maelstrom with exceptional sensitivity. For on the one side it faced a strong left rump of the Democratic Movement (as well as other radical forces), well aware of the Bank’s reputation as the most powerful oppressive force in the Third World since the days of colonialism. Many within the ANC who had lived in Tanzania, Zambia, Uganda and elsewhere up-continent shared a gut feeling that a democratic South Africa must avoid the World Bank like the plague. On
the other side--inviting the Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) with indecent haste--were powerful bourgeois forces. Business ideologues and civil servant scoundrels of the late apartheid era, including leading strategists of the Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA), were ever more anxious to show that Pretoria’s control of bantustans was dependent not merely upon securocrat musclepower but also upon homeland ‘structural adjustment programmes’ (the DBSA did, clumsily, actually use that name). Such econocrats were drawn from both old-guard government and big business cliques, and harboured firm ambitions not only of surviving the transition process but indeed of actually thriving in whatever environment lay ahead. At the vanguard was the Urban Foundation, which tried to position itself as the favoured World Bank junior partner (ahead of its rivals the DBSA and Independent Development Trust). Using increasingly strident but nevertheless quite effective policy advocacy, the UF invariably cited free- market conventional wisdom from Washington DC as the gospel. As Chapter 4 shows, the UF’s vision of cities was decisive. But as an unintended consequence, the econocrats’ arrogance gave many Bank opponents in South Africa experience in understanding the logic and codewords of neoliberalism, critiquing these based on their emergence in the late- apartheid state’s development practice, and also gradually coming to know Bank personnel. For example, during that first Bank visit in 1990, several key ANC leaders were visited by Geoffrey Lamb, a former SACP intellectual who had spent time in jail during the 1960s before escaping to East Africa and then to Sussex, England. There he had completed his doctorate and acted as supervisor to South Africa’s emerging cadre of marxist sociologists, prior to migrating to Washington where during the 1980s he focused on the crafty goal of making neoliberal African economic policies appear to be ‘homegrown’: “ Building an independent technocratic policy capacity within member countries is therefore important to encourage domestic political accountability for policy decisions over the longer run and for improving the credibility of economic advice to countries’ political leaderships-- provided that support for technocratic ‘policy elites’ does not too drastically compromise the recipients’ influence.(5)” Indeed being too close to the Bank was a danger that would emerge later. But in the early days, Lamb broke the ice effectively with his old friend from Sussex, Thabo Mbeki (also a tough young Communist Party ideologue during the 1960s). The two proceeded to assign specialist teams to analyse conditions and generate policy options in macroeconomics, industry, health, education, housing and land reform. The Bank agreed, apparently reluctantly, that there would be no loans to the De Klerk government, which it too came to label ‘illegitimate.’ Lamb’s colleague Jeff Racki--scion of a wealthy liberal family from Cape Town, who was responsible for extremely low-quality urban programmes in neighbouring Zimbabwe--received formal endorsements for research, along with chaperons (drawn even from the SACP) for several ‘urban missions.’ The Bank also funded handsome consultancies to bring aboard a few influential left-leaning intellectuals and researchers who had previously devoted nearly all their energies to the Democratic Movement, including the trade union movement.
-- Michael Pugliese