At a recent launch of The Oxford Companion to the Economics of Africa in Accra, the editors of the esteemed volume were at odds over how to assess the consequences of three decades of "Washington Consensus" neoliberal economic policies. While they debated whether or not these policies had brought growth to the continent, the only point they agreed on was the fact that they have resulted in growing inequalities and increasing poverty throughout Africa.
Elections have therefore only offered the electorate a chance to choose politicians who continue to impose increasing poverty upon them. As a result, in some places, people are actually nostalgic about the years they were living under dictatorships - because they remember them as times when they had more food.
What we are witnessing now is, in part, the blowback from years of neoliberalism and military interventions in places such as Somalia and Libya. This blowback is revealing the shallowness of the "Third Wave" democratisation processes in Africa that the US political science establishment was so keen to ride. Larry Diamond, for example, influenced much of the Clinton administration's thinking about the democratic transitions and now boasts having authored 27 books on it.
The liberal triumphalist thinking of the 1990s was, of course, forced into revision from events that ensued. Neoliberal thinkers in places like the World Bank had thought movements for democracy, supported by Washington, would chop away the burdensome state, freeing natural propensities to trade, allowing capitalism to flourish. The reality is that neoliberal policies destroyed existing local markets while highly sinister elements flourished.
Thinking at the World Bank then turned policy orientation toward building "institutions for markets", "capacity building" and eventually a complete about-face to "statebuilding". The occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan were most influential in forcing this shift cutting back the sate, to now build them up as bulwarks against Islamic fundamentalists, rampant corruption and those who might want to consider re-nationalisation as a development tool.
[WS:] It is amazing how much better Aljazeera is than the US corporate media. The latter read like Pravda - following the neoliberal party line. BTW, the Flesch-Kincaid grade level of the text is13.4 - well above the moronic level of the American political discourse.
-- Wojtek
"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."