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New African development?

This anniversary issue of the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) revisits the prospects for development in Africa. The theme is as prominent today as it was in 1974. However one discusses the statistics or offers stories of woe and hope, the plain fact is that African countries have not industrialised. They have not qualitatively shifted the patterns in the commodities that they export or generated mass wage employment, or appropriated upgraded production technologies: in short, the living conditions of most Africans in 2014 are worse than they were in the early 1970s. While some kind of capitalist transition may have taken place in a number of ‘later developers’, from the NICS to the BRICS, it is also evident that African political economies have not been static, although many have been stagnant. If anything, a fair characterisation of post-colonial economic change would be that many African countries have suffered excessive change: instability and radical shifts in prices, rates of exchange and so on. As a result of a high dependence on the export of primary goods with volatile prices, political instability, and a whole range of damaging policies implemented under structural adjustment and poverty reduction strategy papers, a great deal of accumulation in Africa is bifurcated. It is separated between the short-term, low profit margin, and often desperate activity of what is commonly called the informal sector, and the politically insulated and foreigndominated large-scale investments in minerals, energy, commercial farming, and so on. Indeed, a great many African countries have been through periods of rapid growth, but these have been ephemeral, hamstrung by the uneven and dependent nature of that growth, contributing as a result to the sense that growth is in itself part of the broader political economy of instability that many African states endure. If it is unstable, highly concentrated, and extraverted, developmentally speaking, growth is not good. If this is our context for discussion of development, one might ask why the notion of ‘new African development’ and its synonyms have emerged recently. It is interesting to note that a similar kind of question drove a great deal of the research and debates in ROAPE’s early issues. From a Marxist perspective, a central focus was given to the prospects that emerging African bourgeoisies would forge ahead with processes of accumulation that would underpin broader projects of national transformation. Heavily influenced by Latin American theories of dependency, the premise was that incipient capitalist classes might have the wherewithal (at least potentially) to generate ‘autonomous’ or ‘delinked’ development in which investment would generate expanding wage labour, the growing workforce would demand more of the commodities that peasants produce, peasants would attain higher incomes from crops and invest in agriculture, facilitating improved supplies of materials for new industries and so on. In the present day, the prospects for development are framed in a very different way: here attention is given primarily to rates of economic growth, increases in foreign direct investment (FDI), and a growing African ‘middle class’. Setting aside the historical context for a moment, it is clear that these two framings of development’s prospects are based in very different perspectives. The present-day optimism