/IPS DEVELOPMENT BULLETIN/ AFRICA: Stop Blaming Bretton Woods, African Experts Say

By Toye Olori Reprint | | Print |

Toye Olori

LAGOS, Jul 19 1997 (IPS) - Part of the blame for Africa’s political and economic woes has often been laid at the door of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, but according to experts here, it’s time to stop doing that.

While governments have been wont to complain that their countries have been suffering as a result of unworkable policies imposed by the Bretton Woods institutions, Nigerian academics and economists say Africans thmselves should take responsibility f or what has been happening on the continent.

They agreed at a workshop held here over the weekend in honour of late Prof. Claude Ake — an economist who died last November in a plane crash — that the undervelopment of Africa and the suffering its people have been going through were hoegrown.

“Africa has today been relegated to the background,” said Prof. Osita Eze, who was the guest lecturer at the workshop. “This comes from the way we do things, the result of which is that we have not been able to do much in terms of development.”

“One of the basic problems is the fact that we consume what we don’t produce and what we cannot afford,” added Eze, who also linked the economic and political problems of Africa to selfish personal interest, which has resulted in misgovernment and mismanagement of resources.

“Africans should learn to fend for themselves in a world of competition,” he recommended.

Of the 45 countries which the UN Development Programme (UNDP) lists as having low levels of human development, 32 are in Africa.

The UNDP also noted in its 1997 Human Development Report that the global expansion of trade and investment had been largely for the benefit of the more dynamic and powerful countries i the North and South.

“Unless globalisation is carefully managed, poor countries and poor people will become increasingly marginalised,” it warned. “All countries and all major financial and international agencies must do more than just cheering on the sidelines about

the virtue of globalisation,” it added.

Kalu Idika Kalu, former finance minister under Gen. Ibrahim Babangida — during whose administration a structural adjustment programme and a two-tiered exchange-rate system, SFEM, were introduced in Nigeria — said it was usually not policies that

were faulty but their implementation by African leaders.

Using Nigeria as an example, he said “we, not the IMF or the World Bank, chose not to devalue but to do the SFEM … We, and not the IMF or the World Bank, decided to volve an official (exchange) rate different from the market rates.

“That led to the explosion in the financial sector. And that led to the increase in the size of the domestic debts donominated in foreign currency by our various classes of business,” Kalu noted. “It is not fair to suggest that somebody in Washin gton or … Moscow designed something to kill you. That is not fair. That is not true.”

Nor can Africa’s political problems be blamed on external forces, according to Prof. Akin Mabogunje, former chair of the Presidential Advisory Committee in Nigeria. He said one of the tragedies of Africa was that many people who jump from the barra cks to presidency have no vision at all.

Mabogunje, who is Director of the Development Policy Centre in Ibadan, said it was not that people from the barracks lacked vision per se but that they refused to learn.

Nigeria’s problems, Mabogunje said, also stemmed to some extent from an excessive love of riches, which bred corruption, and a hatred of other people’s success. He added that the government should see it as its job to allow those who could create we alth to keep growing and block those who steal.

There have been too many errors of governance in Africa, noted Mabogunje, who stressed that “going to the basics is going o the real people who produce”.

“We have not even started thinking about development,” he argued.

Professor Bayo Olukoshi of the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA) said there was need to assess the development process in Africa with an analytical mind. He noted that statistics showed that African countries have been recording wo rse economic performances than before they gained independence.

However, Kalu explained that it was improper to look at the continent as a block, because some countries have managed better than Nigeria. “But the sheer weight of Nigeria, whether within the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) regio n or the whole black African region is such that we have pulled down the average growth in this region because of the poor performance that we exhibited,” Kalu said.

“We should have been pulling it just the other way around,” he said. “There is no reason why Nigeria should not have recovered back in 1996, why the naira (national currency) should not have been one or two to the dollar or even better. But we bl ew it.”