Abstract
With their ears finely tuned to the voices of foreign experts and deaf to local voices, African States simply didn’t care about local debates, except when they threatened state authority.
Over the past 20 years, Africa has been marked by unprecedented economic growth and an influx of social movements. The positive correlation between growth and contentious demands unsettles the impulse to equate peace and progress with levels of economic production. Many African governments have relied on extractivism – development strategies predicated on capital-intensive removal of finite natural resources – to bolster their economies at the expense of ecological and social sustainability (The WoMin Collective, 2017). Sustained protests swell the continent for the promises and prosperity of holistic development. Only, their opposition has consistently been against the very institutions that offer discourses on partnership, sustainable development and country ownership. In 2019, Senegalese women and environmental activists successfully halted the re-opening of the Sendou Coal Power Plant. Backed by the African Development Bank (AfDB) the plant would have destroyed the marine ecology and the livelihood of the women fishers (Petersen and Harrison, 2016). 2018 in Ghana saw thousands take to the streets to protest a renewed military agreement between Ghana and the USA that further exposed Ghana to US strategic military interests in the region. In South Africa, after the massacre of 34 workers striking at the Lomin platinum mine in 2012, platinum miners successfully held the longest and most expensive strike in South African history in 2014 (Wengraf, 2018). Though disparate in form, many of these social movements aim to disrupt the savage developmentalism that characterizes the political and economic changes on the continent. Savage developmentalism, as H.L.T Quan explains it, is ‘contrary to modernity’s promise of progress, democratization, and freedom, this regime of development is fundamentally violent and antidemocratic’ (2012: 11). These movements challenge the very prescriptions that development banks, donors and governments peddle as the cure for underdevelopment and expose the symbolism in the participation rhetoric (Zeilig, 2009). Savage developmentalism is part and parcel of the international call for more country ownership from African governments.
I am immensely grateful to the contributors to this symposium for their critical engagement with my book and the timely topic of ownership, country ownership, or ownership of development. Comaroff aptly explores ownership as a relic of European capitalist expansion, creating a more capacious space to imagine the racialized logic that belies the discourse. Graham extends my discursive critique of the paradigm to the Jamaican context, demonstrating the generalizability of the critique and malleability of the paradigm. Táíwò provides a thorough and succinct review of the book that allows me to use this space to expand on the material and social conditions unfolding under the guise of ownership.
In my book, Rethinking Ownership of Development in Africa, I focus, almost exclusively, on the discursive and ideational limitations of what I call ‘the ownership paradigm’. The ownership paradigm refers to the tools, language and practices that the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) initiated at the turn of the century to proliferate neoliberal development strategies under the guise of country-specific development (Harper-Shipman, 2019b). The most prominent definition of ownership comes from the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) as part of the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness. The OECD defines ownership as ‘a developing country government’s abilities to exercise leadership over their development policies and strategies and co-ordinate development actions’ (OECD, 2011: 29). Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), Sector Wide Approaches (SWAps) and Medium Term Expenditure Frameworks (MTEFs) became the technical tools attendant with the language of responsibility and national leadership. The book demonstrates how the ideational underpinnings of ownership reproduce an epistemic imbalance that bolsters scientific capitalism as the only objective and appropriate knowledge. In this response, I provide a cursory sketch of select social responses to various conditions that have unfolded as a result of African governments ‘taking ownership of their development’.
It is important to think about aspects of these grassroots movements in the context of ownership given that PRSPs were supposed to mark a change from structural adjustments, in that they required consultation with civil society organizations. What constitutes civil society in Africa, however, has always been a fraught discussion (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1999). While some NGOs, backed by European and American donors, signed on to the PRSP and ownership model, others demonstrated a visceral reaction to the development model as a mere rebranding of neoliberalism (Dwyer and Zeilig, 2012; Harper-Shipman, 2019a; Zeilig, 2009). The protections afforded these different groups vary depending on their willingness to conform to neoliberal capitalist development strategies, outlined in PRSPs. I demonstrate this by re-examining Burkina Faso in this light. Furthermore, the language of consultation and participation have been contested as donor and government mechanisms for co-opting and mollifying communities (White, 1996). The Kenyan government’s response to community engagement with a regional infrastructural project highlights this point.
A renaissance in the new millennium
In the early 2000s, African leaders conspired to bring the continent from the depths of poverty and into the new millennium through a 21st century renaissance. Leaders like Thabo Mbeki from South Africa, Abdoulaye Wade from Senegal and Olesugn Obasanjo from Nigeria collaborated on the New Economic Partnership for African Development (NEPAD), which would reflect the strategic axes for realizing the spirit of the African Renaissance. Backed by the same international architects that scaffolded the ownership paradigm, NEPAD reflected a continent-wide commitment to collaborate with donors and give primacy to economic development as the solution for poverty reduction (Owusu, 2003). PRSPs and the attendant institutions and discourses are relatively indistinguishable from the NEPAD strategy (Owusu, 2006; 2003). The UN’s Economic Commission for Africa outlined substantial collaborative potential between the NEPAD strategy and the principles informing PRSPs, with particular emphasis on both being county-driven and results oriented (Economic Commission for Africa, 2002). Both strategies also coalesced around Africans taking responsibility for Africa. In January 2000, Michel Camdessus, former Managing Director of the IMF and co-architect of the PRSPs, explained to a room full of African leaders, ‘you have reminded us also that it is your societies that have the primary responsibility for the fight against poverty and that your countries must occupy the driving seat’ (Camdessus, 2000). Merely two months prior, Deputy President of South Africa, Jacob Zuma articulated similar sentiments when describing the vision of the African Renaissance to a London audience. He stated, Ladies and gentlemen each and every African has a role to play in the realization of this vision. Those of us in positions of power and those of us who have the personal ability to do so have a duty to lay the groundwork in order for it to take hold (Zuma, 1999).
Ownership of development, the African Renaissance, and NEPAD were products of millennial capitalism (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2000). Comaroff and Comaroff describe capitalism at the millennium as ‘perplexing times: “Times of monstrous chimeras” in which the conjuncture of the strange and the familiar, of stasis and metamorphosis, plays tricks on our perceptions, our positions, our praxis’ (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2000: 3). The renewed and invigorated promotion of modern capitalist development through vehicles like ownership was perhaps one of the more beguiling chimeras borne out of millennial capitalism. Donors became partners, the World Bank became a repository for knowledge, communities became experts, and the state was once again vital for progress. The smoke billowing from these changes were attempts to shroud the untenable power structures that were held over from the previous development decades. But where there is smoke, there is fire.
Both NEPAD and PRSPs were tone-deaf with respect to the continental demands for more equitable and sustainable development. African institutions like Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) and Third World Network (TWN) responded to NEPAD with scathing criticism of its neoliberal and anti-democratic spirit (CODESRIA, 2002). NEPAD merely reflected Western commitments for further opening the continent to global market forces but with less resistant African governments (Akinola and Ndawonde, 2016). In similar fashion, delegates at the South African Social Forums (SASF) were vocal in their opposition to PRSPs and demanded that the World Bank and IMF offer pecuniary atonement for their deleterious policies (Dwyer and Zeilig, 2012). In many respects, the World Bank and IMF elaborated the ownership discourse and PRSPs as a response to global protests against market-driven development that took place in the 1990s (Harper-Shipman, 2019a; Walton and Seddon, 1994). The ownership paradigm resuscitated neoliberal development in a Frankenstein form. Co-opting discourses from social movements and intellectual critiques of neoliberal development – partnership, country ownership, local knowledge, stakeholder participation – while keeping the original spirit and intent – competition, private profit, measurable results, hierarchies of knowledge, and co-optation – intact.
Protesting development in a time of growth
The breadth of the ownership paradigm and its ability to bend various socio-political environments to its will is an essential feature of the paradigm. Graham is erudite in his ability to demonstrate this in the case of Jamaica by teasing out ‘taking responsibility’ as a discourse that is attendant with ownership but derived from the Jamaican context. Graham demonstrates how the ‘taking responsibility’, that is embraced by Jamaican civil society, intellectuals, and government, mirrors the Bretton Woods Institutions’ calls for country-led, empirically-driven, market-based development. He effectively illustrates the moral underpinnings that inform, goad and invigorate Jamaican stakeholders in their quests to ‘take responsibility’ for their development woes. The subsequent conditions parallel the outcomes in the African cases that I use in the book: a development document titled Vision 2030, improvement in quantitative economic indicators, entrenched marginalization along social and political axes, and government being the sole bearer of responsibility for increases in poverty rates. Graham provides a skilled analysis not only of how the ownership paradigm should be investigated in myriad contexts around the global South, but also its discursive ability to adapt to any political climate. The appeal of the discourse is that it appears apolitical. The tools and strategies for implementing country-owned development can withstand political transitions so long as capitalist development remains a priority (Booth, 2012). Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of Burkina Faso.
The land of the upright: Burkina Faso
Since publishing the book, Burkina Faso, once a relatively peaceful country garnering a reputation for its social and political stability, is now a haven for terrorism. The country initiated its commitment to development in 2000. As a Heavily In-debted Poor Country (HIPC), the World Bank and IMF required the country to produce a PRSP that these institutions would then approve (Harper-Shipman, 2019b). This took place under Blaise Compaoré’s administration, during his 13th year as President of Burkina Faso. Compaoré ruled the country as a capitalist-friendly despot, murdering political opponents, welcoming donor influence and embracing neoliberal reforms (Harsch, 2014; Murrey, 2018). Under Compaoré, Burkina Faso was the prototypical case for international aid and remains so today. As one civil servant told me, Burkina’s PRSP is the model for other West African countries (Harper-Shipman, 2019b). A popular revolt in 2014 forced Compoaré to flee the country in exile after 27 years as president, leaving behind an intact policy framework and a functioning PRSP.
In 2015, Burkina Faso began to witness a succession of terrorist attacks, leading to the government closing entire regions of the country (Bojsen and Compaoré, 2019). All facets of development beyond the economic sector have yielded to the insecurity. In health, the number of women giving birth with a skilled health professional dropped from 47% in 2018 to 41% in 2019 (Government of Burkina Faso, 2020: 8). By the start of 2019, roughly 40% of the schools in the red zones had closed (Dewast, 2019). Some projected that the number of internally displaced Burkinabè would reach 900,000 by April 2020, causing Burkina Faso to become the next Syria (Lamarche, 2020). Never before has the country experienced such persistent and violent cases of insecurity and extremism.
Burkina Faso remains one of Africa’s emerging economies. The country saw an increase in real GDP from 5.6% in 2016 to 6.7% as a consequence of increased mining (Secretariat Permanent du Plan National de Developpement Economique et Social, 2018). In a short span of three years, the country’s GDP grew from 10.4 billion in 2015 to 14.1 billion in 2018 (World Bank Data). Burkina, like many other African countries over the past decade, has maintained growth rates above 5% per annum. In 2017 and 2018, Burkina’s GDP growth rates were above 6%. During this period, the newly elected government soldiered on with the PRSP goals elaborated under Blaise Compaoré. The government produced a new MTEF: the National Plan for Economic and Social Development (PNDES), which retained the same economic strategies as the former MTEF. In their endorsement of the PNDES, the World Bank Country Director for Burkina Faso explained, The objectives of the World Bank Group are consistent with those of the PNDES. This [Country Partnership Framework] will help Burkina Faso accelerate the structural transformation of its economy in order to create productive employment and meet the country’s development challenges (World Bank, 2018).
The privileging of macroeconomic structural reforms remains a central solution to the state of insecurity, despite having also been the source of the insecurity. Against the backdrop of economic restructuring, violence and insecurity have proliferated across the country. The situation has encouraged local actors to respond with alternative modes of governance that circumvent the state and donor community.
In clear and certain terms, the rise of extremism and violent crimes is linked to sources of economic growth, unequal distribution of wealth and climatic shock (Bojsen and Compaoré, 2019). The Kogleowego are emblematic of the mutually constitutive nature of these conditions. Mooré for ‘guardians of the bush’, the Kogleoweogo are a nationally organized vigilante group that protects assailed communities in regions of the country that are most exposed to violence and beyond the state’s reach. The group began as an environmental community-based organization, collaborating with the government and NGOs to stop deforestation, illegal hunting and environmental degradation (Bojsen and Compaoré, 2019). The Kogloweogo now consist of armed men responding to persistent attacks on their already precarious livelihoods, as most of the members are subsistence farmers, former goldminers, or unemployed. Drastically truncated rainy seasons and a scourge of fall armyworm have wrought havoc on the agricultural sector (Day et al., 2017). The government and donor-backed pushes for increases in gold extraction from industrial mines have led many Burkinabe to link mining with increased armed robberies, drug usage, child labor and HIV/AIDS (Bojsen and Compaoré, 2019; Hagberg et al., 2019). A dearth of viable jobs and access to education maps directly on to some of the most insecure regions of the country. These armed men are outgrowths of the conditions they seek to mitigate. Patrolling remote parts of the country with illegal rifles, operating independent jails, capturing and punishing alleged criminals, the group describes itself as a self-defense movement (Bojsen and Compaoré, 2019). Government attempts to regulate the group have been challenged, given that the organization is entrenched in areas that lack police and state presence. International groups have condemned the Kogloweogo as contributing to national insecurity; a position that overlooks the structural conditions that cultivate these types of community responses as potent demonstrations of local agency. The Kogloweogo, rendered legible as a social movement, demarcate the unyielding boundaries of what constitutes a Burkinabè civil society under the ownership paradigm.
One criticism of ownership that I advance in the book is that under the paradigm, donors and the global economic system are not deemed responsible for creating the structural obstacles to improving living conditions in many African countries (Harper-Shipman, 2019b). The PNDES gives considerable emphasis to domestic governance and a struggling private sector as responsible for the national security crisis (Secretariat Permanent du Plan National de Developpement Economique et Social, 2018). Scholars working in the region have been vocal about the role of the USA, France, NATO and other bilateral and multilateral actors contributing fundamentally to its destabilization (Campbell, 2013; Jorio and Hagberg, 2019). Nevertheless, the international solutions to the armed conflict and the climate insecurity in Burkina Faso have been par for the course: more military aid and more private sector responses (World Bank, 2020a). In 2014, Burkina Faso, Mali, Chad, Niger, and Mauritania established the G5 Sahel – a regional institution for economic and security collaboration. The G5 Sahel receives considerable financial and military backing from bilateral donors like the USA and France. In 2019, the World Bank stated that addressing the security crisis in Burkina Faso depends on the country’s ‘openness to international trade, and export diversification. It is therefore necessary’, they argue, ‘ to create fiscal space to expedite investments in infrastructure and human capital with the aim of boosting the productivity and competitiveness of the economy’ (World Bank, 2020b). Absent, again, is reference to the role that international actors played in fomenting instability in the region through direct military action and demanding economic liberalization across West Africa (Jorio and Hagberg, 2019; Wengraf, 2018). Instead, the onus is placed on internal factors that can only be improved with more country ownership.
Harambee: let us all pull together
Thousands of miles to the southeast of Burkina Faso, Kenya is experiencing its share of social movements. For example, in 2017, over 5000 public health facilities shut down for 100 days as health workers went on strike to demand improved working conditions and equitable compensation. While the health workers were able to exact change vis-à-vis the government, other protesters have found the government backed by the global market to be a much more daunting challenger.
The Kenyan government collaborated with Ethiopia and South Sudan to work on the Lamu Port–South Sudan–Ethiopia–Transport (LAPSSET): a regional corridor and communication project that will facilitate the transportation of oil and other finite resources using highways, railways, seaports and airports. A multi-billion-dollar project, LAPSSET has garnered the epistemic and financial support of multilateral donors such as the AfDB, NEPAD, the World Bank and bi-lateral donors like the USA, Canada, Germany and Spain. The project is a core component of Kenya’s Vision 2030, the country’s PRSP. Donors and investors have labeled the project exemplary of the steps African governments must take to ensure the continent continues its integration into the world market. The World Bank endorsed the project as essential for the region’s economic growth (Enns, 2019). The AfDB Regional Director referred to the LAPSSET as ‘a critical project’ for regional integration and Africa’s ability to trade globally, with particular emphasis on the Lamu portion (LAPSSET, 2017). The Lamu site will include a 32-berth seaport, road, three resort cities, railway and three international airports. It is also the site where some of the more widespread protests in opposition to the project have taken place in Kenya.
Activists have been opposing LAPSSET since the proposal stage in 2012 because of the irreversible environmental degradation anticipated with the project: air, water and land pollution, including the destruction of the Lamu Archipelago (Wengraf, 2018). The project requires the displacement of already vulnerable communities with little reference to resettlement or restitution. In a fashion that conforms to the anti-democratic underpinnings of savage development, Kenyan police have used intimidation tactics and arrested men and women during peaceful protests, labeling them as members of the terrorist group Al-Shabab (Human Rights Watch, 2018). Where communities have not been opposed to the project itself, they have been active in creating forms of engagement that will allow them to monitor and direct the project (Enns, 2019). These groups have been met with symbolic gestures of participation and consultation from the government (Enns, 2019). Although the LAPSSET is part of the national strategy embedded in the PRSP, there is no clear mechanism for redistributing the anticipated wealth from the project to the displaced communities or other Kenyan citizens (Chome, 2020). The absence of a wealth redistribution mechanism is another salient critique of many PRSPs in Africa (Cheru, 2006). The contrasting social movements that are engaging one of Kenya’s largest infrastructural projects coalesce around their struggles to be fully incorporated into the decision-making apparatus surrounding the project. If nothing more, these movements signal how vapid the gestures toward local stakeholder participation have been, despite being a key principle of the ownership model.
Owning the extraction and environment
Comaroff’s placement of the ownership paradigm on the telos of Euromodernity in its interminable quest to bring Africa into the ‘racialized process of evolution’ fully encapsulates why rethinking the paradigm as a novel rearrangement of the development enterprise is misleading at best and insidious at worst. Ownership as a specter of colonialism is precisely what decolonial political economy aims to highlight (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2015). The ostensibly changed rules for engagement with development remain possessed by the colonial desire to control, racialize and extract (Gruffydd Jones, 2015; Zein-Elabdin, 2015). The attempts at dispossession rely on the sanitized language of development and ownership.
These capital-intensive projects that are now emblematic of contemporary capital development and underlie much of the economic growth in Africa are what Julie Livingston refers to as ‘self-devouring growth’: the preoccupation with expanding commodity production and consumption in the interest of economic growth at the expense of environmental and social sustainability (2019). Concomitant with their economic expansion into raw commodity production, both countries (along with the rest of the continent) have also experienced extreme climatic shock that has greatly impacted food production (Livingstone, 2019). Burkina Faso, Kenya and many other African countries are not owning a benign and eco-socially responsible form of development. Contrary to the dominant notions put forth that place responsibility for climate catastrophe, social upheaval and economic disintegration at the feet of African elites and politicians, these actors are embracing the very logic and dictates of capitalist development (Livingstone, 2019; Mkandawire, 2014). Social movements and assailed communities have come to understand that capitalism, extraction, development, insecurity and the modern state are so mutually constitutive across the continent that it is impossible to resist one aspect without confronting all of these forces in their entirety.
Conclusion
Ownership was never meant to grapple with the historical inequities that have framed the ways in which the African continent was brought into the global economic system. The tools and discourses are not equipped with the elements of solidarity needed to tame global capitalism or bring it to heel. The ownership paradigm’s dogmatic commitment to economic growth creates the very conditions that the many social movements on the continent seek to challenge and alter. The coupling of consumption and production with development does not equate to equitable, environmentally conscious progress. In fact, it is necessarily antithetical to it. How else can one explain a situation wherein health workers striking for 100 days to receive fair compensation while the national economy grows at unprecedented rates? Demanding that African governments and select civil society organizations own the social, material and environmental consequences of development is a pernicious attempt to further allow global capitalism to accumulate and dispossess with impunity.
Examples abound across the continent of African men, women and children putting forth models of ownership that clash with the OECD version because they reject, creolize and/or manipulate capitalist development for their survival. As the Xolobeni state in their opposition to the extractive development taking place in South Africa, ‘Development should improve people’s lives. It should come from the people because they know what type of development they want’ (The WoMin Collective, 2017: 433).
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.