This article has been published by ThisDay on 01 March 25
http://www.thisdaylive.com/articles/adebayo-adedeji-a-distinguished-scholar
–– Joaquim Alberto Chissano, Former President of Mozambique, in a Foreword to African Development in the 21st Century: Adebayo Adedeji’s theories and contributions.
The diverse contributions of Professor Adebayo Adedeji as a scholar, practitioner, and international civil servant to Africa’s development perspectives and processes are the subject matter of this recently released book edited by Amos Sawyer, Afeikhena Jerome and Ejeviome Eloho Otobo. The 216-page book, published by Africa World Press, has contributions from mostly African scholars, policy-makers, former and current senior officials of the United Nations, leaders of civil society organizations and think-thanks. Two common threads emerge from the diverse authors. First is the distilling of the contributions of Adedeji during his distinguished career of four decades and across national, continental and international levels. Second is the critical diagnosis of Africa’s past challenges, present trends, and future prospects.
Part 1 presents reflections on the
policies and strategies for Africa’s development since 1976. In this context,
Adedeji used his pivotal position as head of United Nations Economic Commission
for Africa (UNECA) to build a distinctive African Voice on developmental issues
of great significance to the continent by strengthening the research
capability, policy advocacy, and human capacity of the institution; and by
serving as trusted adviser to African leaders on economic issues. Part 2
focuses on Adedeji’s efforts to use regional integration and cooperation to overcome
the challenges of small market sizes and land-locked countries, economies of
scale and scope and galvanize the continent’s economic development into a
vibrant and globally competitive African economy. Part 3 is dedicated to
examining the institutional deficits that continued to plague Africa’s
development. Part 4 presents in-depth analyses of conflicts and development in
Africa.
For those familiar with the
development debate of the 1980s and 1990s between the World Bank and UNECA,
much of the materials in this book are available in various publications of the
two institutions. There are also a lot of repetitive materials across chapters
in the book. However, I found fresh insights, ideas and interpretations in the
chapters by four authors: Richard Jolly, Ali Ali, Adekeye Adebajo, and Otobo.
The remaining five chapters essentially revolve around the insights and ideas
provided by what I will call the four core chapters.
From my perspective, the leading
chapter after the introductory chapter should have been Chapter 4 by Adekeye
Adebajo on “A Tale of Two Prophets: Jean Monnet and Adebayo Adedeji.” This
chapter provides a biographical sketch of Adedeji as an erudite scholar, a
foremost development planner and practitioner, and the father of African integration.
A product of universities of Leicester, Harvard, and London, Adedeji became a
full Professor of Economics and Public Administration at the age of 36. Four
years later at the age of 40, in 1971, he was appointed Nigeria’s Minister of
Economic Reconstruction and Development under the military regime of General
Yakubu Gowon. His Ministry would oversee the post-war, peace-building and
reconstruction efforts. Several of the country’s infrastructure base, dual
carriageways, flyovers and electricity pylons were conceived under successive
five-year national development plans crafted by Adedeji and his cabinet
colleagues.
Turning his scholarly insights into
practice, Adedeji championed regional integration as an instrument for
promoting peace and socio-economic development in Africa. As a Minister of
Economic Development, he worked with General Gowon to convince other 15 West
African Heads of States to create Economic Community of West African States
(ECOWAS). He carried this mission to the UNECA when he was appointed in 1975 to
lead the institution and facilitated the creation of Common Market of Eastern
and Southern Africa (COMESA) in 1981 and Economic Community of Central African
States (ECCAS) in 1983. His far-sighted vision and skillful efforts to
transform the UNECA into a Pan-African platform to promote economic integration
across Africa is comparable to Europe’s political visionary—Jean Monnet who was
very instrumental as a French technocrat in the establishment of the European
Community. Yousif Suliman in Chapter 5 on “African Integration and Development”
further elucidates Adedeji’s vision and framework for regional integration; the
record of achievements and shortcomings of the various regional economic
communities; and the way forward for revitalizing the regional integration
process.
Richard Jolly, a former Deputy
Executive Secretary of UNICEF when Adedeji was Executive Secretary of UNECA,
draws on his personal experiences and interactions with Professor Adedeji,
which illuminates the points in his chapter on “Contemporary Perspectives on
the LPA and Structural Adjustment in the 1980s.” He recalls how Adedeji was
aware of the “battles for the African mind.” In challenging the perspectives of
the Washington Consensus, “Adedeji was at his best and his most loyal to
Africa.” In spite of political battering and attacks from the Breton Wood
Institutions, “Adedeji stood up for Africa and presented an authentic African
vision of independent economic advancement.”
Although Adedeji did not initially
succeed in many of these battles, over time some of the priorities for which he
argued have been mainstreamed and accepted. This is the main theme of Ali Abdel
Gadir Ali’s contribution on “The Rediscovery of the African Alternative
Framework to Structural Adjustment Programmes,” which contextualized later
policy developments and situated them with Adedeji’s foresights. Ali notes that
following the failure of SAPs to achieve their growth objectives, most of the
current ideas on promoting development in Africa involve the rediscovery of
ideas that had been previously articulated by African policy makers and
scholars; foremost among which is Adedeji. In response to and in an attempt to
accommodate the issues earlier raised in AAFSAP, Ali traces the evolution of
international development partners’ policy engagement with Africa starting with
the Comprehensive Development Framework (CDF), Poverty Reduction Strategies
Papers (PRSP), and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Jerome
et.al<http://et.al> in Chapter 8 further extend this evolution to include
the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPCs), New Partnership for African
Development (NEPAD), the Inclusive Growth Agenda and the Developmental State
mantra, which gained firmer ground after the 2008 global financial crisis.More tellingly, Adedeji’s positions and ‘lost decades’ proposition have been further validated by the Commission for Africa, whose 2005 Report (p.30) notes that “decades in which Asia was investing, the 1970s and 1980s, were the years of crisis when African governments slashing the budgets of both clinics and schools at the behest of the IMF. Evidence shows that IMF and the World Bank economic policy in the 1980s and early 1990s took little account of how these policies would potentially impact on the poor in Africa.” In Chapter 3, Ademola Ariyo and Babajide Fowowe provided statistical and empirical analysis that corroborated these policy insights and concluded that SAPs have not been able to structurally transform African economies and production systems.
Ejeviome Eloho Otobo’s Chapter 6 on
“African Countries: Three Deficits and Three Futures” builds on Adedeji’s work
in the area of scenario analysis for the continent. While acknowledging recent
improvements in economic performance in Africa, Otobo highlights the structural
constraints impeding Africa’s long-term development prospects as stability
deficit, the organizational deficits, and the scientific deficits. The
stability deficits are manifested in coups, conflicts and crimes which together
prevent development from taking root. In Chapter 9, James Katorobo provides a
detailed analysis of the ten root causes of conflicts in Africa and examined
the framework that Adedeji had provided for managing and controlling conflicts.
The organizational deficits
encapsulate institutional weaknesses and capacity deficiencies for economic
management and political governance. These deficiencies have hampered the
public sector in its role of delivering on the basic social contract between
government and its people in areas such as security, safety, social services,
property and contract rights, markets and competition regulation. As a result,
in conflict-affected countries, dependency on foreign technical assistance and
aids constitute over 90% share of national budget. Building and strengthening
of the capacity of African institutions to achieve accelerated development has
been central to Adedeji’s work; Hesphina Rukato examines this aspect in detail
in Chapter 7.
The third deficit identified by
Otobo is the scientific and technological deficit. Scientific and technological
progress has enabled other societies to transform from agricultural age through
industrial age and now to knowledge-based information age. African economies
remain natural resources based partly because of lack of adaptation through
inventions, innovation and imitation. According to Otobo, African countries
face three distinct futures depending on their position on the combination of
political stability, organizational competence, and technological prowess tripod.
At the upper-end will be a handful of countries with the attributes to be
competitive both continentally and globally. At the middle will be countries
that will rely more cooperation to forge ahead, while at the lower end are
countries bedeviled by conflicts and not able to make much headway.
As an economist and scholar, Adedeji
espouses development of Africans for Africans and by Africans. He favors using
superior arguments to make his points rather than condescension and resort to
calling others pseudo-intellectuals. As a practitioner, he has fought with
passion and rigor for ‘adjustment with a human face’, and against austerity
measures and the misery that the merchants of misery are now inflicting on all
of us, except the ultra-rich oligarchs. Without parading himself with
meaningless self-serving titles, his record as a Minister between 1971 and 1975
will be viewed as a golden era for Nigeria’s economic management with
relatively stable Naira exchange rate, low inflation rate, and respectable
foreign reserves to GDP ratio. His era witnessed orderly crafting and
implementation of development plans and execution of infrastructure development
across the country. He practiced indigenization unlike those who pay lip
service to developing local content and could not find capable Nigerian and
African firms to undertake advisory services for the public sector except using
non-indigenous and non-local firms for such services.
As an international civil servant,
he has been insistent on the development and implementation of African-centered
development policies and programs at a time when the Washington Consensus was
the dominant paradigm for development imposed on African countries. This is in
sharp contrast to the economic refugees of more than two decades at Breton Wood
institutions, who like to parade themselves as reformers, but are now worse
than the un-reformables. He believes in developing the capacity of
Africans to master development process, unlike those who are more in tune with
outsourcing thought leadership on the economy to non-Africans. His constituency
is Africa unlike those more interested in playing to the gallery of the
international development community. As a diplomat, Professor Adebayo Adedeji
is in the league of Chief Emeka Anyaoku, former Secretary-General of the
Commonwealth; both made Nigeria and Africa proud at the continental and global
scenes. To reiterate the words of President Chissano, this book is indeed a
fitting tribute to a man of grand stature and a role model for many yet to come.
–– Oshikoya, an economist, chartered
banker, and public affairs analyst, writes from Lagoshttp://www.thisdaylive.com/articles/adebayo-adedeji-a-distinguished-scholar
