Thandika Mkandawire – A Giant of African Economic Development Thinking

Note: Highlighting the intellectual and societal contributions of Professor Thandika Mkandawire, Grieve Chelwa continues the Miami Institute’s inaugural forum on economics. The Miami Institute’s economics forum will close with a virtual discussion among forum authors, led by Chelwa, on Wednesday, January 27th, 10-11:15 am EST (recording available here).

There has recently been a lot of discussion and debate about the need to decolonize the economics profession. The impetus to decolonize comes from the recognition that economics, especially its dominant mainstream vintage, is colonized in the sense that its worldview is very much Euro-America centric.  Many students of economics, especially those belonging to the Global Majority, are only ever exposed to theories and frameworks suited for the Global Minority. Many of these theories and frameworks are the products of dead (and in some cases living) white men whose basic premises often have had little to do with the daily realities of the Global Majority. Relatedly, and in many cases, the premises undergirding mainstream economics have been racist. It is this “colonization of economics” that has led to widescale misery and disasters of policy in much of the world where the Global Majority reside.

One way of decolonizing economics is to excavate the labour of Global Majority scholars who have done a lot of work in building theories of, and for, the majority. It is in this light that I would like to highlight the intellectual and societal contributions of Professor Thandika Mkandawire, the towering Malawian economist and public intellectual who sadly passed on in March 2020. What follows is largely excerpted from a scholarly piece I wrote in his honour that appeared in the journal African Studies (Chelwa, 2020a). For the appreciation, I decided to focus on the five scholarly pieces by Professor Mkandawire that impacted me the most and are the clearest distillation of the development challenges faced by the Global Majority. I call these pieces my favourite things.

 My favourite things

To kick off the list of favourite things, I begin with Professor Thandika Mkandawire’s most cited scholarly piece, a blockbuster article of sorts, which appeared in the Cambridge Journal of Economics in 2001 (Mkandawire 2001). In this article, titled ‘Thinking about Developmental States in Africa,’ Thandika made, inter alia, two important arguments. The first argument is that African countries cannot attain transformative development if their states are not ‘developmental’ in orientation. A developmental state is one ‘whose ideological underpinnings are developmental and one that seriously attempts to deploy its administrative and political resources to the task of economic development’ (Mkandawire 2001, 291). Such states are crucial for the achievements made by the ‘late late industrialisers’ in Asia. This argument for developmental states was and continues to be diametrically opposed to the view articulated most forcefully by the Bretton Woods Institutions (BWIs), a view that appears to have won over many African policymakers, that a de-politicised technocracy can deliver transformative economic development. Thandika’s second task in the article was to confront the oft-heard proposition that developmental states were impossible in the African context. To confront this ‘impossibility argument’, he deployed the two strategies that have typified his scholarly work: a correct reading of African history and a sublime use of logic. First, many African states were in actual fact developmental in the first decades following independence in the 1960s and, because of this, were able to register impressive achievements in the social sphere. Second, many of those who were proponents of the impossibility argument, such as the BWIs, had themselves recently presided over the implementation of policies that made it near impossible for developmental states to re-emerge in Africa. Or as Thandika put it, the:

significance of the impossibility argument is that the discursive framework [it has] engendered has produced a knowledge that has been acted upon by key policymakers in a self-fulfilling manner. They have led to a set of measures that has so maladjusted African states [and in the process weakened them] that they provide proof of the impossibility of developmental states in Africa […] This weakened state then exhibits incapacity to carry out its core functions. This is then used to argue that the state in Africa is not capable of being developmental and therefore needs to be stripped down further and be buffeted by legions of foreign experts (Mkandawire 2001, 306).

My second favourite thing from Thandika is a book that he co-authored with the Nigerian economist Charles Chukwuma Soludo carrying the title Our Continent, Our Future: African Perspectives on Structural Adjustment (Mkandawire & Soludo 1999). This book is incredibly important because of its timing, coming out, as it did, in the late 1990s, when the BWIs and their many allied development experts believed as a matter of faith that the neoliberal ideas contained in structural adjustment were the answers to the economic crisis then gripping the African continent. As the title makes clear, the book aims to provide an ‘African perspective’ to the understanding of the crisis, a perspective that had been conspicuously absent from the dominant debates about the crisis.

Our Continent, Our Future represents the synthesised ideas of about 25 African economists, many of whom met throughout the 1990s in their efforts to make sense of the situation (see also a sequel—Mkandawire & Soludo 2003—containing all the research papers that had been synthesised into Our Continent, Our Future).

The book has four chapters, with the first covering economic history before the crisis, the second looking at explanations for the crisis, a third looking at results of structural adjustment and a final chapter charting a way forward for the continent. It is striking how in each of the four chapters of the book, the African perspective on the crisis is completely at odds with that of the BWIs. For example, Mkandawire and Soludo went to great pains in the first chapter to demonstrate the dynamism of pre-crisis African economies. The BWIs and many of their advisors, on the other hand, believed that African economies had always been in a permanent state of crisis. Second, Mkandawire and Soludo are more measured in their explanation of the crisis, blaming external factors as much as factors internal to African economies themselves. The BWIs were convinced that factors intrinsic to African economies were entirely to blame for the crisis. Given the influential position occupied by BWIs and their coterie of foreign experts in the African policy space, their one-sided point of view carried the day and resulted in the policy disaster that structural adjustment is widely acknowledged to have been.

My third favourite thing from Thandika is the text of his inaugural professorial lecture delivered at the London School of Economics in December of 2010. Funny enough, the Africanist journal African Affairs cajoled Thandika into submitting the lecture for possible publication, only for it to be rejected on the incredible basis that he did ‘not understand World Bank literature’ (Murunga 2020, 7).  The lecture was subsequently published in the CODESRIA journal Africa Development as ‘Running while others walk: Knowledge and the challenge of Africa’s development’ (Mkandawire 2011).

In the first part of the lecture, Thandika argues that development has always been an emancipatory project for the people of Africa and that many Northern critiques of developmentalism do not contend with this fact. Because of its emancipatory logic, ‘development and the “catch up” aspirations driving it [are] not foreign impositions but part of Africa’s responses to its own historical experiences and social needs [and have] much deeper historical roots and social support than is often recognized’ (Mkandawire 2011, 7). In other words, and to borrow from Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, Africans have always wanted to run while others walked. In the second part of the lecture, Thandika forcefully argues for the primacy of knowledge acquisition in Africa’s development aspirations. And here, Africans needed to learn a lot more about themselves as well as about others. However, many obstacles stand in the way of genuine knowledge acquisition on the continent. For example, the now widely documented anti-tertiary education bias of the World Bank nearly destroyed the university system on the continent and, in the process, set it back many decades. Second, the aid juggernaut, with its extreme preference for foreign experts, has led to a situation where locals are marginalised to the positions of spectators in the development drama unfolding on their own continent. Lastly, and connected to the foregoing, an anti-African elite bias pervades much of the influential scholarship on Africa, with devastating consequences for knowledge production and development policy on the continent.

 My fourth favourite thing from Thandika is a relatively recent journal article that is well on its way to achieving seminal status, if it has not already. Published in 2015 in World Politics, Thandika told me how this essay—‘Neopatrimonialism and the Political Economy of Economic Performance in Africa: Critical Reflections’—ran the entire gauntlet of journals collecting rejection letters all the way and finally, and fortunately for posterity, finding a home in World Politics.

The article takes on what Thandika called the ‘neopatrimonial school’, an analytical approach that has come to dominate, among other things, the study of Africa’s economic performance and the setting of economic policy (Mkandawire 2015). Thandika used Christopher Clapham’s definition of neopatrimonialism as

a form of organization in which relationships of a broadly patrimonial type pervade a political and administrative system which is formally constructed on rational-legal lines. Officials hold positions in bureaucratic organizations with powers which are formally defined, but exercise those powers […] as a form of private property’ (Clapham in Mkandawire 2015, 565).

 Neopatrimonialism, then, entails a ‘marriage of tradition and modernity’ (Mkandawire 2015, 565) that, according to its proponents, finds its most visible manifestation on the African continent, thus giving rise to descriptions of Africans as ‘despotic’, ‘clannish’, ‘tribal’, ‘cronyistic’, ‘corrupt’, ‘factional’, ‘predative’, et cetera. More importantly, neopatrimonialism, through its own logic, makes quite precise predictions about what we should observe in the economic sphere in Africa. And it is in testing these predictions, using detailed empirical evidence, that Thandika made his most devastating critique of the neopatrimonial school. For example, the logic of neopatrimonialism predicts that we should always see low savings rates in Africa because of Africans’ profligacy. However, the historical records show that savings rates have varied throughout much of the continent’s post-independence period, with the major explanatory variable being economic performance: in good economic times when incomes are high, Africans tend to save more than in bad times. Similarly, the school’s logic is incompatible with the actual growth record on the continent. That is, one would be hard pressed to explain the wide spatial and temporal variation in economic growth across the African continent using neopatrimonialism’s time-invariant factors.

I was fortunate in February of 2017 to have been part of a group of scholars who descended on Johannesburg, South Africa for a symposium held in honour of this most profound essay (Titles of papers presented at that symposium can be viewed here. Thandika was also in attendance and gave a memorable response to the papers presented).

My final favourite thing from Thandika is his review of economist Jeffrey Sachs’ best-selling book The End of Poverty (Sachs 2005). Thandika’s review was published in 2006 in CODESRIA’s Africa Review of Books and was titled ‘The Intellectual Itinerary of Jeffrey Sachs’ (Mkandawire 2006). At the time of writing this review, Sachs and his book were all the rage in development and celebrity circles, with the foreword written by Bono, the flamboyant lead singer of the rock band U2. Unlike many reviews that were to be published on the book, Thandika’s reminded us that Sachs’ ideas on development had undergone many twists and turns in the decade-and-a-half leading up to the publication of his book. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Sachs believed that the administration of neoliberal policies via ‘shock treatment’ was the only way to jolt poor countries out of the slumber of underdevelopment. Somewhere in the mid-1990s he moved on and began proselytising about the importance of getting ‘macroeconomic policies right’ as a precondition for growth and development. Then on the eve of the publication of his book, Sachs, like the Christian missionaries of yore, discovered that Africa was replete with mosquitoes, impenetrable forests, unnavigable rivers, a harsh climate and so on, and that these were the factors that explained the continent’s underdevelopment. Geography was now the culprit! In all his twisting and turning, one thing seemed to typify Sachs. He blamed everyone but himself for the fact that his ideas hardly worked and, in many instances, had led to pretty disastrous outcomes.

As Thandika underscored, Sachs in In The End of Poverty  reinvented himself once more; but this time around, Sachs seemed to settle on sensible ideas such as the importance of large-scale infrastructure for Africa’s development. What Sachs neglected to mention, however, was that ideas such as these were not original to him and had been argued for before by the likes of Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah, the Lagos Plan of Action and the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) among others. And this is the other thing that typified Sachs – Africans as moral agents were completely absent from his intellectual itinerary.

 Conclusion

I hope to have given the reader, in the foregoing, some idea of the breadth and richness of Professor Thandika Mkandawire’s scholarship. For reasons of space, I only have focused on the five pieces that have greatly influenced me and might, therefore, reflect a bias on my part. Thandika wrote about so much more than just African development issues. He wrote about rebel movements and the African peasantry (Mkandawire 2002), African intellectual life (1995, 2005), social movements and democracy (Mamdani, Mahmood, Mkandawire & Wamba-dia-Wamba 1988) and idea formation (Mkandawire 2014) among other topics. In a nutshell, there is everything for everyone in his scholarship.

Before signing off, I would like to say a few things about the themes that characterised Thandika’s life and scholarship. First, in reading his oeuvre, one is immediately struck by how unideological it is. Unlike many scholars of Africa, whose analyses tend to proceed from some ideological basis, Thandika’s work was solely guided by careful empiricism. He wanted to describe the African experience as it was on its own basis. Second, even though he identified as an economist, Thandika was very much the quintessential inter-disciplinarian who carefully borrowed frameworks from other disciplines to enrich his economic analyses. Conversely, he carefully exported aspects of economics that he believed would likewise enrich other disciplines. The proof here is in the diverse collection of disciplinarians that he journeyed with. Third, in reading his development work particularly from the 1980s and 1990s, one is struck by just how careful it is in dignifying the African experience. This work was written at a time when the infectious narrative was that of Africa as the perennial basket case. Thandika, working with many of his colleagues in the CODESRIA network, produced grounded analyses that countered this broad-brushed pessimism.

Finally, Thandika did not tire of reminding us about the systematic marginalisation of African social scientists and especially African economists from the important debates that concerned their continent. For him, it was clear that this marginalisation was partly to blame for the policy disasters of the 1980s and 1990s, the effects of which are still with us today; a theme that I continue in my own work (see Chelwa 2015; 2017; 2020b; 2020c).

-Grieve Chelwa

Dr Grieve Chelwa is an economist based in Lusaka, Zambia. He has previously held postdoctoral positions at Harvard and the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. His PhD is in economics and was obtained at the University of Cape Town. His undergraduate degree is also in economics from the University of Zambia. Chelwa has wide-ranging research interests in the broad area of African Economic Development including work on education and health. 

References

Chelwa, Grieve. 2015. ‘Economics Has an Africa Problem’. Africa Is A Country. <https://africasacountry.com/2015/02/economics-has-an-africa-problem>

Chelwa, Grieve. 2017. ‘Does Economics Have an “Africa Problem”? Some Data and Preliminary Thoughts’. Paper presented at the African Perspectives on Global Corruption Conference, Johannesburg, February.

Chelwa, Grieve.2020a. ‘Thandika Mkandawire: A ‘young’ African economist’s appreciation’. African Studies <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00020184.2020.1836913>  

Chelwa, Grieve. 2020b. ‘Pop Developmentalism in Africa’. CODESRIA Bulletin 1: 3–5. <https://codesria.org/IMG/pdf/codesria_bulletin_1_2020_r.pdf>

Chelwa, Grieve. 2020c. ‘Does Economics Have an “Africa Problem”?’ Economy and Society, forthcoming.

Mamdani, Mahmood, Thandika Mkandawire, and Wamba-dia-Wamba. 1988. ‘Social Movements, Social Transformation and Struggle for Democracy in Africa’. Economic and Political Weekly 23(19): 973–981. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/4378467>

Mkandawire, Thandika. 1995. ‘Three Generations of African Academics: A Note’. Transformation: Critical Perspective on Southern Africa 28: 75–83.

Mkandawire, Thandika, and Charles Chukwuma Soludo. 1999. Our Continent, Our Future: African Perspectives on Structural Adjustment. Trenton, NJ and Dakar: Africa World Press and CODESRIA.

Mkandawire, Thandika. 2001. ‘Thinking About Developmental States in Africa’. Cambridge Journal of Economics 25(3): 289–313. doi: 10.1093/cje/25.3.289

Mkandawire, Thandika. 2002. ‘The Terrible Toll of Post-Colonial “Rebel Movements” in Africa: Towards an Explanation of Violence Against the Peasantry’. Journal of Modern African Studies 40(2): 181–215. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/3876277>

 Mkandawire, Thandika, and Charles Chukwuma Soludo (eds). 2003 African Voices on Structural Adjustment: A Companion to Our Continent, Our Future. Trenton, NJ and Dakar. Africa World Press and CODESRIA.

Mkandawire, Thandika (ed). 2005. African Intellectuals: Rethinking Politics, Language, Gender and Development. Dakar and London: CODESRIA and Zed.

Mkandawire, Thandika. 2006. ‘The Intellectual Itinerary of Jeffrey Sachs’. Africa Review of Books 21(1): 4–5.

Mkandawire, Thandika. 2011. ‘Running While Others Walk: Knowledge and the Challenge of Africa’s Development’. Africa Development 36(2): 1–36.

Mkandawire, Thandika. 2014. ‘The Spread of Economic Doctrines and Policymaking in Postcolonial Africa’. African Studies Review 57(1): 171–198. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/43905084>

Mkandawire, Thandika. 2015. ‘Neopatrimonialism and the Political Economy of Economic Performance in Africa: Critical Reflections’. World Politics 67(3): 563–612. doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/S004388711500009X

Murunga, Godwin R. 2020. ‘Thandika Mkandawire (1940-2020): Scholar, Mentor and Institution Builder’. CODESRIA Bulletin 2&3: 3–7. <https://codesria.org/IMG/pdf/tribute_to_thandika_-final.pdf>

Sachs, Jeffrey. 2005. The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities of Our Time. New York and Toronto: Penguin Books.