Governmentality and economic policy in Sub-Saharan Africa

Critical to the articulation and implementation of universally applicable policies for economic development is the question of whether development can be 'taught': of whether it results in essence from a set of policy prescriptions which can be implemented by (or imposed on) any currently underdeveloped Third World society; or whether, on the contrary, it results from characteristics specific to some such societies but missing in others, which in turn confers the hope of salvation on the elect, while at the same time denying it to the damned, who are thereby consigned to irredeemable misery. Raised in acute form by the startling differences in development performance between different regions of the Third World that have become apparent in recent decades, this conundrum is nowhere more relevant than to Sub-Saharan Africa. Of all the regions in the world for which economic data are aggregated by the World Bank, none has had a more disappointing economic performance. In the mid-1950s, as has often been pointed out, a relatively wealthy African state such as Ghana had a GNP per capita equivalent to, and an economic structure not vastly different from, those of South Korea or Malaysia. By the mid-1990s, when South Korea's per capita GNP was 18 times Ghana's, and Malaysia's was seven times, these states had economic structures and levels of human welfare that put them into completely different leagues.' Aggregate comparisons are less spectacular, but scarcely less disturbing. Levels of GNP per capita decline of 0.8% a year for sub-Saharan Africa over the period 1980-1993 compare with annual GNP per capita growth of 6.4% for East Asia and the Pacific, and 3% for South Asia. South Asian GNP per capita, at US$310 in 1993, was appreciably lower than the $520 calculated for those African states for which data were available-a figure which necessarily excluded several states such as Liberia, Somalia, Sudan and Zaire, in which economic and political collapse had prevented any information from being collected. In much of South Asia, however, and notably in its dominant economy, India, there were reasonable grounds for supposing that, with appropriate economic policies, an economic miracle comparable to that of China was possible, and might, indeed, already be under way. The prognostications for Africa were altogether more uncertain. This record has understandably attracted the interest and concern of the global development community. If Africans have failed to 'learn' how to develop, no-one could claim that this was because teachers were not available. A plethora of development experts of one sort or another has bombarded the continent with advice, expertise and aid, most of which has at best had very disappointing