Abstract
Africa’s initial official response to the World Bank’s Accelerated Development (AD) was to assert that ‘the Report was not only unnecessary but was antagonistic to the Lagos Plan of Action.1 Claims made in AD that it ‘builds on’ the Lagos Plan (LPA) adopted in April 1980 by the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), and that its prescriptions provide the necessary short-run policy foundation for achieving the medium- and long-term goals of the LPA have been rejected by academics and representatives of African governments alike.2 According to the Secretariats of Africa’s three principal international organisations — the OAU, the Economic Commission for Africa, and the African Development Bank — the export-oriented and agriculture-based strategy of AD is in fundamental conflict with the internally-oriented and inter-sector-based strategy of the LPA. Rather than the short-term prescriptions of AD supporting the objectives of the LPA, the Secretariats asserted that the LPA specifies its own alternative ‘series of short- to medium-term activities’.3 For Africa’s international organisations, at least, the LPA represents an indigenous alternative to the World Bank’s report. Whether it is a viable alternative is the subject of this chapter.
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Notes
Organisation of African Unity, Council of Ministers, Thirty-Eighth Ordinary Session, 22 February-1 March 1982, Report of the Secretary-General on the World Bank Report [CM/1117 (XXXVIII)] (Addis Ababa: OAU, 1982) p. 3, reporting the views expressed by the OAU, ECA, and ADB at the fourth meeting held with the Bank on the report.
See, for instance, Green and Allison in Chapter 3. The OAU Secretary General’s Report provides a systematic comparison of the two documents. See also the very useful monograph by Robert S. Browne and Robert J. Cummings, The Lagos Plan of Action vs. The Berg Report (Washington, DC: Howard University African Studies and Research Program, 1984).
See John Ravenhill, ‘The OAU and Economic Cooperation: Irresolute Resolutions’ in Yassin El-Ayouty and I. William Zartman (eds), The OAU After Twenty Years (New York: Praeger, 1984) pp. 173–92.
For one case of failed export-led development see Langdon in Chapter 8. See also Henrik Secher Marcussen, ‘The Ivory Coast Facing the Economic Crisis’, in Jerker Carlsson (ed.),Recession in Africa (Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1983) pp. 1–27;
Lynn Krieger Mytelka, ‘The Limits of Export-Led Development: The Ivory Coast’s Experience with Manufactures’, in John Gerard Ruggie (ed.), The Antinomies of lnterdependence (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983) pp. 239–70; and
Charles Harvey, ‘The Case of Malawi’, IDS Bulletin, vol. 14 (January 1983) no. 1, pp. 45–50.
On the disappointments of the Lomé relationship see John Ravenhill, Collective Clientelism: The Lomé Conventions and North-South Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
Gavin Kitching, Development and Underdevelopment in Historical Perspective (London: Methuen, 1982) especially pp. 162–3.
Reginald H. Green, ‘African Economies in the Mid-1980s — “Naught For Your Comfort but that the Waves Grow Higher and the Storms Grow Wilder”’, in J. Carlsson (ed.), Recession in Africa (Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1983) pp. 195 ff.
Economic Commission for Africa, ECA and Africa’s Development 1983–2008 (Addis Ababa: ECA, April 1983), p. 89.
Steven Langdon and Lynne K. Mytelka, ‘Africa in the Changing World Economy’ in Colin Legum et al., Africa in the 1980s (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979) express faith that Africa will choose a self-reliant path.
Their argument is criticised in John Ravenhill, ‘The Future of EurAfrica’ in Timothy M. Shaw and O. Aluko (eds), Africa Projected (London: Macmillan, 1985) Chapter 6.
On the European experience, see Paul Taylor, The Limits of European Integration (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
Oli Havrylyshyn and Martin Wolf, Trade Among Developing Countries: Theory, Policy Issues and Principal Trends, Staff Working Paper No. 479 (Washington, DC: World Bank, 1982), A summary of this paper, ‘Promoting trade among developing countries: an assessment’, appears in Finance and Development (March 1982) pp. 17–21.
Nassau A. Adams, ‘Towards a Global System of Trade Preferences Among Developing Countries’, Trade and Development, vol. 4 (1982) pp. 183–204; quotation is on p. 199.
See, for instance, John Ravenhill, ‘Regional Integration and Development in Africa: Lessons from the East African Community’, Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, vol. XVII (November, 1979) no. 4, pp. 227–46;
Constantine V. Vaitsos, ‘Crisis in Regional Economic Cooperation (Integration) among Developing Countries: A Survey’, World Development, vol. 6 (June 1978) no. 6, pp. 710–69;
Lynn K. Mytelka, ‘The Salience of Gains in Third-World Integrative Systems’, World Politics, vol. 25 (January 1973) no. 2, pp. 236–50.
Peter Robson, Integration, Development and Equity (London: Allen & Unwin, 1983) p. 40.
Thomas S. Cox, ‘Northern Actors in a South-South Setting: External Aid and East African Integration’, Journal of Common Market Studies, vol XXI (March 1983) no. 3, p. 310. External actors often have appeared to be more enthusiastic about regional schemes than were the participating member states. See, for instance, the comments of Robert S. Browne, a former Executive Director of the African Development Fund, on the failure of the fund to support multinational projects. Browne and Cummings, The Lagos Plan of Action vs. The Berg Report, p. 63.
Others have noted the tendency of ECA to draw up plans largely without reference to their intended consumers and with little attention to ‘how and by whom they will be carried out’. Isebill V. Gruhn, Regionalism Reconsidered: The Economic Commission for Africa (Boulder: Westview, 1979), p. 52.
The ECA is by no means the only party guilty of falling back on this explanation. See, for instance, Arthur Hazlewood, ‘The End of the East African Community: What are the Lessons for Regional Integration Schemes’, in Christian P. Potholm and Richard A. Fredland (eds), Integration and Disintegration in East Africa (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1980); this perspective is criticised in John Ravenhill, ‘The Theory and Practice of Regional Integration in East Africa’ in the same publication.
In 1983 the PTA Secretariat had a budget of $1.8 million in contrast to that of SADCC of $300,000. Anglin notes that SADCC places its emphasis ‘on action not institutions’, and that in the PTA there is ‘nothing comparable to the deliberate diffusion of initiative and responsibility characteristic of SADCC’. Douglas G. Anglin, ‘Economic liberation and regional cooperation in Southern Africa: SADCC and the PTA’, International Organization, vol. 37 (Autumn 1983) no. 4, pp. 691–5. According to West Africa (2 January 1984), the ECOWAS Secretariat will have a budget of $69.46 million in 1984.
For a comparison of ECOWAS and SADCC see John Ravenhill, ‘The Future of Regionalism in Africa’, in R. Owuka and A. Sasay (eds), The Future of Regionalism in Africa (London: Macmillan, 1985) pp. 205–24.
Susan Strange, Cave! hic dragones: a critique of regime analysis’, International Organization, vol. 36 (Spring 1982) no. 2, p. 488.
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Ravenhill, J. (1986). Collective Self-Reliance or Collective Self-Delusion: Is the Lagos Plan a Viable Alternative?. In: Ravenhill, J. (eds) Africa in Economic Crisis. Macmillan International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18371-5_4
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