Regionalizing Neoliberalism: The New Partnership for African Development and the Political Economy of Restructuring in South Africa

Abstract

Despite its problems, neoliberalism has undergone multiscalar institutional embedding in Africa. PRSPs are also linked to other policy frameworks. According to Ronald Kempe Hope (2001, cited in Simon, 2003, p. 71), ‘the PRSP process is … recognized in the NEPAD framework document as the principal vehicle for building continent-wide priorities into national poverty reduction programmers and co-coordinating international support.’ NEPAD was launched in 2001 and later adopted by the African Union as an official program. Western leaders were consulted on NEPAD by Thabo Mbeki prior to the African National Congress, but African civil societies were not consulted (Anon., 2004a). NEPAD has consequently been dismissed by some analysts as a ‘western wolf in African sheepskin,’ suggesting continued subservience to western power and values (Adebayo, 2003c, cited in Abrahamsen, 2004b). In particular its emphasis on regional integration and infrastructural development will facilitate continued extraction of Africa’s resources (Toulmin and Wisner, 2006).

Is it an illusion to desire poverty eradication while wishing fully to participate in the system that is known to increase poverty and inequalities?

(Muchie, 2003, p. 6)

While 60 per cent of the population remains landless, almost all agricultural land is owned by 60,000 white farmers. Post-apartheid, the income of the 40 per cent of the poorest black families has diminished by about 20 per cent. Two million have been evicted from their homes. Six hundred die of AIDS every day. Forty per cent of the population is unemployed and that number is rising sharply. The corporatization of basic services has meant that millions have been disconnected from water and electricity.

(Roy, 2003, quoted in Saul, 2004, p. 80)