.World Bank, IMF’ve undermined Africa’s development, says Prof Akhaine
.Says continent has been wracked by huge debts
CHIGOZIE AMADI
The federal government is expected to receive new loans from the World Bank, totalling $2.2 billion in 2025.
According to the Washington-based financial institution’s project list, the $2.2 billion will cut across six different projects.
World Bank earmarked $500 million for the ‘Community Action (for) Resilience and Economic Stimulus Programme,’ which will be approved by March 17.
On March 31, the World Bank plans to approve $552 million for the ‘HOPE for Quality Basic Education for All’ and $800 million for ‘Accelerating Nutrition Results in Nigeria 2.0’.
Also, the World Bank said it will approve $300 million for the ‘Solutions for the Internally Displaced and Host Communities Project’ on July 15 and another $300 million for the ‘Health Security Program’ on August 19.
The Cable also observed another project, ‘Building Resilient Digital Infrastructure for Growth (BRIDGE)’ will receive $500 million after approval on September 15.
World Bank said the BRIDGE initiative and the Health Security Programme are in the concept review stage, implying that they are still in the early stages of assessment and planning.
Also, the Accelerating Nutrition Results in Nigeria 2.0 and the HOPE for Quality Basic Education projects have progressed to the negotiation stage.
The multilateral lender gave Nigeria $1.5 billion in 2024 for a number of significant development initiatives meant to strengthen the country’s ability to mobilise resources and maintain economic stability.
On November 19, 2024, The Cable reported that Nigeria’s loan exposure from the World Bank’s International Development Association (IDA) rose to $17.1 billion as of September 30, 2024.
According to the IDA’s financial statement for September 2024, Nigeria maintained the third spot in the latest top 10 borrowers’ list.
As of December 31, 2024, Nigeria’s exposure dropped to $16.8 billion, but it still retained its position as the third-largest debtor to the World Bank’s IDA.
Meanwhile, a University Don, Professor Sylvester Odion Akhaine has lamented the insidious role of Bretton Woods Institutions (BWIs) – World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other agents of international finance in wracking and undermining the development of Africa over the years.
He said that while “the masses in Africa desire popular democracy that is both participatory and egalitarian and guarantees their basic material needs and self-actualization,” the international finance agencies led by the United States desires a political dispensation congenial to finance capital and its realisation.”
Delivering the 103rd inaugural lecture of the Lagos State University titled, “SHIFTING FOR GOOD: THE WEAPON OF EMPIRICISM IN THE DISORDER OF A THIRD WAVE OF DEMOCRACY IN AFRICA“, Akhaine, a professor of Political Science contends that the economic policies reined in on African countries by these agencies of international finance have led to debt overhang which has virtually crippled their economies, wracking them to their knees thereby making them incapable of meeting their infrastructural demands to guarantee better life for their people.
According to him, the World Bank and IMF engineered policies in Africa only promotes pauperisation of the people”.
Although the Bretton Woods Institutions- International Monetary Fund (IMF) and International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), also known as the World Bank, were established after the Second World War with the aim of “managing the post-war global economy and promoting international economic cooperation,”Akhaine argues they have become tools for domination of the less developed economies particularly Africa.
“Neoliberal economic policies from the BWIs are de-empowering for the states of the global south, and in particular, Africa. While they inflict on the state negative sovereignty, they also encourage authoritarianism that usually thrives well under the military. The problematic nature of democratic transition arises partly from long-time socialisation to the military ethos of the larger population. Therefore, demilitarisation remains a state-building problem,” he added.
Notwithstanding the sundry macro-economic indicators and growth projections, he says, the economies of many African countries are prostrate with burgeoning debt burden put at $1.52 trillion as of 2023 according to the African Development Bank (AfDB).
“Africa’s debt is put by some estimation at about $300 billion out of which that of sub-Saharan Africa alone is put at about $236 billion. Africa’s debt represents about 11 percent of the developing world’s debt estimated at $2.17 trillion as at 1997. In the last one and half decades an estimated $1.3 trillion in loan and debt servicing obligations went to the wealthy countries.
“Between 1970 and 2002, Africa received about $540 billion in loans, paid back $550 billion, principal and interest, and is still saddled with a debt cargo of $295 billion. For sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), it has received $294 billion in loans and expended
$268 in debt services and is still indebted to the tune of about $210 billion,” he reveals underlining the chilling statistics about Africa’s debt crisis.
Dismissing neoliberal policies which tend to favour rolling back the state in economic planning, Akhaine posits that, “The state needs to be brought back into the development equation. Truly, the enormity of the continent’s problems requires a capable state. I have traversed the continent to know that our problems cannot be solved by private capital and philanthropy, the state must be brought back to the table.”
“The era of the third wave has been coterminous with ravages and pillaging of capital. The concept of rolling back the state has become the rallying cry of capital underlying the Marxist conception of the state as the executive committee of the dominant class in society.
“The polity requires a re-orientation of civic value.
Equally, the lack of accountability was a major administrative deficit under military rule. Solving these issues requires a grand approach in the form of process-led constitution-making to produce a grundnorm that engrosses a corpus of democratic rights and power distribution such as fundamental human rights including freedom of the press, association, and the rule of law and separation of powers in ways that the people will become the boss of democracy.”
“This foregrounds the need to review the structure of production in Africa reified, over time, by sundry market and peripheralisation measures coming from agencies of global governance that I have dubbed elsewhere as policies of secondary uneven development, that is, post-colonial policies that reinforce extant inequalities caused by the slave trade and colonialism.
“Colonial states linked African economies to global capitalism through commodification and export production. It oriented Africans towards the production of products with exchange-value thereby entrenching a counterproductive dependency. As Ake (1981) has noted, the inherited colonial economy logically reinforces disarticulation inherent in the production of exchange value in place of use-value.
“The political elite, largely neo-colonial in outlook, have been unable to surmount this contradiction and achieve the goal of governance. The situation has been aggravated by the fact that the transition from colonial rule was hurriedly done “without any fundamental transformation in the economic, cultural and bureaucratic domains.
“Worse still is the fact that the process of integration into the global economy was accompanied
by an intentionality that undermined the development of indigenous capital that could have aided the development of a liberal democratic
order as in the metropole. So, Africa lacks the bourgeois class capable of coalescing other classes in society into a system of bourgeois representation that is liberal democracy
“This deficit has found expression in class and ethnic cleavages in the quest for an elusive legitimacy. The consequences are protests and tensions in the society which have attracted authoritarian tactics easily exploitable by other power contenders in society. Therefore, Africa must disengage from extroversion and unleash its productive forces while fostering pan-African trade and cooperation in line with Agenda 2063,” Akhaine postulates.
The inaugural lecture which was presided over by the institution’s Vice Chancellor, Professor Ibiyemi Olatunji-Bello who was represented by Deputy Vice Chancellor (Administration), Prof Adenike Boyo, had in attendance other principal officials of the university. They include the Registrar, Mr Emmanuel Fanu, Bursar, Mr. Said Olayinka and Librarian, Dr. Omawumi Makinde.
Other prominent guests include former Osun State Governor, Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola, former General Secretary, Afenifere, the Yoruba socio-cultural group, Chief Ayo Opadokun, former Private Secretary to Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Odia Ofeimun and former Arts Editor, The Guardian, Mr Ben Tomoloju.
The capacity filled lecture held at the Buba Marwa Hall at the university’s main campus in Ojo, Lagos also attracted other guests, colleagues, political elite, actors in civil society and the media.
Akhaine, a former general secretary of Campaign for Democracy (CD), an organization led by fiery Dr Belo Ransome Kuti which played a frontline role in ending military rule in the 90s, has over 100 works in prominent journals, monographs, books and other publications. He’s a member of the editorial board of The Guardian and The Constitution, A Journal of Constitutional Development, published by the Centre for Constitutionalism and Demilitarization (CENCOD). He missed death by the whiskers shortly after his prolonged detention in the 90s when agents of the regime of General Sani Abacha pushed him off a moving truck.
