Green, Reginald H.

English

IDS OpenDocs

1SOUTHERN AFRICA: RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT
Southern Africa over 1986-1990 regained a forward economic and social 
momentum as a region if not in all countries. Output per capita rose - 
slowly, true, but in contrast to either the sub-regions 1980-1985 record or 
the 1986-1990 out-turns both of the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa and of South 
Africa. Food production recovered fully from the 1980-1985 drought cycle 
and for the region as a whole, moved into surplus.
The crises - direct and indirect - of South Africa's wars of aggression and 
occupation of Namibia (over $60,000 million GDP loss and of the order of 
1,500,000 human lives lost) began to be overcome as internal resistance and 
external military defeat forced RSA to shift course. The only two large 
dynamic economic cooperation groups in SSA - SADCC (Southern African 
Development Coordination Conference) and PTA (Preferential Trade Area for 
Eastern and Southern Africa) - both moved ahead. Economic and social 
strategy and policy adjustments both showed more domestic initiative in 
several cases and, in those cases performed rather better than the standard 
structural adjustment model.
The closing of the decade was a time for modest hope and for belief the 
worst was past. It was also a time to reflect on one lesson - innovatory 
ways of pursuing objectives often made a considerable difference. And on 
its analogue - cooperating partners with some money but not enough to 
dominate, clear new ideas and focused priorities, technical capacity and an 
ability to innovate, could play catalytic roles out of proportion to their 
size.
Two international bodies in particular sought (whether self-conscious of it 
or not) that role - UNICEF and the ADB. "Children On The Front Line" 
focused attention on the human/economic costs of apartheid aggression and 
on emergency action to limit the human disaster. "Adjustment With A Human 
Face" forced review of people as the ends of and main means to development 
whatever the macroeconomic strategy. The World Bank's evolution from the 
1981 Berg Report to 1989 "Long Term Perspective Study" and 1990 World 
Development Report on (overcoming) "Poverty" reflect that influence as do 
several of Southern Africa's national adjustment/transformation programmes.
$The ADB seemed better placed than UNICEF to play a leading catalytic role. 
It was and is African and probably has the largest agglomeration of expert 
African applied economic analysts and researchers in the world. Its basic 
programme history and experience was closer to overall economic strategy 
than was that of pre-1980 UNICEF. Policy analysis and exploration of 
innovatory approaches was an ADB priority.
But the 1980s results in Southern Africa have yet to bear out the promise. 
ADB (and especially ADF) have provided useful secondary financial flows. 
Some work on relating lending to food aid and poverty reduction has begun. 
But ADB has rarely innovated. Rather it has followed up (rather 
mechanically) World Bank explorations/innovations with a one to five year 
lag. The quest for respectability, fund raising and being seen to have 
safe hands has - to date - checked the urge to explore new roads with their 
higher risks of failure as well as greater chances of breakthroughs. ADB
has not sought to give flesh to the Economic Commission for Africa's 
"Transformation Alternative"; to articulate a conceptualization notably 
thin on applied analysis leading to policy priorities at operational level 
so it could be seen what it really offered different from or complementary
to the late 1980s Model World Bank policy modelling. Similarly the ADB has
not taken the lead in formulating the specific cases for and means to 
massive external debt write-off in, e.g. Tanzania and Mozambique to 
complement more general World Bank advocacy.
Useful, the ADB has been, but an innovator and a catalyst it has yet to be.
And that is what Southern Africa needs today.
Interlude
South Africa is rejoining Africa. That has implications and opens 
possibilities but not the facile optimism of locomotive fairy tales. South
Africa's economy has been sinking for a dozen years. Now, given its 
explosive inequitable inequality, heritage of faulty policy, febrile 
attempts at 1981 not 1991 World Bank adjustment models and necessary 
concentration on political transformation via reconciliation (a costly 
road) it is in danger of going into free fall.
Both Southern and South Africa face what has been called "the Apocalypse 
Drought". Symbolically for over 200 miles the great Limpopo River has 
turned to cracked, dry mud flats - for the first time in over a century.
This year's crisis is staying alive - famine, unlike drought, is man made 
and can be humanly overcome. But the ADB and its Southern African members 
need to look beyond this crisis to the basic challenges of the 1990s and 
especially to those which are both crucial and not effectively top of 
anyone else's agenda. These include:
1. Drought. Institutional capacity and resource mobilisation links for 
early response. Using resources to reduce future vulnerability (e.g. 
via systematic drought relief employment relative to tree cover, 
contours, water supplies.)
2. Regionalism based on production validated by trade in a context of 
creating enabling climates and infrastructures for enterprises. No one 
disagrees but the applied contextual work beyond particular projects 
(e.g. Cahora Basa/Zimbabwe power link) is limited.
3. Export strategy articulation. Regionalism is not enough. More 
traditional raw exports will, on balance, reduce import capacity (as it 
has done dramatically for cocoal). What is needed is not general 
theory but nuts and bolts identifications of product (new or further 
processed) 'lists' by country - a modified East Asian approach. And 
then merchant bank type promotion to domestic and external enterprises.
4. Employment (including productive self-employment) to economise on 
imported capital goods and to reflate demand to justify enterprise 
investment. How? Who? What human investment and infrastructure are 
needed? Again there is a gap between ILO (and World Bank) particular 
projects and general theorising - a programmatic gap of the kind a 
hardheaded investment banker should be well placed to fill.
5. Rehabilitation. Emergency survival relief is a known "humanitarian", 
"short term" aid area. Stabilisation and long term development are 
known too. But not so rehabilitation, livelihood and market 
rehabilitation after disaster. Yet for 15,000,000 war, 5,000,000 
drought without war and 5,000,000 prolonged economic marginalisation 
affected Southern and 25,000,000 apartheid grossly marginalised South 
Africans, that is the link without which emergency survival goes on 
forever with no chance of proceeding to development. UNICEF in the 
1989 and - especially 1992 - Children On The Front Line tried to
4conceptualize and begin to articulate it. Now a banker's input is 
needed.
These are Southern Africa's challenges — and opportunities. But they are 
also ADB's. It has the staff, the reputation for sobriety and rationality 
and the funds to innovate selectively. Will it in the 1990s? If not it 
will remain a useful planet in the World Bank constellation. If so it can 
become a leader in capacity building catalysing national and sub-regional 
action as well as paving roads for the big financial battalions of the 
Bank/bilateral group and - perhaps - of the international enterprise 
sector. The choice remains open. It needs, this time, to be made 
explicitly after canvassing potential costs and gains.
- Reginald Herbold Green 
Maputo 
April 1992
amato.doc/rhg/sh/22.4.92


Southern Africa: Retrospect and Prospect

https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/bitstream/20.500.12413/6050/1/rg346.pdf

Southern Africa: Retrospect and Prospect

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

IDS OpenDocs