In this three-part series (we post Part Two today), Cilas Kemedjio takes on the ongoing crusade to spread neoliberal dogma and “western values.” Part One addresses the “virgin fallacy,” while Part Three moves to the continued efforts of Jeffrey Sachs to create development nirvanas in African (and other) societies.
by Cilas Kemedjio
William Easterly, a former World Bank employee, has become an unapologetic if dogmatic critic of his former employer. In The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor, Easterly charges technocrats with being complicit in the consolidation of authoritarian political regimes. He claims that, as a result,
“Africa has been a notable development failure” (235).
Easterly relies on the neoliberal dogma of free enterprise, globalization, and political freedom.
“The farmers in Wood County in rural Ohio never saw it coming. The soldiers had arrived on the morning of Sunday, February 28, 2010, while the farmers were in church. Hearing gunshots, the farmers had rushed to their houses, which by then were already immersed in flames. While some soldiers kept the farmers at gunpoint from rescuing their homes, others poured gasoline over the recent grain harvest in the barns and burned that as well. One eight-year-old child was trapped and died in the fire. The dairy cows were dispatched more quickly and humanely with a burst of machine-gun fire. Then the soldiers marched the more than 20,000 farmers away at riflepoint. Never come back, they were told; the land is no longer yours” (3).
The farmers are summarily expropriated from their ancestral land that is being taken over by a foreign corporation, financed and promoted by the World Bank,
“an official organization combating global poverty” (3).
This story, Easterly tells us, is true except for one detail. The events occurred not in Wood County, Ohio but in Mubende District, Uganda. The plight of farmers in Uganda is hijacked to buttress the sinister image of Africa as a land of desperation plagued with authoritarian regimes aided and abetted by experts from the World Bank. The dramatization of the suffering of Mubende farmers could be read as an invitation for compassion, charity, or justice. It could also be interpreted as a celebration of the narrative of freedom as a precondition of technological development and economic progress.
After the first World War, the ideology of development emerged as a distraction to counter demands for political rights by colonized peoples. Colonial administrators rallied around progress as a way to avoid a discussion about the political rights of colonized subjects. At the same time in the United States, political leaders were trying to undermine civil rights activists with an emphasis on the need to improve the social and economic welfare of the black community. The suppression of economic and political freedom has become the trademark of development policies. China emerges as the cradle of technocratic authoritarianism, defined here as an alliance between local autocrats and Western experts. Development policies advocated by the World Bank and aid organizations have continued to ignore the rights of the poor. Easterly calls on the concerned reader to advocate for the political and economic rights of the poor for “we must not let caring about material suffering of the poor change the subject from caring about the rights of the poor” (339). This call to action bears some similarities with the stance taken by E.D. Morel in the early days of the 20th century. Morel, in Red Rubber: the Story of the Slave Trade that flourished in the Congo in the year of grace 1906, accused King Leopold of having deprived the natives of the Congo of their basic economic rights, calling for the respect of the free trade clause stipulated by the Berlin Charter of 1885. The charter, it should be recalled, handed the Congo to the King of Belgium as if Western powers meeting in Berlin were the rightful owners of the land and its peoples. Irrespective of the incredible merits of the book, Morel’s opportunistic defense of King Leopold’s victims was part of a strategy designed to defend British commercial interests in the Congo. Freedom to trade and the right to own land, elevated as basic human rights are also the dogmas of laissez-faire capitalism. Easterly, in worshiping this gospel under the unassailable defense of the forgotten poor, could be said to be emulating Morel. Easterly has rediscovered the road to Adam Smith, the controversial apostle of the “invisible hand,” the first and last command of laissez-faire capitalism. The solution is all too familiar: “The Invisible Hand spurs development through the virtuous cycle of specialization, learning by doing, and gains from trade. […] Trade allows them to keep increasing the scale of the virtuous cycle, selling more and more, learning to do better and better, till they take the world market by storm” (254). The invisible hand holds the potential to transform the wretched conditions that befall the forsaken poor by jumpstarting a cycle of virtue.
In the new international ethical order, Western governments and aid agencies are called to account as self-appointed guardians of virtue:
“We can choose not to let our own governments and our own development agencies forget democracy, not to let them forget rights, not to let them forget Eskinder in jail” (342).
Easterly quotes Bill Gates and Tony Blair who defend the exemplarity of the Ethiopian model in reducing child mortality. Human Rights Watch and the New York Times are called upon to defend the rights of the forgotten dissidents. African actors, as the usual suspects, are the perpetrators of violence. Kwame Nkrumah, the great architect of Pan-Africanism, comes across as an authoritarian bent on using punitive taxation to destroy his political and ethnic opposition. Mathieu Kerekou of Benin is nothing more than a “brutal military dictator” (344) despite the fact that he conceded defeat in one democratic election and won two free and fair elections thereafter. The Ethiopian government is charged with “egregious rights violations” (34). Easterly would probably claim that he quotes the Ethiopian jailed activist. Yet, this African voice is framed and contained within the humanitarian order of discourse. The monologue among Western philanthropists, technocrats and self-appointed redeemers will not be disturbed.
Cilas Kemedjio is Director of the Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African-American Studies at the University of Rochester and co-editor of the CIHA Blog.