A Profile of Poverty
Antonio Hercules looks at the causes of poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa, and evaluates the anti-
* Sub-Saharan Africa poverty strategies on offer. Far from harmonising human life chances in different parts of the world, the current phase of globalisation -widening and deepening of international flows of trade, finance and information in a single, integrated global market. -has increased regional inequalities.
Trade liberalisation will increase global income by US$212-$510 billion in 1995-2000. These gains come from from greater efficiency and higher rates of return on capital, as well as from the expansion of trade.
But the losses from this process will be concentrated in those countries that can least afford it The least developed countries stand to lose up to $600m a year. Sub-Saharan Africa will lose $1.2bn. Foreign exchange losses will translate into pressure on incomes, a diminishing ability to sustain imports and increased dependency on aid. Revenue from trade will be lost, undermining the capacity of governments to develop the economic and social infrastructure on which sustained reduction in human poverty depends.
Around the world, from the traditional social-democratic "welfare states" of Western Europe, to the independent states of the Third World, the ideological thrust of globalisation, neo-liberalism, has created a new orthodoxy - predicated partly on the notion that in order to revitalise the market, national governments have to decrease social spending.
The French economist Maxime Durand (1998) writes that the offensive against the public sector and social services has become universal and world-wide. "This is not only an attack on the notion of public property in a 'public sector'. . It is also the motor behind a wrenching change in the way societies meet human needs. Because this change operates at such deep levels, it has been difficult to mount a counter-attack."
Durand explains that the welfare state, public services, and full employment were the global solution to the crisis that began with the Great Depression of the 1930s and led to fascism and the world war. Most mainstream economists concluded that the market, organised in this manner could overcome the contradiction between the unceasing search for maximum profits and the need to expand markets to absorb a rapidly growing production. The public sector, broadly defined, therefore fulfilled an economic function. 12 International Viewpoint #306 December 1998
The system could now claim that it could prevent future crises, that it could guarantee jobs for all, a high-quality social safety net, and a rapid growth in purchasing power. The neoliberal offensive represents a total reversal of this system, and a concerted effort to discredit the previous model.
Economic policy is being formulated in a new global environment which glorifies the liberalisation and privatisation of social services traditionally provided by the state. As Durand puts it, "there is a consciously orchestrated policy of systematic social regression. Capital has stated that full employment and social security have become luxuries it can no longer support."
The impact is being felt across the world, including Sub-Saharan Africa. Reducing the meagre vestiges of welfarism in the poorest region of the world means that millions more of the poor face a desperate slide even further into barbarism and utter despair.
RWANDA The causes of poverty..
The World Bank (1996) identified the main causes of poverty in Sub-
• Inadequate access to employment
• Inadequate physical assets, such as land and capital, and minimal access by the poor to credit even on a small
• Inadequate access to the means of supporting rural development in poor regions.
• Inadequate access to markets where the poor can sell goods and services.
• Low endowment of human capital.
• Destruction of natural resources leading to environmental degradation and reduced productivity.
• Inadequate access to assistance for those living at the margin and those victimised by transitory poverty. • Lack of participation, failure to draw the poor into the design of development programmes.
This is clearly a "technicist" and superficial analysis. It does not provide an historical account for poverty. Nor does it explain regional economic relations within the global economy. It ignores the influence of global politics and power on the issue of poverty within the Third World. An history of poverty creation
At its base, the roots of poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa lie in the historical path of economic and political development. The tragedy of poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa today is the outcome of this path.
According to Leys (1996), the causes of human poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa include:
• "Neo-patrimonialism", "rentseeking and the exploitation of ethnic differences leading to a systematic misuse of public resources
• Governing abuse and corruption
• Lack of trained and experienced entrepreneurs and people in senior and middle management and technical positions led to delays and inefficiencies in the use of resources in all sectors.
Leys links these factors to two underlying problems. First, the African experience of centralised colonial authority, colonial trading monopolies and the colonial exploitation of ethnic differences. Secondly, the sum of the surpluses taken out of Africa by foreign companies tied "aid redatory "management fees" since independence through "transfer and other forms of unequal exchange which have significantly handicapped the region's development.
He argues further that today we need a "general explanation in which all the determinants... find their place in an multi-levelled historical framework". Regional economic relations
Within the multi-levelled and historical framework" one critical cause of poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa is the region's location in the global economic order in relation to the major regional blocs of global capital, such as the US (and NAFTA), the European Union, and Japan.
The origins of Africa's tragedy
CENTRAFRIQUE clearly lie far back in the emergence and evolution of the world capitalist economy. The mammoth task of surmounting the political and economic reality in
EQUATEUR
Congo (Laire)
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SOUDAN
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Africa today, particularly Sub-Saharan
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Africa, is therefore also bound up with the fact that the leading industrial states have recently chosen to abandon that system of regulation to which the global economy was subject at the time when
Africa was launched into independence.
GABON
BANDUNUM
Kinabasa
KASAI-
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Kitona
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RWANDA
ORTENTAL
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Leys argues that by the end of the 1980s the economies of Sub-Saharan Africa could no longer ensure the survival of a growing proportion of their inhabitants. World demand for the region's products is growing slowly or even delining, while world supplies are being constantly expanded. Many of the agricultural commodities in question are increasingly being produced more efficiently outside Africa under market conditions of production.
Since the early 1970s the poorest countries have suffered a cumulative decline of 50% in terms of trade. For the Third World as a group the cumulative terms-of-trade losses amounted to $290 billion between 1980 and 1991.
Much of this catastrophic fall was due to the decline in real commodity prices - in 1990 they were 45% lower than in 1980 and 10% lower than the lowest prices during the Great Depression in 1932. Third World countries" terms of trade for manufactured goods also fell — by 35% during 1970-91.
This forces prices steadily downwards towards levels at which Africans will no longer be able to live on what they can earn by producing them.
In other words, the equilibrium wage level in many African countries is increasingly likely to be below the level of subsistence. As André Gorz puts it, "more and more Africans are becoming supernumeraries of the human race" The influence of global politics
Most African countries are going through decisive strategic shifts in their respective modes of governance. Massive changes are underway in countries emerging from war (Angola, Mozam(Uganda and Sudan), centralised one party regimes (Zimbabwe, Zambia, Kenya), structural adjustment (Ghana, dery Coast, Egypt) among other "mala-
In particular, countries going through World Bank-driven structural adjustment programmes are fundamentally redefining the structure of their economies and respective modes of governance, with far-reaching implications for local urban governance. Many countries are trying to initiate or consolidate multi-party democracies at a time when the consequences of urbanisation in ecologically fragile contexts become apparent.
The older more established and stable polities like Botswana, Kenya, and
OCE.
atadi ANGOLA Ivory Coast are going through changes in their systems of local governance as they adjust to the changing balance of global power, economic liberalisation and increased local and international demands for adherence to human rights
According to Swilling (1997), a shift ın thınking is taking place across the globe regarding the nature of the state and its relationship with society. shift from a noun (government) to a verb (governance), from structure to process, from things to relations, from independence to inter-dependence, from linearity to (feedback) loops, from rational struc-
Migration
Migration to urban areas is often a survival strategy for the rural
• In Mali this migration occurs village to city, village to village, or sometimes internationally (to
Côte d'Ivoire and France).
• In Senegal, migration usually occurs from the interior to the coast, from the North to the
South, from Senegal into the
Gambia and to France.
• In Niger migration occurs from rural areas to other rural areas that may have better commercial agricultural opportunities, coastal areas, oil fields in Algeria and Libya, gold fields in Burkina
Faso, and small and large towns
The movements to costal areas are becoming an increasingly crucial issue for the environment in these
In West Africa, for example, the coastal countries have absorbed an estimated 8 million people in the past three decades. This figure is
•TANZANIE КАТАМБА ZAMBIE turation to patterns of chaos, is influenced by the combined universal disillusionment with the nature of the state and the impact of the post-modern imagination that has abandoned the myth of human self-unification and the vision of a utopian end-state. It was the World Bank's 1989 report on Sub-Saharan Africa that forced the word governance into the mainstream debate."
There are other approaches to the emerging governance debate. Leftwich (1993) views governance as an ideological device that post-Cold War Western Governments have chosen to mask the imposition of capitalist market policies likely to increase to about 20 million in 2020.
Despite the fact that the majority of the population and the poor in particular remain rural, urbanisation has become one of the most conspicuous consequences of the agricultural decline in Sub-Saharan
Urban culture is more secular, individualistic, and commercially oriented than rural culture. Traditional coping strategies no longer work; traditional cultures are breaking down; family and neighbourhood patterns of soldarity no
Women are particularly affected by this social transformation. Without an increase in the demand for labour, many unmarried women who have no opportunity to contribute to family enterprises such as farming and services will be forced to make a living for temselves and their children in an increasingly hostile social environment of crime, violence, prostitution and Aids. *
International Viewpoint #306 December 1998 13
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* Sub-Saharan Africa (via structural adjustment) on highly unequal societies with the consent of increasingly disempowered state systems which no longer represent the real interests of the poor majority — a formula that will lead to increased political conflict and a return to authoritarianism rather than democratic governance.
In the 1960s conventional wisdom rested on the assumption (provided by modernisation theory) that socioeconomic "modernisation" was a precondition for political democracy. But, in the 1990s, it is being asserted that political democracy is a precondition for successful "development". Swilling (1997) argues that this somersault is intimately bound up with the end of the Cold War. This allows Western Governments to impose their own constitutional prescriptions. The rise of pro-democracy movements have also played a role in forcing democratisation onto the agenda. Reaching the poor
Macro-economic adjustments imposed by structural adjustment - or selfimposed in the case of South Africa -have worsened the plight of the poor in Sub-Saharan Africa. While most adjustment policies target trade, exchange rates and agricultural sector policy reform, the accompanying fiscal discipline imposes stringent boundaries on social spending.
Adjustment polices have resulted in severe cutbacks and in some cases the elimination of social and economic programmes. As the ideology of the market as the answer to the world's ills gains global hegemony there has been a near universal decline in welfare and social expenditure as the key means to reaching the poor.
Development practitioners and politicians now favour approaches that would render governments largely free from caring for the poor. One example of this is the World Bank's Handbook on Par-
International Viewpoint ticipation. It argues that programmes targeting the poor should be viewed as a continuum.
In the first phase of this continuum, the poor are recipients or beneficiaries of aid and related aid programmes. The strategies in such programmes are those of community organising, training and other strategies that the Bank describes as being characteristic of one-way aid flows.
Once capacity has been built through the first phase, the poor move from being recipients to clients of development. The Handbook suggests that if the first phase is successful the poor would be in the position to buy services from governments and private agencies, including non-governmental organisations. The strategies inherent in this phase revolve around providing micro-credit for self-employment. This would see a proliferation of marketbased financial institutions, the decentralisation of authority and strategies to strengthen local level institutions.
The next phase of the continuum involves the poor becoming owners and managers of their assets and activities, "influencing and sharing control over development initiatives and the decisions and resources which effect them."
There are some merits in this continuum. Except that the first two phases of the continuum seem to run concurrently, and neither of them very successfully. Only in the last stage do the poor - theoretically - actively shape and determine the programmes that will impact on their lives. This includes the poor making inputs into macro-economic policies that ultimately effect their lives.