By Peter Mulira

As we celebrate our forty-sixth independence anniversary, it is worth recalling the observations made by Professor Rene Dumont in his book he aptly entitled “False start in Africa” which was published in 1962 soon after the onset of African independence.

Dumont was concerned about what was already happening in the new states and warned that unless the right policies were put in place, Africa would find itself “producing more sugar and cotton in order to buy less and less oil and fewer and fewer textbooks”.

An agronomist by profession, Dumont started his career in Indo-China in 1929 before becoming a professor and adviser on agricultural development to many third world countries always warning them that European solutions were not the answer to their problems.

In 1962, Dumont saw Africa as a continent of great expectations which were being betrayed by post-independence leaders and its past colonial rulers. He attacked Africa’s system of education which created elites without skills to use their hands and foresaw desertification through overfarming and overgrazing of our lands.

Looking back 46 years, one finds Dumont’s predictions as to the future course of Africa amazing in their correctness although his solutions may not have been always on target. In an introduction to a 1980 edition of the book Lloyd Timberlake of the International Institute of the Environment and Development gives three reasons why we should continue reading Dumont’s book.

First, the book makes its points by comparison to events in China and Cuba and the Europe of earlier centuries which broaden our perspective. Secondly, the book is an important historical document of African independence. Thirdly, we are told that Dumont was right about what was wrong in Africa, a fact which is proven by historical events.

Although harsh on the new African leaders’ policies, Dumont at the same time blames former colonial powers’ skewed policies, a theme taken up by Professor J. F. Rweyemamu of Dar-es-Salaam University who wrote in another book that “the inherited colonial economies were deformed and led to dependency industrialisation which merely implied the adoption of more sophisticated patterns of consumption without the corresponding process of capital accumulation and technical progress”.

In the area of industrialisation, African leaders in the 60s without first correcting the colonial legacy of dependency, industrialisation merely put in place an industrialisation process which was characterised by import substitution policies under which domestic and foreign investors were encouraged to set up industries which enjoyed tariff-protection and incentive policies.

This resulted in the production mainly of consumer goods proving Dumont right that industrialisation in Africa merely led to more sophisticated consumption and nothing more. For example, import-substitution policies did not lead to a meaningful increase in employment which only rose from just less than two million in 1960 to around around 2.5 million in 1970 in the whole of Africa. It should also be noted that these new industries were concentrated in urban areas without a trickle-down effect on the rural areas which continued to stagnate. After a decade of bungled policies, the seventies brought mixed opportunities for Africa.

From 1972 there was a general rise in world prices for agricultural products like coffee and cocoa but this proved to be more advantageous to the industrialised countries than the third world as revenues thus earned were eaten up by the price rise affecting manufactured goods and food products imported from the industrialised regions.

The seventies also saw the increase in the price of oil by oil-producing countries with petro-dollars so earned being in the west which needed to recycle them. The availability of petro-dollars in the west led to the World Bank and other private banks increasing their lending to the third word, including Africa under the noble aim of conquering poverty. But as Dumont warned, European solutions were not the answer to Africa’s woes. Instead of conquering poverty the increased lending actually planted the seeds of economic crises for Africa as interest rates on external debts skyrocketed while at the same time export earnings were diverted to servicing debts instead of developing domestic economies.

The debt crisis thus created lay at the heart of the economic revolution initiated in the 1980s by the British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and the American president Ronald Reagan according to which “stabalisation” measures were designed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) which imposed strict fiscal and monetary discipline on indebted countries to balance their books and to be able to repay their loans.

These policies led to the soaring of prices as a result of removal of government subsidies and as street riots threatened the survival of governments the World Bank stepped in with structural and sectoral adjustment policies intended to open markets and reduce the state’s involvement in the economy. These measures included trade liberalisation; investment deregulation; privatisation of public utilities; reform of the agricultural sector and the liberalisation of the domestic markets.

How far a government was able to adopt these measures determined its suitability for donor funds. Unfortunately, although some people benefited from these policies and we now have some filthy-rich individuals in our midst, the policies provided no change in the poverty levels after 20 years of implementation.

This led the United Nations to set eight millennium development goals to be achieved by 2015 as the new paradigm for fighting underdevelopment. These goals include eradication of poverty; provision of universal primary education; promotion of gender equality; reduction of child mortality; improvement of maternal care; environment sustainability and development of global partnership for development.

While these are noble goals, it is very unlikely that they will stand a chance of success as fit-all solutions without Africa supplementing them with its own home-grown prescriptions.

This is why False start in Africa comes in handy for its insightful advice. President Senghor of Senegal who had criticised the book when it was first published in 1962 later told Dumont in the 1970s: “I was wrong. We should have followed your advice.”

The writer is a lawyer