Thandika Mkandawire: A ‘Young’ African Economist’s appreciation Grieve Chelwa

Thandika Mkandawire, the towering Malawian economist and public intellectual, went to be with the ancestors on 27 March 2020. Professor Mkandawire liked to be called by his first name, Thandika, even by those, like me, who were significantly younger than he. This always caused problems for those raised in the African tradition of reverence for elders, which manifests in prefixing names with titles. Whenever he was not in earshot, when discussing his work with others, I called him ‘Prof’: ‘Prof says Africa’s problems are as much caused by external forces as they are by internal ones’. When speaking with him, I mustered all the courage in my bones and called him ‘Thandika’. In this piece, reflecting on his work, I am torn as to what to call him. In one sense I am talking to others about his work. In another I am conversing with him as an ancestor. I shall gather all my courage and call him Thandika.

Thandika belonged to that rare specimen of humanity that could effortlessly combine administrative duties with scholarly pursuits. The bulk of his most impactful work was written during a time that he was an administrative head of one sort or the other. His most enduring administrative role was that of executive secretary of the Dakar-based Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), a position he held from 1985 to 1996. This was a time of great political and economic tumult on the African continent, and CODESRIA, under his leadership, produced a horde of scholarship that distilled the situation and continues to be a reference for younger scholars today. From CODESRIA, Thandika went on to direct the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) in Geneva, a position he held from 1998 to 2009. He only ‘relaxed’ into a full-time academic position at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in 2010. At LSE he held the inaugural Chair in African Development.

At the kind invitation of African Studies, I have been asked to reflect on Thandika’s life and work. I have decided to focus more on his scholarly work, particularly his impact on the social sciences in Africa and especially on economics. The challenge in conducting an appraisal of a giant’s life’s work is in deciding which aspects of that work to appraise. In Thandika’s case, the challenge is a significant one because his career spanned four decades (five if you include his years as a journalist in Malawi in the 1960s) with a long and diverse list of publications. ¹ My admittedly half-hearted attempt at resolution is to home in on the five pieces of his that have greatly impacted me as an economist. These pieces have helped me to make sense of Africa’s place and the place of African economists in the seemingly never-ending debates about the continent’s prospects for economic development. I call these my favourite things, because Thandika was African development scholarship’s saxophonist.

Others who knew Thandika much more intimately and for far longer than I did have written quite moving accounts of the man himself. I invite readers to read those accounts alongside this one. ²

My favourite things

To kick off the list of favourite things, I begin with Thandika’s most cited scholarly piece, a blockbuster article of sorts, which appeared in the Cambridge Journal of Economics in 2001 (Mkandawire 2001). In this article, titled Thinking about Developmental States in Africa, Thandika made, inter alia, two important arguments. The first argument is that African countries cannot attain transformative development if their states are not ‘developmental’ in orientation. A developmental state is one ‘whose ideological underpinnings are developmental and one that seriously attempts to deploy its administrative and political resources to the task of economic development’ (Mkandawire 2001, 291). Such states are crucial for the achievements made by the ‘late late industrialisers’ in Asia. This argument for developmental states was and continues to be diametrically opposed to the view articulated most forcefully by the Bretton Woods Institutions (BWIs), a view that appears to have won over many African policymakers, that a de-politicised technocracy can deliver transformative economic development. Thandika’s second task in the article was to confront the oft-heard proposition that developmental states were impossible in the African context. To confront this ‘impossibility argument’, he deployed the two strategies that have typified his scholarly work: a correct reading of African history and a sublime use of logic. First, many African states were in actual fact developmental in the first decades following independence in the 1960s and, because of this, were able to register impressive achievements in the social sphere. Second, many of those who were proponents of the impossibility argument, such as the BWIs, had themselves recently presided over the implementation of policies that made it near impossible for developmental states to re-emerge in Africa. Or as Thandika put it the:

My second favourite thing from Thandika is a book that he co-authored with the Nigerian economist Charles Chukwuma Soludo carrying the title Our Continent, Our Future: African Perspectives on Structural Adjustment (Mkandawire & Soludo 1999). This book is incredibly important because of its timing, coming out, as it did, in the late 1990s, when the BWIs and their many allied development experts believed as a matter of faith that the neoliberal ideas contained in structural adjustment were the answers to the economic crisis then gripping the African continent. As the title makes clear, the book aims to provide an ‘African perspective’ to the understanding of the crisis, a perspective that had been conspicuously absent from the dominant debates about the crisis. The book represents the synthesised ideas of about 25 African economists, many of whom met throughout the 1990s in their efforts to make sense of the situation.³The book has four chapters, with the first covering economic history before the crisis, the second looking at explanations for the crisis, a third looking at results of structural adjustment and a final chapter charting a way forward for the continent. It is striking how in each of the four chapters of the book, the African perspective on the crisis is completely at odds with that of the BWIs. For example, Mkandawire and Soludo went to great pains in the first chapter to demonstrate the dynamism of pre-crisis African economies. The BWIs and many of their advisors, on the other hand, believed that African economies had always been in a permanent state of crisis. Second, Mkandawire and Soludo are more measured in their explanation of the crisis, blaming external factors as much as factors internal to African economies themselves. The BWIs were convinced that factors intrinsic to African economies were entirely to blame for the crisis. Given the influential position occupied by BWIs and their coterie of foreign experts in the African policy space, their one-sided point of view carried the day and resulted in the policy disaster that structural adjustment is widely acknowledged to have been.

My third favourite thing from Thandika is the text of his inaugural professorial lecture delivered at the London School of Economics in December of 2010. The lecture was subsequently published in the CODESRIA journal Africa Development as ‘Running while others walk: Knowledge and the challenge of Africa’s development’ (Mkandawire 2011).⁴In the first part of the lecture, Thandika argues that development has always been an emancipatory project for the people of Africa and that many Northern critiques of developmentalism do not contend with this fact. Because of its emancipatory logic, ‘development and the “catch up” aspirations driving it [are] not foreign impositions but part of Africa’s responses to its own historical experiences and social needs [and have] much deeper historical roots and social support than is often recognized’ (Mkandawire 2011, 7). In other words, and to borrow from Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, Africans have always wanted to run while others walked. In the second part of the lecture, Thandika forcefully argues for the primacy of knowledge acquisition in Africa’s development aspirations. And here, Africans needed to learn a lot more about themselves as well as about others. However, many obstacles stand in the way of genuine knowledge acquisition on the continent. For example, the now widely documented anti-tertiary education bias of the World Bank nearly destroyed the university system on the continent and, in the process, set it back many decades. Second, the aid juggernaut, with its extreme preference for foreign experts, has led to a situation where locals are marginalised to the positions of spectators in the development drama unfolding on their own continent. Lastly, and connected to the foregoing, an anti-African elite bias pervades much of the influential scholarship on Africa, with devastating consequences for knowledge production and development policy on the continent.

My fourth favourite thing from Thandika is a relatively recent journal article that is well on its way to achieving seminal status, if it has not already. Published in 2015 in World Politics, ‘Neopatrimonialism and the Political Economy of Economic Performance in Africa: Critical Reflections’ takes on what Thandika called the ‘neopatrimonial school’, an analytical approach that has come to dominate, among other things, the study of Africa’s economic performance and the setting of economic policy (Mkandawire 2015).⁵Thandika used Christopher Clapham’s definition of neopatrimonialism as

Neopatrimonialism, then, entails a ‘marriage of tradition and modernity’ (Mkandawire 2015, 565) that, according to its proponents, finds its most visible manifestation on the African continent, thus giving rise to descriptions of Africans as ‘despotic’, ‘clannish’, ‘tribal’, ‘cronyistic’, ‘corrupt’, ‘factional’, ‘predative’, et cetera. More importantly, neopatrimonialism, through its own logic, makes quite precise predictions about what we should observe in the economic sphere in Africa. And it is in testing these predictions, using detailed empirical evidence, that Thandika made his most devastating critique of the neopatrimonial school. For example, the logic of neopatrimonialism predicts that we should always see low savings rates in Africa because of Africans’ profligacy. However, the historical record show that savings rates have varied throughout much of the continent’s post-independence period, with the major explanatory variable being economic performance: in good economic times when incomes are high, Africans tend to save more than in bad times. Similarly, the school’s logic is incompatible with the actual growth record on the continent. That is, one would be hard pressed to explain the wide spatial and temporal variation in economic growth across the African continent using neopatrimonialism’s time-invariant factors. I was fortunate in February of 2017 to have been part of a group of scholars who descended on Johannesburg, South Africa for a symposium held in honour of this most profound essay.⁶

My final favourite thing from Thandika is his review of economist Jeffrey Sachs’ best-selling book The End of Poverty (Sachs 2005). Thandika’s review was published in 2006 in CODESRIA’s Africa Review of Books and was titled ‘The Intellectual Itinerary of Jeffrey Sachs’ (Mkandawire 2006). At the time of writing this review, Sachs and his book were all the rage in development and celebrity circles, with the foreword written by Bono, the flamboyant lead singer of the rock band U2. Unlike many reviews that were to be published on the book, Thandika’s reminded us that Sachs’ ideas on development had undergone many twists and turns in the decade-and-a-half leading up to the publication of his book. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Sachs believed that the administration of neoliberal policies via ‘shock treatment’ was the only way to jolt poor countries out of the slumber of underdevelopment. Somewhere in the mid-1990s he moved on and began proselytising about the importance of getting ‘macroeconomic policies right’ as a precondition for growth and development. Then on the eve of the publication of his book, Sachs, like the Christian missionaries of yore, discovered that Africa was replete with mosquitoes, impenetrable forests, unnavigable rivers, a harsh climate and so on, and that these were the factors that explained the continent’s underdevelopment. Geography was now the culprit! In all his twisting and turning, one thing seemed to typify Sachs. He blamed everyone but himself for the fact that his ideas hardly worked and, in many instances, had led to pretty disastrous outcomes. In The End of Poverty, Sachs reinvented himself once more, but this time around seemed to settle on sensible ideas such as the importance of large-scale infrastructure for Africa’s development. What Sachs neglected to mention, however, was that ideas such as these were not original to him and had been argued for before by the likes of Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah, the Lagos Plan of Action and the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) among others. And this is the other thing that typified Sachs – Africans as moral agents were completely absent from his intellectual itinerary.

Conclusion

I hope to have given the reader, in the foregoing, some idea of the breadth and richness of Thandika’s scholarship. For reasons of space, I only focused on the five pieces that have greatly influenced me and might, therefore, reflect a bias on my part. Thandika wrote about so much more than just African development issues. He wrote about rebel movements and the African peasantry (Mkandawire 2002), African intellectual life (1995, 2005), social movements and democracy (Mamdani, Mahmood, Mkandawire & Wamba-dia-Wamba 1988) and idea formation (Mkandawire 2014) among other topics. In a nutshell, there is everything for everyone in his scholarship.

Before signing off, I would like to say a few things about the themes that characterised Thandika’s life and scholarship. First, in reading his oeuvre, one is immediately struck by how unideological it is. Unlike many scholars of Africa, whose analyses tend to proceed from some ideological basis, Thandika’s work was solely guided by careful empiricism. He wanted to describe the African experience as it was on its own basis. Second, even though he identified as an economist, Thandika was very much the quintessential inter-disciplinarian who carefully borrowed frameworks from other disciplines to enrich his economic analyses. Conversely, he carefully exported aspects of economics that he believed would likewise enrich other disciplines. The proof here is in the diverse collection of disciplinarians that he journeyed with. Third, in reading his development work particularly from the 1980s and 1990s, one is struck by just how careful it is in dignifying the African experience. This work was written at a time when the infectious narrative was that of Africa as the perennial basket case. Thandika, working with many of his colleagues in the CODESRIA network, produced grounded analyses that countered this broad-brushed pessimism. Finally, Thandika did not tire of reminding us about the systematic marginalisation of African social scientists and especially African economists from the important debates that concerned their continent. For him, it was clear that this marginalisation was partly to blame for the policy disasters of the 1980s and 1990s, the effects of which are still with us today. ⁷

I met Thandika for the first time in Lusaka in November of 2015. I went on to meet him on several occasions thereafter with the occasional correspondence in between. He was always generous with his time treating my ideas with a level of seriousness that they did not deserve. I, and many other younger scholars, will miss him.

Journey well, Professor Thandika Mkandawire.

Note on Contributor

Dr Grieve Chelwa is a senior lecturer in economics at the Graduate School of Business at the University of Cape Town where he co-directs the MBA Programme. Chelwa has wide-ranging research interests in the broad area of African economic development, including work on education and health. contact : grievechelwa@gmail.com