The zombies of development economics: Dambisa Moyo's Dead Aid and the fictional African entrepreneurs

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Notes

Along with the high-profile Woody Harrelson film, Zombieland, Wikipedia lists 100 feature-length zombie films released in the years 2009 and 2010 combined.

At independence, only 6% of land in Zambia had private title (GRZ 2001). Today the figure would be slightly higher, even though the director of the department of agriculture still cites the 6% figure (Interview, Imataa Akayombokwa, 23 July 2007).

Here Arthur Lewis' 1954 publication ‘Economic development with unlimited supplies of labour’ perhaps most explicitly gave justification to such plans.

In Africa, write Sarah Bracking and Graham Harrison, ‘1979 marked a radical change in global economic policy, inaugurated with the “Volcker Shock” (so called after Paul Volcker, then chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve) when the United States suddenly and dramatically raised interest rates, [which] increased the cost of African debt precipitously, since a majority of debt stock was held in dollars. The majority of the newly independent states had been effectively delivered into at least 20 years of indentured labor. From that point on, access to finance became a key policing mechanism directed at African populations.’ (Bracking and Harrison 2003, also cited in Bond 2008.)

It is of course questionable the degree to which we can consider the intended recipients of the present-day ‘modernisers’, when grand projects for human emancipation are shunned unless they meet standards of ‘public–private partnerships’ as defined by the international financial institutions.

As Keynes put it: ‘Dangerous human proclivities can be canalized into comparatively harmless channels by the existence of money-making and private wealth, which, if they cannot be satisfied in this way may find their outlet in cruelty, the reckless pursuit of personal power and authority, and other forms of self-aggrandisement.’ This is quoted, interestingly enough, in Peter Bauer (1981) to whom Moyo dedicates the book.

It is in fact shocking that a Harvard and Oxford graduate writing on Africa would think it reasonable to cite Wikipedia as a credible source on something as significant to African history as the Berlin Conference (Moyo 2009, p. 158).

One can only imagine how offensive this would seem were it to come from a white, non-African person.

On ‘social capital’ see Fine (1999); on ‘civil society’ see Allen (1997); on ‘good governance’ see Schmitz (1995) and Nanda (2006).

By some accounts these shortages were partly due to inadequacies in marketing infrastructure while crops rotted on farms.

The work of early anthropologists such as Audrey Richards reveals intimate details of the challenges of reproducing the workforce under these conditions. Her work in Northern Province has been the subject of a fantastic re-study by Moore and Vaughan (1994).