Debt, distress, dispossession: towards a critical political economy of Africa’s financial dependency

SUMMARY

With China's rise to become Africa's largest bilateral creditor, much research has focused on an evidence-based critique of the politicised narrative about China's supposed ‘debt trap diplomacy'. At a more fundamental level, this debate problematises the function of debt and related power differentials in late capitalism and calls into question development paradigms, notably the hegemonic infrastructure-led development regime, that have sustained Africa's financial dependency into the 2020s. As the International Monetary Fund is yet again shuttling between Addis Ababa, Lusaka, and Nairobi to resurrect fiscal discipline and to ensure debtor compliance for the post-pandemic ‘payback period', it is argued that (i) periodic cycles of debt financing, debt distress and structural adjustment are a systemic feature of the malintegration of Africa into the global capitalist economy, and (ii) critical research on the social costs and economic beneficiaries of renewed rounds of austerity and privatisation in Africa’s current debt cycle is needed.

KEYWORDS:

• Debt dependency
• debt-trap narrative
• China–Africa studies
• infrastructure financing gap
• structural adjustment
• privatisation

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Paul Nugent, Tilman Schwarze, and the editor Jörg Wiegratz as well as two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Remaining errors and shortcomings are of course my sole responsibility. Thank you, Ian Taylor, for instilling the confidence in me to ‘write what I like’.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not affect the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Sankara famously renamed colonial Upper Volta as Burkina Faso, a fusion of Mossi and Dioula, which is often translated into ‘the land of the upright people’.

2 This is the title of Sankara’s 1987 speech in Addis Ababa.

Additional information

Funding

The research for this article was conducted under a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant for the project African Governance and Space: Transport Corridors, Border Towns and Port Cities in Transition (AFRIGOS) [ADG-2014-670851].

Notes on contributors

Tim Zajontz

Tim Zajontz is a research fellow in the Centre of African Studies at the University of Edinburgh as well as in the Centre for International and Comparative Politics at Stellenbosch University. He holds a PhD from the University of St Andrews. His current research is concerned with the political economy of Chinese infrastructure projects in Africa.