The State of Africa in the Global Political Economy

Abstract

Since the Cold War, at international, regional and domestic levels, there have been various dynamics which have been significantly impacting Africa's political economy. Taking the major historical developments prior to 1990s as background premises, this article intends to critically unveil the existential state (opportunities, challenges and imperatives) of the continent's political economy since the conclusion of the Cold War. Besides, it has to be noted that, except for some minor disparities among African countries, their communalities concerning their political and economic experiences could plausibly take the lion share, which in turn enable a researcher to come up with cogent explanations, evaluations, generalizations and finally conclusive remarks that could logically stand for the entire continent. Given this methodological consideration, in contrast with its successful but short lived historical precedent in the 1960s through deliberately owned national development policy measures by visionary post-independent African leaders, African political economy had been dragged into incommensurable crisis in the 1970s and 1980s. This had been primarily because of the imposition of alien neo-liberal development policies and reforms [1,2, p.4] (Fantu, 2014). Since the late 1990s, however, its overall performance has begun to recover following the demise of Uni-polar power structure for a new multi-polar global arrangement. The deteriorating influence of neo-liberal conditionalities because of national measures, policy independence, and alternative development policies as well as partnership [3,1 p.276]. In spite of its recent commendable signals justifying 'Afro-optimism', the continent's political economy has still been far from structural transformation. Thus, for its positive prospect, the underlying tasks that each African states are expected to undertake and realize are: strong democratic states with visionary political leadership, de-politicized and meritocratic civil service, state-lead or strategically regulated national economy, policy ownership as well as independence, deliberated and strategic integrations with regional and international economies, infrastructure expansion, human recourse development, diversifying development finance and partnership, giving priorities to strategic economic sectors, which could generate fast economic growth, create more job opportunities and could reduce poverty (Fatu, 2016; pp.1278-79).