Title: The Political Economy of Technological Under-development in Africa
Author: Dr Khalil Timamy
Publisher: Centre for Black and African Arts and Civilisation, Lagos
Published: 2007
Reviewer: Tony Mochama
When American President Barack Obama was here at the University of Nairobi as a "mere junior Senator from Illinois" back in 2006, he said in a speech that Kenya’s main "twin towers of fundamental economic problems was the endemic State corruption, coupled with an over-reliance on agriculture, at the expense of technological investment and education of a skilled and knowledgeable workforce."
These are the words, M H Khalil Timamy, a Senior Economist and one time WWF – African Advisor, has expanded into an 800-page plus tome. Some of its arguments are more obvious rather than earth-shaking. Still, this book is a commendable colossus.
Like an academic presentation, Dr Timamy begins by carefully outlining what each of his eleven chapters will prove, exempli gratia, "in chapter five, it will be shown the view that markets are sacrosanct and infallible has more holes than Swiss cheeses," a theory Timamy may practically de-bunk on the evidence of the current global melt down of neo-capitalism.
His main bogey is the capitalist conspiracy by the West he calls "spoliation" in the form of fifth column capitalists like Nepad, whose ostensible agenda is not really to better the lot of Africa… but is a wicked plot to enrich the West further.
Fifth columns, to go tangentially literary, a la Hemingway, are "the enemy within". And Timamy goes some way in his book to expose the insidious nature of these economic Trojan horses that leave our economies as wooden as ever.
Pyramids and doctrines
At the heart of Organised Spoliation, argues the author, is the idea of Overseas’ powers securing a privileged access to Africa’s resources at the lowest expense.
"As the State retreats and the market expands, the economic system tends to become more exploitative; democracy, more procedural and less social."
Timamy harks back to the Golden Era of Africa, Egypt, with its pyramids and doctrines summum bonum of harmony, when we (Africa) passed on knowledge to the likes of Pythagoras (math), Xenophanes (literature), Socrates (philosophy) and Aristotle (government).
Sub-Saharan Africa in the 21st Century, he argues, is in a state of steady economic deterioration. The iniquity of States that stifle individual creativity and initiative has foreclosed opportunities for effective resource use, leading to macro-economic disequilibria and massive citizen poverty.
Going next door to Uganda, Timamy shows a 1997 deal between Kampala and Belarussia where Museveni’s government spent over $12 million (Sh1 billion) on four second-hand M124 choppers worth not more than $3 million (Sh250 million).
But being more an academic than exposÈ author, we are soon back in the world of SAPs and sustained under-development of the continent by our corrupt regimes "that by-pass the legitimate channels of decision-making and subvert democratic processes".
But, unlike Kenya and Africa at large, Timamy quoting Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz brings a glimmer to life of the resistance of leaders like China’s Hu Jintau to the exhortations of former US president George Bush during his presidency to artificially re-evaluate the value of their currency, the renminbi, vis-‡-vis, the dollar, to "balance their trade deficit".
Socialist solutions
The Chinese red dragon refused to bow to the demands of the Texan cowboy, "and from a healthy (post-Clinton) surplus of a trillion dollars," we all know that Bush left the US economy with a multi-trillion dollar plus hole that Obama is trying to fix, even with ‘socialist’ solutions that would seem to boost Timamy’s academic tirade against unfettered markets.
Contrast this ‘protectionist’ attitude with two 1986 examples Timamy show-cases in Eldoret and Meru where the Kenya Industrial Estates and a bakery company are run roughshod by Canadians, Japanese, Swiss, Swedes, Italians and Greeks bearing industrial ‘gifts,’ willy-nilly.
Corporate malfeasance in the US is also documented (Enron, Xerox, AOL Time Warner, General Electric and Charter Communications Cable Company) but Timamy carefully avoids Kenyan examples of corporates and parastatals gone wrong, a little cowardly if you ask me.
Another example of this avoidance of local finger pointing is when Timamy goes to great tracks, no pun intended, on the UK’s Hatfield railway tragedy, while not mentioning the derelict Kenya Railways ones. This would have made this lengthy tome a tad more palatable.
His weakness in real-politik knowledge comes through when he show-cases the South Korean techno-industrial model’s positives while refusing to acknowledge Suharto and Sukarno’s military-industrial-family axis of dictatorship was essential for this tiger’s development.
On the economics of agricultural subsidies though, Timamy is delightfully thorough! From the Corn laws of 1831, to the Treaty of Rome, to the current WTO battles, the academic unpackages the subversion of Globalisation through this mendacity of subsidies, where our farmers in Africa are ‘starved’ and exploited by Europe’s $1 billion (Sh68 billion) a day subsidies for Europe’s 2 per cent population farmers.
Seattle riots
The WTO Seattle riots in December, 1999, he hopes, was just the first shout of the trampled upon majority through enlightened activist members of the Global Civil Society. This is because, for sure, our governments do very little.
For instance, in Ghana, Accra privatised the country’s water system at the World Bank’s bribe and behest for just $100 million (Sh7.6 billion). Timamy, without mentioning the likes of most UN-ish expatriates, talks of universal do-gooders, who preach water and drink wine. Those (white) forces whose seductive programmes cause mass deprivation, then hypocritical, smooth operators step in opportunistically as sympathetic saviours.
But the true pitilessness of the harsh forces of 21st Century globalisation are shown near the book’s end by GlaxoWellcome’s reaction when South Africa, Brazil and India, with ten million HIV-Aids sufferers amongst them, came up with cheap generics to save their poor souls.
GlaxoWellcome lashed out with Intellectual Property irk, just an example of another profit–crazy company that makes at least $40 million (Sh3.2 billion) a year in Uganda with its 2 million HIV sufferers. Ironically, although Timamy does not mention it, it is Bush, in conjunction with supra-capitalist Bill Gates, who have done the most, policy-wise and monetarily, about Aids in Africa.
African renaissance
President Thabo Mbeki’s African Renaissance ideal, starting with leaders ready to lead strategic techno-economic rebellion from the West, seems to have inspired Timamy to write the book a decade ago, and getting it published in Nigeria, in 2007.
Last year, Mbeki was swept away by Mr Jacob Zuma. Perhaps that is prophetic for the African continent, of who the people prefer – when a pipe-puffing intellectual battles a machine-gun waving populist, of our preference for political drama over real renaissance.
