Untitled - Rebel Studies Library

154 PLANET OF SLUMS
transfer of power from Third World nations to the Bretton Woods institutions
controlled by the United States and other core capitalist countries.
According to Tabb, the Bank's professional staff are the postmodern
equivalent of a colonial civil service, and "like the colonial administrators
they never seem to go away except to be replaced by a fresh adviser team
with the same outlook and powers over the local economy and society."8
Although the debt-collectors claim to be in the business of economic
development, they seldom allow poor nations to play by the same rules
that richer countries used to promote growth in the late nineteenth or
early twentieth centuries. Structural adjusknent, as economist Ha-Joon
Chang points out in a valuable article, hypocritically "kicked away the
ladder" of protectionist tariffs and subsidies that the OECD nations
had historically employed in their own climb from economies based on
agriculture to those based on urban high-value goods and services.9
Stefan Andreasson, looking at the grim results of SAPs in Zimbabwe
and self-imposed neoliberal policies in South Africa, wonders if the
Third \X'orld can hope for anything more than "virtual democracy" as
long as its macro-economic policies are dictated from Washington:
"Virtual democracy comes at the expense of inclusive, participatory
democracy and of any possibility of the extension of public welfare
provision that social democratic projects elsewhere have entailed."IO
The Challenge of Slums makes the same point when it argues that the
"main single cause of increases in poverty and inequality during the
1980s and 1990s was the retreat of the state." In addition to the direct
SAP-enforced reductions in public-sector spending and ownership, the
authors stress the more subtle diminution of state capacity that resulted
from "subsidiarity": defined as the devolution of sovereign power to
lower echelons of government, and especially NGOs, linked directly to
major international aid agencies.
The whole, apparently decentralized structure is foreign to the notion of
national representative government that has served the developed world
8 William Tabb, Economic Governance in the Age of Globalization, New York 2004,
p. 193.
9 Ha-Joon Chang, "Kicking Away the Ladder: Infant Industry Promotion in
Historical Perspective," OxfiJrd Development Studies 31:1 (2003), p. 21.
10 Stefan Andreasson, "Economic Reforms and 'Virtual Democracy' in South
Africa," Journal of Contemporary African Studies 21:3 (September 2003), p. 385.
SAPING THE THIRD WORLD
well, while it is very amenable to the operations of a global hegemony.
The dominant international perspective [i.e., Washington's] becomes the
de facto paradigm for development, so that the whole world rapidly
becomes unified in the broad direction of what is supported by donors
and international organizations.ll
Urban Africa and Latin America were the hardest hit by the artificial
depression engineered by the IMF and the White House - indeed, in
many countries the economic impact of SAPs during the 1980s, in
tandem with protracted drought, rising oil prices, soaring interest
rates, and falling commodity prices, was more severe and long-lasting
than the Great Depression. Third World cities, especially, were
trapped in a vicious cycle of increasing immigration, decreasing
formal employment, falling wages, and collapsing revenues. The IMF
and World Bank, as we have seen, promoted regressive taxation
through public-service user fees for the poor, but made no ' counterpart
effort to reduce military expenditure or to tax the incomes or real
estate of the rich. As a result, infrastructure and public health everywhere
lost the race with population increase. In Kinshasa, writes
Theodore Trefon, "the population refers to basic public services as
'memories.'''12
The balance sheet of structural adjustment in Africa, reviewed by
Carole Rakodi, includes capital flight, collapse of manufactures,
marginal or negative increase in export incomes, drastic cutbacks in
urban public services, soaring prices, and a steep decline in real wagesY
Across the continent people learned to say "I have the crisis" in the
same way one says, "I have a cold."14 In Dar-es-Salaam, public-service
expenditure per person fell 10 percent per annum during the 1980s, a
virtual demolition of the local state.1S In Khartoum, liberalization and
11 Challenge, p. 48.
12 Theodore Trefon, "Introduction: Reinventing Order," in Trefon, Reinventing
Order in the Congo, p. 1.
13 Rakodi, "Global Forces, Urban Change, and Urban Managementin Africa," in
Rakodi, Urban Challenge, pp. 50, 60-61.
14 Achille Mbembe and Janet Roian, "Figures of the Subject in Times of
Crisis," in Enwezor et al., Under Siege, p. 112.
15 Michael Mattingly, "The Role of the Government of Urban Areas in the
Creation of Urban Poverty," in Sue Jones and Nici Nelson (eds), Urban Poverty .
in
Africa: From Understanding to Alleiation, London 1999, p. 21.
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