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Celebrating #Thandika #Mkandawire Week1: it's been just a week since we've lost one of the greatest African political economist of our time, Thandika. As a way of honouring his achievements & continuing to learn from him, I composed this thread based on Citing Africa podcast (1)
https://soundcloud.com/lsepodcasts/an-interview-with-professor-thandika-mkandawire-on-african-knowledge-systems My colleague Laura @balootiful & her colleagues at Citing Africa done a great job of recording his insights on a number of issues generally revolving around 'African Knowledge Systems'. Some of the points I've taken include (2)
One of the neoliberal explanations used to defund higher education in Africa was informed by a WB study arguing that the 'rate of return' of HE is high for the individual hence ppl would pay for it, hence no govt funding for HE but only for primary & secondary education. (3)
As a result, African economies failed to build their human capital and failed to replace the ageing intelligentsia and educated workforce which is also linked with the expansion of ex-pats serving as sources & brokers of 'technical' knowledge but with huge political clout (4)
Thandika argues the lost decades from the 1980s to 2000s shld be termed as 'Africa's Great Depression'. Other historical periods of 'Depressions' did not last long and deeper in disrupting socio-economic & political systems compared to the African experience (5)
The term 'Crisis' doesn't really capture the extent & degree of predicaments that African societies passed through. In fact, the period of the 'crisis' is used to explain a very narrow understanding of African PE thru z lens of Neopatrimonialism https://bit.ly/2JCdizS . (6)
The Neopatrimonialim school has painted African states in a reductionist & essentialist manner and presented African politics as devoid of ideology but a shortsighted practice of material gains. One of its major limitations is its narrow understanding of history (7)
Nepatrimonialism approach the African state as 'a complex network of clientelism' and depict the image of 'politics of the belly' to explain the economic downturn during the depression. But it cannot explain what happened before (1960s, 70s) & after the depression (post 2000s) 8)
The likes of Nicholas van de Walle, Chabal & Daloz (1999), Bates (2008),Collier are some of the influential scholars who produced this type of PE analysis about African states. While the public choice school reduced everything to the individual, rational & utilitarian view of (9)
methodological individualism, Neopatrimonialism promoted methodological communalism by taking the community as the foundational unit of analysis to generate a macro-level analysis... 'The economy of the affection' is used to describe Africa's dysfunctional order in (10)
the relationship between the state, society & the economy. The podcast has a number of other insightful conversations and I'll use them in my next threads of celebrating #Thandika and learning from him. I strongly recommend you to listen & enjoy his thoughts! @alemayehuGeda
