In post-independent thought on development, one of the important contributors has been the Swedish theorist, Goran Hyden. His most influential book, No Shortcuts to Progress: African Development Management in Perspective (1983) is sustained argument that the idea of leapfrogging into a developed state by bypassing capitalism is a mirage. Pitching his research against a background of Marxist political economy of base-superstructure, he argues that what African countries need is more capitalism and market-led development planning in order to strengthen the state as a rationalized institution. This will help end what he calls an
“economy of affection” and inaugurate a more dispassionate administrative setup similar to the Weberian ideal type bureaucratic institution.
Hyden’s work requires a closer reading in order to appreciate the relevance of his work to thinking about the development planning practices of the contemporary postcolonial state.
True to his Marxist orientation, Hyden grounds his critique of policy practice in Africa on economic determinism. He points out that the independence struggle was framed as fighting capitalism because it was believed that the African dominated condition called colonialism was as a result of that economic system. As a result, many African countries adopted socialist planning methods that tended to privilege the political allocation of resources over the economic allocative function of the market. With such a policy direction, the state developed faster and more sophisticated than the economy in most of sub-Sahara Africa. Hyden suggests that this does not augur well for development of these countries. “The determining element in history is ultimately the production and reproduction in real life” (Hyden 1983, 4). African countries turned this fundamental logic of history over its head, Hyden argues, by introducing welfare systems and other forms of social engineering. The result of this is what he calls
“lopsided conceptions of development” accompanied by economic decline and a continued incapacity of the governments to control economic policy tools. What this has done is that the
“supply side economists” will have an upper hand in prescribing solutions and interventions
that may lead no where. By supply side economists, he is referring to the international financial institutions. “The international monetary institutions have at present the upper hand in their relations with many African governments and they will continue to dictate their demands as long as African economies show no sign of strength and self reliance” (Hyden 1983, 3).
Incidentally, Hyden was writing at a time that Ghana had just put an end to welfare economic planning and opted for IMF and World Bank supervised SAP. This shift was a revolutionary and significant conjuncture because it marks Ghana’s inauguration into supply side economic planning and an end to the welfare planning policy that Nkrumah started alongside with the founding of the new nation. While Hyden is right in observing that many African nations subverted the historical materialist logic of the economy setting the parameters of the state, the choice made by the first generation of African governments was the logical outcome of the requirements of nation building. Nkrumah captured the spirit of the time when he summed up basis of his policy choices:
My first objective is to abolish from Ghana poverty, ignorance and disease. We shall measure our progress by the improvement in the health of our people; by the number of children in school and by the quality of their education; by the availability of water and electricity in our towns and villages; and by the happiness, which our people take in being able to manage their own affairs. The welfare of our people is our chief pride, and it is by this that my government, will be asked to be judged (quoted in Rooney 1988, 83).
In view of this developmentalist task, the Ghanaian state combined the role of producer, employer, regulator, tax collector and provider of social services and infrastructure all in one.
The humanist aspects of citizenship were privileged over the economic imperative because it was the former that resonated with the ideals of bringing the imagined community into being (see Rooney 1988). If such is the case, then Hyden’s argument suggests that the 1980s mark the moment of paying the terrible price of subverting the historical materialist logic of determination.
Hyden inputs that given the under-developed, predominantly agrarian economy of Africa, we should examine the social and economic realities of the continent through the prism of what he calls “peasant mode of production” (1983, 6). Under such an economic system, little or no surplus is produced. Class divisions are limited and the economy is characterized by lack of structural interdependence because of low level of production relations. The peasant mode of production therefore has a rather diminished superstructure compared to capitalist formation. It therefore cannot sustain an elaborate regime structures such as pertain under capitalism. It is this rural peasant mode of production that came under assault under colonialism, but “one cannot argue that the destruction of the pre-colonial mode of production in Africa automatically meant the disappearance of everything pre-capitalist”
(Hyden 1983, 7). The peasant mode of production is an admixture of both capitalist and pre-capitalist.
With such an analytical framework, Hyden dissects the relationship between the postcolonial state and the economy. With little or no surplus value, with weak production
relations, and consequently with each producer tending to be not structurally integrated into the economy, the postcolonial state lacks an organic relation with the economy. The state in the classical political economic sense is a product of the economy. But here the state is a transplanted apparatus, over an economy characterized by structural autonomy of production units. This limits the state’s ability to extract tax from the virtually independent peasant production units that constitute the economy. Hyden therefore points out that the relations between the state and the economy is tributary one, more that one of production relations.
In view of this, Hyden makes a rather provocative statement to the effect that “African countries are societies without a state. The latter sits suspended in ‘mid-air’ over society and is not an integral mechanism of the day-to-day production activities of society” (1983, 7).
Obviously this is an exaggeration and a qualified one at that. If we contextualize Hyden’s argument within the political economic framework that he prosecutes his critique, we can come to terms with him. For what he is trying to say is that the postcolonial state is structurally superfluous to the structurally autonomous producer. Thus the peasant perceives policy initiatives as “foreign” interventions.
There are pros and cons to such a line of argument. The weakness in such an argument is the blatant disregard for the African experience, like all other social formations, as being unique and not a replica of other or earlier social formations. His argument is built on a fallacy of history by analogy that Mamdani (1996) criticizes in his book Citizen and Subject.
He also fails to take seriously what Bayart (1993) has described as “the true historicity of African societies” where Africa is studied in its own right and not as a reflection of other societies. However, Mbembe (2001, 5-18) rightly cautions that such an undertaking would imply fundamentally different methodological and conceptual route. But Hyden has a historical model, derived directly from the iron logic of historical materialism under which the European modernist history is what awaits African to experience. Africa’s future is Europe’s past, so to speak. And it is only when Africa’s economic development dutifully follows the European example that we can classify it as being on the right path. Such a reading of Africa through a construct specific to an earlier social formation is troubling because it denies the specificities of the postcolonial conjuncture. If African countries are nations without a state just because they do not fit into the classical capitalist state, does that mean that the societies of pre-capitalist Europe had no state? Obviously the European peasantry was structurally independent of the monarchies.
Despite this criticism, Hyden’s argument has a certain purchase on the African experience that we cannot just dismiss. The fact of an alienated state, trying to establish legitimacy over different ethnic and linguistic communities is something we cannot account for if we abandon Hyden’s thesis altogether. Davidson’s account of the Ghanaian experience of nationhood and the transformation of a colonial state into an instrument of self-rule attests to this case of a phantom postcolonial state (Davidson 1989; see also Rooney 1988). But this is not even the purpose for which Hyden denies the postcolonial state. His thesis of phantom postcolonial state forms the basis upon which he elaborates on his theory of “economy of affection.”