Professor Ojetunji Aboyade had many virtues. The one that stands out for me is his insistence that a good economist, particularly in a developing country must be more than an economist. (S)he must be firmly grounded in theory, highly skilled in empirical analysis, sophisticated in the use of mathematical and quantitative techniques and willing to dirty his/her hands in collecting primary data. Furthermore, the good developing country economist will be confident enough to take a position without being rigid; open enough to recognise the limits of the economists' box of tools, humble enough to accept that economics is often subsidiary to politics and strong enough to resist dogma from home or from abroad.
This is an impossible task for mere mortals. Not many of us can claim to be good economists by Aboyade's standards: certainly not I. But one can take some comfort in the second best option of treating his definition as a journey rather than a destination. It is in that spirit, and to keep his message alive that I have chosen as my lecture in his honour, the title "The Poverty of Development: Prolegomenon to a Critique of Development Policy in Africa."
1.1 Overview
The number of people living below the poverty line of one US dollar a day is almost 300 million in Sub-Saharan Africa today. According to the UNDP 2002 Human Development Report, in Sub-Saharan Africa, human development has actually regressed in recent years, and the lives of its very poor people are getting worse. The share of people living on $1 a day was about the same at the end of the 1990s as at the start (47.7% in 1990 and 46.7% in 1999). And, because of population growth, the number of poor people in the region has actually increased from 242 million in 1990 to 300 million in 1999. Further, while most of the world has increased the share of children who are immunized against the leading diseases, since 1990, immunization rates in Sub-Saharan Africa have fallen below 50% (UNDP 2002).
It is not surprising, therefore, that poverty in Africa has become the main concern of the international development community. International financial institutions and the bilateral donor community now base their assistance mainly on the poverty objective. In particular, for most of Africa, the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) has become the dominant vehicle for macroeconomic and structural reform in much the same way that Structural Adjustment Programmes provided the vehicle from the late Seventies to the late Nineties. Africa itself appears to have adopted poverty reduction as the new development religion, as seen in the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD).
However, our anti-poverty march appears to be focusing on form, even more appearances, at the expense of content. And it seems misguided in the belief that participation, however ad hoc, translates into ownership. This paper argues that while ownership is fundamental to development, it must go beyond first order compliance with an externally determined set of norms. To be clear, the reduction of poverty in all its manifestations is the essence of development. But, it is futile to focus on the symptoms of poverty rather than its causes; or to target the shadow rather than the substance.
The paper is in five parts. Following this introduction, Section 2 provides a very quick tour of the development literature from its modern beginning when development was simply growth plus structural change to its current history of a more robust understanding of development with poverty as its main focus.
Section 3 reviews the PRSP approach and provides an overview of the process in those African countries which have prepared full PRSPs. Section 4, the core of the argument, juxtaposes against the Washington approach to PRSPs a "Curmudgeon's guide." Section 5 provides some concluding remarks based on the old philosophical tension between necessity and discretion.
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