Africa in the Storm of COVID-19: Lessons from Thandika Mkandawire’s Critique of Neo-Liberalism.
Dennis Jjuuko
Op-Ed Series – Vol.2 Issue: 1
In Summary
The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that leaving public health, itself a public good, in the custody of market forces, is a nightmare for the poor and vulnerable people.
One of the greatest lessons from this pandemic is that Africa should re-think economic and development approaches from the view that neoliberal policies have not only failed its healthcare sector, but also opened the continent to exploitation by exogenous forces.
The COVID-19 pandemic has taught Africa that Mkandawire was right when he passionately argued that public health systems cannot be abandoned to the profit-seeking mercy of market forces.
If African countries are to save the lives of their people, particularly from pandemics such as COVID-19, the state should play a greater role in building a robust and inclusive healthcare delivery system.
Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic, and its spread to Africa, coincided with the passing of Africa’s imposing political economist and thinker: Thandika Mkandawire (1940-2020). Mkandawire died at a time when the pandemic had started to show, quite incontestably, that his critique of neo-liberalism is on the right side of history. In the 1980s and 90s, developing countries adopted the neo-liberal inspired Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs). SAPs were characterised by the extensive reduction of public expenditure on social services, including health.
With most African leaders affording and preferring to seek state-of-the-art healthcare abroad, the incentive to invest in public health systems was further eroded. The upshot was that the ruling elite consistently allocated meagre resources to this essential sector. It is therefore not surprising that in most Africa countries, the public health system is incredibly derelict. In fact, the state has literally abdicated the responsibility of providing public health services.
The working conditions of health personnel are abysmally poor and dangerous, the salaries are meagre, and there is a critical shortage of basic equipment and supplies. Disgruntled with these conditions, thousands of health workers have left the continent. They are now working in the West, where they are in the frontline of the battle against the pandemic, with a significant number of them having already succumbed to it. Back home, on realising that they have been ‘marooned’ by COVID-19, and therefore unable to seek deluxe healthcare abroad as usual, African elites have mobilised resources to equip health care systems, particularly private ones which they intend to use if they happen to be infected.
From the 1980s, Thandika was one of the leading African scholars to debunk the utility of SAPs in Africa. While the market was being idealized as the remedy to the affairs of the state, Mkandawire consistently warned Africa against neo-liberal policies of privatisation and limited or no government intervention in the provision of public goods like health. In his work ‘Africa: Beyond Recovery’, Mkandawire informs us of the importance of understanding the factors underpinning development, underdevelopment and the recovery of economies in the context of their respective time and space. This is central to any initiative on improving the living standards of African people. He also eloquently reminds us of the role of institutions and history in the development of effective and context-specific policies and programmes in Africa.
Although the COVID-19 pandemic is still raging, it has already debunked the utility of neo-liberal policies in Africa, particularly in respect of the public health delivery architecture. It has demonstrated that leaving public health, itself a public good, in the custody of market forces, is a nightmare for the poor and vulnerable people. The state should therefore play a strongly interventionist role. Robust healthcare systems can withstand sudden and seismic pandemics. However, when a healthcare architecture is built on a neo-liberal philosophy, particularly in poor countries, it is unable to do so. Although public health facilities in developed countries are tending to be overwhelmed, these states have a significant amount of resources to deploy.
If COVID-19 is to spread in Africa with the speed and ferocity with which it did in the West, an incredibly high number of lives will be lost. This explains why most citizens believe that prevention, not cure, is their last line of defence against the pandemic. Livelihoods will also be decimated, making it very difficult for states to recover. It is already clear from the responses that Africa is heavily relying on external assistance to fight the pandemic. Leaving people’s lives at the mercy of external assistance is not good for the Africa. It is probably by sheer luck that at the time of writing, Africa has not been as badly affected as countries such as the United States. What matters in emergencies like the Covid-19 pandemic is not what states and societies are doing today, but what they did yesterday. One of the greatest lessons from this pandemic is that Africa should re-think economic and development approaches from the view that neoliberal policies have not only failed its healthcare sector, but also opened the continent to exploitation by exogenous forces.
One may ask the question of how Africa ended up with such a derelict healthcare delivery system. The incisive answer is that while endemic corruption, poor priorities and other governance related deficiencies have contributed to this, the pursuit of market-based economies has a significant share in this problem. The COVID-19 pandemic has taught Africa that Mkandawire was right when he passionately argued that public health systems cannot be abandoned to the profit-seeking mercy of market forces. The consequences are dire, particularly for poor countries which have no resources to rapidly deploy during unannounced and seismic pandemics such as COVID19. If African countries are to save the lives of their people, particularly from pandemics such as COVID-19, the state should play a greater role in building a robust and inclusive healthcare delivery system. African healthcare systems should be grounded on the principles, needs, aspirations and realities of the African people.
This is the time to generate and deploy African agency. This is where Mkandawire’s argument holds in favour of social equality policies as a way of redistributing wealth in line with egalitarian communalism of African culture, as opposed to Bretton Woods’ SAPs. Africa needs to revisit the concept and philosophy of Ubuntu because it is the true rubric of its society. The post COVID-19 world will be a significantly different one in social, political and economic terms, and so in relations among the community of nations. Africa’s present has been largely influenced by forces which are exogenous to it. Now that the future is taking an irreversible turn, Africa cannot afford to be an actor who continues to be ‘acted upon’ by other states. When Thandika Mkandawire died, there was a massive outpouring of tributes and eulogies in his remembrance, but Africa’s eternal and transformative tribute and eulogy to Mkandawire should be to adopt and institutionalise his incorruptible ideas on the state and the market in the African context. Fare thee well to you Thandika Mkandawire, but not to your ideas, certainly.
Dennis Jjuuko is a doctoral student of Global Governance and Human Security at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and an alumnus of the African Leadership Center, King’s College London’s Peace, Security and Development Fellowship for African Scholars.
Email: Dennis.Jjuuko001@umb.edu
