The Contribution of the Social Sciences to the Crisis in Africa Dan Wadada Nabudare Introduction A great crisis of unimiginable proportions has struck our continent. Africa, the oldest of the great continents of the old and modern world, lies on its feet as if it had been struck by a gigantic force beyond its control. Africa, the Cradle of man appears to have reached its opposite pole and become the Grave- land of Man. The famine disasters in which millions of mal-nourished children and able-bodied men and women are dying in thousands if not mil- lions every year; the diseases of unmentionable kinds never before known on this continent including the man-killer AIDS which has recently struck Africa as if by vengeance; the immense disertification that is eating up the vitality out of Africa's soils-all these and others have roots in man's own rela- tion to nature and to himself through the diverse forms of his socio-economic organisation determined from time to time by his historical and concrete conditions. Yet great as these calamities are, it cannot be said that they are all beyond repair. Being rooted, as they are, in man's relation to himself and to nature, these problems can and will be solved by man himself through his social and political struggles. These calamities constitute, in the old Chinese dialect, a crisis which is at once a danger and an opportunity . But in order for the present generation of Africans to take this crisis as an opportunity and con- vert it into struggles for change, they have to be clear as to the real forces behind the crisis and it is this task of scientific enquiry that we wish to con- tribute in this short address to the general theme of this Bi-Annual Con- ference. In our submission, theory constitutes an important component of man's conscious activity as part of his struggle for existence. Yet theory also can be used to exploit and dominate man himself through processes of class and so- 2 DAN WADADA NABUDARE cial struggle. It is our submission that the social sciences - and here we wish to restrict our enquiry to economic and political theory - have constituted part of the forces of exploitation and domination of the direct producers of this continent which at the same time explains the causes behind the present crisis in Africa. More specifically we wish to place the crisis in its historical context. Africa's enslavement and colonisation constitutes one of the fundamental pillars on which the African crisis is hoisted. This specific form of domina- tion which, in Africa's case went on for five centuries, was responsible for the uprooting of millions of Africans from their homeland to the so-called New World where they created new wealth for their captors. This circumstances, so well documented in Walter Rodney's: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa,1 must be underlined in the analysis of the present crisis. Yet the period of colonisation itself is a specific phase which also requires concrete analysis. It is here that the more direct causes to the crisis have to be found. The present international division of labour, although modified in the second post-war period, basically is foistered upon the colonial system and hence the correctness of the description of the present situation as being neo-colonial. In order to unravel the difficulties in each country and the im- mediate post-independence neo-colonial strategies, the specific characteris- tics of colonisation of each African country have to be studied. Without this study which has to analyse the way in which the old society was destroyed and how to analyse the way in which the old society was destroyed and how the new colonial forces took root-analysisng the role of the various social for- ces in these developments, and how these social forces were also affected and in some cases transformed, we would not be nearer to understanding the crisis in each of our countries. The neo-colonial period also ought to be analysed in its dialectical linkage to the colonial system. It must trace how the social forces -both historical and new - were related to one another and how they related to the forces of exploitation and domination since this analysis also gives us a basis for com- prehending how these forces found themselves poised in the neo-colonial period. The specific character of the neo-colonial state and its roots in the colonial structures and relations must be analysed in order to unravel its ob- jective role in the world capitalist system regardless of the personalities who presided over these states. The rise of military rule and militarism in general will be found to be connected to these colonial relations manifesting them- selves concretely under changing conditions in each country, but also in rela- tion with the outside conditions and forces. In this way a dychotomy between external and internal forces is removed in the understanding of the totality. This does not mean that the internal forces should be analysed with rigour and in their specificity. All it means that they ought to be analysed in a CONTRIBUTION OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES TO THE CRISIS IN AFRICA 3 dialectical way to reveal the interconnections. What the Crisis is About The crisis is about people - the impoverishment of the direct producers, the increasing marginalisation of the peasant and the pastoralist; and because of this the increased burdens being borne by African women and children in the production of cash crops and food as men move to the urban areas in search of work to supplement diminishing resources of the village. The diminishing resources of the village means the exhaustion of the soil through over-cultivation and over-grazing, which have led to soil erosion, dissertifica- tion and recurrent droughts. These adverse developments are connected to the demands of the world markets perpetuated by international finance capi- tal from colonial to the neo-colonial period. The imposition of the interna- tional division of labour which imposed cash crop production as part of the colonial economy in order to service the industrial combines meant that the best and most fertile and accessible lands were placed under cash crop production, and without looking at the social relations that this implied, this had the effect of pushing the pastoralist communities out of these lands, or at least any access to them. This not only disturbed the ecosystems of these communities, but also excerbated the historical contradictions between the agriculturalists and the pastoralist communities. The colonial state responded to this new situation by resorting to violence to crash the pas- toralist resistance to being settled and "agricultured", a heritage which the neo-colonial state assumed on the attaining of its political independence. These developments had two economic and social consequences: The first was that the peasant agriculturalist producers were increasingly required to put in more and more man-hours into the production of cash crops. The second was that as world relative market prices for their produce declined with die passage of time, more and more land was placed under cash crop production with a view to increasing volumes of the products in the hope that this would raise the earnings from these products. In fact it had the op- posite effect: It added to the fall in prices as markets were glutted with the same products from competing colonial and neo-colonial peasant producers. The increased use of the most fertile lands for this purpose without rotation soon exhausted these lands, and this in itself became the basis for new policies advocating the use of fertilisers to "enliven" the soils. But this in itself became a problem as increased use of fertilisers led to the further im- poverisation of the soil, etc. The increase in man-(woman)-hours to cash crop production and its con- comittant in increased acreages for the same purpose, had another result: It 4 DAN WADADA NABUDARE meant that the land available for food production was reduced protanto. The decrease in the lands available to food production was bound sooner than later to lead to a food crisis, which in fact happened for a number of African countries by the seventies. Although food production increased in absolute terms, it did not increase in per capita terms. This was mainly due to in- crease in population. But the increase in population was itself, among other things, a sign of deteriorating economic conditions for it is a universally ob- servable phenomenon that high reproduction rates are consistent with poor economic conditions and vice-versa. This led to an increased dependency on "food aid" for a number of countries. The crisis of 1983-85 revealed that 34 African countries were affected by drought disaster and all of them were facing food shortages. The Ethiopian famine crisis of 1985 brought home this tragedy in which at least a million Ethiopians are reported to have died. This particular crisis triggered off a world-wide shock as to what is really happen- ing in Africa. Thus these historical conditions of production imposed by the colonial division of labour were leading not only to increased poverty and to famine conditions, but they were also leading to what one writer has called "environ- mental bankruptcy".2 The population was dying off with the destruction of the environment - all in greater part caused by the demands of the world economy on the African peasant and worker. The pastoralist peoples were being squeezed every more so by the encroachment of the agricultural economy onto their remaining lands, while the neo-colonial state, true to its class character, was using increasing violence against them. The social conse- quences of this impoverishment meant that the women became the greater bearers of the neo-colonial burden. The crisis also increased the yawning gap between African cities and the countryside, as a great mass rural-urban migration got under way with the crisis in the rural areas, threatening the whole political-security situation of the neo-colonial state. But the political threat came more from the forces of disintegration that were under way in a number of African countries. Many of these disintegrat- ing forces were connected with the artificial boundaries which had become the inheritance of the neo-colonial states, and such was the case for instance, in the conflicts in Chad and the Sudan. Also behind the forces challenging the coherence of the neo-colonial state were nationality claims in Ethiopia and to some extent in the Nigerian civil-war. Many of the other conflicts were in fact associated with the neo-colonial crisis of the colonial structures which the new African governments inherited, such as those created by the policies of divide and rule. Much of the civil strife in Uganda referred to in the popular press as "tribal" is connected to these manoeuvres by British im- perialism to install agent forces in the new state at the time of its inde- pendence - a fact that has led to continued strife and conflict and which has CONTRIBUTION OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES TO THE CRISIS IN AFRICA 5 been used by the agent forces to introduce and intensify ethnic elements in the conflict. Thus the neocolonial state stands challenged from all corners in this widening areas of crisis, to which the social sciences in Africa have con- tributed. Economic Policies and Theories In order to demonstrate that these sciences have played this role it is neces- sary to show that the strategies adopted by the African states in their so- called development policies are in fact part and parcel of imperialist policies for the management of the world economy, and that these policies are reflected in the economic theories advanced from time to time in support of these policies. To be sure, the whole environment in which African states found themselves immediately after the formal political independence was one already predetermined by the imperialist powers as incorporated in the Bretton Woods Institutions. The United States which had played a leading role in formulating this international environment was at first mesmirised with the success of its economic strength and believed that many Third World countries should concentrate on "liberalising trade" as a basis for then- own development, and 'aid' was at this stage looked on unfavourably.3 This environment formed the basis of the earliest "development economics". The first of the economies to focus on the issue of development of these exploited zones was Ragnar Nurske in his 1953 book4 on problems of capital formation. In his book Nurske took the line that the major constraint in these economies would be one of raising domestic savings which he regarded as "hidden resources" which waited to be tapped in the countries themselves. His prescription of how this could be done was one where workers could be drawn from the countryside and put to work in the urban investment projects. He assumed that if these workers incomes were not consumed by those relatives they had left behind such earnings could be mobilised in form of saving and markets to form the basis of sustained investment programmes. Paul Rostenstein-Rodan saw the problem as one of a "Prisoners Dilemma" of scattered small investors who could not mobilise resources for investment since none of them in isolation had the assurance that the others would in- vest simultaneously with him and create a market or demand for his products. These theoretical positions then came to form die basis of the "balanced growth" scenario. Arthur Lewis in 1955 provided a fuller theoretical justification of this strategy5 by advocating growth as the way to eradicate poverty. Harrod- Domar provided the "model" for the strategy which was based on a certain capital-output ratios re-mfordng the Nurske arguments that the central 6 DAN WADADA NABUDARE problem of economic development was the need to increase resources devoted to investment. This led to two conclusions by implication: the first was that savings from domestic sources ought to be mobilised, and the second was that if this saving rate fell below the required optimum which was assumed to be 5-7%, the government would have to raise "economic aid" in order to reach the desired 3:1 capital-output ratio which necessitated a net investment target of 15%. These policy conclusions in fact formed the basis of much of African governments' strategies in the 1950s and 1960s. W.W. Rostow in his Stages of Growth,6 had also argued that a less developed country could embark on a path of sustained capitalist growth leading to a "take-off into a mature development along the classical lines. All these optimistic view points seemed to be supported by the relatively high rates of the late 1950s and early 1960s connected with Europe's recovery. The arguments advanced in support of the growth scenario by the World Bank, which insisted on African countries adopting these strategies as a con- dition of their "aid" loans were three8: The first was that through market for- ces such as the rising demand for labour, higher productivity, higher wages, or lower prices, economic growth would spread its benefits widely and rapid- ly. The second was the assumption that the governments of these countries would be democratic governments which would show concern for the- poor. The third and final argument was that the fate of the poor should not in any case, in these early stages of development, be of concern. One economist has observed: "It was thought necessary first to build up the capital, infrastruc- ture, and productive capacity of an economy so that it could improve the loft of the poor later. For a time... the poor would have to tighten their belts and the rich would receive most of the benefits. But if the rewards of the rich were used to provide incentives to innovate, to save, and to accumulate capi- tal which could eventually be used to benefit the poor, the early poverty would turn out to have been justified."9 In fact all these hopes were ill-conceived and even these bourgeois op- timists were forced to admit: "None of the assumptions underlying these jus- tifications turned out to be true... there was no automatic tendency for in- come to be widely spread. Nor did governments always take corrective ac- tion to reduce poverty, after all, governments were themselves often formed by people who had close psychological, social, economic, and political links with the beneficiaries of, the concentrated growth process,even though then- motives were often mixed".10 A new "discovery" was made and that was that small-scale farmers saved a great deal, were equally entreprenurial and even more productive than the big farmers. It was also "discovered" that under the growth policies the rapid rise in rural-urban migration impeded its rapid ab- sorption into the production process; that the technology which was trans- CONTRIBUTION OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES TO THE CRISIS IN AFRICA 7 ferred in the process was too much labour-saving so that no employment was created; that the rate of growth of the population inhibited development; and finally that the agricultural revolution which was a pre-condition to the industrialisation process did not occur. These discoveries became the basis of a new strategy: EMPLOYMENT strategy. A Conference was organised by the International Labour Organisa- tion in 1969 to "dethrone GNP", and its objective was "promote jobs". The ILO organised "employment missions" to Kenya, Sudan and Egypt among other Third World countries to find ways of creating employment. But in the course of their studies, the missions had "rediscovered" what Gunnar Myrdal had discovered in his Asian Drama11 that unemployment was not the problem in the poor countries, that this was a problem of the industrial countries and that what was really at issue was "labour utilisation". The later concept turned out to have numerous dimensions when applied to self- employed subsistence farmers, landless labourers, artisans, traders, educated youth and women without organised labour markets. It was now argued that the "root cause is poverty" by which it was under- stood to mean low-productivity employment; not unemployment. This was because, it was also discovered, that "the very poor are not unemployed, but work very hard and long hours in unremunerative, unproductive forms of ac- tivity"' This discovery in turn led to a new approach to the employment strategy to pay attention to the informal sector in the towns: the street traders, garbage collectors, casual workers as well as to small-scale producers such as blacksmiths, carpenters, sandal makers, builders^ and lamp makers as well as taxi-operators in transportation. Attention was also directed to women and other "working poor". This, in the words of Paul Streete, became the "thread" which connected the employment strategy to a new approach which was called: BASIC NEEDS strategy which focussed on the levels of living of the "poor", their attitudes to change and the need to create institutions where these were lacking. This entailed addressing "needs" such as nutrition, health and education. This awareness had been strengthened by the Sussex Institute of Development Studies and World Bank's joint publication in 1974 entitled: REDISTRIBUTION WITH GROWTH in which the problems of how to increase the productivity of small-scale, labour-intensive informal sector as well as how to achieve economic growth without re-inforced inequalities in the distribution of in- comes were addressed. But it was soon "discovered" that the results of such redistribution was "modest". Its Gini coefficient measurements were later judged to be an engagement in "meaningless percentiles",13 and therefore of little use. It was now pointed out by the World Bank itself that concern with equality was a matter better left to "utilitarian philosophers and ideologies".14 It was 8 DAN WADADA NABUDARE realised that reducing inequality was highly "complex" and "abstract" objec- tive, "open to many different interpretations and therefore operationally am- biguous", and for this reason it was considered that "meeting basic needs was morally a more important objective than reducing inequality". It was more concrete, it provided "human beings" with the opportunity for a "full life", was more presentable and acceptable to the "international community, and more integrating and organising power intellectually than the equality policy. This was then the Basic Needs Strategy until, it also lost its intellectual ap- peal to the theorists, while international finance capital tightened its grip around the necks of millions of African people. By 1979, the IMF and World Bank found new "medicine" in the "Structural Adjustment Programmes" and "Stabilisation Policies" which have been pursued in earnest with a vengeance. This was because, according to the World Bank in its Annual Report for the year, it had become "increasingly clear to the Bank and its economic advisers that the overall policy environment (of most Third World countries) was a serious impediment to further lending in several borrowing countries". This new approach entailed the reduction of state involvement in economic ac- tivity and reductions in state budgets with all its basic needs projects. Now the idea was maintenance of existing assets with no new large investments, preference being given to private enterprise. With this, the policies in African countries moved full circle back to the "growth" and "trickled down" policies, but with a difference. These policies pursued by international finance capital with cumulative effect had worsened the lot of the African working masses. Economic theory had served its purpose. Political Theories and African Development The above economic juggling with words ended in a quagmire, but political scientists in the meantime were also engaged in their own game of theorising on development issues which, in retrospect, re-inforced the economic theorists. Indeed a point was reached by the economists when they called for the assistance of political science, when it became clear to them that too much state involvement in most Third World economies made it impossible to work with the traditional micro-economics tools of analysis since institu- tional policies "interfered" with their projections and predictions. The link between the two social sciences as a tool of imperialist domination thus be- came ever more clear with the passage of time. The American dominant political Science which was now in the saddle, and in its effort to service U.S. policy of world domination, soon got itself or- ganised for this task. Beginning in 1945 the United States Social Science Research Council Committee on Comparative Politics under the chairman- CONTRIBUTION OF TUB SOCIAL SCIENCES TO THE CRISIS IN AFRICA 9 ship of Gabriel Almond, a leading political scientist, was set up. This was in the same period of Western (mainly U.S.) optimism which saw things from a rosy angle of early growth in the post-war period in the Western economies. The problems that remained to be tackled were seen mainly in technical terms and social scientists were called upon to improve their techniques for dealing with such problems.1 What therefore came to be seen as the moder- nisation approach in social science part of that optimism which assumed that most of the problems of the new countries' could be solved in the same way as they were in the seventeenth century Europe and North America.18 They thus borrowed from the theoretical work of nineteenth century evolutionary writers to construct their modernisation ideal type based on the work of anthropologists and sociologists, particularly that of Max Weber and Talcott Persons, which were combined with the nineteenth century evolutionary theories to produce the 'grand theory' for the comparative politics. This new approach called "behaviourism" broke with the earlier "legal for- malism" which had emphasised the importance of the state and institutions. Behaviourism began to pay more attention to development issues by first en- gaging in theoretically oriented case-studies of particular countries such as the one of Apter on Ghana, Coleman on Nigeria and Apter on the 'political kingdom' of Uganda. The approach brought into play economic and socio- psycological variables and in its political drive it was seen as a means to facilitating the establishment of liberal democratic states in Africa and other new states.19 But this Utopian belief based on Max Weber that the transition from traditional (pre-state) societies could move towards "modernity" soon proved false because it was based on the wrong notion that this was merely a technical-institutional problem. This disillusionment with the new theory was connected with the performance of the new states in the immediate post-in- dependence period which began to shake the stability of these new entities. The real issue, it appeared to some of these theorists was the security of these states. It is this new thinking that brought forth the work of Samuel Huntington in the mid-1960s who, with others, challenged the assumption that modernisa- tion could come about by simple unilinear progression. He therefore placed emphasis in his new approach to the dislocations that had occurred .in this modernisation process. The reactionary nature of Huntington's work came out clearly when his emphasis turned out to be concerned with the main- tenance of "order" in the new states. He defined stability as absence of open conflict and, from this angle of reasoning, he saw political development as the growth of institutions which were compentent to deal with the strains of social mobilisation and political participation. This "shift from 'democracy' to 'order' was noted by O'Brien in his work in the mid-sixties who saw that this was connected with a number of other developments. It is not surprising 10 DAN WADADA NABUDARE that Huntington became one of the leading theoreticians on ccounter-insur- gency techniques that were so useful to the U.S. imperialists in the Vietnam War. It was in this fashion that 'order' emerged as an important concept, as one Sola Pool has noted: "It is clear, order depends on somehow compelling newly mobilised strata to return to a measure of passivity and defeatism from which they (had) been aroused by the process of modernisation. At least temporarily, the maintenance of order requires a lowering of newly acquired expectations and levels of political activity".20 Thus one cannot fail to see the link between the failure of the liberal democratic project envisaged by early behaviourism and the rise in militarism and military rule that became the order of the day in Africa in this period, which was theoretically defended. One cannot also doubt the linkage between this political development and the new ideological shift in the U.S. political science at this same point. Indeed, this development became the point of departure in the new post-behaviourist phase which was the third stage in the evolution of U.S. political and ideological offensive. This phase took shape with the publication of another volume in the comparative politics studies entitled: Crisis and Sequence in Political Development which came out in 1971. The study provided one of the major links between the two phases and constituted what Higgot has called a "cumulative wisdom of the Committee" on comparative politics, and this phase placed great emphasis not only on 'order' but also on "governmental capacity to respond to, and to suppress, certain demands,21 needless to say of the masses of the population. In the new approach, political development was seen now as being con- cerned with five crises: the crisis of legitimacy, the crisis of identity, the crisis of participation, the crisis of penetration, and finally the crisis of distribution. Higgott adds: "Government capacity referred specifically to governing elites, and crises were therefore seen from the perspective of threats to the position of those elites and the necessity of elites for the maintenance of order".22 But soon this approach also lost favour with a number of U.S. political scientists leading to a reaction against it by what has been referred to as the "radical critique of development". This radical reaction brought forth a new orienta- tion based on what came to be called "new political economy" and public policy analysis. The point of departure for this reaction was the feeling in these circles for the need for, more empirically based theory and this in time came to require more policy relevance in political science as well as the use of economics as an important addition to political theory. This turn of events, emphasised by David Easton in his presidential address to the American Political Science Association in 1969, coincided with the same feeling of impotence by the economists who also about this time felt the need for political science to help deal with issues of political institutions and policies which impinged on the CONTRIBUTION OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES TO THE CRISIS IN AFRICA 11 "free play of market forces". The "rediscovery" of economics by political science then became a pillar for the emergence of rationalist theory which, in narrower U.S. context, led to the growth of the "new political economy" which became fashionable in the early 1970s. But this "political economy" while rejecting tenets of the earlier use of sociology in the first behaviourist phase, was also anti-historical in its approach. Rational-choice-cum-new political economy thus became a half-way house between behaviourism and public policy. Beginning with book by Warren Uphoff and Norman Ilchman entitled: The Political Economy of Change written in 1968, there was a shift from concepts like 'function', 'system' to new concepts like 'policy", 'decision', 'choice', etc. It was a political economy concerned with the analysis of the 'economic effects of political choices' based on an economic rationality of choice which led directly to public policy and public analysis of 'choice'. Public policy thus came to represent a variant within this so-called political economy with a shift in emphasis from inputs to outputs and from macro- politics to micro-politics, thereby actually narrowing the area of variables which the earlier behaviourists considered in their own narrow way. This was supposed to provide wider analytical power to the political scientist. In fact the narrowing of the focus was bound to lead the new approach into blind al- leys as indeed it did. The idea that this narrowing down would present the 'developing countries, with limited goals with the aim of achieving a higher success ratio in their policy choices proved unfounded for the problems of most of these countries, especially the African ones, continued to accelerate and intensify. The book by Donald Rothchild entitled: Scarcity, Choice and Public Policy in Middle Africa is such example of applying 'choice' to scarcity in Africa which ends up recommending the choice of maintenance of exist- ing relations in a modified form. It is "modernisation" in a new guise. The book's emphasis on problem-solving and management of the crisis, in fact amounts to the concern for the maintenance of the status quo with a better face. Although the book expressed concern about "underdevelopment", the concept itself is dubious. Rothchild and Curry in fact drew heavily from the earlier works and par- ticularly that of Rothstein: The Weak in the World of the Strong: Developing Countries and the International System (1977), and Higgots points to the common methodology in the two books: their emphasis on decision-making and on the public policy in the Third World with particular interest in the maintenance of order for the public policy decision makers. Rothstein in fact goes as far as finding the best public policy Third World countries should follow in order to get the best deal out of the existing international system without altering its basic relations. Such policy is concerned with how they should increase their "bargaining power" in international institutions: "The 12 DAN WADADA NABUDARE collorary of this emphasis on elite stability in the recent public policy of development literature is a focus on the need for highly centralised forms of government. In this context, the work of Huntingdon on the level of in- stitutionalisation in the new states has been particularly influential in the 1970s. Huntington believes that the degree of government, not its form , is the key distinction in deciding whether or not policy will be implemented. It should then be obvious that like its predecessors, post-behaviourism, new political economy and public policy are a continuation of the moder- nisation-behaviourism of the early phase with the only difference that each is a response to the crisis of neo-colonialism. The public policy analysis and prescriptions of Rothchild, Curry, Rothstein and Migdal are a more in- sidious and well articulated approach which has gone further to re-inforce the dictatorial-centralising forces of neo-colonial states in Africa, and have through the reception and diffusion of these ideas through African univer- sities and policy prescriptions of such multilateral institutions like the IMF, World Bank, EEC-Lome Conventions, consolidated these forces of neo- colonialism. It is not surprising that these policy prescriptions of the American political science, which have such a wide appeal throughout the world, clearly fall-in line with the current stabilisation and adjustment policies of the IMF and World Bank which are being enforced with such rigour on the continent in view of the intensified crisis. Africa, with these developments, has become "Latin Americanised" and the "IMF Riots" are al- ready with us -the latest being those which brought down Nimiery of Sudan and those in Zambia which led to the army and police slaughter of eleven workers and the injuring of thousands in the protests against the doubling of food prices. The African Connection - What is to be done? It is not necessary for us to go to any length to argue the point that these views of American political scientists do constitute the real basis for the run- ning of neo-colonial institutions on this continent. The interlinkage between the U.S. and African teaching of political science has already been exposed in the early neo-Marxist critiques at the University of Dar es Salaam (John Saul, Colin Leys, Loxley, etc., etc.) This was followed by debates of different approaches at the same University, in the late 1970s. The debates moved to Nigeria and the work of people like professors Nnoli and Claude Ake did generate an atmosphere of critical discusion. The Nigerian Political Science Association Annual Conference of 1979 held at the Ahmadu Bello Univer- sity, Zaria opened up this discussion in a vigorous way and greater awareness CONTRIBUTION OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES TO THE CRISIS IN AFRICA 13 of the dominant role of western (mainly U.S.) political science in the African University was drawn attention to. Claude Ake's paper: "The Social Sciences in Africa: Trends Tasks and Challenges, while showing the historical linkages and their ideological im- plications went further to suggest how African scholars could embark on the task of combating this domination. A recent study by Adele Jinadu done for SAREC in 1985 entitled: "The Social Sciences and Development in Africa: Ethiopia, Mozambique, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe has also enhanced our un- derstanding of this problem. The issues are therefore clear: the social scien- ces in Africa are part and parcel of the system of imperialist ideological reproduction whose basic objective is to mystify the role of the neo-colonial states in Africa - creating illusions about the possibility of modernisation into an integrated national economy (away from the dychotomous traditional- modernity syndrome) and having failed to achieve the illusion, to manufac- ture new ideas of state and class maintenance neo-colonial state under crisis conditions. The present day crisis on the African continent, as we pointed out at the beginning of this address, are multifaceted and chronic. The politi- cal crisis manifests the public policy, decision-making, policy reform, crisis management, and state with no hope that these can be improved and, least of all, transformed to meet the material and spiritual needs of the Africans. This then is the dilemma which the African intellectual faces and in par- ticular this Association. There can be no doubt that this Association, in the short period of its existence, has established a tradition of anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism in all its manifestations. Although this orientation created an atmosphere of fear in the minds of the more 'moderate' academics, the AAPS has nevertheless demonstrated that within this broad framework, all points of view that stand for Africa's independence ought to find accommodation, so that all these different points of view can contend with one another in an atmosphere of tolerance. But this broadness should never be taken to mean that the AAPS should become a platform for the supporters of imperialism, and neo-colonialism, for it would be a complete negation of the very ideals we stand for as African people. This is a historical fact of life and freedom of speech and association can never in our political context mean that we revert to colonialism as a "solution" to the crisis on the continent. That is why the anti-imperialist tradition must be maintained with firmness and the AAPS must continue to grow in this broad approach of ac- comodating all African opinion dedicated to the full liberation of our people from exploitation and domination. Such would be our contribution to help- ing resolve the crisis on the continent. In pursuance of this line of policy, the AAPS has also encouraged from time to time to attract political activists into the ranks of the Association. This however has never been a licence for any group of faction to use the As- 14 DAN WADADA NABUDARE sociation for its own programme of political action in any particular country or to use the Association to give support to a particular party or movement on the continent. Any such effort would wreck the very basis of the Associa- tion for the AAPS is the only regional association of political scientists within the IPSA which brings together all African scholars and activitists for a common aim and not for factional positions. If we observe these principles and work together to raise our common awareness on the problems facing our continents, I feel there is plenty of room for individual scholars to take up the challenges in each of our countries to fight neo-colonial domination in the political field . This is a decision of each individual scholar, based on programmes worked out in each country together with those social forces that stand to gain from the es- tablishment of a revolutionary party which stand for the overthrow of the neo-colonial state and the establishment of a new democratic Africa, and this is only possible if the masses of the people led by the most revolutionary class and strata in our societies organise themselves. The task of analysing which class forces these are is a task of a particular party or movement. Nevertheless, it should be possible for such revolutionary parties and move- ments to establish pan-African revolutionary co-ordianating arrangements to co-ordinate and strengthen the struggle of the people in the second phase of the African revolution. The time for such action is NOW. Footnotes: 1. Rodney, W: H*v Bnrtpt Unitritveltfti 2. Tlmberlake, L: Africtn Critit. Earthscan, London, 1985. 3. Sp«ro, J.E: Tkt Ptlitict »/ InternttUntl RdtUiom, 1983, Allen k Unwin, London Afriet, Bogel Onverture, 1972. p.180. BlackweU, 1953. 4. Nurske, R: PrtUtnu »/ <7«»ttat FtrnuUim i* UnitritnltftCnntritt, Basil 5. L«wk, Arthur: Tkt r*c*r* ./ Bcttumie Grtwtk, Alien it Unwln, 1955. 6. Rostow, W.W: St*t*t •/ Eetntmic Gr»wtk, Cambridge University P m i, 1960. 7. See the Pttr$*n Rtptrt: Ptrtntrt 8. Stretten, P: FIRST THINGS FIRST: Mteti*§ Buie in Dnthrnunt, 1969. Nttit in the Dntltfinf Cfntriu, World Bank, 1981 ppJ-45. 9. Ibid: p.9. 10. Ibid :p. pp.10-11. 11. Myrdal, G: Ant* Drum: A* Enquiry int* tkt Punrtg Century, New York, 1968. 12. Streetra, P: op.clt. p.13. 13. Ibid: p.16 14. Ibid: p.17. 15. Ibid: p.21. 16. See Inltrnttitn*} Htttli Triton*, April 15, 1986. 17. Hltfott, RA: PtUtietl Dtnl»rmtnt Tkttrf. Tkt C*n*