The paper examines the underlying conceptual and theoretical logic of the policy of privatisation in the area of social welfare services, and its unfolding empirical manifestations in Africa, with a Nigerian example. The hegemony of the neoliberal economic orthodoxy in the global arena has evoked market principles and policies, including the privatisation policy, as the dominant means of economic management and service provision and delivery. The privatisation policy is believed to make for efficiency, rationality, cost management and optimal resource allocation in the provision of public goods. The paper argues that the theoretical basis of the policy with respect to the provision of social welfare services is tenuous and rests basically on a foundation of sand. The privatisation policy, like the market policy of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs), isa fundamentalist economic project, rather than a sanguine economic policy, which can promote societal welfare. It seeks to reconstruct the object, nature and basis of social welfare services, from a social and public orientation, to a private one, which has implications for the issues of allocative efficiency, social and class inequities, access to the provision of those services and societal development The net-benefit of the policy is less to society and may be dysfunctional to it, but is more to the interest of capital.
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