Introduction

Developmentalism is the view that less developed nations need to be picked up by state intervention where there is heavy industrialisation, protectionism and a robust internal market especially over the external global market.

The Challenge for Africa

With the youngest population in the world and the lowest rate of industrialisation in the world, Africa has quite the uphill battle to enjoy the benefits of modernisation. Industrialisation is one of the key pillars of bringing up to material wealth of nations starting with the first phase in the 1700s in England. Humanity could now escape the Malthusian trap where population growth is exponential, but the resources growth was linear. The story goes that the steam engine broke the chains of limited growth, we moved into the cities, created new jobs, child mortality drops, male breadwinners can hold up a household, and poverty disappears. Of course, that's a fantasy that ignores the economic arguments between the lineages of Classical and Marxist theorists and the explosive conflicts between liberals, nationalists, socialists, traditionalists and all their children.

The African Experience

We Africans inherited these struggles via colonialism in a very compressed manner with a tiny middle class and a massive working class and underclass, almost never as the ruling class. After many ideological experiments and geopolitical pressure, most of the world has settled into "mixed economies" with neoliberal characteristics. The reason why they are mixed is because local ideologies became synthesised with neoliberalism as the Pax Americana hegemon requires you to at least liaise with institutions such as the United Nations and the World Bank. Only pariah states and hegemons can negotiate their own position harder than the rest.

The Neoliberal Framework and Its Limitations

What neoliberalism brings in general is the advocacy of free-market capitalism, minimal government intervention and freedom of association. Not much there about aiding the struggling. So how do poorly developed countries participate at a braai where they only bring salt while others bring meat? We know who is going to throw their weight around at that braai.

Three Levels of Analysis

There are a few layers to unpack here where we can look at different states of being which would be to look at the individual, the collective and collectives of collectives.

The Individual Level

At the individual level this sounds fantastic, nobody encroaches on my free movements, and I don't encroach on theirs until I need to do things beyond my capacity and there are now competing visions of the good. The spaza shop owner cannot bootstrap their own telecommunications infrastructure, and neither can a billionaire for that fact. The very free market trade we do today depends on infrastructure beyond ourselves so naturally we step up from the individual to the collective.

The Collective Level

Now the collective need not to be an entire society at large, but it could be families, private associations, business, etc. These collectives have a very strong chance of creating an elite class that can in fact create infrastructures that permeate through entire societies. Innocent enough until one collective becomes supreme overall and turns into the oligarchy that can abuse their position and pursue rent-seeking and cartel-like behaviour. That moves us to the next level: collectives of collectives or let's use the word "nation".

The National Level

To make an intelligible definition of "nation" I would say that it is the compression of individuals plugged into collectives that have overlapping interests that can be summarised as commitment to the common good shared by common history, conflict resolution, tongue, geography, ideologies or ethnicity.

Infrastructure as the Foundation

Infrastructure is the glue that makes a nation tick. Show me a functioning nation and I will show you functioning infrastructure. So, who can steer the development of this infrastructure if it's not just about consumption, productivity and exchange? Men like Singapore's Lee-Kuan Yew, China's Deng Xiaoping, Turkey's Mustafa Kemal Atatürk knew a thing or two about nation building. Now he was made out to be a dictator and with our liberal democratic sensibilities that is a no-go for us, and I won't certainly advocate for throwing the dice on whether we get a benevolent or malevolent dictator. I do think that such people embodied an aristocratic noblesse oblige characteristic to them. They knew that to steer a nation isn't just about making an economy for today, but it is to build it up for generations and generations after you have long passed.

The Role of State Power

The authoritarian hand they used to unify the nation is due to the hollowing out of civil society's ability to due nation building so state powers filled the vacuum to do the business. That vacuum used to be filled by aristocrats, churches, guilds and other non-state elite vessels but now we have been atomised by modernity and there is a vested interest in exacerbating our differences and satiating our self-interests.

Addressing the Critics

Now critics would imply that the word "development" in this case would be a neocolonialist construct because the benchmark is set as becoming Westernised in development. Ecological thinking would also be quick to criticise the desire to develop by adding to the carbon footprint. Free marketers would obviously ignore the subsidiarity implicit to the theory. From a political and economic realist perspective, these arguments don't move the needle because they don't really build a positive case, they just entrench the status quo and that's why I put this to you as an opportunity to think outside the box.