Africa

We have drawn the teeth of all countries, or groups of countries, that harboured thoughts of going, or actually attempted to go, against existing orthodoxy, as defined to mean the methods and expectations of the established order, represented by the conclusions of the G7 on Third World debt, and by the creditor's cartel that we have established, and that we so effectively chair. Indeed, our punishment for erring countries have been immediate and withering. To see this one just has to look at the Peruvian abortive experiment to contain its debt crisis, or the fate of countries like Brazil and Argentina and Nigeria that tried to flirt with 'national' debt solutions, or the outcome of attempts at 'regional solutions'. Concomitantly, the Fund and other members of the creditors' cartel have always managed to repress, immediately and completely, any attempt to organize what can remotely be perceived as a 'debtors' cartel'. We did manage to get this obedience in the South, and to bring protesting debtors to their knees, by unscrupulously declaring miscreants ineligible for use of our resources, irrespective of circumstance - eg; whether external factors beyond their control were responsible for their inability to repay, or whether they deliberately took a decision to defy us thus. By mid-1988 several countries were so declared and others were on the verge of being blacklisted. Our declaration of ineligibility constitutes the kiss of death for all these countries. They immediately became international lepers, with no hope of making operational any other alternative to the Fund's iron fist.

President Reagan effectively told us to go out and make the Third World a new bastion of free wheeling capitalism, and how we responded with joy, and with a sense of mission! Of course the entire strategy for propagating Third World economic rebirth into unfettered free enterprise was finalized and explicitly stated in the Baker Plan of 1985 and in the eligibility criteria to Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility to the 62 'poorest' countries of the world. Thus everything we did from 1983 onward was based on our new sense of mission to have the south 'privatised' or die; towards this end we ignominiously created bedlam in Latin America and Africa in 1983-88.

When we use the term "structural adjustment," we wish to convey to those who are being "structurally adjusted" the idea of economic and financial policies to get the economy out of an economic hole and place it on a path of sustainable growth and social transformation within a context of indigenously-determined economic and social priorities and trade-offs among desirable objectives, and within a time-frame defined by our 'program.' But there is a big difference what we want others to believe, and what we know to be true. For us the term "structural adjustment" conveys a politically inspired ploy, as against an economic concept that can be measured and evaluated in relation to some criterion of economic efficiency and optimal resource use by the recipient. More specifically, when we talk of "structural adjustment" we have nothing else in mind but an irresistible motivation to implement, in every country of the South, the following political agenda: to call an immediate and complete stop to economic policies that can be interpreted as being in the slightest degree 'socialist' or 'populist' or 'people- oriented', or weighted, however slightly, in favour of the poor and economically underprivileged, or based on the collective, social consensus of the population concerned. All such policies, if they exist, must be summarily scratched, and substituted forthwith with the type of Reaganite free-wheeling capitalism that is so comprehensively built into our 12 to 18 month stand-by arrangements, and our 3 year SAF and ESAF. Now as we implement, in each country of the South, t his agenda for political transformation, we have no expectation whatsoever that our policies would lead to economic development or enhancement of the social welfare function of our Third World clients; in no instance do we aspire to have our program set the stage for sustained economic and social transformation - a goal that we hoodwink others to believe that we are out to achieve, Yes, yes, Sir. We hide behind the mask of 'structural adjustment' - a concept with great respectability in economics, to do political things in Third World nations that make all known precepts of economics to look like old hat. You know, sooner or later someone will have to start rewriting the economics of developing countries in terms of the basic precept of IMF political imperatives that relate directly to the on-going debt strategy of creditor nations and institutions.