Where is Uhuru?

Abstract

The neoliberal project, led by the IMF and World Bank, promised to correct many of the distortions in the African postcolonial environment. It pledged to engineer liberalisation and expand democratic space through competitive multiparty elections. For a people who had suffered years of statism, these promises were persuasive. Indeed, they accorded this project a level of legitimacy it otherwise would not have enjoyed. However, several decades down the line, Issa G. Shivji aptly asks, Where is Uhuru? Few people, if any, can testify to the success of the envisaged reforms. Instead, neoliberalism failed to guarantee a sustainable basis for freedom, rights and prosperity. These essays show that the reform period opened the continent to greater privation by a more emboldened local political class who, under pressure from or by acquiescing to foreign imperialist forces, undermined the struggles for democratic transformation and economic empowerment. Whether one is examining the rewards of multiparty politics, the dividends from a new constitutional dispensation, the processes of land reform, women’s rights to property, or the Pan-Africanist project for emancipation, Shivji illustrates how all these have suffered severe body blows. Shivji not only calls for a new, Africa-centred line of thinking that is unapologetic of the continent’s right to self-determination, but through these essays sets out examples of how such thinking should proceed.