ABSTRACT
From the late 1950s, independent African states, like other ex-colonised territories in the rest of the Third World, embarked on state-led social provisioning in order to mitigate the systematic deprivation of colonialism and to meet the triple promise of independence – decolonisation, democracy and development. With varying degrees of success, the immediate post-colonial African states took on the provision of education, healthcare, water, public transportation and employment through the establishment of import substitution industries (ISIs). The ISIs were established and or capitalised with loans from international finance institutions (IFIs) – the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). A coterie of structural inequalities – from persistent unequal terms of trade to international and local power arrangements – meant that many of the ISIs were in crisis by the middle of the 1970s. Having incurred large sums of debt and even larger debt servicing costs, many African states again turned to the IFIs for further loans. In return, they were forced to undergo severe cuts to crucial public services like education and healthcare and privatise strategic state-owned enterprises and parastatals such mines and marketing boards. The cumulative social outcome was mass impoverishment and the reversals of the gains made against preventable diseases and illiteracy.
