Regional Disparity in Sub-Saharan Africa: Structural Readjustment of Uneven Development by Assefa Mehretu

Author:Assefa Mehretu [Mehretu, Assefa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ethnic Studies, African Studies, African, Social Science, Political Science, World, General
ISBN: 9781000309447
Google: hK2bDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 49433112
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-06-04T00:00:00+00:00

An important characteristic of hegemonic spatial structure is that once it is set in place, it creates its own momentum of process. It is also prohibitively expensive in both time and money to reformulate such a structure. This is what postcolonial African policy makers failed to realize. It is foolhardly to manage an internally inspired development process constrained by a structure of another era moulded for a completely different and alien purpose. This is why neocolonial control of Africa's socio-economic conditions became easy. The colonial form was intact and operating, and new internal measures were too weak to offset the bias. Even in Tanzania, where a far-reaching policy to dismantle the colonial spatial form was attempted, the ujamaa model finally faltered (Von Feihold, 1979; De Vries, 1978, pp. 11-19; Boesen, et al., 1988). Zimbabwe may face the same problems that Tanzania experienced especially because in Zimbabwe, first, the spatial polarity is much more pervasive and profound, and second, the redressive plan that forms the basis of its Growth with Equity objective (GOZ, 1981, p. 82), is too weak to offset the inertia of the polarity (see Sibanda, 1985, p. 20). Zimbabwe's approach may yield some results to remove some of the glaring inequities. But accomplishments of a structural nature cannot be realized without a positive move on agrarian reform and related structural features that address fundamental issues in developmental design (see also Sibanda, 1985, p. 19-25; Wekwete, 1985, p. 1-4).

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