African Miracle by Abou B. Bamba

Author:Abou B. Bamba [Abou B. Bamba]
Language: eng
Format: epub

THE COURSE OF THE IVORIAN economic growth was not without its problems. This emerged clearly in the rush to turn the savanna region into a model of state-led development. In addition to its heavy reliance on foreign capital and expertise, the expansion of the agribusiness of sugar production was largely seen as a top-down technopolitical exercise, which theoretically de-democratized the search for the good life. Such an elitist vision not only marred the implementation of the sugar program, it also weakened other state-driven modernization schemes, including the twin regional development projects of Kossou and San Pedro.

The current chapter looks at the shortcomings of the Ivorian economic growth that cast a dark shadow on the achievements of the miracle. Student activists, Marxist Africanists, Left-leaning Ivorian academics, and local organic intellectuals articulated some of the earlier critiques of these weaknesses. In fact, even as many foreign observers hailed Ivory Coast as a model to be emulated, radical thinkers never stopped underlining the limitations of its strategies of development and nation building. Their criticisms, which were echoed in rallies, novels, political tracts, rumors, lectures, and in other popular outlets, formed both an alternative discourse on the Thirty Glorious Years and a social reality that the Ivorian authorities, by necessity, had to engage lest they sow the seeds of popular unrest.

The chapter also explores the contours of the response of the Ivorian government, including the launching of the state-led educational television project that began in the early 1970s as the authorities sought to expand the provision of primary school education to a growing number of children. Although meant to respond to the pressing calls for more Africanization of the labor force, the project would ultimately entrench French hegemony in Ivory Coast. Other government-initiated development actions in the late 1970s, such as the construction of a second dam on the Bandama, would leave in their wake devastating social and ecological consequences and would worsen the already difficult conjuncture of the burden of foreign debt and the incidence of its service.

The story of the last boom years of the Ivorian economy demonstrates that the expensive state-initiated schemes created some of the conditions leading to the adoption of a series of structural-adjustment programs in the 1980s. In so doing, it validated the criticisms of those who claimed that the Ivorian miracle was just a mirage whose hold—sooner or later—was bound to dissipate.

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