Africa’s Last Neoliberals
As the pink tide swept through Latin America, Africa’s neoliberal regimes held firm. Where is Africa’s rupture —and what explains the absence of a sustained left challenge?
Nigerian president Bola Ahmed Tinubu waves at supporters during his swearing-in ceremony on May 29, 2023. (Paul Kagame / Flickr)
It has become fashionable in recent years to assert that neoliberalism is in crisis. At face value, this seemed increasingly plausible in the wake of political shifts that appeared to intensify—especially in the “Global North,”—following the 2008 financial crisis. The success of right-wing populist political parties—especially in the nominally advanced democracies of Western Europe and the United States—is the most prominent of such shifts. With the promise of resuscitating tariffs on international trade, reviving domestic manufacturing, and stemming migration, right-wing populist regimes have challenged critical areas of the policy consensus associated with a previously unquestionable neoliberal orthodoxy.
Yet, an even earlier challenge to neoliberalism emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s in Latin America and southern Europe, where left-oriented political parties propelled by anti-neoliberal social movements began seizing power. Referred to in Latin America as the “pink tide” (i.e. not “red” communist), a series of left-oriented parties came to office in Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, Uruguay, Venezuela, and other states, successfully expanding social welfare provisions, reducing poverty and inequality, and pursuing far-reaching constitutional changes—often with the explicit aim of dispensing with the neoliberal paradigm.
Coinciding with these developments, the rise of China as an economic and political powerhouse has represented a challenge to the dominance of neoliberalism globally. China’s development model—emphasizing an ambitious and interventionist but illiberal state—has remained a prominent counterexample to the idea that neoliberalism is the “only game in town.”
Cumulatively, these trends seemed to question the idea that neoliberalism had become globally hegemonic. It is understandable, then, that by the 2010s, academic scholarship started to speak of the “crisis of neoliberalism” and that the popular writer Louis Menand, writing in the New Yorker in 2023, was ready to chronicle the “rise and fall of neoliberalism.”
Yet, it would be premature to declare the end of this paradigm, even in contexts where it has faced significant challenges. In Brazil and Argentina, for instance, the initial “pink tide” in Latin America gave way to a right-wing backlash that retained austerity while embracing authoritarianism. In Western Europe and the U.S., far-right movements, while attacking immigration and imposing tariffs, have nonetheless maintained and even intensified neoliberal austerity measures, further rolling back the state (as exemplified in the absurdities of the U.S.’s new doge—the “Department of Government Efficiency”).
The resilience of neoliberalism, even in contexts where it has been challenged, is further aided by its dominance in other corners of the globe where it has not been confronted head-on. Indeed, in many parts of our dear continent, the idea that the individual private investor, relative to the state or other social collectives, is the motor of development—the persuasion, more pithily expressed, that the “government has no business in business”—still counts as the only “serious” alternative among most self-respecting and enlightened public commentators and officials. This view is particularly strong in nominally democratic countries such as Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, and Kenya, where most ruling and major opposition parties advocate for minimal state intervention in health, energy, housing, and education, emphasizing the need to create an enabling environment for private investment.
If the success of the Chinese model undermined the relevance of neoliberalism in Asia, and if the paradigm has been discredited or challenged in parts of Europe and the Americas, there is a sense that it is in Africa that the last true neoliberals remain unchallenged. This leads to the central question that animates the rest of this essay. How might we account for the stability of the neoliberal paradigm in Africa? Why has an increasingly discredited model found such a willing audience in our part of the world?
African solutions
In responding to this, it is worth noting that it is not everywhere in Africa that neoliberalism is the only game in town. Indeed, African states have adopted a variety of responses to the neoliberal economic paradigm since its arrival in the briefcases of IMF-supported economists who pushed for the implementation of Structural Adjustment Programs (saps) in the 1980s. In this sense, African responses took three broad forms.
The least traversed path was laid by Africa’s oldest electoral democracies, Mauritius and Botswana, which established what Thandika Mkandawire, in Globalization, Poverty, and Conflict, referred to as “democratic developmental states.” In both countries, high rates of economic growth and stable social pacts allowed dominant parties to eschew major planks of the saps, shielding some strategic state-owned enterprises from privatization, protecting domestic industry, and maintaining redistributive social policies.
A second course was charted by authoritarian or single-party dominant developmental regimes, which arose especially in parts of East and Southern Africa. In a 2013 working paper series for the Oxford Refugee Studies Centre, Will Jones, Ricardo Soares, and Harry Verhoeven coined the phrase “illiberal state-building” to describe those regimes that drew inspiration from the examples of East Asian developmental states, particularly China and Singapore. Such regimes, including Rwanda, Sudan, Angola, and Ethiopia, combined authoritarianism and military supremacy with state-guided economic transformation. Arguably, the military juntas of the Alliance of Sahelien States (AES), supported by Russia and, even more so, by China, have been the most recent additions to this path.
A third model emerged among African states that, after implementing SAPs in the 1980s, embraced multi-party elections in the 1990s as part of the global “third wave” of democracy. In such contexts, the ruling and major opposition parties tended to agree on maintaining or deepening the neoliberal paradigm, producing what Mkandawire again evocatively referred to as “choice-less democracies.” Anti-neoliberal movements in these countries were episodically vibrant on the streets. Yet, they remained electorally marginal, and political competition was frequently characterized by a convergence among governing parties on the basic principles of the neoliberal package. It is this third group of regimes that, despite two decades of nominal democratic openings and electoral competition, have still primarily stuck to the path of orthodoxy.
When compared to their counterparts in Latin America, who also traded in authoritarian rulers for electoral democracy in the early-mid 1990s, the ideological quiescence of Africa’s multi-party democracies appears more perplexing. While neoliberalism faced a mounting challenge in the streets, at the ballot box, and eventually within municipal and national governments across numerous Latin American electoral regimes by the early 2000s, anti-neoliberal movements to date have achieved sporadic victories in the streets and constituted even less of an effective electoral challenge in Africa’s third wave democracies. How might we account for these divergent trajectories?
Most accounts of the pink tide in Latin America tend to emphasize the growth of two primary forces: anti-neoliberal social movements and left-oriented political parties. Understanding the divergence between Latin American and African “third wave” regimes requires us to examine the conditions whose presence or absence allowed for or prevented the emergence of these forces.
Revisiting the pink tide
A useful framework for understanding the rise of anti-neoliberal movements in Latin America was advanced by the political scientist Eduardo Silva, whose book Challenging Neoliberalism in Latin America offered an early attempt to explain the pink tide. Besides its comparative approach, the advantage of Silva’s analysis is that it offered a useful distinction between external conditions or “opportunity structures” that anti-neoliberal movements confronted and the internal capacities that such movements developed or possessed, making it more or less likely that they would successfully challenge neoliberalism.
Of these, the key external conditions identified in Silva’s analysis include the imposition of saps, the presence of economic hardship, exclusions, and inequality for the majority of citizens; growing disillusionment with the political options on offer; the persistence of a moderate associational space to allow for movements to organize without immediate repression; and the intensification of an economic crisis—characterized by reversed or volatile gdp growth and debt and banking system crises.
These external motivations also needed to coincide with new internal capacities among social movements. It is worth emphasizing here that social movements were often (though, as we will see, not always) the primary agents of this transformation, given that trade unions, the key source of social opposition before the implementation of structural adjustment programs, had frequently been weakened or co-opted because of such programs. Yet, while social movements represented a multiplicity of new identity groups—with groups of Indigenous, unemployed, and African descent featuring prominently—the question of class and relative economic disadvantage remained central to anti-neoliberal social mobilization.
What, then, were the capacities that allowed social movements to take center stage in successfully challenging neoliberalism? According to Silva, such movements needed to: increasingly frame neoliberalism (rather than corruption and incompetence) as the problem; adopt contentious and sustained forms of direct action; and form broad coalitions across previously fragmented and more sector-specific (anti-privatization, anti-eviction, anti-austerity) groups.
An additional and interrelated set of practices alluded to by Silva but further developed by other scholars of anti-neoliberalism in Latin America tended to strengthen the capacities of social movements to confront neoliberalism. This included, firstly, the fact that movements often engaged in direct forms of economic production rooted in the social and solidarity economy both as a source of sustenance and care and as a means to experiment with and develop forms of direct participatory democracy. Examples of these experiments, referred to by scholars such as Manuel Larrabure as “post-capitalist struggle,” include the cooperative agro-ecological occupations pioneered by Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra), and the worker recuperated enterprises (Empresas Recuperadas por sus Trabajadores) of Argentina.
Secondly, social movements often pursued the democratization of forms of political education that had initially been pioneered by an older tradition of left-wing organizing. Frequently rooted in the radical pedagogies of Paulo Freire, political education explicitly eschewed vanguardist forms of learning premised on the presence of a learned and battle-hardened senior comrade imparting wisdom to ignorant young idealists. Instead, as Rebecca Tarlau explains in the article “Critical pedagogy and the limits of ‘framing,’ and social change,” movements tended to adopt models of political education that sought to equalize and democratize the mode, subjects, and character of learning, bringing teacher and student into a more dialogic encounter that undermined the capitalist division between manual and intellectual labor.
Ultimately, this combination of external motivations and internal capacities helped strengthen and reinforce social movements in their embrace of contentious actions, especially street protests. The intensification of economic crises instigated by the implementation of neoliberalism intensified anti-neoliberal agitation. Over subsequent “waves of contention,” these movements deepened the delegitimization of the crisis-ridden neoliberal system and increased the demand for an alternative to replace it. A crucial tipping point that saw social movements shift from a defensive posture to a more proactive challenge to neoliberalism was the emergence of new electorally viable anti-neoliberal parties that could challenge neoliberalism at the ballot box.
Life of the party
Usefully, scholars such as Enrico Padoan and Sebastian Etchemendy identify various pathways through which anti-neoliberal political parties developed. In countries such as Uruguay, Brazil, and Argentina, union-based left political parties that pre-existed the implementation of saps formed the base of the new left parties. Unions were still relevant in countries where industrialization had been more advanced and where unions remained the main opponent to neoliberal reforms. In the first pathway exemplified by Uruguay’s Frente Amplio, a union-based party emerged where there were no substantial independent social movements. In the second pathway, exemplified by Brazil’s Partido dos Trabalhadores and Argentina’s Partido Justicialista, a dual party formed by unions and independent social movements built a viable electoral force.
A third and fourth set of pathways emerged in contexts where the central trade union federation had either been weakened by neoliberal policies or delegitimized through their embrace of the paradigm. The third pathway, exemplified by Bolivia, emerged when independent and relatively coherent social movements coalesced to construct their own electoral vehicle in the form of the Movimiento al Socialismo party. In contrast, Padoan argues that where social movements were more fragmented, such as in Venezuela and Ecuador, a charismatic leader served the role of channeling various anti-neoliberal energies toward forging an electoral alternative.
Notably, across these pathways, the viability of anti-neoliberal party formations was often tested and strengthened in the context of municipal politics before a more national electoral aspiration was pursued.
Where is the African pink tide?
Though necessarily a schematic and incomplete overview, these pathways and criteria offer a translatable framework against which the divergent trajectories of Africa’s third-wave democracies can be compared. Although many similarities exist in the motivations and capacities of contemporary social movements in Africa’s third-wave democracies relative to their 1990s Latin American counterparts, there are also evident areas of disjuncture.
The external “opportunity structures” for African social movements demonstrate some similarities, as well as crucial departures from the criteria described by Silva. Economic and political exclusions have certainly intensified hardship and delegitimized neoliberal party systems in Africa’s multi-party democracies, where electoral abstention and the decreasing popularity of the ruling and main opposition parties have become the norm.
Yet, these are more recent trends. Indeed, the late 1990s and early 2000s—which witnessed an intensification of the neoliberal crisis in Latin America—featured more of an economic and political “honeymoon period” in African multiparty democracies, exemplified by “impressive” though highly exclusionary rates of GDP growth witnessed in countries like Ghana and Nigeria into the 2010s. It is no wonder that this period of GDP growth (most pronounced between 2000–2014) and a measure of multiparty democratic consolidation was celebrated through corporate-sponsored tropes such as the now laughable “Africa-rising” narrative championed at the time by sections of the international business press.
This is a significant contrast with the Latin American cases, where the implementation of neoliberalism increased volatility in the 1990s and early 2000s. In that context, recessions became more frequent, and economic crises (collapsing currencies in Argentina and Ecuador, leading to dollarization in Ecuador, banking system distress, and a run on the banks in Argentina) led to what might be termed the “crises of capitalism.” This opened up a significant window of opportunity for pink tide mobilizers in Latin America. From a comparative perspective, one might argue that neoliberalism “worked” better in Africa for a time, buying off dissent and diffusing volatility in a way that temporarily foreclosed rupture.
An additional distinction in the African context has been the fact that neoliberalism, while ascendant, was still framed as a political underdog for much of the early 1990s and 2000s. Remaining with the examples of Ghana and Nigeria, this underdog status was made possible due to the recurrence of a statist wing of neoliberalism, namely, the right-wing authoritarianism of Generals Abacha and Buhari in Nigeria, and the more moderate statism of the National Democratic Congress in Ghana. The persistence of a rhetorical modification of elements of neoliberalism (while remaining within the overarching frame) has allowed the more overtly market-centric neoliberals to play the victim—claiming that the social ills of poverty and corruption are evidence that neoliberalism had never been allowed to take root sufficiently. However, the more recent consolidation of power among more orthodox neoliberal figures, such as Nigeria’s Bola Ahmed Tinubu, might undermine some of the plausible deniability retained by relatively more heterodox predecessors.
Added to these external difficulties for anti-neoliberal organizing have been certain internal constraints in the capacities of African anti-neoliberal movements to form a counter-hegemonic bloc. Crucially, as in Latin America, social movements appear to have increasingly seized the initiative from the traditional labor union federations in leading social protest. Yet, while such movements have been engaged in street protests over significant socio-economic concerns, such as the funding of public education, the restoration of energy subsidies, a rejection of IMF-backed austerity policies, and an end to police brutality, these efforts have remained fragmented and sporadic. Likewise, it is not evident that movements have embraced or championed new efforts to experiment with directly productive forms of solidarity, such as movement-affiliated cooperatives and worker-run enterprises, or more egalitarian approaches to political education.
Left out of the party
These divergences are, in some respects, greater when the trajectory of anti-neoliberal party-building is compared across both continents. A crucial point to emphasize is that the pathways for anti-neoliberal party-building based on a left-oriented, pre-SAPs union federation (as seen in Uruguay, Brazil, and Argentina) has largely been closed off in African multi-party democracies, given that the main union federations were weakened or co-opted (or both) following the implementation of adjustment policies.
Similarly, we have not witnessed the emergence of social movements that can unify a diversity of forces under a unified anti-neoliberal partisan umbrella. Rather, electoral competition in multi-party African contexts has tended to intensify the fragmentation of social movements due to ideological differences—often breaking down on liberal vs radical lines, or on sectarian lines between rival left groups.
This fragmented movement landscape, coupled with a failure to build anchoring institutions, has meant that leader-centric pathways for anti-neoliberal party building have been the path left most available in the context of African multi-party politics. In this sense, Nigeria’s African Action Congress (AAC) and South Africa’s Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), arguably both contradictory attempts at forging anti-neoliberal movement parties, might be considered exemplary. Both parties are indeed leader-centric, with movement activists relying on the charisma of party leaders to bridge divides between various support groups and agendas. Both parties have also attained minimal electoral representation, with the more successful eff building on a base in Gauteng to secure a fringe parliamentary presence, while the AAC’s successes have not exceeded the recent attainment of two councilor seats in Bauchi and Jigawa states.
While party leaders in both organizations articulate anti-neoliberal positions, it is not evident that they have embarked on a long-term project to deepen anti-neoliberal agitation. Indeed, other competing frames, including police brutality, corruption, and the exploitation of youth, in the case of the AAC and economic empowerment for a younger black constituency in the case of the EFF seem to compete with more systemic economic critiques. Nor do the disproportionate benefits of the neoliberal system in class terms seem to form a central element of the discursive frame articulated by both parties. These examples serve as an illustration of the possibilities and limits of both movement and party activity in some of the contemporary contexts where agitation against the status quo has been most explicitly anti-neoliberal.
Latin Americanization in Africa?
Several conditions internal to social movements and left-oriented parties in Africa have prevented the type of anti-neoliberal resurgence witnessed in Latin American pink-tide states. The persistent limitations in the capacities of social movements to frame neoliberalism as the central problem, and to embrace direct democratic forms of political education and production, have contributed to blocking the path from protest to institution building. Nor has the birth of leader-centric movement-parties created much of an opening in the electoral arena to “leapfrog” these institutional limitations in movement-based organizing. Arguably, even more devastating than the fragmentation has been the failure to develop anchoring institutions that can sustain solidarity and growth within various movements between periods of mass mobilization.
Yet, some of the external elements of the current political and economic context in Africa appear to align more closely with the contexts from which the pink tide emerged. The end of the faux optimism of “Africa rising,” the intensification of cost of living crises across the continent—especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia-Ukraine War—and the re-emergence of crippling debt and increasingly delegitimized party systems suggest that the grip of Africa’s last neoliberals is growing more tenuous.
If the pink tide taught us anything, it’s that crisis alone is not enough; what matters is how movements respond. Whether Africa’s emerging discontent can give rise to a durable anti-neoliberal alternative may depend on whether today’s movements can do what their predecessors have not: build anchoring institutions, experiment with solidaristic forms of survival, and rearticulate class not just as grievance but as strategy. The tide, in other words, will not arrive on its own—it must be turned.
